20140717.0735

I spent a far bit of time yesterday catching up on my journal reading (and I mean to spend a fair bit of today doing the same). Why I am behind in it, I have addressed before. But in trying to come abreast of where I need to be in terms of keeping up with my disciplines, I find myself somewhat saddened. It is not because the work is bad and I am having an arrogant "Oh, how the world is degrading, that such things are allowed to pass as knowledge" moment. It is not even because I have not gotten as much into print as I ought to have done; I am working to correct that particular failing, with a book chapter in revision and a poem and an essay just accepted for publication (details to follow). No, I grow sad because I see in the research places where humanity has failed and where it is called to action by my colleagues, and I know that they will not be answered. The work in which the calls are made is seen as wasteful, as I noted, and when it is the case that the work is looked at by those outside the academic humanities as being of value (which is seldom), it is regarded as arcane and abstruse, such that it cannot be understood and the calls cannot be answered.

Seeing and knowing such things makes difficult the fight against despair. Seeing and knowing my own complicity in systems of oppression and my continued benefit from the oppressions of the past join with the certain knowledge that I cannot extricate myself from those systems, that I cannot set aside those benefits. I am the Shakespearean Claudius again, asking how one might be pardoned when one cannot set aside the offense. Even within the fairly common Protestant tradition in which I am immersed (itself beset with problems), forgiveness requires repentance, and repentance entails giving up what is gained through regret, and how I can set aside my privilege while I 1) remain who I am and 2) do the work that I do inside the classroom and outside it eludes me. I feel I have to be in a position of authority, one which I have in some senses earned through the work I have done thus far and which I have in other senses yet to earn but still possess, but how much of that feeling is the result of my internalization of preexisting social constraints and practices is unclear to me.

My discomfort is as nothing compared to the down-treading of which so many have been the recipients, I know. I know that the problems I have in considering my complicity in oppression are insubstantial against the problems of those who are oppressed. And I know that it smacks of elitism in many senses that I would even for a moment consider that I alone am tasked with the redress of the situations imposed upon others prior to my arrival and continuing on into the now. But I know also that I ought to be such a person that the world is better for my being, and I do not know how even to look at what better actually is.