Irrelevant Squared
By Jacob Levin
10 January, 2012
Countercurrents.org
Two things struck me about Tom Friedman's latest op-ed . One is how tremendously proud I felt reading it. The other is how disconnected it was from the biggest trends affecting humanity in the 21st century. What if the conversation about the future of the job market were actually about what the human species can do to lessen the immanent social, economic, political, and ecological catastrophe? What if it was about why current employment trends make me want to douse myself in gasoline and light myself on fire outside of the next WTO meeting? What would well-meaning journalists and visionary social entrepreneurs be talking about if they were forced to experience the psychological discomfort I currently feel as I try to find something worth doing with my life?
Let me start out by saying I love Blair Levin. I know his professional achievements intimately and do not think there are any serious blemishes on his record (except maybe not spending enough time exploring alternatives to a proprietary spectrum regime). My children and my children's children will be brought up learning the legends of how Blair used satellite television to force cable to invest in the internet business, and how he threw a strategic birthday party for an FCC commissioner to make sure that every child in America would have internet in his or her classroom. And beyond all that, I also know that he's a loving husband and father who has raised three children to believe that a more just world is worth pursuing.
I am indebted to him in two ways. First, I am indebted because he has always struggled to fulfill his role as a father. My mom deserves massive credit for letting him get away with long periods of failure, but she always knew that he would do whatever he needed to do to make up for lost time when his crusade ended and our house turned into a home again. Second, I am indebted because he also managed to find work he could do in good conscience (rare in Washington) that would pay him enough to give me every educational opportunity I've ever wanted without forcing me to go into debt. He had to take on a great deal of debt to finance his own education, and made it a priority to save up enough money to pay the absurd price of a US Bachelor's degree for all three of his children. In a time when people are starting to realize that "debt is slavery," I am well aware of how privileged I am to be free of debt.
But the example of my parents, and the education I sought out while I went through the necessary motions to get a degree (read: rubber stamp), taught me that freedom is only worthy of the word when it is lived in service of Truth and Beauty. My education trained me to notice how the words we read, and the sounds we hear, and the images that our gaze falls upon, serve to validate certain beliefs that make ways of life seem worthwhile. I learned what a challenge it is to speak truthfully and listen attentively. I talked with friends late into the night, struggling to articulate the inarticulable while 'searching for communion' (my favorite euphemism for recreational drug use ). Free from the pressure of having to find a high paying job after graduation, I had the luxury of spending my time in college trying to train my ear to notice the subtle difference between incarnational language and incantational language, between language that creates its meaning through the act of speaking and language that produces a desired effect in its audience, between language that calls forth virtuous performance and language that lulls listeners into a fascist slumber, between woody words and tinny words .
As I read the article out loud and my chest swelled with pride, I couldn't help but notice this awful tinny taste in my mouth as I spoke Friedman's words. I know my duty to honor the fifth commandment, but the curse of my education forces me to cringe when I read: "The best of these [innovation] ecosystems will be cities and towns that combine a university, an educated populace, a dynamic business community and the fastest broadband connections on earth. These will be the job factories of the future."
The emptiness of these words echoed deep inside of me. I've worked in a "dynamic business community," a relatively good place to work if you have debts you need to pay off or loved ones to care for. But my privilege gave me the freedom to admit that I was slipping into Babylon. The daily routine was lulling my mind to sleep and the lack of sunlight was making me a more bitter person. So I quit after less than a year to head to graduate school. And now, after four months of intense reading, I have also quit graduate school, forced to face the fact that there will be no place for the kind of education I want to offer once the academy turns into an "innovation ecosystem."
Hugh of St. Victor taught me that education is about evaluating the situation I find myself in and finding ways to repair my relation to the humans and other created beings my life-force interacts with. In my opinion, education can only begin after a student learns that " humanity consumes 25% more of the world's natural 'products' than the Earth can replace- a figure predicted to rise up to 80% by mid-century " and that " the global 1% line is $36,000 a year ." Only after hearing the jarring dissonance of the present can students begin listening for those words that might lead us towards a future humanity. The two contemporary literary phenomena most worthy of my students attention are The Temple of Hip Hop and The Dark Mountain Project , but educational institutions oriented towards reproducing necessary labour supply will be allergic to both of them. What are my chances of receiving a tenured position in an innovation ecosystem built to sustain a middle class if I tell my students:
"Humanity is up to its neck in denial about what it has built, what it has become- and what it is in for. Ecological and economic collapse unfold before us and, if we acknowledge them at all, we act as if this were a temporary problem, a technical glitch. Centuries of hubris block our ears like wax plugs; we cannot hear the message which reality is screaming at us. For all our doubts and discontents, we are still wired to an idea of history in which the future will be an upgraded version of the present. The assumption remains that things must continue in their current direction: the sense of crisis only smudges the meaning of that 'must.' No longer a natural inevitability, it becomes an urgent necessity: we must find a way to go on having supermarkets and superhighways. We cannot contemplate the alternative." ( The Dark Mountain Manifesto )
Although I love America, and wish nothing but the best for its entire population (documented and undocumented; Christopher Columbus and Hernando Cortes snuck in illegally), I do not believe collectively devoting our resources to maintaining a middle class will serve America's interest in the long run. Though a small number of Americans may realize the potential for "more high-value-added services and manufactured goods" in the near future, you don't need a degree in ecology to know that extractive capitalism is a suicidal project that will destroy itself before the end of this century. That is, unless some sort of cultural transformation brings it to a preemptive halt. The humanities only matter if we recognize that there is something "inhuman" living amongst, and within all of us, and we need to interrogate signs and symbols with the utmost care if we want to restore our likeness to the Human, that part of us which, according to the Judeo-Christian tradition, was created in the image of the Divine.
Worrying about bandwidth scarcity is a great way of distracting ourselves from the far more pressing questions we now face. The really critical question for Americans today is how do we deploy ourselves in the service of the collapsing social and environmental ecosystems we find ourselves connected to, in an age of horrific market failure? How will we play whatever remains of "the job market" in such a way that allows us to put food on our children's dinner plate without becoming bitter or brain dead? How will we protect our kids' imaginations from the homogenizing effects of the industrial model of education? How will we ensure our parents receive quality end-of-life care, even if their pensions disappear and state-run retirement centers are unspeakably understaffed and underfunded? How will we protect the commons, which can offer richness without a price tag and even be used to supplement income, from apathetic degeneration and privatization? How will we keep the dream of credit-granting professions from seducing our children into innovation ecosystems, where they will be trapped in a vicious debt cycle and kept so busy that they won't have time to worry about the fate of the people and places they left behind?
The answer, of course, is a renewed emphasis on the humanities. For proof, look no further than Blair's better half. My mom went to the same liberal arts college as I did. Her education taught her that fulfillment does not come from professional recognition, but from an (always imperfect) performance of her humanity. She gave up a promising career as a pediatric geneticist in order to move the family up to DC because she did not want my sisters and me to grow up without a father. My dad's income gave her freedom, and she lived it in service of Beauty and Truth. When we were in elementary school, she coordinated our cultural arts program, bringing our school the wonders of mimes and African dancers. As we got older, she volunteered in PTA's and drove us wherever we needed to go to develop our passions into talents. These days she volunteers with hospice, works tirelessly to remove the ivy from our neighborhood woods in the hope that the wildflowers will come back, volunteers at "College Tracks," trying to prevent our predatory education industry from scamming high school students, and attempts to teach her delinquent son how to cook healthy meals from scratch. Though she may consume more than her fair share of resources, her skillful performance of humanity leaves me in awe, frightened that my own heart is too blemished to ever allow me to perform love so eloquently.
But you don't need an expensive liberal arts education to keep yourself and your children from becoming inhuman. In fact, your children's souls would be much safer if you loaded their iPod with lectures and podcasts, handed them a couple of good books and sent them off to a sustainable farm. They could learn practical skills during the day and study at night. Sure, they might slack off a bit at first and not take learning seriously, but so do most college freshman. In my case, it took me almost two years (~$90,000) and countless shots of dirt-cheap vodka and bong rips before I recovered from having twelve years of 'education' forced down my throat, and rediscovered my will to learn. For anyone who knows that "life without knowledge is death in disguise," there is a free, quality education waiting for them on the Internet (if you're looking for a good place to start, I recommend anything and everything by Ivan Illich ).
Once my thirst for knowledge was activated, having access to professors and other interested students was a Godsend. But nothing about attending an elite institution guarantees that you're going to receive a quality education. Many kids who attend elite colleges and universities graduate unaware of the world beyond their own dreams and desires (to be fair, this is the intended effect of the industrial model of education). Others graduate as semi-decent human beings, but fail to spend enough energy resisting those forces that would turn healthy ambition into a jealous need for external validation and are transformed into pricks later in life (and I speak as someone who worries every day that I deserve to be in this category).
Nothing makes my blood boil more than imagining eight doctors remotely reviewing an MRI of one of my classmates who decided to spend his entire life trying to maximize his own fleshly pleasure. While those eight doctors figure out how to get him back to pleasure seeking, a rural town will pool its resources to try to fund what should be an affordable procedure to save the life of a beloved daughter, only to find the doors of the medical industry closed to those who have not allowed themselves to be invasively monitored at all times. The only thing that keeps me from ripping out my hair and sobbing uncontrollably about the injustice of it all is my faith that those who are opened to vulnerability and the inevitability of change escape the living hell of those stuck in the desire to remain forever in the self-same, terrified of whatever else might be out there. The beloved daughter, and all those who sit around her at the table in her final days, will share a foretaste of eternity at every meal, a taste so much sweeter and more substantial than all of the expensive whiskey, designer pot, and beautiful women that my classmate will consume in pursuit of that which will finally fill the void inside of him (though to be fair, at any moment something might happen to shake him out of his settled world and set him on a quest for substance).
Mastery of the humanities is something first and foremost performed. As long as you are aware of the danger of becoming an inhuman pleasure maximizer, who pursues comfort and stability without concern for hidden costs, you are a student of the humanities, engaged in the interpretive project of "becoming human." But be careful! The world is full of sounds, images and smells, expertly designed to twist your desires, making you the puppet of an inhuman master. It was astonishing how much easier it was for me to perform my humanity when I limited the amount of time I spent in front of brightly lit screens and started to force my eyes across the pages of J.M. Coetzee and Cormac McCarthy novels. And on the many days I feel too tired to read, I rest my eyes and listen to music. But I always make sure that the music I listen to respects the fact that trying to become a human is a struggle. Anyone with an attentive ear knows that there's a big difference between the catchy noises that Soulja Boy and T-Pain stick on an album and the gifts that Gil Scott , Public Enemy , KRS One , Rakim , Saul Williams , Mos Def , Talib Kweli , Nas , Damian Marley , Sabac Red , Unknown Prophets , K'naan , Akala , Lowkey and Amir Sulaiman offer fans. These artists help hold me up when I feel my demons trying to drag me down towards a person I don't want to be. What the class of professionals who pretend to be specially ordained protectors of "the humanities" don't tell you is that there are thousands of people living in ghettos, townships, prisons and family farms who have attuned ears, watchful eyes, and still-beating hearts, allowing them to offer more impressive performances of humanity than you'll find in the stuffy halls of the academy. Comfort and security are always in danger of destroying our ability to see and hear as caring human creatures, open to change.
This brings me back to my own struggle with trends in the job market. I'm finding it challenging to figure out how to balance my desire for a job that offers health care with my desire to remain human. If I had loved ones to provide for or debt to pay off, I would submit myself to whatever alienating labour I could find. But my undeserved privilege grants me the freedom to try to serve Truth and Beauty. So what are the jobs that can help make this world a slightly better place for future generations, from whom we are currently stealing so much? Everything I've learned has made me certain of one thing: soil health will be crucially important for whatever remnant of humanity survives the next few tragic decades. Without a doubt, the tumultuous times will be easier to cope with if high-speed broadband is available to places other than a couple big cities on the coast. Gig.U is an important infrastructure project that could prove useful in any number of ways, but these information networks will only matter if there are still humans around to make use of them. Coveting South Korea's broadband ecosystem is absurd. Our broadband ecosystem is not the problem. The world has millions of real ecosystems that are rapidly losing biodiversity and are in serious danger of becoming unable to sustain life. If you want to think of yourself as living in an ecosystem (isn't this word a bit sterile for the majesty of creation?), then understand yourself as an active part of every ecosystem your consumption and excretion interacts with, and devote time and ingenuity into trying to prevent those ecosystems from becoming wastelands. Given how hard it is to investigate supply chains at the moment, buying local from people you trust is the only surefire way of avoiding being complicit in ecocide.
The most miraculous thing about land populated with people who live lives in service to a healthy environment (read: Zion) is the way the land becomes capable of sustaining more and more life over time, assuming no technologically superior, violent colonists come and extract everything of value or use it as a dump. The places able to nurture the quest for humanity in the future will be places with rich soil (and soil by no means only refers to the brown stuff on the ground) and minimal pollution (and pollution by no means only refers to the refuse that ends up in the dump). The promised land is anywhere people live as caring community members and stewards of the environment, where people collectively admit how psychologically strained we all are and try to rediscover activities, other than consuming scarce resources, which make life worth living (potlucks and dancing are all well and good, but many of us would rather die than not be allowed to use weed and moonshine in moderation).
An op-ed about the future of jobs in America is just as irrelevant as the republican primary debates if it fails to recognize that it is the health of our soil that will allow future generations of Americans to escape the horrors of destitution (I intentionally avoid the word ' poverty ') and carve out sustainable forms of prosperity. The soil is our alpha and omega. The only people who can afford not to care about soil health are those colonial land pirates, who can use their access to credit markets to isolate themselves from the violent effects of their lifestyles. I want to live a life that worships the life-giving capacity of rich soil, but there is a serious scarcity of jobs that allow me to treat soil health as anything more than a hobby or a consumer preference. Industrialized agriculture makes it difficult to take good care of soil, unless you're blessed to have minimal debt, and access to affordable medical care. Every year, the number of people who can live their life in devotion to healthy soil shrinks thanks to the wonders of "free trade" (do you hear the tinniness?). Massive urban unemployment all over the globe, and the resulting militarized police presence, has everything to do with the intentional sacrifice of peasants to the gods of 'development.' And to add insult to injury, the good folks taking part in the Durban climate talks decided to include agriculture in carbon markets , providing an incentive for governments in the Global South to invest in and subsidize capital intensive, carbon-sinking, "climate friendly agriculture" (a phrase even more tinny than "economic sanctions" or "enhanced interrogation techniques"). This move will accelerate the already rapid extinction rate of subsistence living, lifestyles that can offer an alternative to homo economicus when he is rudely awakened from his dreamworld and forced to face the nightmare he's created.
Imagining how unjust the next few years of history are going to be, as the kids of people who caused this climate catastrophe find ways to profit off of the billions of people who have never had an opportunity to consume enough to contribute to the crisis, has left me in an extremely precarious psychological state. If it wasn't for the support of friends like Kafka , David Foster Wallace and Paul of Tarsus , who have complicated my understanding of death, you would probably see pictures of me outside the next WTO conference, dousing myself in gasoline and lighting a match.
So what would an op-ed look like if it focused on the ecosystems that will truly sustain human life in the future, and gave some recognition to those visionaries who are finding a way to value the environment within a global economic system set up to deplete it? It might be about National Family Farm Coalition 's "Food From Family Farms Act." Beyond just creating sustainable, alternative lifestyles for some of the millions of unemployed people currently trapped in consumption-centric cities, the act would force the WTO to recognize the principle of food sovereignty . Our collective failure to push this principle has lead countless beautiful souls (like Lee Kyung Hae ) to hate what America stands for in the world. Or maybe the op-ed would be about One Acre Fund 's success revitalizing peasant lifestyles in Kenya and Rwanda. Or maybe about Central Carolina Community College's outstanding sustainable agriculture program . Or maybe about Ragan Sutterfield 's attempt to help kids with behavior issues (read: intuition into the tinniness of institutional language) understand the value of a hard days work caring for the land. Or maybe about the thousands of innovative permaculture projects that have been popping up across America over the past half century without a single policy maker taking note. Or maybe just about my mom's valiant attempt to rid our woods of ivy. If you read any of those stories alongside Friedman's latest column, you too would have to admit that there is something annoyingly tinny about Friedman's language.
And once you learn to hear tin, you can begin the terrifying but exhilarating quest for wood.
Jacob Levin was born on North Carolina's red clay, but moved up to a white-flight neighborhood outside of DC when he was still very young. He went to college in the purple mountains of Massachusetts, where he studied philosophy and theology and worked as a forest caretaker. When he finished, he moved back to the red clay and tried to become a productive member of the workforce. It didn't work, so he tried going back to school. He quickly realized that was a waste of money, and now spends his days working on farms up and down the east coast, searching for places for the Academy to take refuge in a world that has no place for it. He lives for sunsets.
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