Itinerant Professional Vandal. Moi?
Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine --Henry David Thoreau
I've been looking for this quotation/argument for awhile, and finally found it:
"Everywhere, every day, local life is being discomforted, disrupted, endangered, or destroyed by powerful people who live, or who are privileged to think they live, beyond the bad effects of their bad work.
A powerful class of itinerant professional vandals is now pillaging the country and laying it waste. Their vandalism is not called by that name because of its enormous profitability (to some) and the grandeur of its scale. If one wrecks a private home, that is vandalism, but if, to build a nuclear power plant, one destroys good farmland, disrupts a local community, and jeopardizes lives, home, and properties within an area of several thousand square miles, that is industrial progress."
-Wendell Berry, “Higher Education and Home Defense” in Home Economics (1987), p. 50
My perenniel, beginning-of-the-school-year-procrastination-fueling angst: Are colleges and universities basically about training up the next generation of itinerant professional vandals (IPVs) and their lackeys? To what degree is my work entangled with and ultimately supportive of this economy? Given that the answer to the last question is: "quite a lot," to what degree can my work be a friction in the machine?
Here's some more from Berry's essay, as summarized by Patrick Deneen of Georgetown University:
Berry’s [evaluation of economic development decisions] refuses to depersonalize the destruction wrought by modern economic forces upon local communities by rejecting the dogma that the “market” or “globalization” or progress itself is an impersonal and thus uncontrollable force. He articulates not only the particular set of assumptions and preferences built into those seemingly impersonal “forces,” but points to the particular agents who carry out those assumptions. In particular, he gives a face and personality to the humans whose economic assumptions have the effect of eviscerating local traditions and mores. He lambastes the condescension of “experts” and “progressives” who presume to know what is better for a community than the people who live in that community, ones who otherwise view such places as “fly-over” country and practice a form of “absentee” exploitation. He notes that this “powerful class of itinerant professional vandals” brings no capacity to assess the value of locality in terms other than profit and growth. Such people, above all, lack the capacity to assess the non-monetary value of localities because they have been raised and educated both to avoid any such local commitments, and even to disdain them as untoward forms of limitation. They are formed to be “the purest sort of careerists - ‘upwardly mobile’ transients who will permit no stay or place to interrupt their personal advance. They must have no local allegiances; they must not have a local point of view. In order to be able to desecrate, endanger, or destroy a place, after all, one must be able to leave it and forget it…. Unlike a life at home, which makes ever more particular and precious the places and creatures of this world, the careerist’s life generalizes the world, reducing its abundant and comely diversity to ‘raw material.’”
American colleges and universities pull students out of their home communities pretty deliberately; it's considered bad for ratings for a college to be too regional in its focus; part of the reason that academics in general look down their noses at community colleges is that their draw is so very localized (and often drawn from an older, less-likely-to-be-mobile demographic).
The place I teach aspires to a more national and even international demographic; we aspire to share in the financial windfall that results from this "absentee" exploitation. As Berry says so simply in that same essay: "To build houses here, we clear-cut forests there. To have air-conditioning here, we strip-mine forests there. To drive our cars here, we sink our oil wells there. It is an absentee economy. Most people aren’t destroying what they can see…."
Where I teach is located in a fly-over, rust-belt city, with many displaced Appalachians and African Americans whose ancestors came here directly from slavery, and, most recently, Mexican and Central American migrants, whose lives and communities have been disrupted again and again by this "global economy." But mostly they are not my students; aspirant IPVs from American/Ohioan suburbs are dominant. Most of them are a little nervous about the idea of straying too far from home, hence their choice of school, but when I teach immigration or natural disaster issues, I know some can be pretty critical of people who are "too stupid to leave" when jobs dry up or their homes are destroyed.
Worst of all: If the economy really "goes south" I know that I have the skills to pick up and leave if I have to. L'IPV c'est moi.
I'm not sure that all the "service learning" in the world can ever alter this blunt reality.
---
I've been looking for this quotation/argument for awhile, and finally found it:
"Everywhere, every day, local life is being discomforted, disrupted, endangered, or destroyed by powerful people who live, or who are privileged to think they live, beyond the bad effects of their bad work.
A powerful class of itinerant professional vandals is now pillaging the country and laying it waste. Their vandalism is not called by that name because of its enormous profitability (to some) and the grandeur of its scale. If one wrecks a private home, that is vandalism, but if, to build a nuclear power plant, one destroys good farmland, disrupts a local community, and jeopardizes lives, home, and properties within an area of several thousand square miles, that is industrial progress."
-Wendell Berry, “Higher Education and Home Defense” in Home Economics (1987), p. 50
My perenniel, beginning-of-the-school-year-procrastination-fueling angst: Are colleges and universities basically about training up the next generation of itinerant professional vandals (IPVs) and their lackeys? To what degree is my work entangled with and ultimately supportive of this economy? Given that the answer to the last question is: "quite a lot," to what degree can my work be a friction in the machine?
Here's some more from Berry's essay, as summarized by Patrick Deneen of Georgetown University:
Berry’s [evaluation of economic development decisions] refuses to depersonalize the destruction wrought by modern economic forces upon local communities by rejecting the dogma that the “market” or “globalization” or progress itself is an impersonal and thus uncontrollable force. He articulates not only the particular set of assumptions and preferences built into those seemingly impersonal “forces,” but points to the particular agents who carry out those assumptions. In particular, he gives a face and personality to the humans whose economic assumptions have the effect of eviscerating local traditions and mores. He lambastes the condescension of “experts” and “progressives” who presume to know what is better for a community than the people who live in that community, ones who otherwise view such places as “fly-over” country and practice a form of “absentee” exploitation. He notes that this “powerful class of itinerant professional vandals” brings no capacity to assess the value of locality in terms other than profit and growth. Such people, above all, lack the capacity to assess the non-monetary value of localities because they have been raised and educated both to avoid any such local commitments, and even to disdain them as untoward forms of limitation. They are formed to be “the purest sort of careerists - ‘upwardly mobile’ transients who will permit no stay or place to interrupt their personal advance. They must have no local allegiances; they must not have a local point of view. In order to be able to desecrate, endanger, or destroy a place, after all, one must be able to leave it and forget it…. Unlike a life at home, which makes ever more particular and precious the places and creatures of this world, the careerist’s life generalizes the world, reducing its abundant and comely diversity to ‘raw material.’”
American colleges and universities pull students out of their home communities pretty deliberately; it's considered bad for ratings for a college to be too regional in its focus; part of the reason that academics in general look down their noses at community colleges is that their draw is so very localized (and often drawn from an older, less-likely-to-be-mobile demographic).
The place I teach aspires to a more national and even international demographic; we aspire to share in the financial windfall that results from this "absentee" exploitation. As Berry says so simply in that same essay: "To build houses here, we clear-cut forests there. To have air-conditioning here, we strip-mine forests there. To drive our cars here, we sink our oil wells there. It is an absentee economy. Most people aren’t destroying what they can see…."
Where I teach is located in a fly-over, rust-belt city, with many displaced Appalachians and African Americans whose ancestors came here directly from slavery, and, most recently, Mexican and Central American migrants, whose lives and communities have been disrupted again and again by this "global economy." But mostly they are not my students; aspirant IPVs from American/Ohioan suburbs are dominant. Most of them are a little nervous about the idea of straying too far from home, hence their choice of school, but when I teach immigration or natural disaster issues, I know some can be pretty critical of people who are "too stupid to leave" when jobs dry up or their homes are destroyed.
Worst of all: If the economy really "goes south" I know that I have the skills to pick up and leave if I have to. L'IPV c'est moi.
I'm not sure that all the "service learning" in the world can ever alter this blunt reality.
---