Twin New York-associated articles of note today. First, we have the New York Times with Ilana Horwitz of Tulane University on the topic of how religion helps working-class young people—especially boys—to better achieve after high school. This is part of the ongoing saga of better understanding the sagging social support network (“social capital”) that has been suggested to explain high rates of despair, opioid addiction, alcohol abuse, suicide, and even white supremacist ideation and Trumpism among working-class Americans. What is particularly interesting to me is that the same religious enhancement of educational attainment doesn’t apply to the children of college-educated professionals and the author notes that strong religious belief systems—especially among young women—may interfere with future decision-making by directing them towards traditional female careers and roles.
Meanwhile, Cornel West has a wide-ranging interview in The New Yorker where he repeatedly decries Harvard for becoming a spiritual wasteland of sorts, dedicated to the education of a professional-managerial class that lacks some elemental soul needed to translate ideas into public intellectual and social engagement:
That’s not just brother Trump, even though he’s a neo-Fascist one. He’s on the continuum with so much of the professional-managerial class in terms of their lack of accountability to working people and poor people. Once you have that kind of spiritual decay and moral decrepitude, man, then it’s just gangsterization on steroids, man. That’s where America’s headed.
So it seems many of the religious working-class college achievers are just working towards some kind of soulless professionalism. Without converting their intellectual achievements into activism, and by just focusing on jobs and further achievement, they are content to let the backslide towards authoritarianism continue apace. West sees a neoliberal hypocrisy at every turn, as well, and almost as toxic as the fascist urge. Neither care much about the working class or poor, and are indifferent or militaristic to other countries.
Later, West calls for a more Continental kind of philosophy given that Anglo-American philosophy is so tied to analytic concerns about language. The closest approximation to what he wants is more aligned with the arts and musical theater as a more robust engagement with life than academic professional philosophy. As far as I can tell, he sees theater as providing moral content to ideas rather than abandoning them as purely intellectual levers for control.
I was trying to imagine what an alternative to the religious scaffolding that helps young working class males order their lives and, simultaneously, carries through to a more socially-responsible intellectual elite rather than forcing the college-educated into traditional molds. West sees Socratic engagement as the model that allows for disagreements and discussions, and in turn leads to activism. I think I see that model in much of the better web content, from opposing YouTube videos to clarifying blogs.
I’ll just provide one simple example. I like music as much as Cornel West and have invested in fairly good sound reproduction machinery. I also have a BSEE and MSEE in signal processing, information theory, and related areas. Yet I had no idea how much bullshit, irrationality, and grifting goes on in the world of audiophile equipment, recording, and streaming until I did a deep dive. There are companies selling people ridiculous cord lifters and chemicals to improve the electrical contacts of their USB cables. People invest tens of thousands of dollars in objectively poor tube amplifiers and play vinyl recordings using crazy-expensive moving coil cartridges on turntables with external power supplies, in turn drawing power from “AC regenerators” that do absolutely nothing. The term “audiofool” is bantered around for these people who claim that their wives come running in from the kitchen (yes, it is old sexist dudes, mostly) to declare each little change they make to their system improves spatial separation, blackens the blacks (reduces noise), enhances resolution, etc., etc., etc. The ability to hear and discern differences between systems is even more fraught than objective measurements, too. Assessing subjective differences is subject to a whole range of psychological problems from individual differences to hearing loss, from volume level matching to order effects of presentation. These people are crazy and waste their money but also object to being told that they are nuts. In turn they continue to get grifted.
But there are efforts to counter this trend. Online debunking measurement forums are drawing increasingly larger audiences away from the grifters and reviewers in the pockets of the product marketers. These places are sometimes rough-and-tumble but rarely distractingly trolled. They represent pointed Socratic engagement and activism in the Cornel West mold, just for something that is arguably less socially important than his focus on the poor, disenfranchised, and working class. We see similar dialog between atheist and religious activists on YouTube. Suddenly the formally hidden depths of apologetic arguments are laid bare and dissected. The dissections are interrogated and the arguments are reconstituted and, in turn, get drawn and quartered again. It has even happened with something as simple and harrowingly complex as how electricity works.
Still, the model is potentially relevant for increasing the engagement among college-educated folks. We can create fora where intellectual capital is generated to destabilize existing hypocrisies and create new ideas. Getting this kind of thinking on the ground in working-class communities alongside the steadying effects of traditional religion is worth considering. The draw of belonging can be filled by toxic fascist involvement, traditional religious thinking, but also engagement with ideas that are contextualized outside of the school curriculum and imbued with a moral freight. I would vote for the latter in terms of providing the most socially responsible West-style Socratic thrill ride.
Didn’t think I could pull all those title terms together, did you?
A few edits
Oops, properly spelled Cornel West