StickWithANose

In my morning class, I finished off a series of lectures on the foundation of sociology that focused on the key concepts of Marx, Weber and Durkheim: alienation, the iron cage and anomie respectively. After class, a student approached me with a deceptively simple question for which I had no answer. She explained to me that each of the concepts that we had been discussing has had a significant impact on her saying: “I identify with each of these ideas! I’m living it! And I’m wondering if we’re going to talk about solutions… Are there answers available to us to deal with alienation, rational-based control and anomie?”

It was one of those teaching moments in which you realize that your words have a greater impact than you often realize and that you, the supposedly all knowing teacher with fancy letters attached to your name, are in no position to give that student what s/he needs at that moment. I resorted to explaining that these concepts are best thought of as the “social costs” we pay for this thing we call modern society, but it seemed to be a wholly inadequate answer to the question for both my student and myself. Of course, it is easy to recognize that the question itself is rooted in that time honored tradition of youth: angst. However, it also demonstrates a far more fundamental truth associated with this thing we call angst besides the whinny popular music and brat-pack movies it generates.

The teens and early twenties are a time in people’s lives when the normative understandings passed on to us by our families, churches, schools, etc. run headlong into the empirical realities of a world that is turned upside-down and in contradiction with itself. Pointing out that these disjunctions have been theorized by sociology and the social sciences for over a 150 years comes across to many as an affirmation of the tribulations they’re experiencing in navigating this social milieu, but it offers precious little in the way of how to navigate those tribulations. My student was clearly excited to see her own thoughts and ideas clearly articulated into a theoretical framework that “put the pieces together” into a coherent whole, and she was looking for an equally systematic answer that is, of course, impossible.

I’m not really sure that there is an overall point to this post except to say that there is something lost in the transition into adulthood that we would do well to embrace and hold on to and that is the ability to question the disjunctions of what we [as a society] say is important to us and what we actually do. Perhaps, in the transition to adulthood, we give up a critical element of our humanity that makes self-determinative action and human liberty possible in exchange for inner peace and structure. Perhaps there is an element of de-humanization in this process we innocently refer to as “growing up.”

Now… back to work…

“The great learning [adult study, grinding corn in the head's mortar to fit it for use] takes root in clarifying the way wherein the intelligence increases through the process of looking straight into one’s own heart and acting on the results; it is rooted in watching with affection the way people grow; it is rooted in coming to rest, being at ease in perfect equity.” -Kung