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> | The performance of protest has become a proxy for actual social change. One could say this has come about largely without comment, but the irony of the situation is that comment—in the modern medium of liberal activism—abounds. At this point, it might seem fitting for me to delve into some smug literary badge like “and therein lies the problem,” before launching into a dramatic description of my grievances and patting myself on the back for discovering yet another flaw in the modern movement we like to call liberal activism. This is not that. For me, this is a stop gap. This is a brief acknowledgement of a problem which will still trouble me tomorrow, but by then I will have turned back to more pressing matters. | | | | |
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> | The problem as I see it—not to be confused with “the only problem”-- is this. In today’s largely public, social media mix of what it means to be a liberal in a tradition of activism, the heart of that tradition seems to be falling to the wayside. Increasingly, in this new age of Bernie Sanders stans* , Black Lives Matter hashtags and HeForShe? ? campaigns, people are liberal, but we’re not all that active. | | | | |
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> | About a month ago, I attended the Beyond the Bars conference put on by Columbia’s School of Social work. Half asleep and haunted by the ever-approaching deadline of my moot court memo—5pm that very evening--I told myself that I would get in, attend my friend’s panel and get out. I had been doing what I thought of as meaningful work for a couple of months by then, and although I don’t think I walked in with any particular chip on my shoulder, I was confident in my role as a budding agent of change. As my companion and I made our way into the morning welcome rally, I noticed there was a bit of a buzz, an urgency to the atmosphere. Nobody there was at rest. There were no smugly folded hands or presumptuously cleared throats. The setting was academic, but the energy was hardly that. As I walked in, carefully picking my way past people who didn’t look or sound anything like those people I had been surrounding myself with-- however voluntarily-- for the past few months, I’m ashamed to say I was still going over the machinations of my brief in my head. I’d hardly settled into my seat when the whole room rose to their feet to welcome the organizers of the conference. As each of the students finished introducing themselves, they stepped back until only one Black man remained at the center of the makeshift stage. It was clear this man was ‘’ the boss.” Small and slim in stature, he was dressed in all black. Black hoodie. Black tee. Faded black cargo pants tucked into scuffed doc martins. His brown eyes were sharp and took in the room as he said “we cannot afford to treat injustice like an academic exercise as long as people are rotting and dying at its hands.” The words, which in a “normal” academic setting would have dropped the room into a stunned and sober silence was met with cheers. In a room full of academics, students, community organizers, formerly incarcerated men and women, social workers, and other change agents**, it became very clear that the unrest was not borne from discomfort or uneasiness but from the urgency within the room. These were people who had long since understood the gravity of their battles. There was no place for performance. There was no time for empty action. I realized I was surrounded by people who carried an awareness of the consequence and levity of their actions; they knew people were dying and time was of the essence. And in this academic setting, they carried that urgency with them. | | | | |
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< | The thinking man is the man who engages with the world around him and prides himself on being well-read, present in various movements and capable of making independently formed opinions. The establishment of that character as the outlier, the lone champion of true critical thought, in a world of faceless followers is something we might need to believe in. Most likely, the case will be that we want to believe it about ourselves, that we are the man in the mirror. That we are capable of looking introspectively at our values and projecting those values competently onto the world around us in an attempt to map our truest beliefs about the world onto our varying realities. However, simply wanting to believe that that person in the mirror, that person who reads all the thought pieces on the Atlantic, the person who ruthlessly rips apart other people’s arguments, opinions, and characterizations, the person who reads Kant and Marx because they’ve heard that’s what other smart people do, has some significance does not necessarily make it so. | >
> | That urgency is rare, and its rarity is unsurprising in this age of hashtags, media attention, and obsessive over-analyzed thought pieces, all of which purport to be doing something—and indeed they are doing something---but they are not always doing the things that need to be done. People are still dying, but we are blinding ourselves to their plights, even as we “engage” with them. If one person shares a million articles about an issue, tweets about it, zealously discusses it at every open opportunity, we applaud that person for “being involved”. The problem is we have lowered our standards of what it means to be involved. | | | | |
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< | It’s almost too easy to get caught up in ideas of one’s own intellect, honing it, building it up, and jealously guarding it against criticism which might show us the fragility of our intellect. Intellect has become more ornamental than it’s ever been. The thinking man has the right credentials to discuss anything you would like to discuss, but to what extent does he--do you--internalize that information? To what extent is it yours? In this day and age, with access to unprecedented levels of information and where others have unprecedented access to our own intellect, intelligence is simply decorative. Likes, statuses, and following give us new tools through which to monitor our fellow humans and new tools through which we are also monitored. Everyone is now the thinking man like they have always been, but now there’s an audience. Before, where the thinking man may have been somewhat predicable, he is now completely scripted. If you “like” something, you know others will see it, and so you must “like” the right things. If you read something, how will others know you have read it unless you share? And then of course, again, you must read the right things.
The thinking man, once a myth of a man, one so rarely seen, is now “seen” everywhere. And the irony is that we are faster about calling them out. Pseudo intellectuals are called out by pseudo intellectuals and each thinks that the other is the liar. We select our authorities based on whose truth most closely aligns with our ideas of the world and consider ourselves thinking men. We consider ourselves more educated than our counterparts because we have aligned ourselves with someone whose philosophy is our own and we consider others unintelligent when their critical thought doesn’t lead them to our conclusions. We run ourselves ragged trying to pull people to our side, convinced that, being the thinking men that we are, salvation lies with us, with our way of living and thinking which is crucial to something larger than us and something that is crucial to society as whole, little realizing that we are holding things that have been handed to us. The ideas that we think will redeem society has been handcrafted and specially packaged for us by products of that same society, and thus—while we congratulate ourselves for being outside the system—the system uses us to sustain itself.
-- JinduObiofuma - 19 Feb 2016
We need to start over here.
First, what is the idea of the essay? It isn't about Arnold's
thinking man, because it has no relation to the idea he expresses,
so that's just a borrowed phrase. The three paragraphs you seem to
have meant (I inserted the blank lines between paragraphs for you)
don't develop an idea: they ramble. One can tell that you have some
strong feelings, but not what they are about, or how they are
related to some idea we can get from you. Apparently you don't
think much of the Atlantic, which doesn't mean much to me, or to any
reader who doesn't think of magazines as a unit, but rather as
containers of ideas that may or may not be productive for them. A
distaste for Kant and Marx is communicated, but neither a reason for
the distaste nor a basis for confidence that you've read them. In
the conclusion, we are told there is a "system" handcrafting and
packaging ideas "for us," (I'm not sure how it is packaging Dante,
Chaucer, Shakespeare and Plato for me, let alone Newton, Maxwell and
Einstein or Marshall, Taney and Holmes), which is either a big idea
needing explanation or no idea at all.
Let's start by putting in one sentence, as the theme of the essay,
the idea you want the reader to take from you. The first paragraph
in addition to expressing the short, lucid expression of your idea,
should give the reader some attractive reasons to keep reading.
Subsequent paragraphs should develop the idea, showing where you got
its components from, how you put them together, what the likeliest
objections or questions are, and how you answer them. A conclusion
can then sum up what you have taught, and provide the reader with
one or two consequent ideas she could explore on her own using the
idea you've provided as a starting point.
I won't say this can't be done in 575 words, if you take great care
to formulate everything as clearly and succinctly as possible. But
in general it will be difficult to do in fewer than 600 words what
is assigned to do in 1,000. Brevity is easier to achieve by editing
what is good but too long than by starting with a slipshod draft
that doesn't capture your meaning clearly at whatever length.
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> | Direct engagement is something that is largely missing in this modern wave of liberal activism. To be fair, this is not the case across the board. We have people risking their lives and limbs for incredible causes every day. However, this is not the norm. Speaking to my peers in the western world, from whom I don’t assume any great moral distance, we can’t afford for a sense of urgency about others to be a rarity. We tweet and march and pen and protest, but these are things largely done in the comfort our own circles of liberal friends. We shy away from throwing ourselves against the issues we purport to care about. We close ourselves off from the people those issues affect. There is no urgency. There is no engagement. And this is what we must fix if we mean to live the lives we say we want. To be liberal is to do more than vote Sanders and to be an activist is more than tweeting #Black Lives Matter. We have to engage with the communities and issues we claim to care about. And we have to act as if we know that our action or inaction has consequences. In case you haven’t heard, people are dying. | | |
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> | * A Stan is a superfan; this term originated with the song “Stan” by Eminem in which a superfan becomes obsessed with the rapper to the point of self-harm; the term is often employed in association with celebrities with intense fans; ie. Beyonce stans are really intense; you can’t say anything about her without getting at least a few of them on your case. ** I later found out I was the only lawyer (law student) in the room. | | | \ No newline at end of file |
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