Don’t Be Afraid of Politics

Dear friends on the cusp of college,

What advice can I give you now that you’re about to enter this institution I’ve spent so much of my life trying to understand? You are infinitely better-informed than I was when I stumbled into the classroom for the first time some decades ago, scared and stoned and eager to find a foothold. You’ve school rankings and social media accounts and other windows into the engine rooms of higher education, and you know all about the imperfections that trouble American colleges. Your minds, friends, are ready; but your hearts, I’m afraid, are not.

I say this not as a cynic who delights in the souring of young innocence, nor as a bitter old fool projecting his own wilted experiences onto the world. I say it because I believe in universities as fiercely as you can believe in any institution fashioned by man, and because I think they’re failing past the point of forgiveness or the possibility of redemption. I hope you will somehow save them, nonetheless. And I know that if you try, you will get hurt.

Pain will come from unexpected quarters. Some of your professors, you will find, will not be humble servants of knowledge but crass crusaders for small ideas. You will recognize them right away because they will be the ones speaking with certainty. They will explain the world and all in it as orbiting around one monolithic theory, and they’ll permit you but a single observation deck from which to view everything and everyone under the sun.

Some of your fellow students, too, will find such singularity irresistible, and they’ll soon roar at anyone who entertains her doubts. You will recognize them, too, without much effort: They’ll be the ones demanding that you check your privilege, that you be their ally, that you respect their safe spaces, that you watch what you do and what you say and what you think. Of you, they’ll demand everything; of themselves, not much.

What to do when surrounded by such toxicity? Some years ago, I might’ve urged you to challenge these philistines as loudly and gloriously as you could in the classroom and the college paper and online, to fight calmly and respectfully with facts and figure and better ideas. But I’m older now, and I know that the war you’re about to enter, whether you like it or not, is not a war of ideas. It is not a struggle between those who support Israel, say, and those who are troubled by the plight of the Palestinians. It does not pit fans of American exceptionalism against universalists who see the whole globe as their oyster, or compassionate socialists against the calculating accumulators of capital, or conservatives against progressives. If these old ideologies make an appearance at all, it’s as sources for costumes and slogans, not in any starring role. Instead, the war that rages on campus today is about the way you ought to feel, which makes the conventions of reasoned and demonstrable discussion as antiquated and as irrelevant as elephants would be on the modern battlefield.

On the other side of this line of scrimmage are the vulgarians, for whom every human interaction must end in subjugation: For black to breathe free, white must kneel; for woman to rejoice, man must weep; for them to speak, you must remain silent. They’ll confront you in the classroom and the barroom alike, dripping with fear and loathing. They are the accusers, and you are the guilty. And their convictions, I’m afraid, are not without their charms: There’s something appealing about an urgency that cares little for cost or consequence, and there’s promise in the orgasmic tingling of imminent release.

Resist them. That’s the only advice, really, I have to offer. Resist the zealots, the hysterics, the cold, the unforgiving. Don’t debate them—there’s no use, they’re not listening. You can try, if you’d like, to be defiant. You can try to argue your point. Eventually, though, you’ll realize that the mad old German professor had it right: When you stare into an abyss, know that it, too, is staring into you. Instead of stumbling into a walk-on role in the macabre productions of identity theater that consume so much of the air on campuses everywhere these days, do something else: Be political.

By which, friends, I am not advocating allegiance to blind partisanship. What I mean by being political is realizing that the project ahead of you is the difficult, if not impossible, undertaking of living with other people who have other ideas and other expectations and other principles by which to organize the world. The old souls call it compromise, but you’re still young, and you’ll recognize it right away as what it really is: an act of love.

There’s no more appropriate term for real politics, the sort that involves the delicate construction of coalitions not around empty and bombastic nonsense—Gaza is just like Ferguson!—but around the real desire of real people to live freely and with dignity, enjoying the same opportunities as everyone else. Engage in this kind of politics, the real kind, and you’ll soon learn the wisdom coined long ago by a poet who never did too well in school: In dreams begin responsibilities.

Your work should begin where the vulgarians conclude theirs: If they yell about income inequality, you must toil to find a path to justice without burning the house down. If they sneer at gender disparity, you must work to heal the union of men and women without strangling romance with the deadening language of power and legalese. If they scoff at racial unease, strive to bring the races together, not to give them further reason to observe each other with distrust. These pursuits, you’ll find, are doomed to fail, but it’s failure in the service of a good cause, one that’s been propelling us forward for millennia now.

And so, try. Do not think of yourself as young professionals, treading an easy path to a better job. Do not think of yourself as radicals, here to perfect the arts of affliction. Do not think of yourself as travelers, just passing through on someone else’s dime. You’re something greater—citizens, free to contemplate a life worth living. This freedom drives each of us to fashion different blueprints—some start journals, some organize communities, some craft apps. But the only ones who grease the tracks along which the earth revolves are those who do more than rage against the dying of the light. It’s the ones who build and the ones who listen and the ones who keep their hearts open for the possibility of somehow, somewhere achieving life’s profoundest pleasure and communing with other human beings. Our universities, having momentarily forgotten this simple fact, are now steeped in darkness; it’s your job to let the light back in.

***

To read more from Tablet magazine’s special Campus Week series of stories, click here.