Cluelessness Reigns in Academia’s Ivory Towers
I: The Surety of the Young
I.A. We’re all headed into a future of unknowns. Well, not all of us. College students know precisely what the future holds as they take their cues from clueless adults. Gotta hand it to them: At least they think they know.
I.B. Parochialism at Halloween in 2023 wears the mask of Cosmopolitanism. But be assured, beneath the costume, it is just a young person who’s wearing an outfit that adults provided. As a result, the causes supported by the young can become the curses of their old age. Proof of this lies in the many hopeful revolutionaries who succumbed to worse dictatorships than those they overthrew (e.g., The Russian Revolution and the rise of murderous Stalin and the loss of freedom under the Soviet Union).
I.C. All of us have undertaken a personal journey from naive parochialism to relative cosmopolitanism.
II: Parochialism
II.A. As a young teenager in a small western Pennsylvania town, I was largely unaware of world politics and national current events and the potential of both to affect my life. But I had inklings: I was fortunate enough to live in a public school district with a curriculum that included civics, geography, and world history, so my parochialism did not exist in a vacuum of personal centrism. And the Cold War with its ever-looming possibility of a nuclear conflict always surfaced itself when I walked past the town’s more substantial buildings, each with a posted yellow and black “Fallout Shelter” sign over some basement entrance. Those signs, some 1.4 million of them spread throughout the country, plus occasional school bomb drills during which we had to get under a desk or into a hallway away from windows, meant the outside world wasn’t very far away. The drills temporarily introduced a weak cosmopolitanism that faded into my young mind’s recesses as homework, sports, and social activities occupied that teenage brain. Could anything have been more important than the Pirates getting into and beating the Yankees in the World Series, clarinet lessons, football or baseball practice and games, school dances, and those carefree summers at Mountain View’s giant oval pool I spent with friends? Ah! Those female classmates lounging by the pool or playing Marco Polo or totem-pole wrestling with us boys in the water. Sorry; reverie afflicts all of us with attention deficit disorder. What was I...
Back to…
II.B. In my later teenage years I was fortunate to attend a private school with a student body hailing from around the country, giving me a sense that the world was larger and my connection to it was more adhesive than I had previously thought. I would have discovered this as I aged, but the nature of that student body thrust cosmopolitanism into my cortex. Brighter than I, my classmates engaged one another and me in numerous debates about social and world matters that challenged my parochialism and taught me that no society is the center and that every society in a world of nuclear weapons and mobile populations is connected.
III. Transitions
III.A. Increasing self-awareness is the avenue into psychological maturity; increasing other-awareness is the avenue to social maturity. Both avenues snake aimlessly in the absence of specific knowledge because few of us can plan a direct route to maturation. We live; things happen; we learn in retrospect. And because the maze of life keeps changing unpredictably, our travel on both avenues has its surprises, elations, and disappointments.
III.B. During my late teen travels on the relatively clueless path to social awareness, I became an advocate of sorts. For example, I sent in my dollar to become a dues-paying member of the NAACP, which, at that time, was not a mouthpiece for the Democrat Party, but was more a mouthpiece for oppressed African-Americans robbed of freedoms and rights by mostly southern Democrats and also by hiring agents in numerous businesses run by staunch Republicans in a world controlled by Caucasian managers.
III.C. Lacking specific knowledge about the complex relationships between Americans of different races and the need for personal responsibility, I adopted a rather simple position that would eventually see me advocate for Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. The economic and social plight of Black America had become a cause. I had contributed a dollar!
IV. Wakeup Calls and the Inevitability of Disillusionment
IV.A. Probably the loudest wakeup call and point of no return to those happy transition days between the bliss of ignorance by the Mountain View pool and a budding cosmopolitan reality occurred over a short period known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Before that incident, the possibility of a nuclear war seemed remote even in the presence of those fallout signs. But a very real possibility of a nuclear war meant I was inescapably part of a world system whether or not I wanted to think about other countries. In fact, it forced me to think about them and my own helpless vulnerability. There were others in control, and I had no way to influence their spur of the moment and self-aggrandizing decisions. Both Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy had their fingers on buttons only they could push.
IV.B. There was also that back-of-the-mind reality that though the United States through the efforts of my Marine father and his generation had won its battles against the Axis Powers in WWII, the country had fought a stalemate campaign in Korea and had failed miserably in supporting the Bay of Pigs invasion.
IV.C. In a very short while, the War on Poverty in the Great Society initiated an insidious deleterious effect: Hard-working African-American families struggling to succeed in the unaccommodating worlds of education, business, and industry began to decline in numbers as more welfare became available. The number of fatherless children born to those families at the start of the Great Society was 35-40%. That percent increased steadily and rapidly through the ensuing decades till it reached today’s 65-67%, an increase that coincided with the rise in drug use, gang membership, and violent crimes by teenagers of all races, but that affected negatively the lives of proportionately more Black teens.
IV.D. Too young to remember the American-Japanese internment during WWII and too far removed from wars with Native Americans in the nineteenth century, I and my contemporaries had another wakeup in the riots, stand-ins, and Kent State shootings of the 1960s and 70s. Was the American government the same as those distant governments I was becoming more aware of during my transition period from parochialism to cosmopolitanism? Could the American government turn against the people who elected it just as the Soviet Union’s tyrants turned on Russians? Are the FBI memo directing agents to spy on traditional Catholics and the Attorney General’s call to monitor parents protesting at school board meetings indications that the American government is little different from those censoring governments I had learned of during my transition period?
IV.E. Those failures to achieve a definitive victory in the war on poverty, the war in Korea and the subsequent loss of more than 50,000 American soldiers in the debacle of Vietnam during a time when my dollar dues to the NCAAP did little to alter the status of Americans all added to a sense of personal vulnerability shared with me by many Americans, a vulnerability that the Arab oil embargo and several economic downturns further exacerbated in my early adulthood a background disillusionment sprung from a realization that the local and the distal were not only related, but were also alike.
V. Overcoming Parochialism
V.A. “There is no frigate like a book,” wrote Emily Dickinson. Speak of insularity! With a life lived mostly in her Amherst home and Mt. Holyoke school, Emily was about as removed from world affairs as any teen in my youth. But that one line from one of her little poems was probably as valuable a lesson in international affairs as any. With my limited resources and travel experiences, I realized I could travel virtually. So, I developed rather eclectic reading interests. What was “out there?” What didn’t I know?
V.B. I stumbled on a book about the Maya in the school library one day. The Maya? Why hadn’t I heard of this civilization when I took those history classes in my teen years? How could an entire civilization have come and gone without any section devoted to it in my textbooks. I knew about the Egyptians, the Greeks and Romans, the Eastern and Western Roman empires, the Holy Roman Empire, the British Empire, but noting about a Central American Empire other than the Aztecs. I had as a young student heard of the Aztecs and knew the Marine song’s reference in the words “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli,” but I never heard about this extensive civilization that had come and gone before the Conquistadores had a chance to destroy them. I don’t remember the book’s author or even its title; I recall the author was an archaeologist. But I know that in reading it, I realized that our species was pretty much the same regardless of time and place: We were no different in our ostensible accomplishments and our insidious threats both domestic and foreign. Those pyramids were fascinating structures that rivaled those at Giza and gave evidence of a highly organized and rather sophisticated (if one ignores the absence of the wheel and the human sacrifices) society. That civilization lost for centuries in the rainforests of Central America most likely mirrored modern civilization’s foibles domestic and foreign. If a civilization that complex had risen and fallen, could my own civilization also fall? Could the causes adopted by today’s youth be as inimical as those of civilizations long gone? Is the modern world—my modern world—destined to follow the Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Incan, Mayan, and Aztec worlds in falling? And if so, would the fall occur because of inside or outside forces, the former a slow decay and the latter a brutish nuclear war?
V.C. Apparently, some of today’s college students—in places like Cornell, Harvard, and NYU—have taken up the banner of the Palestinians. They have rallied round a cause, one they have simplified into the “evil, apartheid Israelis” and the “oppressed and abused Palestinians.” In adopting this cause, many have denied the realities of beheaded babies, raped and tortured women, and slaughtered men in a massacre that Hamas has itself documented and displayed. But no matter. The ardent anti-semitic protestors believe they have a handle on cosmopolitanism, that they have an encompassing view of the world that separates the oppressor and the oppressed. They know. At least, they think they know.
V.D. But what if, years hence, the very people they support and whose actions they justify through equivocation decide that just because they are Americans, they deserve to die? What if the very organization they now call “freedom fighters” focuses on what they designate as the Great Satan? What if the cause they now support causes them problems they can’t anticipate in their naïveté and closed-mindedness?
VI. Backfires of the Vanities
VI.A. The Great Society I supported in my youth has turned into a socialist nightmare that has cost about 15 trillion dollars with no end in sight. Since 1964, the poverty rate hasn’t changed much. The War on Poverty, a noble cause in my youth, has become an endless war with many casualties, among them the Black youth who grew up fatherless in inner cities. The vanity of the Johnson Administration in assuming that a mere expenditure of tax dollars could solve the problem reveals itself in its failure. But in my youth I believed I knew the future and that my generation could shape it as we willed.
VI.B. The support of the young for Hamas and Palestinians and against Israelis and Jews around the world is destined to become their future disillusionment. They will learn their cosmopolitanism the hard way: In some terrorist attack in which they become a target or collateral damage, or in a tribal society not much different from the most culturally disjointed groups in history and in those tribal units currently squabbling, fighting, and killing one another. Whereas the extent of such fighting was limited to specific regions during ancient and medieval times, that fighting will now become more cosmopolitan, and its victims will be more widespread.
VI.C. We humans have difficulty living harmoniously in our local “parishes.” On a cosmopolitan scale, we find harmony even more difficult to achieve and maintain. Adopting any cause isn’t a guarantee that its promise will end in some utopian society; those college students who are “Christian, white, and middle to upper class” and who are out condemning Israel for defending itself might find some day that they are the target of terrorists simply because they are “Christian, white, and middle to upper class.” We learn in retrospect because we live, and stuff happens, and most of the stuff that happens occurs because of those who live outside our sphere of influence, outside our local "parish." We can adopt causes we believe to be worthy, but we cannot predict their consequences. Our vanity often backfires, especially the vanity of youth sure of themselves but lacking in a true cosmopolitanism.
VII. Conclusion
VII.A. Just sayin'
VII.B. What do you say?
I: The Surety of the Young
I.A. We’re all headed into a future of unknowns. Well, not all of us. College students know precisely what the future holds as they take their cues from clueless adults. Gotta hand it to them: At least they think they know.
I.B. Parochialism at Halloween in 2023 wears the mask of Cosmopolitanism. But be assured, beneath the costume, it is just a young person who’s wearing an outfit that adults provided. As a result, the causes supported by the young can become the curses of their old age. Proof of this lies in the many hopeful revolutionaries who succumbed to worse dictatorships than those they overthrew (e.g., The Russian Revolution and the rise of murderous Stalin and the loss of freedom under the Soviet Union).
I.C. All of us have undertaken a personal journey from naive parochialism to relative cosmopolitanism.
II: Parochialism
II.A. As a young teenager in a small western Pennsylvania town, I was largely unaware of world politics and national current events and the potential of both to affect my life. But I had inklings: I was fortunate enough to live in a public school district with a curriculum that included civics, geography, and world history, so my parochialism did not exist in a vacuum of personal centrism. And the Cold War with its ever-looming possibility of a nuclear conflict always surfaced itself when I walked past the town’s more substantial buildings, each with a posted yellow and black “Fallout Shelter” sign over some basement entrance. Those signs, some 1.4 million of them spread throughout the country, plus occasional school bomb drills during which we had to get under a desk or into a hallway away from windows, meant the outside world wasn’t very far away. The drills temporarily introduced a weak cosmopolitanism that faded into my young mind’s recesses as homework, sports, and social activities occupied that teenage brain. Could anything have been more important than the Pirates getting into and beating the Yankees in the World Series, clarinet lessons, football or baseball practice and games, school dances, and those carefree summers at Mountain View’s giant oval pool I spent with friends? Ah! Those female classmates lounging by the pool or playing Marco Polo or totem-pole wrestling with us boys in the water. Sorry; reverie afflicts all of us with attention deficit disorder. What was I...
Back to…
II.B. In my later teenage years I was fortunate to attend a private school with a student body hailing from around the country, giving me a sense that the world was larger and my connection to it was more adhesive than I had previously thought. I would have discovered this as I aged, but the nature of that student body thrust cosmopolitanism into my cortex. Brighter than I, my classmates engaged one another and me in numerous debates about social and world matters that challenged my parochialism and taught me that no society is the center and that every society in a world of nuclear weapons and mobile populations is connected.
III. Transitions
III.A. Increasing self-awareness is the avenue into psychological maturity; increasing other-awareness is the avenue to social maturity. Both avenues snake aimlessly in the absence of specific knowledge because few of us can plan a direct route to maturation. We live; things happen; we learn in retrospect. And because the maze of life keeps changing unpredictably, our travel on both avenues has its surprises, elations, and disappointments.
III.B. During my late teen travels on the relatively clueless path to social awareness, I became an advocate of sorts. For example, I sent in my dollar to become a dues-paying member of the NAACP, which, at that time, was not a mouthpiece for the Democrat Party, but was more a mouthpiece for oppressed African-Americans robbed of freedoms and rights by mostly southern Democrats and also by hiring agents in numerous businesses run by staunch Republicans in a world controlled by Caucasian managers.
III.C. Lacking specific knowledge about the complex relationships between Americans of different races and the need for personal responsibility, I adopted a rather simple position that would eventually see me advocate for Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. The economic and social plight of Black America had become a cause. I had contributed a dollar!
IV. Wakeup Calls and the Inevitability of Disillusionment
IV.A. Probably the loudest wakeup call and point of no return to those happy transition days between the bliss of ignorance by the Mountain View pool and a budding cosmopolitan reality occurred over a short period known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Before that incident, the possibility of a nuclear war seemed remote even in the presence of those fallout signs. But a very real possibility of a nuclear war meant I was inescapably part of a world system whether or not I wanted to think about other countries. In fact, it forced me to think about them and my own helpless vulnerability. There were others in control, and I had no way to influence their spur of the moment and self-aggrandizing decisions. Both Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy had their fingers on buttons only they could push.
IV.B. There was also that back-of-the-mind reality that though the United States through the efforts of my Marine father and his generation had won its battles against the Axis Powers in WWII, the country had fought a stalemate campaign in Korea and had failed miserably in supporting the Bay of Pigs invasion.
IV.C. In a very short while, the War on Poverty in the Great Society initiated an insidious deleterious effect: Hard-working African-American families struggling to succeed in the unaccommodating worlds of education, business, and industry began to decline in numbers as more welfare became available. The number of fatherless children born to those families at the start of the Great Society was 35-40%. That percent increased steadily and rapidly through the ensuing decades till it reached today’s 65-67%, an increase that coincided with the rise in drug use, gang membership, and violent crimes by teenagers of all races, but that affected negatively the lives of proportionately more Black teens.
IV.D. Too young to remember the American-Japanese internment during WWII and too far removed from wars with Native Americans in the nineteenth century, I and my contemporaries had another wakeup in the riots, stand-ins, and Kent State shootings of the 1960s and 70s. Was the American government the same as those distant governments I was becoming more aware of during my transition period from parochialism to cosmopolitanism? Could the American government turn against the people who elected it just as the Soviet Union’s tyrants turned on Russians? Are the FBI memo directing agents to spy on traditional Catholics and the Attorney General’s call to monitor parents protesting at school board meetings indications that the American government is little different from those censoring governments I had learned of during my transition period?
IV.E. Those failures to achieve a definitive victory in the war on poverty, the war in Korea and the subsequent loss of more than 50,000 American soldiers in the debacle of Vietnam during a time when my dollar dues to the NCAAP did little to alter the status of Americans all added to a sense of personal vulnerability shared with me by many Americans, a vulnerability that the Arab oil embargo and several economic downturns further exacerbated in my early adulthood a background disillusionment sprung from a realization that the local and the distal were not only related, but were also alike.
V. Overcoming Parochialism
V.A. “There is no frigate like a book,” wrote Emily Dickinson. Speak of insularity! With a life lived mostly in her Amherst home and Mt. Holyoke school, Emily was about as removed from world affairs as any teen in my youth. But that one line from one of her little poems was probably as valuable a lesson in international affairs as any. With my limited resources and travel experiences, I realized I could travel virtually. So, I developed rather eclectic reading interests. What was “out there?” What didn’t I know?
V.B. I stumbled on a book about the Maya in the school library one day. The Maya? Why hadn’t I heard of this civilization when I took those history classes in my teen years? How could an entire civilization have come and gone without any section devoted to it in my textbooks. I knew about the Egyptians, the Greeks and Romans, the Eastern and Western Roman empires, the Holy Roman Empire, the British Empire, but noting about a Central American Empire other than the Aztecs. I had as a young student heard of the Aztecs and knew the Marine song’s reference in the words “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli,” but I never heard about this extensive civilization that had come and gone before the Conquistadores had a chance to destroy them. I don’t remember the book’s author or even its title; I recall the author was an archaeologist. But I know that in reading it, I realized that our species was pretty much the same regardless of time and place: We were no different in our ostensible accomplishments and our insidious threats both domestic and foreign. Those pyramids were fascinating structures that rivaled those at Giza and gave evidence of a highly organized and rather sophisticated (if one ignores the absence of the wheel and the human sacrifices) society. That civilization lost for centuries in the rainforests of Central America most likely mirrored modern civilization’s foibles domestic and foreign. If a civilization that complex had risen and fallen, could my own civilization also fall? Could the causes adopted by today’s youth be as inimical as those of civilizations long gone? Is the modern world—my modern world—destined to follow the Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Incan, Mayan, and Aztec worlds in falling? And if so, would the fall occur because of inside or outside forces, the former a slow decay and the latter a brutish nuclear war?
V.C. Apparently, some of today’s college students—in places like Cornell, Harvard, and NYU—have taken up the banner of the Palestinians. They have rallied round a cause, one they have simplified into the “evil, apartheid Israelis” and the “oppressed and abused Palestinians.” In adopting this cause, many have denied the realities of beheaded babies, raped and tortured women, and slaughtered men in a massacre that Hamas has itself documented and displayed. But no matter. The ardent anti-semitic protestors believe they have a handle on cosmopolitanism, that they have an encompassing view of the world that separates the oppressor and the oppressed. They know. At least, they think they know.
V.D. But what if, years hence, the very people they support and whose actions they justify through equivocation decide that just because they are Americans, they deserve to die? What if the very organization they now call “freedom fighters” focuses on what they designate as the Great Satan? What if the cause they now support causes them problems they can’t anticipate in their naïveté and closed-mindedness?
VI. Backfires of the Vanities
VI.A. The Great Society I supported in my youth has turned into a socialist nightmare that has cost about 15 trillion dollars with no end in sight. Since 1964, the poverty rate hasn’t changed much. The War on Poverty, a noble cause in my youth, has become an endless war with many casualties, among them the Black youth who grew up fatherless in inner cities. The vanity of the Johnson Administration in assuming that a mere expenditure of tax dollars could solve the problem reveals itself in its failure. But in my youth I believed I knew the future and that my generation could shape it as we willed.
VI.B. The support of the young for Hamas and Palestinians and against Israelis and Jews around the world is destined to become their future disillusionment. They will learn their cosmopolitanism the hard way: In some terrorist attack in which they become a target or collateral damage, or in a tribal society not much different from the most culturally disjointed groups in history and in those tribal units currently squabbling, fighting, and killing one another. Whereas the extent of such fighting was limited to specific regions during ancient and medieval times, that fighting will now become more cosmopolitan, and its victims will be more widespread.
VI.C. We humans have difficulty living harmoniously in our local “parishes.” On a cosmopolitan scale, we find harmony even more difficult to achieve and maintain. Adopting any cause isn’t a guarantee that its promise will end in some utopian society; those college students who are “Christian, white, and middle to upper class” and who are out condemning Israel for defending itself might find some day that they are the target of terrorists simply because they are “Christian, white, and middle to upper class.” We learn in retrospect because we live, and stuff happens, and most of the stuff that happens occurs because of those who live outside our sphere of influence, outside our local "parish." We can adopt causes we believe to be worthy, but we cannot predict their consequences. Our vanity often backfires, especially the vanity of youth sure of themselves but lacking in a true cosmopolitanism.
VII. Conclusion
VII.A. Just sayin'
VII.B. What do you say?
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