To Each Her Own

Read about excellent sheep. This isn't necessarily the premise for this blog, just a starting point.

Like good products of elite colleges, AM and I appreciated the article's validity on several levels but took issue with it in other ways. In righteous self-awareness, we agree that "because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it." [AM: "i know many people with that affliction"]. Is it an affliction, or a fairly universal condition (or both)? Don't members of a less elite class find themselves in the similarly paradoxical position of aspiring to the upper class without being able to converse with anyone in it? Remembering, of course, that not every elite student cares about helping the working class, and not every member of the working class cares to be anything but.

This assertion of a major fallacy in elite education seems to contradict the author's main point: that more students are matriculating and graduating with material goals and buying into a system whose main "societal function" is to replicate the class structure. In my experience, however, he fails to address what I see as a significant portion of the graduating class of 2007; that is, those, like my good friend AM, who are entering the world in corporate positions so that they may learn to game the system for the greater good. They are attempting to effect change from within society's walls, unlike those rare students extolled by the author, who reject society for solitude in a quest to contemplate and (I'm assuming as a corollary) bring about the "good society".

So we go round and round in the small questions and learn to distract ourselves from the cosmic ones. In the sociology department, we spend more time studying the mechanisms of social change movements than the validity of their ends. Does normativeness even have a place in the classroom?

Now for a personal whine: As an elightened liberal arts degree-holder, I can't in good conscience say that my job is better than a comfy mindless job that pays the bills but does nothing for society or doesn't at least come with the kind of paycheck that says "sure I sold my soul but I have my own charitable foundation", yet I wonder if I personally could be happy in that sort of position. It's like supporting abortion rights even though you yourself could never commit such an unconscionable act. We try and say we're not better, just different, and maybe in some cases that's true, but in the end it just comes off like "separate but equal". Inherently, it's not.