Autopsy of an Education

~~~
I considered framing this as a selfless and objective account. I told myself (as I would tell you) that it wasn't a petition for pity, not a rant rooted in ressentiment, nor a humblebrag, nor a piece of excuse-making. Those are lies. The truth is that I am sad, and angry, and I do feel unfairly deprived of my privileges.  I can only bring myself to admit so because I suspect I'm not alone in this feeling.

The question lurking behind the present storytime is "How many?" How many young men like me had every reason to believe they were going places, so they did their best, only to discover that the system was not interested in their contributions?  How many have given up, and shut down, as I have?  Finally, what are the results for a society if this happens on a regular basis?

Speaking from my own experience, grade school gave me the sense of being singular, at least among those kids within busing distance.  My alleged smarts were spoken of like sorcery, a strange mysterious power conferred on me by the Fates. A classmate once asked if I had eaten a dictionary. I finished Grade 8 Math with a final mark above 100, which might say more about my math teacher than myself. All of which is to observe that the ear of one's ego has to bend toward something. It wouldn't have been sports. It couldn't have been church. Lord knows, it wasn't Canada. Not having a tribe of my own or a healthy and harmonious family, I could only take pride in my numerically-quantified academic accomplishments as an atomized individual.

So I was a student. A good student. A very good student. I would often like to protest that I didn't work that hard, only as hard as the projects apparently required, yet that minimal standard seemed to exceed that of others.  Completing these mostly pointless and stupid assignments, and watching others struggle with them, undoubtedly warped me in all kinds of ways.  I only wish that inflation and distortion of my character might have been harnessed for good.

This may be where I went astray. I never got to a point with math or science where it was anything more than rote learning. If you understood the principles and followed them correctly, you always found the right answer. Maybe I could have been a great mathematician, but I could think of nothing less interesting. The practice of science looked similarly thankless, long stretches of dull routine broken up by occasional excitement.  I made the choice to go into arts and humanities instead as soon as I had the option.

What was the essence of that choice? Was I moving toward understanding humanity, expressing myself, and thinking creatively, or was I just fleeing from the boring business of keeping this shit show running? I surely revelled in the maverick move of not doing the obvious, and I really hoped to find engaging shades of grey demanding messy interpretation, but I was also lazy, and worn-out from a decade of busywork while my peers were having childhoods. I think I had legitimate grievances against the status quo, against war and waste, corporatism and kakistocracy, but did I actually believe that I could not operate within the establishment without compromising my principles, or did it just look like too much trouble? I'm trying to recount the ways my education failed me, but I can't get past my own complicity. I could be a rich doctor right now, instead of a destitute dreg. Sometimes smart people are improbably stupid.

On that note, I eventually chose to attend Trent University. They had a department of cultural studies, and Maclean's magazine said they wore Birkenstocks and sometimes went to class in pyjamas there, so that's the school I picked. The highfalutin hand-waving the program used to describe itself sounded good enough. Of course there are power imbalances in society. Of course there's injustice. Who wouldn't want to make the world more just and fair? It did all sound a little airy, but the program promised workshops in the arts.  I would learn practical skills.  If not a professorship, I could go into film or theatre.  Three career tracks in one degree! What could go wrong?

I must pause at this point to draw out another animating idea for this bit, and that's the good faith assumption of a functioning society.  You want to believe that your elders and superiors have guarded against decadence and decline. You want to believe that expensive degrees have value. It looked on the surface like cultural studies might be an indulgently speculative enterprise, an ivory tower endeavour far-removed from reality.  I knew that to be the unschooled assumption of retrograde country bumpkins.  It simply wasn't conceivable that so many smart people could be caught up in a lie.  If the Emperor had no clothes, someone would have said something, and that cultural studies department would disband in shame.

Of course, they had no shame. I was told about the pathological propensities of my people to want a happy family and a strong leader, and I was told that another people were the supreme paragons of moral virtue in human history.  I figured out that I was only being very poorly taught how to put on a play or make a movie so that I could advance the social theories of my professors. Despite my efforts to avoid the drily predictable patterns of rationalistic quantitative analysis, there was still only one right answer, and what was worse: it didn't even agree with reason. 2 + 2 was always 5.

My experience of cultural studies was akin to gaslighting. The hostility to anything normative seemed to come out of nowhere in second year, after I had committed to the major, yet all the students and professors treated it as established, proven, and beyond debate that we should all be Marxists disassembling the dominant culture. I looked around the table and couldn't see anyone as confused as I felt.  Maybe it was me.  Maybe I was mistaken.  Maybe I was mad.  The alternative was a lot worse to contemplate.

I never kept my grades up for their own sake. The mark was a measure of the degree to which I had committed myself to understanding and embodying the principles conveyed. I could feel good about myself because I was playing along.  I was learning the ropes so that one day I might captain my own ship in a vast armada. Together we would do great and glorious things, noble things we can't even imagine.  All I had to do was listen to the words of those older and wiser than myself, apply what they had taught me, be reasonable, and speak the truth. Speech is social, and justice is true, so I thought that I was on board with social justice.

I never expected that my degree would end with an epic moral quandary.  I was just a few papers away from earning my Honours, papers that I had imagined would be the culmination of my learning, tying it all up in a neat bow that would point to what the next step should be.  Instead I was more confused than at the beginning, not to say that I didn't have more ideas in my head.  I knew the sociopolitical bullet points that I should work from if I knew what was good for me, but in truth, I had not been convinced of them.  I could fake it, I was sure of that, but I wasn't sure I would emerge from that process the same person. A little part of me would die, the part that wants my reason, actions, and conscience to be in accord with one another.  The very part that torments me to this day, but I keep alive anyway, in the hopes that one day I'll find a worthy use for it.

The Gentle Tyranny of Nathan Rambukkana

~~~

 Wilfrid Laurier University is the latest scandalous instance of the political weaponisation of academia.  A year after Jordan Peterson warned that changes to Canada's Human Rights Act and Criminal Code amounted to legally-compelled speech, a teaching assistant has in fact been censured by an ad hoc tribunal for presenting Prof. Peterson's argument without reflexively condemning it.  The old characterization of university as a neutral space for higher learning is now passé.  Social justice as an ideology has been fully institutionalised.

Clearly Lindsay Shepherd, the offending TA, is the hero of the day.  She had the foresight to secretly record her superiors, the presence of mind to cogently convey her position, and the courage to face down a hostile panel accusing her of gendered violence and the passive endorsement of evil.

Wilfrid Laurier will undoubtedly suffer for this episode, but it's her supervising prof Dr. Rambukkana who comes off the worst in Shepherd's recording.  He accuses her of creating a toxic teaching climate with her problematic opinions.  Nonetheless, perhaps partly because he hasn't yet given any interviews, Rambukkana does not present as a real person.  He is a caricature, an absurdly convenient condensation of trends that have worried people like Peterson.  He steps forth and offers himself as a stock character in the dramatic enactment of our collective troubles.

If it wasn't him, it would be someone else.  If it wasn't Wilfrid Laurier, it would be another university.  However outrageous this occasion may be, despite or even because of the concreteness of the evidence, the scandal functions chiefly as a target for the projections of people who have already made up their mind on these matters.  The whole thing is so unsurprising that it's tempting to damn, denounce and decry and be done with it.

I wish it were that easy for me.  You see, fifteen years ago, Nathan Rambukkana was my TA.  I remember a sweet, gentle soul, who you can almost hear behind the tremulous and uncertain tones of his inquisition.  The question that presents itself is how did a well-meaning academic end up an Orwellian villain?  This is perhaps a question for us all to ask ourselves.

Nathan, what happened?  When did justice become about revenge for hurt feelings?  How did the infinite multiplicity of possible perspectives reduce to mandatory Marxism?  Who made that argument for you, and why did you never share it with us?  It confused me then and it confuses me now.

You know, the problematising of my positionality left me a broken wreck, so I've had fifteen years of sorrow in which to try to reconcile your seeming friendliness with the antisocial angst of my later professors.  There is no rational argument to be found, as far as I can tell.

For what it's worth, I think the most helpful thing you taught us was that reading cultural studies sometimes requires letting it wash over you without trying to understand it.  In hindsight, that sounds a bit like brainwashing.

All of this hoopla is over a short clip attesting to the existence of a debate, a piece of critical thinking in a communication class that you deemed to be inappropriate for school.

Do you remember, Nathan, the time you made us watch an entire episode of The Young Ones in lieu of conducting a tutorial?  I don't know if you thought you were giving us a treat, or if you were just hungover that day, but the case you made for its relevance to our studies was extremely weak, everyone hated it, and I was offended.  But I didn't take it to your bosses, because I was under the misapprehension that you're a nice person.

When Jared Taylor Came To Town

Racial and Religious Abuse Increasing Among Small Children

A three-year-old Mancunian has been questioned by police for a possible hate crime after causing "harassment, alarm, or distress" to his victim.

Jewish Boy Deplores White Privilege

Now I realize that it’s quite possible to find 14-year old White boys who, having endured a standard American education, would deplore their White privilege — that they are “ethnomasochists” as John Derbyshire would have it. But it also seems to me that it’s more likely that such sentiments would come from a Jewish boy raised in the home of left-wing Jewish activists.

Radio Tunes Really Are Getting Stupider

In the course of just ten years, the reading skill necessary to understand popular songs in America has dropped a whole grade level, to somewhere between second and third grade.  Between Hip-hop, Rock and Pop, and Country, Country fares the best, with Blake Shelton’s hit "All About Tonight" requiring an incredible 5.8 grade reading level (the song challenges with such utterances as "concoctions" and "Gatorade").  With electronic dance music already degraded to a series of farts and burps, it's only a matter of time before all music will be fully comprehensible to babies and smart dogs.

Cupcakes for Some, Guilt for Others

“Bank Street wants to give kids of color a space to talk about shared experiences,” Wahi explained in a parent handout, “because even in society today, people of color are treated unfairly.”

“In the recent past,” she added, “children of color in our Lower School have been told by well-intentioned peers that their skin looks like the color of poop.”

Bearded Children Hitting On Canadian Girls

The parent added that the Syrians “have started on the girls in the year below who they are having success with. It’s really ugly, the Canadian boys are very frustrated but are too scared to speak up (they know how dangerous the ‘you’re a racist’ label will be for the rest of their lives).”

Boredom Good For Young Minds

“A child develops best when, like a young plant, he is left undisturbed in the same soil. Too much travel, too much variety of impressions, are not good for the young, and cause them as they grow up to become incapable of enduring fruitful monotony.”

The Peaceful Donald

With increasing frequency over the last few months some of the most thoughtful left and progressive figures have begun to speak favorably of aspects of Trump’s foreign policy. Let us hear from these heretics.

Music Improves Auditory Processing in Children

These initial study results, published recently in the journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, provide evidence of the benefits of music education at a time when many schools around the nation have either eliminated or reduced music and arts programs. The study shows music instruction speeds up the maturation of the auditory pathway in the brain and increases its efficiency.

Virtual Reality and the Holocaust

A "virtual Holocaust survivor" who lived through an extermination camp and a death march will now be educating children by "upsetting the viewer’s sense of comfort." 

The interactive hologram and associated artificial intelligence answers questions with selections from 25 hours of footage of Pinchas Gutter, creating a vivid and convincing testimony intended to "jolt another world into your own." 

Historical investigation of the event remains verboten.

Cooperation Intensifies to Combat Hate Speech

Leading technology companies, including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, have signed a collective pledge to the European Union to scrub any hate speech from their walls within twenty-four hours.  Some kind of definition or understanding of what qualifies as hate speech is presently lacking, but such details will surely be worked out cogently and transparently very soon.

Minority Silenced

DePaul College Republicans invited Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at their school on the subject of feminism.  At the last minute, the DePaul University administration demanded that the club pay for an expensive security team.  When protestors took to the stage, stole a microphone, and threatened to punch the speaker, administrators ordered the officers to stand down.  The event was eventually cancelled.

Confessions of a Straight White Male Cultural Studies Major

~~~

An empty decade ago, I got my degree in Cultural Studies from Trent University, in Peterborough, Ontario.  That was the most progressive program at the most progressive school I could find in Canada. 

It was ten years ago that I fled in shame--unable to write what I had to in order to receive my Honours.  Only today am I prepared to say that I couldn't get my Honours then because there was no honour to be found in what I was doing.

~~~

We must back up, to whatever point little Joey first learned the word, “society.”  What a revelation that concept was!  I was sure that things could be so much better, saner, safer, and more peaceful if this amorphous, capricious creature called “society” would only get its act together.  The utterance was always at the ready, deployed by wee Joey as a mild curse.  “Society.”

Clearly individuals were generally decent, but in association I could only see their accumulated error.  Somehow good people added up to a needlessly shit social environment, and in my hazy innocence I imagined that understanding and considering the social and psychological exigencies of our conduct could help cleanse us of this need to waste energy on condemnation and habitual idiocy.  We suffer not because we deserve it, not because we must, but for want of understanding just how much the inertia of past ages still directs us.

Yes, people weren't the problem, it was society.  The terrible disappointment that is humanity was but a mass of waves and murmurations echoing old impulses.  It wasn't something inherent in each faulty person, it was old mistakes handed down and uncorrected.  Our common heritage was our misperception of things.

~~~

I remember the feeling I had in junior high social studies class, when Mr. Houle explained why Canada was better than the United States.  America strove for a melting pot with one standard—he invoked “hotdogs and baseball” and got big laughs, so I know the message stuck—while we enlightened Canucks, in our more refined and elevated moral sense, presented a mosaic of cultures.  We were a place where every colour and creed could belong.  Our identity was all identities.

It should have made me feel full.  It should perhaps have made me feel privileged and proud and overwhelmed with the depth and breadth of the Canadian soul.  Instead it made me feel oddly hollow.

Of course other people from other cultures could bring their assorted foods, dances, and hats, and thereby give me a richer palette with which to colour my life, but what could I bring to another country of my own home, my own culture, my own identity?  We were everything and nothing, yet I knew there was something more in me than snow and maple syrup.

~~~

The school counselor called me down one day to tell me about a special program at the University of New Brunswick.  I got the impression mine was the name from our school she was giving them.

The program was a Bachelor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Leadership Studies.  They operated out of an old Victorian home, where I would be living and working alongside my classmates.  I took the tour, was shown a project they were working on, something about different perspectives on oil drilling, and then we sat down with the dean. 

Eventually he came to that awful, awful question: “Do you have any questions?”  I fished around for a moment, and then stumbled into asking him point-blank what the goals and objectives and principles and philosophy of the program were.  What were they trying to accomplish in the world?

In response, he reached for the brochure and read me the fucking blurb on the back.  It was then that I knew I would not be lead into whatever kind of leadership they were offering.

~~~

My childhood fixation with “society” gradually became more finely tuned and nuanced into a preoccupation with “bullshit.”  Yes, bullshit was the problem now.  If only society would get over its bullshit.

It seemed to me that English, Sociology, Psychology, History, Philosophy and Fine Arts were all too narrowly circumscribed by their own particular brands of bullshit.  What I needed was a degree in Bullshit Studies, but I couldn't find that.

I thought I got close enough when I found the only department of Cultural Studies then existing in the country at Trent.  So I went.

~~~

At first it was great.  For the first time in my life I felt intellectually stimulated and challenged.  It was exciting to have my field of view expanded so rapidly. 

It was good to be away from home.  I had a board plan for meals and a thousand mandatory flex dollars for personal pan pizzas, I had thirty hits of pretty good acid I brought from Nova Scotia, and it was now possible for me to get old Doctor Who on my computer.  Genesis of the Daleks.  The Caves of Androzani.  Those were good days.

I made one critical mistake, and that was critical thinking.  I took a course in practical reasoning in the philosophy department, learned logic, and did quite well at it—my highest mark, with a final of 96, if I remember right.

When my second year began, and I was now taking four cultural studies courses instead of one, a terrible sinking feeling appeared in my gut.  I suppressed it as best I could, but I couldn't convince myself I didn't detect a problem. 

I thought I had signed on for the study of culture, but it was increasingly apparent that we were studying it in order to impose our predetermined narrative upon it.  I couldn't help but notice that this narrative was built on assertions more than data.

I got very good at making those assertions.  I realised that I could throw my practical reasoning out the window, as it was irrelevant.  Writing in the proper mode was more performance than reason.  Eloquence, conviction, and slavish devotion to identity politics were all that was needed.

They had lots of good points and perspectives, but my intellectual conscience wouldn't permit me to ignore that the justification for the sanctification of Marx and Freud was never given.  With other names too, we read them to find the ways in which they were right.  Everything was interpretation, but there was only one acceptable interpretation.

We disagreed at our own peril.  With a breathtaking lack of self-awareness, the professor I most respected once castigated us for not speaking up and participating more often, apparently blissfully unaware that she would routinely make fun of anyone who stepped outside her dogma.  I'm almost certain that everyone else in that seminar had the same thought in that moment.

~~~

It wasn't until my third year that I learned about the Sokal hoax.  I think I made the mistake of Googling my education.  Within moments of wondering how the outside world viewed post-modernism, I discovered that a journal of cultural studies had accepted a paper made mostly of meaningless gibberish because the author had included enough buzz words that they liked. 

It was a big scandal and I hadn't heard a peep about it, much less sober discussion about the limitations of our methods.  This was pretty fucking damning, but I was so far into my degree that it seemed there was no turning back--and it still seemed inconceivable that a nascent discipline could be quite so fragmented, incoherent, and misanthropic as cultural studies appeared, so I was sure I was missing something, I just wasn't smart enough.  This was university, after all.  It was grown-up business.  There was no way it could be as fucked as it appeared.

~~~

In my final year, I took two 400-level courses with the intention of getting my Honours.  The only identity Mr. Houle had left me with was being a good student, so that was what I would do.

One of those classes was taught by a young gay man, the other by an old gay man.  Both courses drew heavily from Jacques Lacan, and both professors readily admitted that they didn't understand most of his mystical psychobabble.  This was supposed to be the summit of my learning, but my teachers seemed almost as confused as I was.

When it came time to compose my final papers, I could see all the hoops I was to jump through arrayed before me.  It didn't matter if I understood what I was saying, I just had to repeat some stuff with my own clever spin to make it sound like an elaboration of a proven idea.  I had to adopt a pose and sustain it for however many thousand words, building self-referential loops of nonsense until the mounting absurdity reaches such levels that the mind relents and agrees.

I still believed that we're driven by the unconscious.  I still believed that every cultural artifact encodes layers of meaning.  I still believed that there exist institutionalised injustices, and I still wanted peace and understanding for all people. 

Somehow all this brought me to was a listless self-loathing.  I still didn't know what my culture could possibly stand for, beyond slavery, exploitation, colonialism, patriarchy.  I still didn't know what I could stand for, other than to be an ally for aggrieved classes.

Indeed, when my nervous breakdown came and I e-mailed my teachers that I wouldn't finish the year, I don't think I imagined that the older gay professor appeared most upset to be losing an intelligent, straight, gentile ally who he had invested in.  I hope that's only a vicious projection on my part.  The young gay Jewish professor just seemed confused, while my three straight professors, all of them in the philosophy department, expressed various levels of support and concern. 

My metaphysics teacher shuffled things around to give me a pass with the work I'd done, so I could still get a degree.  Another phoned me in Nova Scotia, when he read my e-mail too late to make a difference, and earnestly tried to confirm I was sure about dropping the course, as I had written a paper he liked.  Between the philosophy and cultural studies departments, the difference in reaction when I faltered was striking.

~~~

At that time the problem was academic.  It was my own failure, or it was the excesses of my teachers, but it was behind me.  I tried for a few years to catch up on the readings I'd missed in the hopes that something would come together, but I only became more convinced that most of my higher education was best ignored.  I could retain some psychology and semiotics, film theory and the history of ideas, but as an animating ideology cultural studies was impossible.  It told stories of oppression in which I could only play a stock villain or a prostrate ally.  But at least it was only professors who believed that shit.

Now I'm actually worried.  What I thought ten years ago was a radical academic fringe confined to a hippie school and mentally stuck in '68 is now a swarming horde of shrieking cultural Marxists, determined to remake society in accordance with the dictates of their puny feelings.  I just want to convey to the rational men and women, gay and straight, Jew and gentile alike, that from my own lived experience, the ideological underpinnings of the militant social justice movement are every bit as mental as they may appear, and I barely got out alive to tell you so.

Sweden Invests In Imams

Kista Folk High School in Sweden will be training imams with a government grant in the autumn, in the hopes of counteracting fundamentalist groups.  The program will be open to Shi'ites, but is intended to cater to Sunnis.  There is some debate over whether it will be able to satisfy the needs of all Islamic backgrounds, or if there will even be employment opportunities for the Sunni theology.  Nevertheless, Kista Folkhögskola's rector, Abdulkader Habib, thinks religious authorities being educated in Sweden is a "positive development."

Neil deGrasse Tyson Fucking Loves Science

‘Science’ here has very little to do with the scientific method itself; it means ontological physicalism, not believing in our Lord Jesus Christ, hating the spectrally stupid, and, more than anything, pretty pictures of nebulae and tree frogs.

Muslims Prize Canadian Freedoms

Canadian Muslims are more proud of being Canadian than non-Muslim Canadians--but young Muslims are more attached to their religious identity than their parents, more likely to value Canada for its multiculturalism and diversity rather than its freedom and democracy, more likely to be pessimistic about discrimination, and more likely to say their faith is more important to them than their nationality.

More female Muslims are wearing the niqab than ten years ago, with the largest growth among young people who have been to university.  In general, Muslims with less education are more likely to wear the niqab, but not in Canada.

Almost twice as many Muslims as non-Muslims think that the father should be the master of the house, and less than half as many think homosexuality should be accepted by society.  89% of Muslims report being satisfied with the direction Canada is going, compared with 56% of non-Muslims.

"Muslim Canadians," itself a discrimination, say they have experienced discrimination more than that reported by the "general population," an apparently undifferentiated mass.  How it could be logically otherwise is unclear.

Super-Whitey Is The Wizard Behind The Curtain

A professional education consultant speaking at the 17th annual White Privilege Conference in Philadelphia has suggested that teachers must be activists too, working to overcome the racial supremacist narrative of disciplined hard work leading to individual success.

The white imperial gaze must be deconstructed by transgressing against the normative hetero-patriarchal conceptions of goal orientation and proper English.  The hierarchical power structure of grading emphasizes traits chosen to favor whites!  Students should be assessed not for their individual merits, but rather taught as a class.

Classroom learning and class consciousness must be intimately intertwined, like the hammer and sickle of our mighty banner.

Sticks and Stones and Words

The Halifax Regional School Board continues to deny and obfuscate complications surrounding the integration of refugee children, while feminists and anti-bullying advocates continue their silence.  Parents want support, leftists call them racist--while the school hears, sees, and speaks no evil.