A couple of days ago I was talking on the phone with a dear friend, a well-known scholar that is facing some medical problems. As always, we engaged in a free-ranging discussion about books, documentaries and politics. Somewhere about the end we got into a heated exchange over young scholars, filmmakers and activists who, according to him, don't have any real sense of the problems this nations faces. It reminded me of other such rantings by others--including myself--about how the "new generation" doesn't get it. Then it came to me that no "new" generation ever gets it, especially when they are new on the scene. The reality is that "getting it" comes with time and experience, and usually when the new generation has had time to go through its own trial by fire moment. Also, their experiences while similar are never exactly the same. Some issues and circumstances may repeat themselves but they never do so in the exact manner so their responses are likely to be different than ours were in another era.
What started this sometimes angry exchange was his charge that another, much younger, friend of mine had produced a documentary that "offered nothing new" and was reflecting a leaderless and unimaginative generation. Knowing the circumstances under which the documentary was made, I well understood the reasons for the direction taken. I also understood that my younger friend saw things differently than both my older colleague or I did because his life experiences have been different and he is still finding his way. I understood this and enjoyed the film while my colleague did not and disliked the it.
The disagreement, however, made me think about how often we are boxed in by our ideologies and our experiences which are often a reflection of trying to live out our political, religious or philosophical views. It can often be an unending cycle that begins with some experiences that lead us to think in a particular way which then leads us to act in a particular way which then leads to re-affirm what we believe and the cycle keeps going ever faster and often in shorter loops. Before we know it we are boxed in and while we might want to see things differently we often default to our ever present views when we are forced to react or when we engage in a discussion as did my friend and I.
A wonderful human being and an excellent scholar, my friend has lived his "ideals" for so long that he sees everything from that angle and as it happens to us old people, we become less patient with those that are different. Worse, when our world view becomes extremely unpopular or doesn't even get into the kitchen table anymore, we double down and seem to pin a badge of courage on ourselves for being different. Now, I believe that there are things worth believing in no matter what others think, but my sense is that politics and rigid ideologies are rarely ever worth sacrilizing, mainly because they are men-made and often begin in particular times and spaces that do not necessarily represent the totality of life experiences. The main ideas can remain relevant but their details and original application rarely do. And those details and applications are usually the ones that make us irrelevant to the larger conversations as they have my dear colleague whose early work was outstanding but whose current and future works go further and further out on a limb and which, unfortunately, seem to be disproven almost as soon as they are published. The catastrophic financial collapse of 2012 never came, neither did the election of a leftist president in Mexico, nor the massive popular uprising or a host of other predictions.
The tragedy is that as a fine scholars he understood the problems, provided great evidence of their impact on world economies and even offered some good solutions, but his need to see dynamic affirmation of his ideas clouded his conclusions, and so his last two books may well be outdated before they ever make it past their first half decade. Worse, the more they become outdated the more he doubles down and the angrier he gets, slipping into the role of angry polemicists and out of being the scholar that he was. The more he sees the self-created walls creep closer and closer the more he defends his shrinking intellectual space.
This is a phenomenon that occurs to very bright people who take their words and writings as gospel. Because they frame them in such high rhetoric and affirm them so vehemently they find themselves in a quagmire with two choices--embarrasingly admit you were wrong or argue against all evidence that you are right. Both choices have consequences though the first one can still bring redemption while the latter usually means ridicule and ending up in the disposable binge of history with other individuals who were wrong but never admitted it.
How do we end up there? Part of it is arrogance, but the other bigger part is our constructing a world view that is dependent on simply expanding that which we already know. A good example is historians who write about say the factory floor in American society. The historians that get boxed in are the ones that get caught up in only writing about the machinery and daily function of the shop floor and not on the greater meanings of both. While this is important and surely too many scholars don't get into the details, it has an intellectual ceiling and eventually the work loses any sense of originality or even relevance. There are areas which are simply overworked and minutea becomes the prominent feature of further study, and to continue to do it is to box ourselves intellectually.
Also, when ideology in our writing becomes primal and we see people only through that lense--which often means we ignore those who don't follow our ideological trajectory--we end up with conclusions that are rarely applicable to what is actually going on. I don't mean to say that ideology is not important or that it cannot explain much of what happens in the lives of people, only that even ideology has to be fluid and understand that people don't function in a linear fashion or even in a logical one. Our writing should be based partly on a "scholarship or intellect of the flesh" which causes us to continually evaluate how things actually play out in real life.
In no way does this mean that we have to be relativists or individuals without a firm foundation of belief. Rather it means we retain a desire to continue to grow, learn, and experience and a willingness to admit that sometimes we are wrong and we have to change our analysis or our conclusions. To say, "I don't give a damn what others think" or to think that everyone is wrong except us is to close our minds to the essence of the intellectual pursuit or even to our efforts to do good with our scholarship. It means we have boxed ourselves in with those ideals that were once meant to make us more knowledgeable and better intellectuals.
