Proud to be an American?

~by David Aiken~

In a recent ethics class one of the student presentations was about Injustice and the State, and the discussion, naturally, slid over into torture and state-sponsored terrorism. As usual then, at least for those who know me even the slightest bit, at the end of the presentation Teacher held forth on the unacceptable-ness (an Aikenesque neologism) of State involvement in committing illegal acts in general, and especially on the subject of America’s participation in such activities… complete with the usual, “We (i.e., Americans) should be better than that!” It was the whole enchilada. So, it caught me a bit short when, on the way out at the end of class, a student asked me if I were still proud to be an American.

            I admit—the question took me by surprise. At first, looking at her a bit askance and askew as is my teacherly wont when unsure about whether I am being mocked, I could not decide whether or not she was being facetious with her question, as I had been cranking rather unambiguously on the U.S. critique-machine; so, frankly, irony could certainly have been in her mind. Even now, years later, I am undecided about whether the student intended to serve up a cold portion of irony with this question.

            At any rate, what she got from me in response was still my philosophical stock in trade answer – I am only proud of things when I actually have personal merit or involvement in them in some capacity. As an erstwhile disciple of that old Stoic Slave-Master, Epictetus, there can be no other possible answer to such a question than his:

6. “You should never accept praise, from anyone, for any accomplishment or quality that belongs to another. (2) If a fine-looking horse should ever exclaim, exalting himself, “I am fine-looking,” that would be acceptable. (3) But you, each time you say, exalting yourself, “This fine-looking horse is mine” –remain aware that you are praising yourself for a quality that belongs rightfully to the horse. (5) So, your “accomplishment or quality” here is only a “borrowing” from “the horse’s” outward appearance. What then is actually yours? In a world cobbled together of outward surfaces & façades, what this means is that you should hold fast to your own real or natural qualities—in which case you are rightfully praised. (7) For then you shall accept praise for some quality that belongs rightfully to you.” (Aiken translation)

Or again:

44. … These reasonings are connected: "I am richer than you, therefore my property is greater than yours;" "I am more eloquent than you, therefore my style is better than yours." But you, after all, are neither property nor style (as rendered by Ms. Carter on the MIT site).”

So, the simple and philosophically correct answer to my student’s question must necessarily be that no, I am not in the least proud of some ‘condition’ over which I had no control. My birthright is neither mine nor my possession in any normal or meaningful sense of that word, so it would be philosophically inappropriate for me to make it a subject of my pride. It is this same Stoic common-sensical critique that also makes social constructs, such as {Patriotism + Pride = American value}, so patently and philosophically meaningless.

            Being proud of where I am born is akin to being proud of having naturally curly hair or good skin… these are not personal accomplishments that demonstrate any particular character on my part. So one who is proud or not proud, or who has any strong opinion whatsoever about where he is born, is exactly like the little mole who wanted to know who did a poo on his head, and who then proceeded to walk around beshat (beshatten? beshitten? beshyted?) for the entire duration of his investigation into poo-ish causal origins. What is frankly important here is not whose business it is, but what I personally do(o) (apologies for the 3^rd grade puns) about it now that I am bespattered. So, let us choose to be different from our little mole-lish friend, and, by asking the correct questions up front, try to draw out the best possible conclusions. Chances are much better that we will act well if we begin our quest by thinking well.

§ Answer by List. Perhaps there are other philosophical considerations relevant to my student’s question. How might it be meaningful to make the connection between personal and individual pride and the fact of being the fruit of American loins? This reflection is not an endorsement of any American party or of any political candidates or platforms, but rather of a philosophical value – Justice.

·      In my generation it was trendy not to be proud of America’s involvement in Vietnam—for all the various and sundry reasons. It therefore stood to reason that I should not be proud to be an American in that season of America’s history, because it seemed to me that I was implicated and therefore complicit in America’s Asian involvement.

            However, I was distinctly proud of the fact that individual Americans, including my younger self, would take to the streets to protest that war– I was proud to engage my thought, and my time, and my energy in the real-life working out of a people’s democracy.

·      Likewise, I was not proud to be an American in the era of U.S. segregationist policies. But I was distinctly proud of the moment in America’s history when she was able to get beyond the issue of color in order to see a man, and then to elect him president—because I actively supported that transition into social justice in my political choices, and because, although racism is far from dead in America, I personally continue to refuse to allow ‘racist’ opinions, which is to say: category thinking of any and every the ilk (e.g., gender, color, nationality, etc.,), to influence my thinking and my actions.

·      According to Human Rights Watch, America seems to have an active policy of putting its convicted youth in solitary confinement. So, while I have to admit that I have known some pretty rowdy and even out-of-control young people in my time, this particular American philosophe is not proud that he hails from a modern western 1^st-world country that locks up its troubled young people in solitary confinement. If someone in prison needs medical or psychological attention, it would seem reasonable that we Americans could and should find a more appropriate manner that addresses these problems, which would include a whole range of professional approaches and solutions.

            This America does not make me proud. But the fact that I can actively and loudly join my critical voice to that of the people at Human Rights Watch makes me proud, because it gives me the opportunity to play a role, no matter how small, in creating an America that is good and just.

·      Also according to the HRW, America got away with torture during the Bush Administration (2001-2008). This was a violation of both US and international law, not to speak of the U.S. Army Field Manual (since 1956 until its revision in 2006 under the Bush Administration). But to address all the arguments relevant to torture and our need for intelligence in one fell swoop—at the end of the day it does not even matter whether or not torture “works” in getting that all-too-important and all-too-urgent intelligence we keep hearing about. Torture is ILLEGAL, a violation of American constitutional law, and therefore we Americans should not be practicing it. I am not proud of America’s renegade conduct in this matter.

            By the way, the science is in – torture should be out, unless we are just absolutely dead-set on creating the next generation of terrorists by means of our own state-sanctioned terrorist conduct. On the other hand, if political America should wish to practice torture, then it should follow the legal and political channels of American democracy to have torture voted into law and ourselves voted to be taken out of the U.N. This is how We the People should work in a democracy.

            However, because this step toward the legalization of torture has not yet occurred in the U.S., I was therefore delighted that the former President (B. Obama) decided that America and her president should act within the confines of the U.S. Constitution, as well as in agreement with the treaties the U.S. has signed with the United Nations. And I was proud that I cast my vote on the side of a man whose character is such that he values Justice, and who still had a vision of America that reflects the America I have known in my life. So nix to Gitmo and torture—almost…

·      There are approximately 241 countries and territories in the world; and to whatever degree countries expect their citizens to act within the confines of Law, we all, each and every one of us, individually as well as nationally, at least pay lip-service to the idea of Justice in the world. I am proud to actively be of this number. Also, I know of no one, personally, who has ever convincingly made the case that we humans should not strive for Justice.

            Of the world’s 241 countries, 193 are member states of the United Nations. I am proud to say that America is of this (latter) number, and that I have also played my part by teaching students the importance of justice and civilized conduct in our relationships, both close to home and beyond our shores.

·      However, in publishing its 2012 Facts and Figures, Amnesty International supplies a corrective to my rose-colored understanding of America’s engagement for Justice in the international community, because the country of my birth is plainly playing a non-supportive role in the theater of global justice. I am not proud of this side of America. The International Criminal Court (ICC) was founded in 2002 with the following transnational statement of value: “The investigation and prosecution of international crimes—including genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes—is a fundamental component of transitional justice.”

·      To date, there are 122 member states which have signed on to the International Criminal Court. Simple math tells me that 71 countries and territories, which are member states of the UN, have not signed on to or are non-signatory states of the ICC, with another 48 non-party, non-signatory states, which are just existing in some moral no-man’s-land at the edge of the world. Unfortunately, the United States is non-party and non-signatory of the ICC.

Per the wiki-source, “During the Obama administration, US opposition to the ICC evolved to "positive engagement," although no effort was made to ratify the Rome Statute. The subsequent Trump administration is considerably more hostile to the Court, imposing visa bans on ICC staff in response to concerns that an investigation may be opened up against American nationals in connection to alleged war crimes in Afghanistan.”

It would therefore seem that on the question of International Justice the U.S. has opted to play keep-up-with-the-Joneses with the likes of North Korea and Somalia, two bad boys of the world’s most repressive societies.

Sheesch…

Even Uganda, of Idi Amin fame, and Nigeria, perhaps the most historically corrupt country on the planet, are signatories to the ICC.

I am not proud of this American fact.

According to wiki-sources on this question, the Clinton Administration signed the original Rome Statute in 2000, but failed to submit the treaty to the U.S. Senate for ratification; and the Bush Administration, again according to the above source, made quite clear that the U.S. would not join the ICC. For these two facts I am not proud; because this does not reflect the justice I value for America and for the world community of nations.

            However, I am proud that under the Obama administration America sought to reestablish a working relationship with the ICC. My pride about this comes from the fact that I have not only taught my students about Justice, but that I also worked together with other people who value justice to choose as the representative for America a president (B.O.) interested in questions of world Justice.

            It is an evidence of very practical philosophy that when we support just men and just women, we create Justice in our world.

While we all may hope that God might bless these United States of America, per the Greenwood song, you and I, My Fellow Americans, must still not fail in our day job—which, in Dr. King’s words, is to create an America where, every day in our own personal actions, “justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

(Reprised from an original essay posted 31-10-2012)

The Naked “Messiah”: Martin Heidegger

~by David Aiken~

The waves of our past seem inevitably, inexorably, to wash up on the sun-drenched beaches of our present—as if wanting to deliver to the unforgiving sunlight of open judgment the most hidden nooks and crannies in the multi-layered history of our lives. To judge the books by their covers, it would seem to be the season of the great equinox flood tides for Martin Heidegger, because his oceanfront intellectual property is materially dissolving under the relentless pressure of the tidal pounding. Especially in current French scholarship.

The academic question of whether MH was anti-Semitic is now resolving into trite justifications of whether it really matters that the Great One was anti-Semitic, “which,” says French philosopher Barbara Cassin, “we all knew anyway.” And while this woolly state of affairs may certainly ensure scholarly debate among philosophers, it guarantees no significant inquiry into whether MH’s general philosophical postures are essentially informed by, even if just in part, his pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic opinions, and what difference this might make to those who stand to inherit from this more than dubious philosophical, as well as moral legacy.

This is indeed the philosophical essence of the affaire Martin Heidegger—whether his philosophy is contaminated by elements of Nazi ideology, and what that might exactly look like when articulated for transmission. But what generally flies under the radar of the Academy are the moral (in)sensibilities of a man like Martin Heidegger, who was both Nazi and anti-Semite. There is massive hue and cry from the parental public when we discover a school teacher who turns out to be a pedophile; and rightly so, although the content of what (s)he teaches in the classroom may be right as rain academically speaking. The issue in this latter case is not so much the intellectual content of classroom instruction, although this should clearly also be scrutinized, but rather the ‘other’ sensibilities of the pedophilic teacher. As a society, it would seem that we would generally rather not discover that these ‘other’ (in)sensibilities have also been taught or transmitted to our young, receptive students. Is not the metaphor apt for a Martin Heidegger as well? Any more than pedophiles, do we really want admitted Nazis and anti-Semites to occupy the front of our classrooms? To what levels of moral vacuousness do we need to accede before we can, like philosopher Barbara Cassin, presently directeur de programme at the Collège international de philosophie, sigh blushingly, look on adoringly, and listen rapturously as “Heidegger helps us understand the Greeks and the importance of poetry for thinking”?

Whatever….

Among other debris recently washed up on the shores of contemporary studies into the Life & Times of Martin Heidegger, is the Meister’s problematic 8-year long tenure as a member on the Nazi state’s Commission for the Philosophy of Law, from Spring 1934 until July 1942, “which concerns … the practical elaboration of Nazi law” (Kellerer). This Commission for the Philosophy of Law was integrated into the Academy for German Law under the jurist Hans Frank in June 1933. This is the same Hans Frank who was condemned to death by the Nuremburg Tribunal and hanged in 1946.

Now, all of this may seem only bland and boring academic nitpicking… until we begin making other connections. For example: that the Academy for German Law was responsible for elaborating the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935, which forbid marriage between Germans and Jews. And that, for further example, when the Nazi policy of Endlösung was legally adopted in January of 1942, which meant that the total annihilation of the Jewish people was given the official go-ahead by the Academy for German Law to be legally enacted as Reich policy, it is absolutely clear that Martin Heidegger absolutely knew, but said absolutely nothing, ever, about the permission that he also gave with deliberation, as a member on the Commission, for the legal adoption of the Final Solution as the Nazi response to the Jewish Question.

So much debris; so much sunlight; so much repetitive denial by All & Sundry. And this is just the history of the question. But has Heidegger’s racial endgame not also been philosophically predictable all along, whose ideological roots reach all the way back to an Aristotelian notion of entelechy applied to the questions of race and value? Listen to Sidonie Kellerer’s reenactment of MH lite: “…for Heidegger, there is no use for [philosophical debate] because everything has already happened before the discussion. Either a Dasein has an essence that gives him access to Being, or he does not. Reason and logic are only loopholes for those who are not at the level of Being.”

The concerted efforts of international scholarship have now brought us clearly to the historical denouement of the affaire Heidegger. As Ms. Kellerer writes in Le Monde: “Heidegger did not just content himself with justifying Nazi ideology, he never stopped actively participating in the implementation of the Nazi political program” (Heidegger ne s’est pas contenté de justifier l’idéologie nazie :  il n’a jamais cessé de participer activement à la mise en œuvre de la politique nazie.).

For other contemporary teaching philosophers, the personal cautionary tale contained in this glum history is clear: that we need to remain alert and vigilant, and extremely lucid, concerning the real world that is happening around us, so as never to stray too far off-course from a recognizable moral compass. At the very least, this is part of any philosopher’s response to the Socratic encouragement to pursue the Examined Life of justice and honor with a certain degree of insight, lucidity and humility. However, a more general question on the intellectual table concerns, as it always really has, whether public educators and public education, and fields of knowledge for public consumption, such as philosophy, should or should not be aligned with certain moral expectations and parameters. Or whether we are all really alright with learning about Life and Wisdom, Poetry and Thinking, from those who have neither respect for, nor commitment to, either.

Charlie Hebdo (Totem et Tabite, Charlie Hebdo No 1383 / 23 January 2019, p. 6): Yann Diener’s “Heidegger, This Messianic Messiah.”

[Translated by David Aiken]

The 8^th of January last, in the French periodical Libération, Delphine Horvilleur (NdT: French female rabbi, editor-in-Chief of the quarterly Jewish magazine Revue de pensée(s) juive(s) Tenou'a) announced that “antisemitism is never an isolated hatred, but rather the first symptom of an impending collapse.” What is the relation to psychoanalysis, you ask? (Well, there is already the fact that the term ‘symptom’ is rarely used in its correct sense).

            One can try to find some modicum of comfort by pretending that antisemitism reeks only from the pores of neo-fascist gangs from eastern European countries, from the daises of Islamic fundamentalists, or from the yellow and brown Facebook pages* –which already seems like enough—but it just so happens that the whole of Western philosophy is dominated by a certain Martin Heidegger, who calmly called for “the destruction of the enemy inside” (i.e., the Jews), and prophesized the end of Judeo-Christian philosophy to arrive at the hegemony of German thought, and more particularly at his own, Heidegger’s, thought. What might have remained the isolated delirium of a philosopher lost in his mountains has seduced entire generations of philosophers, and in particular French philosophers.

            At least two books have demonstrated recently that one can no longer separate the man Heidegger, his engagement in the Nazi party, his observations concerning the beauty of Hitler’s hands, from his grandiose philosophy. Emmanuel Faye wrote Heidegger, the Introduction of Nazism into the Philosophy in 2005, and François Rastier, Naufrage d’un prophète, Heidegger aujourd’hui, in 2015. Since then, they have both become incessant targets of attack by a great many, very zealous Heideggerians, who do not respond with any sort of arguments, but rather with insults and threats of extermination. Like this former president of the philosophy department at the Sorbonne, Michel Fichant, who has declared that Rastier’s book, Naufrage d’un prophète, is, and I quote, “a fuming pile of sh#t.” You can see how the Sorbonne raises the tone of the debate! “It is even worse than Faye’s book, which just about says it all. Philosophically, Heidegger dominates the preceding century. That is just how it is. Insects simply cannot do anything about that.” (Just to remind us all: the Nazis used to compare Jews to insects, and in particular to lice, and promised to reserve the same type of treatment for them. On a broader scale, Heidegger was of the opinion that Jews, like other animals, have no land [Boden/sol], and that they are weltarm, which is to say that they are “world-less”—so that there would be no difficulty in exterminating either of them.)

With a new book, François Rastier takes stock of these flippant questions: Heidegger, Anti-Semitic Messiah (Lormont: Le Bord de L’eau). He demonstrates the actuality for Heidegger of this deleterious and deadly reference, by citing the different nationalists, Islamicists and other identitarians who today lay claim to the great Martin Heidegger in order to legitimize an anti-Semitic dogma; that goes for Alexandre Douguine to the Heideggerian school of Teheran, from Slavoj Zizek to Tariq Ramadan.

Heidegger, Anti-Semitic Messiah is an important book for taking the measure of the wave of contemporary obscurantism, and it will be introduced at the Heinrich-Heine House in Paris on the evening of January 24.

*[NB: Gilets jaunes (the recent Yellow Vest movement in France); the Brownshirts (German SA)]

References & Further Readings:

·      https://religionsphilosophischer-salon.de/miriam-wildenauer

·      https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2017/10/26/heidegger-n-a-jamais-cesse-de-participer-a-la-mise-en-uvre-de-la-politique-nazie_5206008_3232.html

·      https://www.academia.edu/34972657/Heidegger_et_la_mise_en_oeuvre_du_droit_nazi_article_paru_dans_Le_Monde_27.10.2017_

·      https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/31/books/heideggers-notebooks-renew-focus-on-anti-semitism.html

·      https://theconversation.com/heideggers-notebooks-reveal-an-early-blindness-to-the-nazis-reality-24760

·      https://www.humanite.fr/le-labyrinthe-theorique-antisemite-de-heidegger-passe-au-crible-de-la-critique-614964

·      https://www.humanite.fr/neologismes-et-manipulations-blanchir-heidegger-par-des-traductions-dilatoires-des-cahiers-noirs

·      https://www.humanite.fr/essai-heidegger-toujours-actuel-helas-661395

·      https://www.humanite.fr/les-adeptes-de-heidegger-aux-abois-652912

·      https://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/idees/20151117.OBS9683/heidegger-et-les-juifs-un-etrange-colloque.html

·      https://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/actualites/20150123.OBS0619/pourquoi-je-ne-participe-pas-au-colloque-sur-heidegger-et-les-juifs.html

·      https://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/essais/20140919.OBS9704/barbara-cassin-nous-savions-tous-que-heidegger-avait-ete-nazi.html

·      Heidegger’s Der Spiegel Interview (EN): http://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/330T/350kPEEHeideggerSpiegel.pdf

·      https://philochat.wordpress.com/2014/05/06/heidegger-das-spiegel-interview/; Heidegger’s Der Spiegel Interview (DE): https://docs.google.com/file/d/0ByBmdFWIrZRhVEM0V0RDTU9yNGs/edit?pli=1

All translations are by Phrontisterion. Further reading around Charlie Hebdo themes in Phrontisterion:

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2016/09/a-rousing-charlie-hebdo-rendition-of.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2015/12/paris-and-charlie-hebdo-enlightenment.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2015/11/paris-and-charlie-hebdo-wager-on.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2015/01/january-2015je-suis-charlie.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2016/02/heidegger-treacherous-millesime.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2015/02/the-divine-right-of-kings.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2015/03/enlightenment-and-spirit-of-jihad.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2015/11/from-eric-emmanuel-schmitt-question-on.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2016/04/martin-heideggeris-lady-philosophys.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2015/05/singing-good-and-evil-in-garden-of-lord.html

Other Phrontisterion posts concerning Martin Heidegger:

·      https://nonimprimatur.blogspot.com/2018/01/charlie-hebdos-great-heidegger-debate.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2016/02/heidegger-treacherous-millesime.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2017/04/heideggers-greek-inversions-reversals.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2017/11/my-nights-without-heidegger-editorial.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2016/04/martin-heideggeris-lady-philosophys.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2012/08/martin-heidegger-state.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2017/02/potpourri-from-charlie-hebdo-november.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2014/08/august-septembers-essayvoices-on.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2014/11/novembers-essaynietzsche-eichmann-and.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/p/blog-page_24.html

A Teacher’s Tale Entitled ‘’What I did on my Summer Vacation.” As an UPDATE on “Liberal Arts at University College Roosevelt_RIP”

 

~by David Aiken~

Diogenes, by Zanchi

 Setting the record straighter: An UPDATE on “Liberal Arts at University College Roosevelt_RIP” (useful for moments of dis- and mis-information).

·      No! The suspension of the policy of co-governance at UCR was not done to protect the confidentiality of a few teachers or staff; but rather to impose a new non-liberal orientation to studies at the institution.

·      No! The Reorientation at UCR was not made to improve or enhance an LAS program; but rather to dismantle one.

·      No! The notion of ‘liberal’ in Liberal Arts and Science does not mean being able to choose whatever courses you want to take, or to create your own program. Even a cursory web-search definition of LAS always yields approximately this: “… liberal arts means that the courses you take will be in general [= liberal] areas of study such as philosophy, mathematics, literature, art history, or languages, rather than in applied or specialized [= non-liberal] fields.”

What I did on my Summer Vacation

Let us play a little memory game—one that all American school-teachers used to do with their students at the start of Fall classes, when All & Sundry are fresh and rested and ready to return to the fray of another school year after a summer of adventures and travel, rest and play. Our teachers used to ask us kids to write a short essay about what we did on our summer vacation. That was then, for children.

For teachers, on the other hand, summer is a time for getting away from the endless bureaucratic administrivia that goes along Part & Parcel with the profession of teaching. Summer vacation is a time for the teacher to re-source himself emotionally; to be able to plunge quietly back into her subject and to breathe the exhilarating intellectual air of ‘thinking’—about her research; about how to rediscover, and then to pick up again the thread of her thinking and writing from the summer before; about the quiet that accompanies the thinking life in general, time for sustained reflection unperturbed by the floodwaters of meetings and colleagues, students and papers and grades, and forms needing to be filled out, signed, and sent out along their various and diverse ways into the blackhole of the institutional administrative labyrinth.

This year, summer vacation will be a time of special nostalgia for those of us who teach at our imaginary LAS university. We will remember the massive institutional changes that were introduced to our community mere weeks before the end of a long semester, administrative decisions announced just in time to join forces with, and to be dissipated by, the barrage of papers and exams and deadlines and extensions, and end-of-semester meetings, that swamp us all during this period.

Administrative announcements of institutional change and dissolution made precisely at semester’s end in order to dilute, it might almost seem deliberately, the very possibility of response by those upon whom those changes were thrust… changes to lives and livelihoods, programs and academic orientations. Changes that were conceived in the hush-hush shadows that linger ominously behind closed doors and gag-orders, and birthed by circumventing institutional principles and policies of co-governance; changes that were never openly and democratically proposed, and therefore went unchallenged by the community of the concerned; changes that were never brought up for public debate or approval, or rejection.

So, this summer, as we go about our away-time occupations, we teachers will have new opportunities, right from the get-go, to enter into the nostalgia of ‘what I did on my summer vacation’. We will be able to quietly reminisce about the ‘done-deal’ of massive institutional changes to an LAS program, which was dropped in our laps just as we were shutting off the lights, locking our doors, and preparing to get into our cars, all packed up in anticipation of driving off into the sun for summer fun and adventure, and, yes, even for the prospect of the teacher’s summertime of non-administrative other-ness and away-ness.

Some of our teachers will have nostalgia for their jobs—having been openly informed by administration, mere weeks before the end of the semester, that their contracts were being reduced or terminated. Those concerned, especially in the area of foreign languages, will of course also have heard publicly from administrators that as academic subjects go, their classes are of little or no interest to (non-liberal) academic or university programs in general. So, these teachers will have the long summer to process and deal with their newly discovered intellectual and university unworthiness, and to gird themselves up to begin their search for new lives and meanings.

Otherwise, all the other humanities types will have several months of vacation isolation to think their way to some new protective emotional strategy, having discovered the hard way that their public worth to the institution is not intellectual, but rather only as an economic resource which is poised to be cannibalized and consumed, depending upon time and place, in order that the rest of the institution, represented by disciplines more scientific, or at least more immediately useful in the short-term, might survive.

For myself, at least part of my summer vacation will be spent reminiscing nostalgically about what was once a worthy and worthwhile career. And in my nostalgia I can well imagine that I might consider, even if only just for the odd moment, that I am somehow become an extremely amateur ‘crisis actor’ who gets the sudden and unexpected opportunity to turn player in his own little personal drama—a drama of life’s endgame where an unsuspecting senior gets put out to pasture, thereby losing his sense of productivity, usefulness, etc., etc., etc. The role of a lifetime.

In my summer reverie, the tragic action of my little drama would begin where the administration announces publicly, repeatedly, in several venues to different bodies, that This Teacher will be retired in due course. ‘It is the law’; ‘it is mandatory’, they will say, ‘so of course we must obey’. They, of course, will color themselves as simple servants of the law, and the narrative as comedy—‘here retirement is a reward, not a punishment, like it is in your country’. But the unsuspecting and unwary victim nonetheless experiences the public announcement as tragedy. Because the tragic victim thought, foolishly as it turns out, that This Teacher was already in negotiations with our administrators to remain teaching for ‘a while longer yet’. And then the institutional curtain drops upon my reverie, and our philosophical duffus cum crisis actor is met with lusty guffaws and rancorous applause by administrators and onlookers alike.

And yet it will still certainly continue to seem to my obviously aging memory (but fortunately my wife’s memory is sterling on the subject…), that This Teacher was recruited and hired out of a country with no mandatory retirement, with the promise of post-retirement teaching at our LAS university, should This Teacher wish for it. But, silly day-dreaming me!

And all this talk about retirement when the Dutch state has been continually retarding that moment legislatively, and, in fact, “no longer sets a fixed age for retirement.” In fact, the Netherlands has been accelerating the implementation of their non-age of retirement, explaining that “acceleration is necessary due to continued budget deficits and a strong increase in the social security cost.” Obviously, then, there is active legislative encouragement for workers in the Dutch system to work beyond retirement, so that it can continue to pay for itself and its various good, but very expensive programs of social maintenance!

Our imaginary LAS university must not have gotten that memo.

One consolation in my summer nostalgia, I suppose, will be to know that after being openly shown the road out of the institution by fiat of retirement, our imaginary LAS university has only publicly (but never privately and/or confidentially) offered This Teacher the possibility of applying for his old job back—'as one in the field of all the other possible candidates’. But with the town crier’s additional caveat: “Hear ye, hear ye, all ye who pass by: ‘Dependent on the candidate pool, This Teacher may perhaps be permitted back to teach, but only as part-time faculty’.”

I wonder whatever happened to the principle of confidentiality at our imaginary LAS university? Elsewhere, I have known confidentiality about matters of Human Resources to be Law; but at this troubling imaginary place it is obviously just a Pleasant Possibility, a passing afterthought really.

Maybe I just dreamed it in the haze of the tsunami that is the end-of-my-semester… but it seems like just yesterday I heard our administrators pay lip service to confidentiality and gag-orders in order to justify skirting open institutional debate concerning their new project of reorientation. Did I really recently just imagine or mis-hear administrators making very impassioned public defense of confidentiality and gag-orders? It may be entirely possible, given the institutional opinion of my advanced age and obvious dotage—for which reasons they are clearly right to want to put me out to pasture next year. But it certainly seemed to my senior brain that the Management Team of our imaginary LAS university was making the case that these restrictive and gagging ‘means’ were necessary for them to impose all their new changes in program orientation and institutional structure…

My summer-time reverie presents a funny kind of Looking-glass inversion, does it not? A contemporary version of Alice’s journey into a Looking-glass Wonderland… minus the Wonder. And minus Alice, of course.

The imaginary Management Team of our imaginary LAS university applies and even compounds confidentiality where and when subjects and topics, such as institutional reorientation and re-structure, are supposed to be open to public democratic debate. At least according to institutional policy.

Then they just pleasantly and quite conversationally forget about confidentiality when it comes to addressing, very personally, very publicly, and very often, the topic of This Teacher’s retirement.

The little memory game learned from my childhood teachers was intended both to remind us of the value of ‘being entirely away’ in the summer, and of the importance of returning ‘ready to take on the world’ at summer’s end. When we all, teacher, staff and student, return to the reality that will mark the start of Fall classes at our imaginary LAS university, when the adult versions of All & Sundry are fresh and rested and ready to return to the fray of another school year after a summer of adventures and travel, rest and play, reverie and reflection. Perhaps we will then be ready to take on the challenges of injustice and dis- and mis-information, right here on our very own door-step.

And, in hoping against hope, would it not also be comedically wonderful, invigorating in fact, to discover at our Fall return that over the summer some surprising changes had been made to our current cast of players and characters. So that, renewed and unexpectedly supported, we could move forward in defense of Liberal Arts and Sciences; so that we could all learn as a life lesson that honesty and democratic openness can, actually and truly, trump the shadowy world of the closed society… right here on our very own door-step.

Further reading:

·      https://nonimprimatur.blogspot.com/2019/05/a-philosophical-fable-entitled-follow.html

·      https://nonimprimatur.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-question-of-self-and-co-governance.html

·      https://nonimprimatur.blogspot.com/p/teacher-musings-and-rants.html (from 03 May 2019)

·      https://nonimprimatur.blogspot.com/2019/04/further-on-liberal-arts-at-university.html

·      https://nonimprimatur.blogspot.com/2019/04/liberal-arts-at-university-college.html

Further reading on retirement in Holland:

·      https://www.aon.com/netherlands/publicaties/connected/2015/juli/accelerated-raise-of-the-retirement-age-for-the-aow-state-pension.jsp

·      http://www.agediscrimination.info/international-age-discrimination/netherlands

·      https://www.towerswatson.com/en/Insights/Newsletters/Global/global-news-briefs/2017/07/netherlands-new-target-retirement-age-starts-in-2018