20100623.1741

There are a lot of things going on at the moment, and since I have been out of pocket for many of them, I am not going to discuss them here. But I am no longer out of pocket, as the fact of this post indicates, and so I return to my being in contact with this thing that is the Internet.

It should come as no surprise that I am something of an arrogant person. A number of people, some of whom I have discussed before, would have it thought that since I am a college educator and I push my students beyond the traditional, restricted canon and challenge them to actually think about what underlies the things that they do and with which they are presented, that I am a member of the "liberal elite." And, since I am in a position where I will simply laugh at anyone who disagrees with me, I must believe that I know better than other people, and both of those are arrogance.

(As though the ad hominem and false dichotomy "You either support the Patriot Act or you hate America/love the terrorists" are not themselves a bit arrogant. And that they are decried by the very traditions that many who employ them clamor to see returned to primacy...)

And I suppose that there is some truth to the accusation that I am arrogant. I do think that I know better than a damned lot of people; knowing things is supposed to be one of the reasons school exists, and I have been in school for a long time. Heaven forbid that I might take a bit of pride in the results of the many years and thousands of dollars that I have spent coming to know and understand things, or that any of my colleagues who have fared similarly do so. How dare I congratulate myself even a little for helping the students in my classrooms to be able to look beyond the surfaces with which they are presented and begin to be able to analyze and understand the substructures of them. It's not like its real work, after all.

Though I rather think that those who make in earnest such complaints as I mock would be far less able to do my work than I theirs. But that, too, is a bit of an arrogant statement.

It is true that I have a healthy--perhaps an overly-healthy--ego. And it is also true that the nature of the work I do smacks of hubris.

Both as a scholar and as a teacher, I am in a position where I do assert my judgment over the works and actions of other people. As an evaluator of cultural products (in which I do include my students' papers, since they are not written without the context of the students' physical and social surroundings--in a word, culture), I necessarily assert intellectual authority, and any such assertion smacks of pride. Doing so is a judgment, a vicarious foisting onto another of arbitrary, externally imposed standards.

In that sense, my work is a work of oppression.

It is fortunate, therefore, that the thing described by the term is not so uniformly negative as some would have others believe.

Certianly, it is true that much oppression is wrong. It is equally true that much ill has been done with it. It is also true, however, that all social relations are, in effect, extensions of an oppressive principle. We are all of us caught in systems that compel us to behave in certain ways through no more complex a reason than that of "might makes right." Children, particularly, are subject to this; they are placed under arbitrary--though not necessarily capricious--restrictions that are utlimately enacted by virtue of their being physically compelled to act in a certain way or physically punished for failing to comply (and the removal of privileges and confinement to "time outs"--which I am not certain are all that effective--are physical punishments no less than the spankings which are so roundly decried).

Their being so subjected helps them to be safe. It provides them with a structure for understanding that they can use to develop as people who can actually act in such a way as is of benefit to others as well as to themselves, ways not likely to result in one participant maiming another.

These, I think, are good things. And if it is true that fair ends cannot proceed from foul means (which is, admittedly, debatable), then it follows that not all oppression is ill.

Arrogant as I am, however, I am not so much so that I am unwilling too admit that I may well be wrong, should evidence to that effect be presented to me in an articulate, well-reasoned manner. And that, I have been taught and continue to believe after having looked about myself, is part of the ideal of scholarship that the "arrogant" liberal elite--the disconnected intelligentsia that are mocked even as the woks of their minds underpin the societies that facilitate their mocking--aspire to embody.

So who really is the cocky son of a bitch?