Have to turn in my first college paper the day after tomorrow. One of the courses I'm taking turns out to be very literature oriented. The textbook is a book of essays. I've had to read two so far, and they were only a few pages long. Much lighter reading that Sapolsky or Krauss. Almost want to say too easy, but I knew college would start this way. I'll have to take a lot of easy courses these first two years, just to accumulate credits. Still, I'm quite nervous, being new to all this, so it's probably good that I'm not starting with physics.
Anyhow, since I haven't felt like blogging lately, figured I'd post my essay here.
“Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong," ~H.L. Mencken
Life is complicated. I've been having some trouble figuring it out. I don't understand how the rest of you get through it without inflicting all sorts of harm and misery on yourselves and each other, but alas, we actually don't. They say we're making progress, though. Here in the twenty first century, there are only an estimated thirty million human lives still being held in chattel slavery.
After reading these two essays - "Learning to Read and Write," by Frederick Douglas, and "Library Card" by Richard Wright - I figured I'd give my self some time to digest what I'd read before attempting to write about it. Well aware that this is just the sort of gibberish my mind uses to get me to procrastinate, I pretend wasting some time on Twitter to be the better idea. I almost want to argue that it can be a more productive endeavor than some might think. A small fragment of this latest evolutionary leap in human interaction we call the internet. Learning language, learning to speak, learning to read and write, across telephone lines, radio waves, cable television, and now Twitter.
I try to imagine books, reading and writing, in a world without all that. A world where I go from reading these two essays in a matter of minutes, to reading a tweet, which points me to an article about Kalief Browder. He was only sixteen when thrown into prison, pending trial. Never to be convicted of anything, charged only with a petty misdemeanor that was eventually tossed without ever going to court. He spent years there, much of it in solitary confinement. I'd already known all that, but this tweet linked to an article about a research paper Browder had done, as a student at Bronx Community College, prior to taking his own life. A research paper on solitary confinement. It struck me that there were parallels between his work and the two essays I'd just read. It all strikes me as an effort to rise above oppression, by learning, and then by sharing what's been learned. This goes right to the heart of what humanity is all about.
As put by another great writer, Michelle Alexander, more black men are in prison today than were enslaved in 1850. To quote the thirteenth amendment of the United States Constitution, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime," in a country that has the worst incarceration rate per capita in the world. Not merely the "western world" or the "industrialized world," but our land of the free imprisons more of it's citizens than any other government anywhere. Iconically, it's the old plantation state of Louisiana that's now known as the prison capital of the world, where prison labor is a booming industry.
For most of my life, I've agreed with Dr. Martin Luther King's assessment, that the moral arc of the universe is long, but that it bends towards justice. Many a compelling case can be made for that being the way things are going, but I'm not so sure, anymore. When we seperate technological advancement from social progress, distinguishing all the suffering that's been mitigated by advancements in medicine, comfort, and distraction, are we really making social progress at all? There's probably less abject suffering. I'm just not so sure it's because terrible people are being any less terrible towards each other at all.
These two essays both touch on the power of communication technology. What progress would we have made, without books to facilitate the spread of ideas? Where would we be, if books were taken away, our means to learn about the world, sharing ideas across great distances, across history, our knowledge and conceptual framework predicated on countless others we've learned from? I suspect that we'd be back to square one, all that progress collapsing in short order, without the technology that's not only made it possible, but keeps it going.
Maybe this is why, at times, it does not seem like such progress after all. So much of it depending on what people have access to, but this is also what's been changing. The spread of ideas through technology growing increasingly ubiquitous throughout the world, seeping into even the most totalitarian states, growing more and more difficult to keep at bay. I get very discouraged and cynical at times, but I am looking forward to seeing where it all goes. It is precisely because of our ability to exchange knowledge and ideas, building upon each other's efforts, that I do have some hope.
Frederick Douglas writes that learning to read at times felt like more of a curse than a blessing, and while I can hardly imagine what he went through as a slave, that sentiment does resonate. So much of what I've learned and taken for granted, shattered as I've expanded my horizons, as only reading has made possible, from books to social media. Comforting narratives about progress and evils left well behind us, crushed beneath the weight of learning just how terrible the world still is.
Richard Wright also comments on this matter, no longer merely feeling that the world was hostile, but coming to understand it as fact. As horizons expand, learning just how murderous and hostile humanity can be, and struggling with that realization. I struggle with this myself, both the feeling, and the understanding that it's all too accurate. I struggle with how to approach this.
I consider what Douglas and Wright then went on to accomplish though, having taken those steps. Looking forward, using any means available to learn, using that knowledge to fight for what might be possible, merely by sharing their own ideas, in much the same way they'd shared in ideas of others. Even long after their passing, their own writing still changing the world to this day, on their behalf. On humanity's behalf.
Posts
