Living in the Material World

I teach in a community college in an overwhelmingly African American/Latino neighborhood. Of 25 students in my last class, only one or two had any idea about world and national events, and only one regularly read a newspaper. They knew that Obama was in the Whitehouse, but apart from that, their sense of events had exclusively to do with entertainment -- sports, various popular "stars," etc.

In my last teaching post, in a predominantly white, middle-class private college, students who were really aware of current events were also a minority, but the situation in my present school is particularly stark. These kids live in one of the most dynamic cities in the world, yet they know next to nothing of the events that impact their lives, even at the level of city politics. It seems that those most dangerously affected by the economy know least about it.

This lack of interest in what scholars broadly refer to as history (where history includes the important political/economic events of the present as well as the past) is evident across the culture. About 18 months ago, when I first came to Reality Sandwich, we tried to bring in stories that touched on events in Afghanistan. We got very little interest from our readers. We had a guy on the ground in Tibet reporting on the rising dissent there and the Chinese crackdown: same deal, insufficient interest.

I have an old friend who is very learned. He has travelled widely and has pursued a particular spiritual path for more than 50 years. He abstains from all media -- newspapers, television, etc. But his case is different. He has spent his whole life reading philosophy, history, and scholarship in a wide variety of fields. He has a vast context for understanding world events and despite his abstention from immediate news media, can speak and write wisely on many topics relevant to the present world situation.

I'm not worried about my writer friend's lack of interest in the news. What worries me is the general and increasing deterioration of interest in much of anything beside entertainment and personal enrichment, whether material or spiritual, on the part of the generation that shows up in my classrooms unable to name the continents, let alone locate on a map the nations where we are currently at war, and unable to say anything at all when I ask, "what was going on in the world between 1914 and 1918?" (One semester, my privileged private college students went into stunned silence at this question. Then one brave soul at the back of the room ventured "industrial revolution?").

Today, in my Brooklyn neighborhood, my son and I went to the bank to do some business. Inside, a dozen television sets line the walls from the waiting area all the way back and around behind the tellers' desks. Speakers all over the shop carry the audio at easily audible levels. Today, July 23 2009, the sets were all on CNN and the featured story, for the entire twenty minutes that we were there, was about the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and president Obama's comments about that event. After making my deposit, I asked the young teller what she thought about the case. She didn't have a clue what I was talking about. I couldn't help thinking that for her, as for my present students, even though they live with racial profiling every day of their lives, the news of a potentially culture-shifting case of racial profiling just isn't on the radar. Even when it is broadcast in the room, news simply does not figure in their reality.

Upon leaving the bank, we walked over to the video game shop across the avenue, as I had promised my son we would do. There were dozens of young people there, many with headphones in their ears, checking out the latest gadgets and games. Overhead, speakers blared the news about soon-to-be-released games and their movie tie-ins, and I couldn't help thinking that this is all there is of a larger world for them, this is all there is outside of the family, the job, the school; the larger world is a commercial, a movie, an mp3.

Writing at the end of the 1960s, Christopher Lasch warned that what he called a "culture of narcissism" was taking hold. After the cultural ferment of that decade, and the extraordinary involvement of youth of all ethnicities in forging cultural change in America, Lasch prophesied a turning inward that even in its most purportedly altruistic versions would have the form of egoism and consumerism. Now, even spirituality has become a category of marketing, a set of benign options on a chain-restaurant menu. A two-page ad in Rolling Stone summed it up a few years back. The first page said "all you need is love." The next page said, "What's love got to do with it?" Times had changed, said the market. Any sense of collective compassion or real community was passé and had to be eradicated, and different strokes for different folks came down to the BMW versus the Mercedes. 

Those of us who have the privilege of education can no longer turn on and drop out. We have gone beyond the point where ignorance of the material realm is excusable for "spiritual" reasons. We have to be fully present, and we have to be informed; we have to get as learned as we can in the ways of the world, and we have to teach that to others whenever and in whatever ways we can. The only resistance to cooptation by the market is to understand the market.  That means knowing where and why we are at war, and how and why the economy is a mess, and knowing these things in a deep historical context reaching all the way back to the beginning of civilization, and then going active around that. Being an intellectual is no longer just for "academics" and the nerd minority; all who are capable of learning deeply and broadly have to do it in one way or another. As they used to say in my parents' day, "don't you know there's a war on?"

My family recently took a trip to Colorado where I had a gig teaching in a summer session at a college. There we met the great and venerable dancer Simone Forti. During one of the panel sessions, someone asked Simone how she started dancing, and she said it came from the news. She was born into a Jewish family in Italy, and her father was a great reader of newspapers. He read the news deeply, and he realized what would happen under Mussolini, and he got his family out of there. Simone grew up with the sense that news is a life saver. And she began spreading newspapers and maps on the floor as a child and crawling around on them, and that developed into a vocation for dance. And she went on to play a significant role in the transformation of dance in America in the 1960s.

I once had a music teacher who said, "What do you need to know in order to be a musician? Everything." It's like that. The artist has to become a historian and aesthetician. The spiritual practitioner has to become a social psychologist. Everything we do has to work toward the transformation of the world on every level, and that means we have to study and read and investigate. And we have to know what's going on in the world, stop being inward-turning passive consumers, and become active in the outer world. We have to promise not to vanish into spirit until everyone can go with us, and that means understanding the material world to the best of our ability.

Image by joiseyshowaa, courtesy of Creative Commons license.