The Flying Machine

I've been bumping head-first into a particular issue seemingly everywhere lately. Call it the distinction between proselytizing and preaching to the choir, though really that's not quite it. I've put off writing because I've had a devil of a time finding the right words. (Would welcome reading suggestions, hint hint)

It all started when my buddy Tom G. moved into the area. He and I worked together on environmental issues back at Dartmouth, and he's always been a real savvy guy. He takes a very policy-oriented approach toward environmental problems: we should fix this system, or change these rules.

Having spent the past two and a half years as a community-based nonprofit worker negotiating a forest of poorly-executed and often downright piss-poor top-down policies and rules, I'm a little (a lot) skeptical of this approach. How can public policy have any utility if it doesn't serve the public? The hoops I jump through to, say, secure food systems grant funding from USDA are built just fine for USDA's administrative needs, but they sure as hell don't serve my organization's needs. Don't even get me started on working with FEMA on natural hazard plans.

So when Mr. G moved into town we immediately started going 'round about the ins and outs of policy-writing and the role of community stakeholders. (I'll note that I respect his views and we listen to one another and have a lot of fun arguing!)

Then I read this Stanley Fish piece. Now, I often disagree with the curmudgeonly Mr. Fish anyway, but this bit really did it, with its waxing on higher education as "distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world."

Now, I like the idea of higher education being a place for the kinds of academic thinking that don't lend themselves to wild commercial enterprise (Comp Lit comes to mind). But the problem is that too much time spent in an environment of "determined inutility" creates very intelligent people who don't actually know how to apply - to utilize - information in the real world.

I was lucky, I had several professors who understood the importance of applying an academic idea to the real world situations upon which it could have an impact. Not everything needs to always be interpreted this way, but, well, context matters.

And OK, there's a big difference between academia and policyland, and there's a lot of ground between "determined inutility" and "trade school", but go with me here while I add another tangentially related article to this mess.

So I read this piece from Seal that comments on a comment of Jonathan Franzen's - here's the Franzen:

As for my own ambitions for the novel nowadays, I make fun of the ambitions I had when I was 22 and thinking, I will write the book that unmasks the terrible world, I will cause the scales to fall from the public’s eyes, and they will see how stupid the local news at 11 is, and they will realize how cliché-riddled the pages of their local newspaper are and how corrupt their elected officials are. And they won’t stand for it any more. Exactly what kind of utopia I thought would ensue was never clear.

[...] I think the difference now is that I recognize that there’s a small but non-zero segment of the population that feels and thinks in all of those literary ways, and that my task is to reach them and to participate in the life of that segment of the population. This is what I’m writing for, for the people who want a literary experience. I’m no longer worried that nobody besides me can have that kind of experience, but I’m also not imagining that, in any conceivable twist of history, everybody will want that kind of experience. So it’s a weird and possibly selfish-seeming form of communitarianism: I’ve ceased to care much, as a writer, about people who don’t care about books.

And here's the Seal -

I find it somehow counter-intuitive that technologies which make instantaneous global publishing possible have encouraged the development of what must be considered a relatively monastic attitude—a twinned belief that a vanguard of scholar-devotees can preserve both knowledge of and passion for literature in a dark time and that this vanguard is its own best and only audience.

I'm not trying to criticize here, merely to consider how this came about, how the possibilities brought about by the internet have led to the development of this attitude in many notable quarters, and how inevitable such a development was. And finally, to ask whether this technologically-facilitated monasticism will increase over time, or whether there will be a sort of humanist reaction, and if so, how long until that comes about.

I'm not exactly a humanist but I find Franzen's take to be as bothersome as Fish's or your standard-issue policy wonk's. Isn't there some better middle ground between the overly idealistic views of age 22 and the thoroughly cynical ones he holds today?

It's like moving to California to become an organic farmer. Go ahead and preach to THAT choir. Haven't you got any more gumption than that? Where's the challenge there?

Maybe I was an evangelist in another life, but I see a deep (and very nearly inviolable) importance in connecting your work - be it a great American novel or agricultural policy or literary criticism - to the real world. The goal is not to lock yourself up into a little bubble of like-minded smart people forever. It's to take those smart people and smart ideas and put them to use for making the world a better place, or at least to try. Yeah, I know that my and your definition of, say "real world" or "better place" may be wildly different. There's no longer any universally recognized ideal world (was there ever?), but I guess I don't see that as an excuse.

Now who's the idealist, eh?

Like I said before, this is something I'd be interested in discussing further (or, uh, reading up on before I expound at length again).