July 19, 2024

You have to start early and plan your life, or you won’t survive in the kind of society we live in now.  That is what we tell young people these days, and they believe us, though they shouldn’t.  In preparing to use a different textbook for my fall composition classes, the new edition of The Norton Reader, I was at first puzzled to find that it includes the essay “College Pressures” by William Zinsser.  Why, I wondered, include an essay on that topic that was first published in 1979?  After having read it, however, I put it on the syllabus, and will be interested to see my students’ response. 

I am not sure whether they will be amused or annoyed to find that private college tuition in those days was $7000, though it will provide them a bit of education on the popular topic of inflation, for I will caution them that in today’s dollars that would be about $22,000.  Still, times have changed.  The tuition at Baldwin Wallace University is $39,000, a little lower than the national average of $42,000.  But if you add housing and meals, the total cost is $53,000, which sounds appalling.  But I hasten to add that no student really pays this.  Schools now provide financial aid to cover most likely half the cost—which would bring the students’ expense down closer to what it was in 1979.  But financial considerations need to be put honestly upfront in the following argument, because this is why students and their parents are anxiously trying to plan their lives. 

Zinsser’s argument, however, is that it is the attempt to plan that is unrealistic, another manifestation of the collective-minded panic talked about last week.  It just doesn’t work that way—the system doesn’t, and life doesn’t.  The attempt to control, past a reasonable, commonsense point, how one’s future life unfolds is not only a stressful waste of energy but in a certain way counter-productive.  “I tell them to relax,” he says.  “They can’t” (597).  Instead, “They want a map—right now—that they can follow unswervingly to career security, financial security, Social Security and, presumably, a prepaid grave” (596).  Far from looking down on his students, Zinsser is concerned: “I think we should all be worried about the values that are nurturing a generation so fearful of risk and so goal-obsessed at such an early age” (600).  However, why should the students not reply, “Easy for you to say, especially since you are employed by a liberal arts college and are therefore biased”?  

I would tell students, respectfully, that life is as unpredictable as the weather, and as uncontrollable.  This is literally true, because weather is an example of the so-called “butterfly effect” in chaos theory, in which “a sensitive dependence upon initial conditions” may produce big results down the line from minute changes.  The wing of a butterfly may conjure a tornado.  Even the best career advice cannot predict changes in the job market, including such things as which careers are going to disappear due to automation and, now, AI.  But it is more than that.  Whether you initially get your foot in the door depends on a combination of chance connections and blind luck.  Maybe you have a friend whose company suddenly has an opening, and he can tell you what they’re looking for.  Once you’re in, who knows what will happen?  Maybe you’ll find that the job that looked so attractive in itself is rendered miserable by a toxic CEO who doesn’t know what he’s doing but wants to micromanage.  Maybe the start-up that gave you a chance despite your inexperience goes belly up.  Maybe you are pushed from a tech job towards project management because that’s what the company needs.  Maybe you’ve changed from who you were at 21 and need a new direction.  There simply is no stability.  We all walk on stepping stones across the rapids. Zinsser says, “Mainly I try to remind them that the road ahead is a long one and that it will have more unexpected turns than they think.  There will be plenty of time to change jobs, change careers, change whole attitudes and approaches” (595).  Lest this seem the advice of a sheltered academic, Zinsser adopted a canny tactic:

One of my ways of telling them is to invite men and women who have achieved success outside the academic world to come and talk informally with my students during the year.  They are heads of companies or ad agencies, editors of magazines, politicians, public officials, television magnates, labor leaders, business executives, Broadway producers, artists, writers, economists, photographers, scientists, historians—a mixed bag of achievers.  |   I ask them to say a few words about how they got started.  The students assume they started in their present profession and knew all along that it was what they wanted to do.  Luckily for me, most of them got into their field by a circuitous route,  to their surprise, after many detours.  The students are startled.  They can hardly conceive of a career that was not pre-planned.  They can hardly imagine allowing the hand of God or chance to nudge them down some unforeseen trail.    (600)

It works that way inside academia too.  I am a rather dramatic example of this.  Child of working-class parents, I went to Baldwin Wallace because the high school guidance counselor recommended it.  I happened to end up as advisee of Ted Harakas, who became my mentor and loaned me Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry, saying I should read it.  That one chance act totally changed my life.  Five years after graduation, I applied to the University of Toronto, simply because Frye was there, too naïve to realize how unlikely it was that a world-class university would accept some applicant with a degree from an unknown college in Ohio.  But they did, and I have never understood why.  Once there, I became Frye’s research assistant because I became friends with his secretary Jane Widdicombe, who recommended me.  Jane herself was another example of the unplanned life: a working-class Englishwoman from Nottinghamshire with a high school education, former secretary for a coal company, she came to Canada and applied blindly for a job, ending up as Frye’s guardian angel, traveling with him on speaking engagements all over the world, meeting Alice Munro at the Governor General awards ceremonies.  Words with Power is dedicated to her.  I was not strategically  networking when I became friends with Jane.  She was just my friend, and, 45 years later, still is.  It was through Jane that I met Robert Denham, another American, who invited me to be his partner editing Frye’s unpublished notebooks.  When I got my degree and it was time to apply for jobs, the first MLA job bulletin I ever opened advertised two positions in the Baldwin Wallace English department.  And I came home to BW after 16 years—exactly the length of the lapse of time in Shakespeare’s romance The Winter’s Tale, whose theme is the strangeness of transformations over time.  When I turned 30, my English grad school relationship gave me an old-fashioned English shilling and a piece of paper with words from Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici:  “Now for my life, it is a miracle of thirty years, which to relate, were not a History, but a piece of Poetry, and would sound to common ears like a Fable.”  I met her by accident too:  we were in a seminar together, and I asked her out for coffee. Which leads to the observation that it is not just careers:  love too is controlled by accident.  Cupid is blind, and shoots at random. Every one of my marriages and relationships began with a chance encounter. 

Positivistic science in the later 19^th century tried to insist on a complete determinism of cause and effect.  If you knew the exact position and energy charge of every single atom at a given point,  you could calculate the future of the universe to the end of time.  Everything is determined by a prior cause, so there can be no free will, only necessity.  This is a comforting fairy tale for very rational types, who need to feel that everything is under some kind of rational control, not subject to the whims of gods or any unscientific mystical claptrap.  Unfortunately, quantum mechanics, with its uncertainty principle and its photons that seem to choose where they will go, did not cooperate.  Einstein complained that God does not play dice with the universe, but in fact that seems to be exactly what God does.  It is interesting how the determinism of modern materialism reproduces older ways of thinking.  Non-Christian mythologies had the notion of an impersonal power of fate or destiny that controlled even the gods:  moira in Greek mythology and wyrd in Northern mythology.  Christians were forbidden to believe in fate, because nothing is stronger than the will of God.  “What I will is fate,” says Milton’s God in Paradise Lost.   Yet Christian theology was driven to produce its own determinism in the doctrine of predestination.  It is human pride to think that I achieve salvation by exercising free will and making good choices.  In that case, I would not need God.  No, everything depends on God.  But that means, by inevitable logic, that God has predestined some to salvation and some to damnation for inscrutable reasons of his own which we are never to question (Romans 8-9). 

To some of us, this is even more horrifying than the determinism of mechanistic materialism.  Yet it is, again, reassuring to those who need a certain kind of security, such as Alexander Pope in An Essay on Man.  Pope begins by saying that he wants to “vindicate the ways of God to man,” signaling that he intends to rebut the revolutionary Milton who helped depose a king in the name of liberty.  Pope’s Tory vindication of the deity is the antithesis of Milton’s.  To him, any attempt at social betterment is just the vanity of thinking that we can design life better than God, and the idea that we might control our own destiny is just the will to power.  Because “Of systems possible…Wisdom Infinite must form the best,” Pope notoriously concludes that “Whatever is, is right,” which means that all the people whose lives are miserable should stop rocking the boat.  Those who do not prosper in this life will get their reward in heaven.  As a previous newsletter has noted, Pope revised his metaphor about life from “A mighty maze of walks without a plan” to “A mighty maze, but not without a plan,” a revision dictated by anxiety, not aesthetics.   

Pope’s was a last-ditch attempt to shore up the kind of static, changeless order that characterized the Christian Middle Ages.  The 19^th century was forced, like it or not, to reckon with the fact of change on all fronts.  History was invented by the Greeks, but modern history as we know it was invented by an 18^th century forced by the French Revolution and its aftermath to confront the fact of historical change.  At the same time, the development of biological science forced people to recognize that nature was not a changeless Chain of Being established in the beginning but a constant evolution.  But there was a reluctance to entertain the notion that both natural and human life were nothing but ceaseless flux.  Ovid’s subversive suggestion to that effect in the final book of the Metamorphoses was studiously ignored.  Okay, so God’s plan is not a changeless “model,” as C.S. Lewis called it, established in the beginning.  But there is still a plan, a diachronic rather than synchronic myth of nature as an evolutionary progress towards “higher” forms of life—meaning us—and history as controlled by a progressive Providential plan.  The Biblical religions had in fact always been informed by such a vision:  it was known as typology.  But its implications had been largely suppressed throughout the Middle Ages by a Church interested in maintaining its ascendency. 

In the 19^th century, however, parallel to various theories of “creative evolution” in the natural world, various attempts were made to understand history as the unfolding of a plan.  The most ambitious was Hegel’s.  It would be accurate enough to say that, for Hegel, God, or the Absolute Spirit, not only has a plan but is a plan.  History is the process within which Absolute Spirit is born, awakens, and comes to full realization, which conveniently happens to be in Hegel’s own time.  Marx, as is well known, said that his system turns Hegel’s Idealism on its head.  But Marxist materialism is not content with endless class war.  It retains Hegel’s sense of a plan inevitably working itself out in the course of events, leading to the end of history in all senses.  By the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the social sciences were beginning to develop, driven in part by a desire for the predictive rather than the merely descriptive.  If human behavior is predictable, then history can become a discipline that uncovers the laws of historical change, leading to the ability to foresee the course of events.  No longer would those in power have to relay on diviners reading entrails or the flight of birds, or seers and prophets who claim to be inspired by God.  In 1942, Isaac Asimov began to publish the most popular science fiction series of all time, the Foundation stories, which developed first into a trilogy and later into a series.  Set in a decadent and declining galactic Empire modeled on Rome, the Foundation stories turn on the science fictional idea, not of a new technology, but of the invention of “psychohistory” by the genius Hari Selden.  History not only can be predicted, but Selden leaves behind him the plan by which history will inevitably unfold, leaving the Foundation to further its ends by foreshortening the time of troubles before a new order emerges.  Everyone can relax:  it’s all under control, at least in the long run.  Nobel-Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has said that it was the Foundation trilogy that made him want to become an economist because of the dream of a predictive human science.    

The problem is that the best-laid plans of mice and men are confounded by a spirit that not only plays dice with the natural cosmos but enjoys overturning the reasonable expectations even of his own worshippers.  In the natural world, it was established by Darwin that the course of evolution was determined by natural selection: variants of a species competed, and the winner was the variation that competed most successfully within the demands of the environment.  But what caused the variations in the first place?  Modern genetics provided the answer: they occurred not by some orderly, controlled process but by chance mutation.  The course of evolution is determined not by a plan but by blind chance.  In the Foundation novels, Hari Selden has recorded speeches to be played at regular intervals, summing up the changes he has predicted to take place by that point.  But in the second Foundation novel, his predictions start to become inaccurate, eventually useless.  Why? Because a mutant has appeared, a genetic anomaly known as the Mule, with paranormal powers that are enabling him to become a dictator.  Not even psychohistory could have predicted the Mule. 

The idea of a predictive human science has taken quite a beating since Asimov’s time.  Neither economists nor the wizards of Wall Street predicted the crash of 2008, and in fact, as shown in the brilliant film The Big Short, were reluctant to believe it was possible until shown by a neurodivergent outsider.  An old story, really—Elijah in a contest with the 400 false prophets of King Ahab.  And of course Covid, which could not have been predicted, has taught us how evolution really works.  If evolution is driven by mutation, surely it could not have the “intelligence” to change and evade various challenges, including vaccines.  But Covid continues to demonstrate a remarkable cunning, adapting itself with a swiftness that has startled scientists.  Moreover, evolution is not solely dependent on mutations.  When parents create a child, they shuffle the genetic pack, and we are the chance result of that reshuffling.  Not content with trying to make sure their child’s life is planned from the moment it is born, some of the elite are looking forward to the time when they will be able to plan their kids genetically, choosing not only gender and eye color but maybe a proclivity for playing the violin, or at least such is the fantasy.  Reproduction is too important to be left to mere chance.  If this happened, it would be a realization of the old fantasy of eugenics, of creating a superior race by genetic manipulation rather than random rutting.  That plan was so important to some people that they were willing to commit genocide in order to realize it, leading to a marked decline in its popularity. 

If not by genetic manipulation, then perhaps we could achieve pre-planned human beings by psychological conditioning.  Behaviorists, who believed human beings were stimulus-response loops with legs, demonstrated exceptional hubris in this regard.  John B. Watson said that he could make a child into whatever he wanted if given total control of his early conditioning. Abraham Maslow’s response to this assertion was simply to shake his head at its naiveté and ask whether Watson had ever actually raised kids. 

But the need for a plan haunts the human race.  Astrology claims that our lives have a plan that is mapped in the stars.  The more modern idea that human beings must come up with their own plan rather than looking for one on high has led to the genre of the utopia, the rational plan for a whole society.  The United States is in fact a utopian experiment, a society designed on rational principles.  But, alas, democracy has its own kind of prognostication.  We are at the present moment, four months before what might be the most crucial presidential election in U.S. history, driving ourselves mad in the attempt to achieve certainty through the reading of polls and voter surveys.  The pollsters claim to operate according to scientific principles, yet it is clear that they are completely unreliable and should be ignored.  But we are too anxious to do that.  The idea that something utterly random could determine the course of events is anathema to the order-seeking mind—that, for example, a mentally-ill 20-year-old with a rifle should almost succeed in assassinating a presidential  candidate.  That young man could have been the butterfly that caused the tornado.  Immediately the idea occurs that such a psychotic could not be merely the nail that happened somehow to get into your tire.  He must have been part of a plan.  Conspiracy theories will arise—I know, because I was 13 when John Kennedy was assassinated, and the conspiracy theories about Lee Harvey Oswald have still not quite died. 

Loren Eiseley has a brilliant essay on all this called “The Chresmologue,” an archaic name for fortune teller.  In it, he says, “No civilization professes openly to be unable to declare its destination.  In an age like our own, however, there comes a time when individuals in increasing numbers unconsciously seek direction and taste despair.  It is then that dead men give back answers and the sense of confusion grows.  Soothsayers, like flies, multiply in periods of social chaos” (64).  This is, if regrettable, understandable.  The human mind seems to be constructed to perceive patterns—the pattern-perceiving, pattern-constructing faculty is the imagination.  The mind is unwilling to accept mere chaos: to do that is to stare into the abyss, into madness.  Rather than do so, it will take defense in paranoia, projecting a sinister order on the universe.  Better a sinister order than no order at all.  Robert Frost has a terrifying little sonnet called “Design,” in which the narrator contemplates the bizarre coincidence of a white spider on a white flower holding a dead white moth.  He concludes that, actually, it could not be mere coincidence, but rather design:

What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?

The last line puns on the literal meaning of “appall” as “to make white.”  It is easy to idealize the imagination, but the imagination can be used for better or worse.  There is something in us, some kind of original sin, that results in the tendency to use the imagination reductively and pessimistically, to interpret experience according to the worst possibility, priding ourselves when we do so on our “realism.”  I know it in myself, and I have known it in others.  It can possess entire schools of thought, as I think it did in philosophy and literary theory in the late 20^th century, and it can affect the plots of literature.   Pope is confident that a deity would only construct the best possible universe.  What would he make of Thomas Hardy, whose novels always exemplify Murphy’s Law that “Anything that can go wrong, will”?   Not to mention the stories of Kafka.  “Tragedy” is a type of plot that moves inevitably towards some catastrophe.  Our lives do, of course, and that catastrophe is named death.  It may be that the root of our pessimism, our reductionism, and our paranoia is the terror of death, as Ernest Becker surmised in The Denial of Death (1973). 

There are two ways of coping with our sense of inevitable catastrophe and ultimate death—the tragic and the comic.  Tragedy accepts the premise that all life has an unhappy ending, but it is not, like ironic writing, merely pessimistic.  Tragedy affirms the possibility of the heroic, defined as anything that aspires to the meaningful and good, to excellence and achievement.  We all die, but our admiration of or dedication to something heroic and aspirational gives life significance, even when, or perhaps especially when, those aspirations fail.  The other way, that of comedy, is a refusal to accept the premise.  The plots of comedies are very often characterized by some twist, reversal, or coincidence by which catastrophe is avoided.   The twist is usually not very plausible, but the skill of the dramatist keeps us from noticing or at least thinking about that.  Unless it is a comedy by Shakespeare, who often calls attention to the implausibility by having a character say that if this happened in a play, no one would believe it.  We could dismiss such a statement as a mere wink wink nudge nudge, an assurance to the sophisticated members of the audience that they are in on the con.  But I think it is more than that.  I think it is a suggestion that we could question whether life is really a rat-proof trap, as “realism” assumes. 

There is something mad about this universe, an unpredictable wildness that calls to a kindred wildness in ourselves, something that lures us to tear up all the rational, practical plans and do something spontaneous, high-spirited, and outrageous in the name of joy and release of desire, without worrying about whether it will doom our job chances if an employer sees it on Facebook.  A common plot of comedy, whether on the stage, in novels, or in such films as, say, Titanic, is that the girl is pressured to marry the practical choice—the guy who offers money and security and who is always depressingly sane.  Sometimes the girl pressures herself, like Eurydice in Hadestown, Anais Mitchell’s musical version of the myth of Orpheus.  Eurydice knows that life is hard, and feels there has to be a practical plan for survival, which leads her to sell herself to Hades.  After all, her boyfriend is a poet—he majored in the liberal arts and has no job prospects and no plan for getting on in the world.  The story is in fact a tragedy because Eurydice chooses Hades over Orpheus, and Hades represents exactly the reductionist attitude that life is a merciless affair of survival of the fittest, so that one has to be ruthlessly practical.  It is the wrong choice. 

Who says so?  Well, the Jesus who preached to take no thought for the morrow.  Jesus directly challenges the commonsense view represented by Aesop’s fable of the ant and the grasshopper.  The ant has a good work ethic and stockpiles food for the winter, while the grasshopper plays.  When the weather gets cold and times are lean, the ant snubs the grasshopper.  The ant is the recommended example even in the Bible itself, in the famous proverb:  “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, Provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest” (Proverbs 6:6-7).  Nonetheless, Jesus is hinting that there is a larger perspective than such worldly wisdom.  In the first place, the real naiveté is to believe that the ants of the world are always rewarded, at least in this life.  Second, we do not live by bread alone.  In James Joyce’s version of the fable in Finnegans Wake, the grasshopper becomes the “gracehoper” and is identified with the improvident artist, like Orpheus, like Joyce himself.  It is absolutely a risk to live without a safety net, but there is also a risk in living with one—the risk that one will live a life that is secure but small and meaningless.  In Dickens’ David Copperfield, Mr. Micawber lives with total lack of responsibility, always confident that something will “show up” and rescue him.  But Micawber embodies the spirit of comedy, in which something does show up, whether the characters “deserve” it or not. 

Security can be a temptation that we need to resist.  But what makes us think that we always have a choice about how we live?  We may be determined to live a safe and unassuming life, content to leave the risky adventures to others—but something may decide otherwise, and we may find we have no choice in the matter.  You can be Bilbo Baggins peaceably smoking your pipe in the sun, when along come a band of dwarves and a grumpy wizard, and somehow you have no choice but to go on a quest that should belong to a hero.  Jesus called to Matthew, the tax collector, and Matthew stood up and walked out the door, leaving his comfortable pension behind.  When a tax collector does this, you know that something strange has happened. 

A gifted young person I know has told me she is attracted to “absurdism.”  I am intrigued by this, although absurdism could mean a number of things.  Within the context of existentialism, absurdity seems to be something negative that we are to accept stoically or defiantly, but I have always found existentialism a rather dreary philosophy.  Still, it is an interesting word.  When something is absurd, we laugh (except for existentialists, who seem rather humorless).  It is an absurd twist that produces the happy ending of comedy, and we laugh because something has been victorious over the relentlessly plausible.  Something has broken loose and shown us that all things are possible.  The absurdity of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, of Monty Python and Firesign Theatre, of the satires of Thomas Pynchon, represents an attitude to life.  The great comic strip that most embodies this attitude is Bill Griffith’s Zippy, whose title character speaks in continuous non sequiturs.  Zippy wears a polka-dot mumu or clown suit and enjoys life more than normal people—his famous phrase is, “Are we having fun yet?”  He usually is.  The strip has been around since 1971 and does not seem to have run out of creativity yet. 

There is in fact something to think about in these reflections relevant to a theory of creativity.  The anxious attitude that wants a plan is essentially anti-creative.  The creative attitude in the arts is to relax all demands and invite something to surface or take place, to let happen whatever will happen.  This involves a certain amount of trust, and most creative blocks derive from an anxious lack of trust.  Is it good enough?  Is it the kind of thing that critics or an audience will approve?  Is it out of fashion? Am I repeating things I have done or said before?  Is it organized?  Is this just stupid and I’m going to humiliate myself?   But the creative process cannot be pre-planned and cannot be controlled.  That does not mean revision is impossible—but revision has to take place within and as part of the creative act itself.  Creativity is improvisation based on what you already have.  If you are writing a song and have a rhyme word, that influences what happens in another line.  We have this false notion that animals are hard-wired with instincts, which means they are never creative but only repeat the same actions.  This is human nonsense, one more way of underestimating animals out of our sense of superiority.  We now know that some animals have invented tools, but it is more than that.  Even within instinctual activity, they must be continuously creative, because no situation is ever like any other.  The other day, noticing that a spider had spun a web between two sides of the concrete pit holding the backup sump pump, I thought of the very different locations in which spiders have built webs in my house, adapting their general web-building technique to the particular situation.  The same would be true for birds building nests, groundhogs deciding where to dig their tunnels, and so on.  They adapt their skill to the job at hand in a way that we should admire more than we do. 

In “The Chresmologue,” Eiseley says, “Life is never fixed and stable.  It is always mercurial, rolling and splitting, disappearing and re-emerging in a most unpredictable fashion” (69).  His conclusion is, “We are in a creative universe.  Let us then create.  For man himself is the unlikely consequence of such forces” (70). 

The usual way of vindicating the ways of God is make him an order figure who created a fixed cosmos and a predetermined plan for history which we are supposed to admire and find our obedient place within.  But the reality we actually find ourselves in is a set of interlocking structures of oppression and limitation—natural, social, psychological.  As I have argued elsewhere, what we need is less an order figure than a Trickster God, a spirit comparable to the tricky servant in traditional comedy, whose strategies (and sometimes blunders) help bring about the implausible plot twist leading to the happy ending, foiling or outwitting the forces of oppression that cause so much suffering.  

I do not think such a God can be “justified,” which basically means rationalized, nor can such a deity be worshipped, if only because it is too elusive, neither present nor absent.  And anyway, worship is for idols, for projections.  Milton’s real God in Paradise Lost is not the monarch sitting on the throne but the mysterious spirit he felt within him, the spirit that inspired his poetry.  If we encourage students to go out into life with a spirit of adventure, not anxiously clutching a plan, we must try to instill in them a trust that there is something inward and invisible at work in both themselves and the world, a spirit that produces “luck,” that produces chance meetings and synchronicities, that may bestow a sudden flash of insight like a match struck in Plato’s cave, that may provide intuitions of possibilities as they improvise a way through the wilderness of this world, that bestows talents upon them with the expectation that they should be used in the world and not hoarded for security.  It is not a deity that is guaranteed to give them what they want, for what we want is often not in our best interests.  But if they try sometime, they might get what they need. 

References

Eiseley, Loren. “The Chresmologue.” In The Night Country.  University of Nebraska Press, 1971.  59-78. 

Zinsser, William.  “College Pressures.” In The Norton Reader, 16^th Edition.  Melissa A. Goldthwaite, General Editor.  Norton, 2024.  595-601.