Jan
24
English professor demonstrates why sitting around and being paid to muse can create really crappy articles
Filed Under academia
William Deresiewicz, whose “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education” article was excellent, has produced an absolute stinker in the Chronicle of Higher Education: “The End of Solitude” is a case study in how not to write. It’s far too long and very badly argued, and it is the latter I want to focus on, because it demonstrates how modern academia makes assumptions about things (much like I do), but does it so that way there are lots of papers to demonstrate the existence of an “industry,” and then it builds off all those problematic assumptions such that it misses any and all serious questions.
I’ll try to keep this brief, but it’s probably going to get out of hand.
1. His thesis is clear enough, even though it is in the midst of 3 paragraphs of filler:
The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.
Now for me, the strongest development of this claim about “anonymity” doesn’t rely on constructing a historical narrative. Anyone who thinks straight realizes that investigating the truth of “the great contemporary terror” is going to yield some facts for, some facts against. What makes an argument thoughtful isn’t all the crap you’ve been reading about put on paper and shoveled in my face, but rather your willingness to demonstrate how something is manifest in the world.
2. So of course we spend the next 5 paragraphs doing this pseudohistory where solitude starts as a religious thing, characterized by prophets who are outcast before they are accepted, then democratized by the Reformation, secularized by the Romantics, and with that dual process of democratization/secularization, turned into something that had a “dialectical relationship with sociability.”
Why am I calling this “crap?” Because I’m making a stronger argument than our author in my brevity, and the holes are obvious: What about monks? They had nothing to do with solitude or sociability? No one could be a monk except a prophet? You need to be specific about what exactly was democratized, not just say “it’s about talking to God and it refreshes norms.” Sleep can do that.
In fact, that’s the most gaping hole in this stupid piece, the one that makes me want to get a committee together and revoke this guy’s PhD: When have people not wanted to be celebrities? You mention “prophets” and “hermits:” those aren’t exactly people that don’t stand out. It is true that solitude is a theme developed in serious thinkers throughout the ages, but how many people grasped it aside from the religious aspect? And how many people within a religion are capable of understanding the full significance of mysticism?
I think everyone here can see my line of argument: it isn’t that Deresiewicz is entirely wrong. He’s got a lot right – the trouble is, to make the claim he ultimately wants to make, he needs to show me how people act and don’t act. All the other stuff is too much cleverness, being exerted for less than salient points.
3. The proof that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about is the paragraph following his pseudohistory. The beginning of that paragraph:
But we no longer live in the modernist city, and our great fear is not submersion by the mass but isolation from the herd. Urbanization gave way to suburbanization, and with it the universal threat of loneliness. What technologies of transportation exacerbated — we could live farther and farther apart — technologies of communication redressed — we could bring ourselves closer and closer together. Or at least, so we have imagined. The first of these technologies, the first simulacrum of proximity, was the telephone.
Modernism, in our author’s description, had a place to correspond to it. So now we have to go through and use the argument “here’s where we are, technologically,” in order to fit ourselves into the narrative. Problem: I don’t remember talking about mules and farms and stuff in the Middle Ages. When you introduce technology as a key part of your argument, whereas before you were talking about various ideas serious authors and mystics held, you invalidate one part or the other of your argument. You could have talked about David Foster Wallace here, but no.
4. Anyway, I want to cut this short, so I’ll say this: if you build a faulty foundation, you end up doing a crappy analysis, and saying stupid things like:
- “My students told me they have little time for intimacy.” (Dude, I hate to tell this to you, but they’re getting very intimate with some people.)
- “[Young people's] use of technology — or to be fair, our use of technology — seems to involve a constant effort to stave off the possibility of solitude.” (This might be openly untrue. I’ve known several girls who use the remoteness of contact to keep people they want to keep at bay, but still in the picture. The “analysis” has not accounted for control at all.)
- “The two emotions, loneliness and boredom, are closely allied.” (Duh. Any other insights?)
- “And losing solitude, what have they lost? First, the propensity for introspection, that examination of the self that the Puritans, and the Romantics, and the modernists (and Socrates, for that matter) placed at the center of spiritual life — of wisdom, of conduct.” (Please. I mean, I have serious problems with young people, but are you going to really tell me other ages were more “introspective?” Socrates held this was the hardest of all things to do; Christianity emphasizes obedience and personal encounters with God can be placed before a public tribunal; the Romantics just as much valued self-expression. The committee is waiting, dude.)
- “Solitude isn’t easy, and isn’t for everyone. It has undoubtedly never been the province of more than a few….if solitude disappears as a social value and social idea, will even the exceptions remain possible?” (Eliot: “This, then, is the greatest treason / to do the right thing for the wrong reason.”
5. Deresiewicz’s argument ultimately fails because there’s a much simpler explanation for what’s going on nowadays.
The question is how you want to characterize us nowadays. We all agree that we’re uninhibited, “loud” in numerous ways, narcissistic, in constant communication, blah blah.
Deresiewicz wants to say something like “what’s bad is all this is public, there’s no private life anymore.” That’s the exact wrong analysis – the private has destroyed the public. “Uninhibited” is the major clue: populism isn’t just a mass force, it’s a force unleashed by appealing to something in each of us (something like: first, our envy. Then, when it has realized its full scope, our fear).
We may not have “solitude,” but we have loneliness, and it is devastating. The ability of people to find partners for life almost doesn’t exist. Date my exes – I love them very much, but they’re in worlds of their own imagination. If I’m loved, it’s because of coincidence, not because I correspond to anything real.
What we’re seeing in modern technology, then, is something that can work two ways: we can create our cult of the self, or we can forge a real public identity and create the conditions for who we are privately. The latter takes an enormous amount of skill, but back when rhetoric and literature and manners were taught, it was possible. Mass media, commercialism, and populist politics crushed it, in part – since our voices couldn’t be heard, why bother? But the potential to get “solitude” back in some form is there.
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2 Responses to “English professor demonstrates why sitting around and being paid to muse can create really crappy articles”
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A little testy today? I had to read the article to see how horrible it was, unfortunately you were right an unfortunately I read all 3528 words of it.
It’s easy enough to read, but certainly flip flops on itself and comes to a conclusion that I find completely false.
There is something in society that makes us lonely. This connectivity is a reaction to that not its cause. People want constant contact- and that’s assuming they do, I don’t really, I wasn’t very interested in getting a cell phone because people would be able to reach me, I’m positive I’m not the only one- because there is no quality to our relationships (and this is also NOT a universal statement, only a generalization.)
Since I’m already yapping about me I might as well state that I wasn’t particularly interested in the internet until I was separated from my family and became lonely. It was absolutely not the cause of the problem.
It is kind of interesting that I’ve read several articles, and I can’t cite anything- I don’t remember- coming to the opposite conclusions; that the ability to communicate remotely has made people antisocial, rude, unfriendly kings and queens of their own little worlds and my experience has shown this to be more true. Maybe there is some difference in the younger generation I’m not aware of.
I am trying to think of somewhere to popularize this. Perhaps you should send it to the Chronicle ops section. I love it.
Amanda probably speaks for many of us who are swept up in the whole cyber-world as result of displacement. It can be good though, it’s how you communicate. Rather than texting brief updates about where you are and what you’re doing (twitter), things like blogs have the potential to create more thought–it’s great to get to know HOW your friend thinks. Sometimes face to face isn’t better, if you can’t get beyond shallow communication there either.