I loved this XKCD comic. It’s a very elegant distillation of what’s become a blogger and pundit favorite: if you study X instead of Y, you are a fool. Never mind that our system is slouching comprehensive failure; whoever you are, you should feel bad for studying whatever you studied. If you’re unemployed, underemployed, or unsatisfied in your job, well, it’s your own fault.
To put it in personal terms: I’ve known for most of my life that I would end up in graduate school, even back in the boom days of the go-go early 2000s that I grew up into, when unemployment was low and incomes were bubblicious. That means that I have had people calling me a moron in print for well over a decade now. That’s cool. The system regards everyone who isn’t a profit maximizer as a chump; that’s what it’s for. What has been interesting, recently, is that the ranks of the chumps have suddenly grown. For years, going to law school was represented as the practical, responsible, even mercenary alternative to going to grad school. Going to law school was what you did if you wanted to really go for the American plutocrat lifestyle. Then, suddenly, it wasn’t– the law job market collapsed. Did the narrative change? Did people say, hey, we were sure law school was the practical thing to do, turns out it wasn’t, maybe we shouldn’t be so judgy about shit? No. Instead, law school was just subsumed into that narrative. Never mind that people could have gone into law school at a time when it was considered the most pragmatic thing to do and finished when it was considered a rip-off. No sympathy! The judgment cometh.
We could always insert some facts. Like this one: those with advanced degrees are the single healthiest educational demographic, both in terms of unemployment and income.
Is this the only fact that matters? Of course not. Are there provisos, qualifications, and complications? Of course. Can people find a thousand ways to deny the meaning of this information? I know they can; I’ve heard it before. Demographics are not destiny. What interests me is how desperate many people seem to be to find those provisos, qualifications, and complications. The idea that academics are necessarily chumps is argued back to front: people arrive at the conclusion and proceed to find justifications for it. Why?
Here’s what I think: I think that our culture, to its great shame, has responded to widespread crisis and anxiety not with solidarity but with its opposite. That opposite is the defensive posture of attacking everyone else’s choices. You will never go broke, as a blogger or a journalist, writing stories that call other people suckers. People seem to have an insatiable hunger for narratives that indict the choices others make. Because it’s not just graduate students, anymore, or law students, and you can bet that as more and more occupations fail to deliver the good life, more and more people will be cast down as suckers. What people don’t say, but is abundantly clear, is that their search for suckers is pure defense, a way for them to feel better about their own anxiety, precarity, and unhappiness. In a time of crisis like the one we’re living through now, people could draw together and try to support each other. But our culture, so riven with competitiveness and zero-sum thinking, permits only defense through aggression. When people start talking about other people’s bad choices, I know that they feel angry and sad about their own life.
When the law school turn happened, it was tempting for me to laugh; my own fortunes had been negatively compared to theirs for a long time. Couldn’t do it. I can’t change our culture, but I can do my best to let other people make their own choices and to not be shitty to them. I might end up a sucker, I don’t know. My own department, in a very small field, has an almost unheard of hiring rate. But God knows I could be the one to wreck the track record. If I do, then I’ll do what everybody else is trying to do: get by. And maybe eventually we’ll all say, “Well, the financial crisis sucked, and we didn’t exactly respond to it the best possible way, but it’s a new day, and let’s see how we can make things better for everybody.”
Everybody except for the people who fucked it up in the first place, that is. They go to jail.