Archive: Don't Withdraw

Today (May 6, 2024) is a particularly difficult day for my colleagues who teach in the arts and humanities at my home institution; I offer this consideration of the arts and humanities in honor of my colleagues and our shared endeavor today.

From Living Deliberately, Living Well 1.0, 8 January 2021

Don't withdraw.

Last Friday morning, AV was watching an interview with the artist Ann Veronica Janssens. I was half listening and coming-to with my morning coffee until a discussion between Janssens and physicist Kristine Niss turned to the place of art and science in society. Niss suggested that art and science - their free pursuit and their influence on the culture or community - are indicators of cultural health. A healthy society is one that allows artistic and scientific expression to function in their spheres and, as such, takes note when these expressions enter the broader communal conversation with something to say.

I found Niss’s insight refreshing and I appreciated her way of putting the point. Too often these pursuits - artistic, scientific, theoretical, philosophical - are categorized as luxuries or unnecessary because they don’t necessarily produce anything. It doesn’t take a physicist to point this out, either; talk to any college student whose parents are insisting that they pursue x, y, or z career because it is legible in the realm of the money-making or “marketable” enterprise after these students have gone home to the folks for the summer and say “I’ve decided to major in Sociology.”

As a philosopher, I find myself always hedging to place my work, to justify it because it falls almost completely out of the main passages carved by capitalism and our expectations of what it means to contribute to society in a capitalist context. This context suggests that whatever we spend our time on needs to translate into skills that will make money, secure futures, etc. For a long time I defended philosophy because of its intrinsic good (a gesture to the ol’ megiston agathon Socrates talks about, I guess), that it is indeed good for people to consider the bedrock for the sake of considering the bedrock. Without context, this is a kind of tough sell.

And then something like Wednesday happens.

When our institutions fail - when the President of the United States can stand at a rally and call his supporters to charge the Capitol (he did and they did), when the police let insurgents into the building and pose for selfies and let people ransack offices (and they did) - well, then, I think it’s pretty clear that not only is the edifice cracked, but the bedrock needs attention.

I started my Wednesday morning by watching the current (though soon-to-be-former) Majority Leader describe the plan by members of his party to object to the electoral votes as inciting a “death spiral” for American democracy. I wondered in that moment, before the junior Senator from Texas took his turn on the floor to give one of the most cynical (and dumbest) speeches I’ve ever heard, where the soon-to-be-former Majority Leader has been. Very shortly after this, of course, the Capitol was overrun and the news that engulfed many if not all of us on Wednesday afternoon and evening unfolded.

American democracy depends on other things than just the minimal functioning of our institutions to be successful, right? The health and well-being of our communities, the prospects of gainful and stable employment come to mind; maybe it also depends on the belief - however naïve - that the people we elect to represent us are working to actually represent us instead of interests that pour money into election coffers. Without these expectations, then we all end up like those truly execrable junior Senators from Texas and Missouri or the Majority Leader himself, viewing the government apparatus as something only to be gamed, a stream of power that needs to be turned in the right direction to serve an individual’s interests under the guise of some larger good.

One other thing American democracy needs is a common world that can resist manipulation by mere political ambit. That it’s now a useful tactic to weave a world to one’s liking - rather than according to some recognition of what counts as facts or evidence - and the horrifying events of Wednesday afternoon cement the fact that there are at least two worlds operating right now. This makes it possible to evade responsibility, to choose for myself the world in which the actions I take up are honored and raised up irrespective of the damage these leave in the places I enact these.

I don’t think this worry or concern can be limited to politics, honestly. I have found myself wondering for quite a long time how it’s possible to live with others at all when (as Harry Frankfurt wisely pointed out in 1986), there’s just so much bullshit. The answer, like most answers lately, came to me just as I was trying to fall asleep on Wednesday night. Also like most answers, it comes to me from my long engagement with the principles of Jesuit spirituality and pedagogy.

The notion of Cura Personalis, or “Care for the Whole Person,” the work of integrating head, heart, and hands, continues to speak directly to me. It is the paydirt of every course I teach. It might also be the paydirt of this letter, though I still have a ways to go. Jesuits believe that education is formation, and in order for this formation to take it’s necessary for everyone doing it to meet one another where we are at. It’s by honoring the place and the moment of arrival that folks are able to be formed, and this formation isn’t prescriptive - its expression is diverse, unique to each individual. Jesuit formation is an exercise in profound faith; that those who participate will be transformed, and that this transformation will fit the person themselves. It’s also necessary that those of us “in charge” are also active participants in formation, expressed in the simple recognition that we still have more to learn and that our communities of concern are sufficient to teach.

The moment of arrival is always a point of departure and for everyone engaged.

In 2008, the 35th General Congregation of the Jesuit Conference in the United States began developing a valence of this idea called Cura Apostolica, or “Care for the Work.” The idea was (and is) that those of us affiliated with the work of the Order are called to turn our part of this work toward “the most pressing of human needs.” It’s certainly possible that the study of philosophy, which includes attention to the link between what we say we think and what we actually think; understanding and acting on the responsibility that accrues to us (whether we choose it or not) for living with others; and finding interior and persisting causes for injustice and hope for transformation, isn’t usually understood as a most pressing of human need. But from my point of view, when there are two worlds in play, when their competition imperils our basic ability to live together, and our ability to discern responsibility that aids transformation is compromised, philosophy and its tools are a remedy to these pressing needs.

Cura Apostolica invites me, as Mary Oliver put it beautifully, to understand that “my work is loving the world.” So what do I do when there’s so. much. bullshit? I keep working. Keep thinking, keep writing, keep teaching, doing the things I’ve been called on and called in to do.

I position myself perpendicular to the bullshit whenever it comes up.

I work with the world to bring it back in common. I refuse to withdraw. I stay, as it were, in the place I’ve been stationed.