Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what's going on right in front of me. Paying attention to what's going on inside me. As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head. Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about "teaching you how to think" is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: "Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master." This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull- value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.
I don't know about the alone part but this really resonated with me in a way that spoke to the potential for re-conceptualizing activism as well. Wallace talks about how we automatically center ourselves partly as a function of how we look at the world - with ourselves at the center and everything literally going on around us - and partly as the product of how our society places value on the individual. It is important to de-center yourself in a way that is not necessarily how we're socialized. Wallace's point is that we need to be more conscious of others and their needs around us.. I would extend that to say that in an activist model we need to look at the collective as the way both to true unity/solidarity and to power. Can we learn to value the individual and not ignore needs of each member of a group while simultaneously drawing on the energy of a unified group as a vehicle to confront structural oppression/inequity?
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