A senior academic at London
University has advised me that it would be ‘strategic’, in terms of my ‘career
development’, to remove from my personal website a comment by a former student
questioning the role of capitalist market forces in Higher Education.
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| McCarthy, Tough on the Causes of Equality |
However tempted to ask this
professor if s/he realises that s/he sounds like Senator Joseph McCarthy, I instead
asked myself whether we have all forgotten how to visualise a better world in
which financial markets did not rule us. For if we stop trying to visualise
utopia - a good community with mutual respect, state-funded edifying
entertainment, and universal education and healthcare, for example - we really
are in trouble. Imagining how wonderful life could be for homines sapientes is
a prerequisite of actually achieving social progress.
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| Emmet Brickowski, hero of the Lego Movie |
What makes today’s absence of utopian thinking
so sad is that people are not stupid. There is a widespread, heartfelt understanding of what our
problems are. Three popular movies I have recently seen (Hunger Games, the Lego
Movie, and Elysium) all portray imagined future dystopias. In all three,
no-holds-barred capitalism has trashed the environment beyond repair, created a
cynical, gated ruling class, desperate to hang onto its privileges, and reduced
everyone else to abject poverty.
In all three movies, inspirational
working-class heroes stand up against the tyrannical über-rich and bring down
their evil governments. But then the film ends. Not one has the remotest
concept of a fairer economic system and happier society to put in place of
persecutory rule by capitalist Bad Guys.
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| Fighting for Healthcare, Hollywood-style |
The gated community in Elysium is called after
the ancient Greek islands where the fortunate deceased spent a blissful
eternity. The repeated experience of founding new colonies made the Greeks
think hard about the circumstances conducive to human flourishing. From Hesiod’s Golden Race, and comedies in
which all the slaves were liberated, to the philosophers’ ideal polities
(Plato’s Republic was just one of several), the Greeks were constantly debating
the nature of the ideal community.
My favourite ancient utopia is Iambulus’
Islands of the Sun, where work, government and intellectual life are fairly
shared by everyone: ‘They alternately serve one another, some of them fishing,
others working at the crafts, others occupying themselves in other useful
matters, and still others—except for the very aged—performing public duties in
cyclic rotation… Every branch of learning is diligently pursued by them.’
The best thing about being a Sun Islander is
that everyone had a tongue with two tips, which meant s/he could carry on two
conversations simultaneously with two people, ‘responding to the questions of
one with one prong of the tongue, while conversing familiarly about current
events with the other.’
Such a tongue
would allow me to talk to university Management in a ‘strategic’ way and
‘develop my career,’ while still engaging with everybody else in optimistic discussion about how we might one day, just possibly, manage things better. On the other
hand, perhaps I’ll continue talking utopia to everyone indiscriminately and to
hell with ‘career development’.
In a rational world a "senior academic" such as the one you mention would not be employed in a university as they manifestly have no clue as to what a university is and why it exists. They also seem to be incredibly stupid, but then again that has never been a barrier to reaching the highest ranks of academia...Keep up the excellent work. The more of us that actively resist the time-serving lickspittles the harder it will be for them to define reality to their advantage.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Colin! Support much appreciated!
ReplyDeleteUhm...isn't that a "forked tongue" there? In that Sun Island thing.
ReplyDeleteNot that that's a problem really.
Just asking.
Overall point yes. Definitely.
Education as a business is a form of enslavement by enrollment. Where the yearning of the young for a good life is channeled into an increasingly constricted path that leads inevitably to a lifetime contract of service to financial predators.
Like slavery, the mistake people make is once the outer form of it's been removed, the actual dynamic must be gone as well. But no. Would-be slave masters figure an angle, a workaround, and go there.
The utopia I see is one where there are no people capable of enslaving others, or preying on others.
Not because it's illegal, though.
Simply because they aren't there anymore.
The bright formlessness of that isn't exactly a vision of a better world, it's the vision of where a better world begins.