LAST DAY OF UNDERGRAD B.P.E.S.S. I know I have honours next year to look
forward to but it won't have the same space for the juvenile thrills of
passing inane unfunny notes in lectures or occasionally skipping tutes
to peruse bookshops in Newtown by myself. Life is good now and I don't
like change!
Everyone doing an arts degree complains at some point that wider society doesn't understand its value. If you think you have it bad, try studying social sciences with Indian family and Indian family friends who can't acknowledge the legitimacy of anything outside science/medicine/engineering/accounting (the last one grudgingly). Anyone who knows me well enough would agree that the thought of me dedicating my life to any one of those is quite laughable. So I do laugh it off... and am amused, more than anything else at any standard Indian gathering when X uncle asks me what I do and my response makes him almost visibly recoil. His expression is strained as he tries to grapple with the strangeness of what I've just told him and for some reason, of all the words in the title (bachelor, political, economic, social, sciences) only one sticks out.
"So... you're... going to be a politician?!?!?!?!" I can almost see the cogs in his mind creeeaaaking to a halt as he decides that I'm not going to be a good person to introduce to his son after all.
Which is a good thing.
I've never really tried to defend myself and typically just go along with the jokes, which are unoriginal and pathetic.. something about being homeless and/or a cardboard box. To me the answer is so mind-numbingly obvious, like the equivalent of trying to prove that oranges aren't square. I mean, imagine if we really lived on a planet populated by just accountants and engineers and scientists! These vocations may help to make the world "efficient" but not functional. The social sciences, as far as I can see, are essentially the study of what holds the fabric of society together and hey maybe I'm biased, but that seems to me like a pretty damn important thing. Human society is not comprised of atomised, rational individuals and the spaces between us aren't just filled with gadgets, bank loans and roads/bridges. Nothing in your life is apolitical. Besides this, an arts degree teaches you how to think, for God's sake, why is that so underrated? I found this yesterday and it blows my mind:
That said, if I were to sum up all I've learnt in the last three years, all I know for sure is this: People are shit. We're all going to die. Maybe in light of the former, the latter isn't such a bad thing. Maybe I would be better off with a commerce degree after all...
PS scenario with X uncle has actually happened. Sometimes he's an aunty
Everyone doing an arts degree complains at some point that wider society doesn't understand its value. If you think you have it bad, try studying social sciences with Indian family and Indian family friends who can't acknowledge the legitimacy of anything outside science/medicine/engineering/accounting (the last one grudgingly). Anyone who knows me well enough would agree that the thought of me dedicating my life to any one of those is quite laughable. So I do laugh it off... and am amused, more than anything else at any standard Indian gathering when X uncle asks me what I do and my response makes him almost visibly recoil. His expression is strained as he tries to grapple with the strangeness of what I've just told him and for some reason, of all the words in the title (bachelor, political, economic, social, sciences) only one sticks out.
"So... you're... going to be a politician?!?!?!?!" I can almost see the cogs in his mind creeeaaaking to a halt as he decides that I'm not going to be a good person to introduce to his son after all.
Which is a good thing.
I've never really tried to defend myself and typically just go along with the jokes, which are unoriginal and pathetic.. something about being homeless and/or a cardboard box. To me the answer is so mind-numbingly obvious, like the equivalent of trying to prove that oranges aren't square. I mean, imagine if we really lived on a planet populated by just accountants and engineers and scientists! These vocations may help to make the world "efficient" but not functional. The social sciences, as far as I can see, are essentially the study of what holds the fabric of society together and hey maybe I'm biased, but that seems to me like a pretty damn important thing. Human society is not comprised of atomised, rational individuals and the spaces between us aren't just filled with gadgets, bank loans and roads/bridges. Nothing in your life is apolitical. Besides this, an arts degree teaches you how to think, for God's sake, why is that so underrated? I found this yesterday and it blows my mind:
Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about ‘the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.’
And I submit that this is what the real, no-bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.
The so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
The real value of a real education [has] almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
This is water
-David Foster Wallace
That said, if I were to sum up all I've learnt in the last three years, all I know for sure is this: People are shit. We're all going to die. Maybe in light of the former, the latter isn't such a bad thing. Maybe I would be better off with a commerce degree after all...
PS scenario with X uncle has actually happened. Sometimes he's an aunty
