Our American Discomfort with Unsolved Pain

by Lucy S.

I don't have much time, so this won't be written as well as I'd like, but I'll do what I can in 60 minutes or so. I started to write back to a friend of mine who told me we shouldn't stay in the initial slump of depression as we more fully realize how the system functions, but should push onward with renewed strength. The system "wants" us to be depressed, said my friend. What I've written here isn't positioned in any kind of opposition to my friend's stance.  I am not saying that he is for some kind of uncritical, perpetual cheerfulness. Rather, these are things that came to me as I began writing my own thoughts in response. I will share what I wrote (and did not send, deciding instead to make it this post), interwoven with what I am adding now as I go back through it. Bur first, some context:

I recently was fortunate enough to be part of a one week intensive seminar focused on better ways to teach writing to students. My university offered this.  I applied last fall and was among twenty selected from different disciplines.  I love many aspects of this approach to teaching writing - making course and assignment goals align with what is taught along the way and with how students are finally evaluated and assessed. Students are well supported all the way through the process and so they fare better. This caring, constructive approach lines up with my own philosophy of teaching, writing, trying to enact more democracy in our classes, and building relationships with students.

At the same time, there were aspects of my experience in the seminar that hit me hard. A number of faculty from the business department were in our group, along with people from other disciplines who by and large continued to emphasize the need to prepare students to have the skills their corporate employers want. As I noted in my last post, if all goes "well" for these students (and for our university's reputation), these folks will graduate and become the professional-managerial class. If they're lucky, some will become the capitalist class - the elite. Or in various ways, they may become both (owners of businesses, investors, high level executives). At any rate, with all the emphasis on preparing students to meet the demands of their business employers, it sunk in particularly deeply that education, especially at institutions where students pay so much in tuition, is so forced to twist and turn itself to what big business wants.

 And so I had written to my friend something along the lines of what I said in the above two paragraphs, but I additionally expressed that I felt depressed by what I've explained in the second paragraph. My point here isn't to attempt to adequately represent his own undoubtedly more nuanced view or to "debate" whatever that view may be, but instead to share some of the thoughts that came to me as I started to write back.

I already have known for many years that education under capitalism is for getting jobs. That is even what people who aren't at all critical of capitalism already believe. But the big question is always whether we are educating against that grain or whether even our efforts to do so are co-opted back into serving the system. And that is a question that I think everyone not only has to answer for themselves, but will inevitably go on answering in changing ways. Education as it has been delivered for most of the last 60 years in public institutions (free or low cost) is quite different than education as it is increasingly being delivered even in our "public" institutions with their soaring tuition (high tuition with huge student loans for most people or wealthier parents who save up and pay these exorbitant fees).  Disciplines like literature, history, and philosophy start falling apart when they're forced to answer to market logic that way, just as libraries would if it started costing $1000 a year or whatever to belong to your "public" library.

And so more than ever, the pressure is on to turn English into a discipline that churns out good corporate writers. Furthermore, the only ones who can afford to study literature, philosophy, history, etc. "for its own sake" become those in more affluent classes. And that is a massive change from what has been the case in previous post World War II decades.  It works very well for corporate interests for higher ed to change into this kind of structure.

At my university, where students paying full rate for tuition and board (and almost all live there in the dorms) spend $180,000 for their B.A. (in whatever combination that happens - parents paying part; student loans...), it's easy to see why most students major in the things that they think will lead them to making a lot of money when they're done. The degree must "pay." It's not just that they "have to work" under capitalism. It's that they will become the upper-middle to upper class. And we know from Gramsci, Marx, etc. that people by and large behave according to their class interests. My goal isn't to syphon off a tiny amount of class traitors (though that's always nice to have happen), but to be part of educating the working classes to more fully grasp their own position in capitalism. It is in their class interest to actively oppose capitalism because they're the ones most screwed over by it.

The poverty- and working-classes are also the ones far less likely to find that college degrees change their class from working-class to the middle or upper classes.  Jack Conroy wrote about that way back in the early 1930s in The Disinherited - the way that very few working-class people "rose" out of their class by means of higher education - and we're seeing that more and more again now. (I see it in the experience of my two kids with B.A.'s, in my income post-M.A., and in the experiences of so many people working low paying retail and food service jobs after college graduation.)

I know all this on an intellectual level and political theory level, but knowing it in that way and living it are different. This is why the great Brazilian educator Paulo Freire emphasized the importance of "class knowledge." The lived realities that shove you up against the wall, exhausting you, scaring you when you don't know how you'll have enough money, limiting your options, angering you, breaking your heart over and over... these teach you what theory alone cannot.

But I don't think that the system in its American instantiation "wants" us to be depressed. It functions best when most people find ways to be "positive" within it and keep viewing their own and other individual lives in terms of "choice."  Those kind of "positive" and "hopeful" people make the best workers. They "know their place" and at the same time, believe that if they try hard and play by the rules, they and everyone else can make good lives for themselves. People who are upset, sad, angry, etc. are the ones who may organize against capital - we can see it in recent times as well as historically. But in the U.S. this is often cast as some kind of individual problem or even illness. Or it gets romanticized and individualized and directed into expressions of depoliticized personal angst. I am sympathetic to that individual angst, but I think it's crucial to show how it's not just an amorphous despair, as it seems - how its source should be identified in the structure of the system, and how we can then respond to it effectively. But cutting off our mourning, our grief, our chronic pain cannot be the answer, and at any rate, people can't just turn them on and off at will.

In terms of what this means for those of us working in education, it's not that I see it as wrong or foolish to do this work. If I did, I wouldn't root so strongly for friends of mine to get into academic programs or get the positions they're trying for. And I wouldn't do the work myself.  Also, I know the constraints we're all under. But there's no need for people to try to not feel whatever it is they feel, whether that is depression at various times, grief, joy, etc. Some of the strongest people I've known were what gets called "depressed" in American terms. It's just that we're so infused with the contemporary American ideology - the push to be relentlessly "positive" - that we tend to connect that mental state with "strength," and many of us tend to become uncomfortable with people who express their raw pain without any neat and easy solutions to it.

I have found that people who are more invested in the system and are faring pretty well under it, even if they are in theory on the Left, struggle enormously with the cognitive dissonance they feel when presented with other people's testimony that the system is working horribly for them or that their own efforts may be co-opted into perpetuating the same inequalities. (In basic terms, cognitive dissonance is the extreme discomfort people feel when they find out that their beliefs don't match reality.) The work of social psychologist Melvin Lerner is extremely useful here. I will lift something about it from a graduate paper I wrote in fall 2012:

Social psychologist Melvin Lerner’s research, known as the “just world” theory (first published in 1966 and repeatedly followed up and expanded on by a multitude of researchers in a variety of countries), demonstrated that when people encountered others who were suffering, they tended to blame the sufferers if they could do nothing to alleviate their suffering.

[His research] arose, initially, out of the efforts to explain why scientifically trained university students insisted on condemning poverty-stricken victims as “lazy and no good” while denying the evidence of their victimization by overwhelming economic changes. The explanation offered … was that people, for the sake of their security and ability to plan for the future, need to believe they live in an essentially “just” world whereby they can get what they deserve, at least in the long run. This may involve acting to eliminate injustice. But failing that, by blaming, rejecting, or avoiding the victim, or having faith that the victim will eventually be appropriately compensated, people are able to maintain their confidence in the justness of the world in which they must live and work for their future security (Lerner 1).

Most awfully: “The greater the injustice the greater the tendency to denigrate [the victim]” (2). Yet these researchers found that if observers found the victims to be similar to themselves, the blaming did not tend to occur. Thus, they report, homosexuals did not blame homosexuals with AIDS; unemployed people did not blame others for being unemployed; and so on (4). Moreover, the psychologists found that “giving observers instructions to empathize with the victims (imagine it is happening to you) seemed to prevent their victim derogation, as did reminding the observers that they were not supposed to condemn innocent victims” (2).


That paper was about the importance of connecting working-class literature to Critical University Studies, but I could broaden the argument to emphasizing the importance of connecting real working-class lives to critical analyses of the institutions.  And I am using it here to most of all emphasize why it is that many are so uncomfortable with, as I said earlier in here, raw pain that lacks neat and easy solutions.

This isn't to say I'm advocating some kind of "learned helplessness" - quite the opposite - but I'm arguing that those who resist the system best are those who can't find individual solutions or those who have close relationships with people for whom individual solutions fail. As Lerner's research shows, people don't blame others in similar straits.

Demanding that people put on cheerful, ever upbeat facades is not a genuinely progressive demand, nor does it help people who are suffering. When I talk with my cousin Johnny who got out of prison last year, he often expresses anger, bitterness, and profound grief.  It would be disrespectful and damaging for me to start lecturing him about what he can do to "better" himself.  (Not to say I haven't ended up delivering my fair share of disrespectful, moralizing lectures to people that I later regretted - including in some of my comments to people's responses in this blog last year.) The truth is that the system horrifically screwed Johnny - stole so much of his life - left him in a terrible mental and physical state when it finally let him leave its prison.

In 2011, I was volunteering for a project locally and mentioned to the director - a man who'd left his corporate marketing job of 24 years to "give back' to the community - that my cousin was in prison on a 27 years to life sentence for nonviolent crimes relating to his heroin addiction - and this perpetually exuberant person exclaimed with a big smile, "It probably saved his life!!"  It is people from his class that need to put a perpetual happy face on every rotten experience of those who are supposed to thankfully accept the crumbs the system's benefactors hand out to alleviate guilt and cognitive dissonance.  Otherwise,  people like that man would have to interrogate the system they support.

But those of us who want systemic transformation know better. And this is why I say, we need to critically analyze the urge toward cheery positivity within ourselves - the American white middle to upper class norm that makes people so uncomfortable with unsolved pain and so unable to fully accept it without berating or avoiding the person expressing it for being "a downer."

Thinking about my discomfort with not only the last post of mine but so much of what I've written on this blog for the past year, I know that I too am infused with these ideas about being "positive."  This is I think why I feel so guilty when I express pain and anger about the way the system plays out in my life and the lives of many close to me.  And I've chosen to use a lot of my life energy and time in these educational systems, so I too find it hurtful if too much of the meaning in what I do is unraveled.  And it HAS been transformative. I am still trying to sort all of this out,

One last thought: another reason I find myself feeling that something I've strongly expressed is not true enough is because so many of these things are dialectical. Out of the seeming contradictions, we work out a complicated, paradoxical truth that encompasses what seem to be at opposite ends.  And that's true with this topic as well.  We do need (as Frederic Jameson says) the utopian impulse. We need to imagine and try to create better. Mixes of joy, anger, and despair at the possibilities within the system can push us in that utopian direction. And that is probably what my friend was getting at.




Works Cited:

Lerner, Melvin J. and Leo Montada. Responses to Victimization and Belief in a Just World (Critical Issues in Social Justice) New York: Springer, 2010. Print.