Let's call this post On the Human condition

[A] The world is full of injustice at any given time. As it happens [A] strikes me as a truism. So, let’s call [A] ‘the truism’ or (more old-fashioned) ‘the human condition.’ Ipse facto the truism involves [A*] non-trivial and massive suffering. I think the truism is common ground among many religions and political doctrines. I don’t think the truism ought to be a source of acceptance of or complacency about the status quo. For, it’s also true [B] that there may well be many individual or collective actions right now that lead to non-trivially improved states of affairs over time.

My embrace of [A] & [B] helps explain, for example, why I find it fruitful to engage regularly and with open-mindedness with Catholic social theory, Islamic political philosophy, and (say) contemporary feminism despite my otherwise frequent and occasionally intense disagreements. I especially like thinking about and engaging with theories that embrace original sin or naturalistic versions of it. But one need not hold ‘human nature is wicked’ views to embrace [A] or [B]. Even a team-Enlightenment-and-it’s-mostly-nurture thinker like Rousseau may well embrace them.

Not everyone agrees with the truism. In fact, some ideologies exist to convince us that the status quo is pretty good or splendid. These ideologies may well accept [B], but treat [A] as a heresy or disloyalty or just mistaken. I think this is actually a characteristic of totalitarianism. In liberal democracies we find much more thinner variants hereof during re-election campaigns — think Reagan’s Morning in America — or in a persistent unwillingness to even consider or listen to grievances of minorities. But even Reagan’s ‘Morning in America’ commercial did not explicitly deny the truism.

I don’t find it is especially difficult to accept the truism. In fact, because it is a rather bedrock principle in my life, I am not especially surprised or prone to despair when I read the news. I usually view the news as a call to education in order to understand it and, perhaps, a call to (collective) action.

Now, one can accept the truism, and still note that [B] is compatible with the possibility that [C] one’s expectation about the future are frustrated or even systematically violated. I suspect [C] is built into the very grounds of why many of the wisest religions and philosophies embrace [A], but it can just be a contingent fact. For some [C] will (quite naturally) lead to grief and disappointment, but it need not lead to despair. That really depends on the intellectual and emotional resources one has to cope with setbacks and (ahh) a lack of plenitude.

Now, what I am about to say is anecdotal in character, so quite tentative. But I often have the sense that a non-trivial number of my undergraduate students despair about the future. (Shockingly many are dealing with quite serious psychological diagnoses.) I am quite confident they are much more likely to feel despair than when I started teaching more than a quarter century ago. [I taught slightly different kinds of students then, but I am not alone in this perception.]

When my students explain to me why they despair, they don’t mention the cost of housing (much as they find it an enormous nuisance in Amsterdam): they usually mention that [I] they feel powerless and unable to make the world a better place—it all seems so overwhelming; or they mention that [II] man-made climate change will lead to catastrophic outcomes. By and large they do not fear their own safety or survival.

A few months ago, in the context of Jennifer Frey’s program of educational reform, I discussed (recall this post) how contemporary education tends to fail (what she correctly calls) students’ ‘existential needs.’ (Recall also this post.) I strongly suspect that something like Frey’s diagnosis is correct (although do read my own variant thereof). So, keep that in mind.

Now, what [I] and [II] have in common may well be (as my Marxists friends are wont to say) capitalism. But if you are firmly convinced by the Marxist analysis, the grounds of debilitating despair are also removed. There is a plan of action. Good for the Marxists, and maybe my students will be converted to it. (That may be context-sensitive: what Marxists Stateside want is not far removed from what the Dutch have even after a long period of ‘neoliberalism.’)

Some other people, including influential readers of this post, may well wish to deny [I] or [II] as false, or not treat it as a foregone conclusion. For example, I myself teach in a political science department where we aim to teach our students skills and knowledge that can allow them to contribute to their social worlds, and to either mitigate or prevent [II]. I am going to set aside this approach.

Rather, today I want to express my hypothesis that one reason why [I&II] are so despair inducing — leaving aside contextual factors such as isolated social media consumption — is that my students have never been exposed to the truism in any sustained way not through religion, not true literature or art, nor philosophy, or school indoctrination. Rather, they perceive even experience (and I don’t think one can disabuse an experience) a pretty good world going to hell. And they don’t know how to cope with it. (Again, my interest today is not on how we can educate them better to combat existential angst. Recall this post.)

Now, it is compatible with the truism that the world can go to hell. In fact, if one embraces or treats the truism as the truism that it is, one often expects to be in circumstances that the world is going to hell. But in the prevalent worldview, which involves variants of prosperity theology or secular versions of self-help, this is treated as defeatism or dwelling on misery. The first time I became aware of such a disposition was when a friend informed me sincerely that the real lesson of Oedipus Rex is better anger management, so you don’t kill random strangers who happen to be your dad.

That’s all I wanted to digress. And so lurking here is a kind of invitation to reflect on the place of the truism in our zeitgeit, and what might be done to give it more of a place in it. I don’t have very great confidence in my own views on these matters; perhaps, you find all of this just loopy.

But I do have one more thought. Interestingly enough, some of the worst far-right political programs today grasp and personify our secular prosperity theology because they truly loath and wish to destroy academic/intellectual programs that even dare to call attention to features in the vicinity of [A]. That is to say, any regime that finds the world’s saturation with injustice so unwelcome news that they wish to ban it in some fashion or another, is itself an expression and entrenchment of a worldview that contributes to the suffering of the young.