My specialty as a technologist has been to help faculty adopt ePortfolios – electronic collections of student and faculty work, typically with the intent of making student learning visible to an outside audience. There are a variety of purposes to ePortfolios, but one of the most common is assessment – figuring out whether students are really learning what they’re supposed to be learning.

Educational institutions have come to emphasize assessment more and more in the past decade. Assessment is sometimes resisted in the humanities because of an emphasis on quantification – often with good reason, as in the case of the UK’s catastrophic RAE and its relentless insistence on quantity over quality of scholarship. But there’s no reason for humanists to be opposed to assessment in principle. We always claim that our students come out of our classes better than they were when they began – better writers, more careful readers, more thoughtful, more critical, more knowledgeable, more engaged citizens, whatever. If they didn’t improve in some such ways, there would be no point in our teaching them. And surely at least some such improvements can be observed, even if we resist attaching numbers to that improvement beyond the grades we give. Moreover, some of those who have tried to observe whether students do indeed improve in these ways in their college classes – notably Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa – have found that in many cases, in the US at least, they don’t. This fact, if true, would be disastrous, considering that US students typically go tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt for their educations. Surely we cannot merely assume that this is money well spent. And so assessment of some sort seems to me quite a valuable task.

Working professionally with assessment has led me to think more about the question: how do we assess philosophy? It is this question, I think, that may have contributed the most to the notorious divide between analytic and “continental” philosophy.

It has been a commonplace for some time that the concerns of analytic and “continental” philosophers overlap considerably. In the past couple decades, philosophers in the two traditions have started reading each other’s work considerably more than they had when the divide was at its peak. Yet the gap endures – a student trained in the continental Boston College philosophy department is unlikely to be offered a job at analytical NYU, and vice versa.

It’s understandable to bemoan such a gap; I’ve done my share of this bemoaning myself. And yet I’d also like to suggest that the gap currently exists for good reason. It is not, as partisans on either side usually have it (and as I have thought in earlier periods of my life), because one side does philosophy so much better than the other. Rather, it is for the related reason that the two sides disagree on what good philosophy is. They disagree, that is, on assessment – right down to the matter of assigning marks (grades) to student essays and exams.

I saw this difference firsthand as a teaching assistant at Harvard. I taught in two courses, Michael Sandel’s “Justice” and Jay Harris’s “If There Is No God, All Is Permitted”, which I think exemplified the divide. Both courses were offered under the now-defunct rubric of “Moral Reasoning”, in which all Harvard undergrads at the time had to take a course. Neither course was taught by a philosophy professor – Sandel taught in the department of government, Harris in Near Eastern studies – and yet the courses still effectively managed to reproduce the analytic/continental divide, evidence that this divide is not merely a matter of the parochial turf wars of philosophy departments.

In Sandel’s course, argument was all. Students were given a specific question on which to take a position (e.g. “Should governments torture terrorists to gain information about future attacks?”) We marked the papers on whether they had a clear thesis; gave clear, logical and relevant arguments to demonstrate the truth of that thesis; and anticipated potential objections and responded to those. If you did that, you got a good mark; if you didn’t, you didn’t. Kant and Mill and Rawls and Aristotle were on the reading list, but as resources for arguments about the particular cases, deeper theoretical sets of reasons to underlie the arguments students made. Whether you interpreted them correctly was of secondary importance.

That wasn’t the case in Harris’s course. I had a bit of difficulty adjusting to that course, because after two semesters with Sandel, I expected to continue marking on the basis of argument. But for Harris and my fellow TAs in that course, argument was secondary. There was a wide variety of topics to write about, some of which would barely even require the students to have an argument, just explore an interesting position. Much more important was interpretation – and not merely a correct interpretation, but a deep interpretation, one that could explain not merely what Kant said, but why he said it.

Harris’s approach here was much closer to that typically taken in continental Europe. I found it very enlightening to read a short piece in a Harvard magazine by a student who’d gone on a study-abroad program in France. She noted that in French humanities classes – not merely in philosophy – students were expected to open their papers not with a thesis, but with a problématique, an explanation of the various aspects of the problem to be explored.

I’m not even talking here about the difference in content taught between the two classes – but about assessment. The two professors effectively disagreed about what constitutes good philosophy. And it’s that disagreement, I think, that makes the analytic-continental split so enduring.

Now couldn’t one say that both rigour of argument and depth of interpretation are important, and get over the dispute that way? Well, sure, and I would argue that that’s the right way for philosophy to go. The trick is that doing it is not as easy as it sounds. Pedagogically, it’s easier to focus on teaching students a single skill than multiple ones. And I might be tempted to argue that there’s a deeper problem – that the two goals can in some respect interfere with each other. But that’s a topic for another post.

[EDIT: Earlier version of the post didn't have links to the BC and NYU philosophy departments, just notes to myself to include them. Whoops. Thanks to Jeff for pointing that out!]

And I thought: cynical? Hall made his name studying the material conditions that gave rise to American “religion,” the economics of printing and text production. Much of his career was about the (often wise) materialist advice to explain the popularity of certain ideas by following the money. And yet suddenly, when that same mirror was turned on his own intellectual environment, of the 21st-century North American university – somehow it became “cynical”? Somehow, unlike all those thinkers we study, we have magically managed to escape the pressures of money-making and live in a world of pure ideas?

I suppose it might not have been so hard for Hall to think that way as a member of the Luckiest Generation: the pre-baby-boom scholars who taught at a time, unthinkable now, of vast expanding opportunities in academia. But for a member of today’s academic proletariat, it’s hard not to think in materialist terms – to follow the money, as one tries to think and write in socially approved ways in order to make it possible to earn a living.

It’s not that contemporary academic thought in the humanities is monolithic; there are at least three major methodological approaches that are very much at odds with one another. But there is something these approaches all share in common, and I think that that something can be attributed directly to the material conditions of academic life.

The first and oldest of these approaches is philology. Philology is devoted to the collecting, editing and translating of old texts – figuring out exactly what it is the text says, more than what it means. There aren’t that many philologists left teaching at smaller or regional colleges, but they often receive the juiciest teaching positions at the big prestigious universities, the Harvards and Pennsylvanias.

The second major approach is analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophers devote their attention to analyzing arguments in ever more precise detail, leaving aside as many extraneous issues as possible in order to get one tiny conclusion exactly right. Analytic philosophy tends to be the object of scorn and derision outside of philosophy departments, but it rules those philosophy departments with an iron fist. The philosophy job market is cruel enough to those who are trained solidly within the analytic tradition; if you do anything else, your odds of getting a teaching position in a philosophy department these days are very close to nil.

The third, and surely most widespread, of the three is postmodernism, or the many variants on it. Postmodernists believe, among other things, that there is no definitive interpretation of any given text; a text is certainly not limited to what its author intended. So one can, for example, perform a “queer reading” of a classical text, examining homoerotic dimensions that are more apparent to a contemporary reader than to someone in the text’s own time. Leading postmodernist Jacques Derrida emphasized reading at “the margins,” those parts of a text which the author wished to wave aside. In philosophy, the majority of postmodernists are often quite cagey about advancing philosophical theories that they claim as their own (in the way that analytic philosophers do); rather, their works typically involve the exegesis of someone else’s existing work.

All three approaches are found in religion departments today, and they are typically quite hostile to each other. Postmodernists, especially, are philosophically opposed to the philologists’ attempt to pin down a single fixed text and the analytics’ attempt to find a single truth; analytic philosophers and philologists both disdain postmodernists’ apparently fast and loose readings of texts and of the world.

Beneath this hostility, however, there is one thing that all three schools of thought have in common. And that is the tendency to think small. The philologist focuses on tiny details of a single text, the analytic on tiny details of a single argument. The postmodernist may look at a whole text or even corpus of texts, but with the attempt to establish one single new interpretation among many, no attempt at anything grand or definitive; and talking only about what’s within the text and its historical context, not examining whether the text’s content is true or correct about the world outside the text. (Thus much postmodern work in so-called ethics tends to actually be in ethics studies.)

And that smallness, in turn, brings us back to the material conditions with which I opened. There is endless room to publish new work coming from all three of these methodological approaches. There are always ever more obscure texts for philologists to study, lying forgotten in dusty rooms until someone publishes about them in a journal. There are always smaller and smaller corners of an argument for analytic philosophers to poke at, finding some new detail or twist that has not yet been explored. And there are nearly infinite ways to reinterpret a text in the postmodern manner, taking the many permutations and combinations of applying interpretive lens X to text Y. If you want to publish in an academic journal, any variant of these three strategies gives you a good start for finding something new to say.

What you can’t do is be a scholar in the manner of Confucius, who tried to faithfully pass the received great ideas of the past down to new generations. Such scholars were the norm in the old days; now they are nearly an extinct breed. Sadder yet, the dominance of these three schools leaves no room for the wide-ranging, broad-minded work that pulls together many fields of knowledge into a single synthesis. If a young scholar today were to try to write the contemporary equivalent of Plato’s Republic or the Mencius, she would find herself eating out of garbage cans.

It is for these reasons that I have embraced blogging with such excitement. In academia, I could never have gotten away with asking the big questions I ask here. I would have earned great scorn for saying as much as I do on Greek and Chinese philosophers without knowing Greek or Chinese. Never mind that Thomas Aquinas managed to be one of the world’s greatest Aristotle commentators without knowing any Greek; if written today, his painstaking works would be snubbed as the scribblings of a dilettante. But if one wishes to try and learn, as I do, from all the major philosophical traditions – to learn all the languages involved would itself require a lifetime of training before one could begin to do any actual thinking. Outside of academia, one can start the thinking process as one wishes, and allow oneself to be corrected by people who do know the relevant languages if one gets something egregiously wrong.

I make no secret of being a big-picture thinker. (At least, not anymore.) But I also keep in mind the admonitions of the previous weeks: the details do matter. Ken Wilber is another philosopher who was able to get to the big picture by sidestepping academia; but I found that in his early work at least, he erred in the opposite direction, often writing the same book many times and rarely letting himself be corrected about the things he gets wrong. He could have used some of the detail-mindedness that academia provides. (Though I am currently reading some more recent works of his and finding that he may have started to get better at this.)

For this reason I have some sympathy for all of the approaches I discuss: we need the philologists to collect the texts we learn from, the analytic philosophers to sharpen our arguments’ precision, the postmodernists to remind us there might always be another way of looking at it. All of these approaches risk getting lost in their details, not seeing the forest for the trees; but Wilber (like myself) tends to gloss over the trees that make the forest up. The ideal approach, far easier said than done, is to combine the two. For that reason I’m grateful to have had a detail-oriented PhD training before trying to write about the big stuff on my own. That certainly doesn’t mean I’m necessarily going to get it right. But it feels like I’ve got a good shot.

I speak, of course, of Steve Jobs, the co-founder and former CEO of Apple Computer. Jobs’s figure loomed large over my life a decade ago. My first wife had convinced me to switch to a Mac in 2000, and I embraced everything Mac and Apple with all the zeal of the newly converted. She and I regularly went together to the Apple retail store in Cambridge for Jobs’s keynotes, just to watch him announce new products with his famous showmanship. I have been far less enthused about Apple recently, especially the arbitrary restrictions the company places on iPhone apps – the exact kind of controlling monopolistic behaviour that Apple was once best known for fighting against. I still happily use Macs and iPods, though. And more importantly for today, I learned important lessons from following Apple and Jobs so devotedly in the 2000s – above all about leadership.

I’ve never been much of a leader. I’d much rather let people do their own thing, and stay out of their way. But there are plenty of circumstances when such an attitude is not appropriate. Sometimes, we need to make decisions for other people, and it’s not easy to figure out how to do that well. “Leadership” does not figure prominently in premodern lists of virtues (like Aristotle’s), but I wonder if that’s because of different social circumstances. The idea of leadership as a virtue seems to me to come to the fore in organizations that are supposed (in theory) to be meritocratic, and where the input of subordinates is supposed (again in theory) to be valuable. This is the regular situation of a modern business, but seems to me to have been less common in earlier days. Confucius’s “rectification of names” tells us that “a king kings” (that is, a king should act in the manner proper to a king and “a father fathers”; it doesn’t tell us that “a leader leads,” and I wonder if this wasn’t because most hierarchies were specific enough that the more general idea of leadership was unnecessary.

I’m not enough of a social historian to say any of that with confidence. The point is: however that history may be, today we – at least we in the white-collar middle classes – are frequently thrown into situations where we are expected to lead people who are in other respects considered our equals. And this is a situation that requires decisiveness, requires that those decisions be made even when there are others who actively disagree. And Steve Jobs was the best model of this kind of leadership that I knew.

I remember how back in 2001, not long after I’d first obtained my beautiful Ruby iMac, Apple announced one of its famously secretive press conferences for a mysterious new product. Online Apple forums lit up with underwhelmed disappointment after the conference, saying “you mean it’s just an MP3 player?” But that disappointing MP3 player, of course, turned out to be the iPod – a product that wound up being more successful for Apple than any of the computers it had previously sold, and one which probably eventually wound up in the hands of nearly all the people who had previously posted their disappointment. Similarly, the new computer designs that Apple released under Jobs were often notable for what they lacked. It was unthinkable in 1998 for a computer to be sold without a floppy disk drive – but that’s exactly what the iMac was, and it was the computer that saved Apple. If Jobs had listened too attentively to those around him, he could not have made the bold decisions that he did.

In this respect, leadership is in many respects the inverse of humility, a virtue I’ve spoken of quite frequently on this blog. One must listen to others enough to be aware when one might be wrong – but one must nevertheless still make the decision even though it might be wrong.

Indeed, while Jobs’s decisiveness made him a good leader, it may well be the occasional dose of humility that helped make him a great leader. Just before the iPod, Jobs had gushed about a computer called the G4 Cube, saying in interviews “Isn’t it beautiful?” The G4 Cube, as it turned out, was a very expensive computer that was only as powerful as a laptop but had none of the portability. Few people wanted one; I can’t recall meeting anybody who owned one. It was a flop. But soon enough, Jobs admitted “we goofed.” The humility to admit a mistake is essential to a good leader – one must have the courage to make mistakes, but then be willing to accept their consequences. Jobs did, and he didn’t look back – he continued to make the bizarre but prescient decisions that would build his company from a struggling niche player to the most valuable company on earth.

Now as part of an integrated human life, leadership extends beyond just your own organization; it’s one thing to be a good leader for your company’s bottom line, and another to be a leader who benefits humanity as a whole. On this score, Jobs’s later monopolistic tendencies leave me unable to give him the unequivocal praise I would have liked to give; excluding competitors arbitrarily from the iPhone’s store has probably been great leadership for the bottom line, but it diminishes the broader human good in a way that Jobs’s earlier innovations never did. But then power corrupts, and Jobs is no exception to that. I doubt I could have been as effusive about Jack Layton had he actually become prime minister for a significant length of time. For many years, at least, Jobs gave us a model of what it’s like to be a great leader. That model is worth celebrating – and emulating.

Meanwhile, a couple of related recent American events you might not have heard of. In Maine, newly elected Republican governor Paul LePage has ordered the removal of a mural in the state Department of Labour depicting the state’s labour history, along with the renaming of conference rooms named after César Chávez and other labour organizers. The governor’s spokesman proclaimed that these symbols are “not in keeping with the department’s pro-business goals.” At the symbolic level too, the government has explicitly picked a side in a class struggle.

The same battles come up in the federal government, where House Republicans have prepared a measure to deny food stamps – the main US provision to ensure people do not starve – to striking workers. If you fight for better labour conditions, the logic appears to go, you deserve to die hungry. Some irony that all this is taking place around the 100th anniversary of the industrial disaster that helped create labour laws and labour movement in the US. (Keep in mind, too, that unions are already extraordinarily weak in the US; less than 10% of private-sector employees belong to a union, and even in the public sector the number is less than 40%.)

It has been hard for me to go through the past couple of weeks without hearing the voice of Karl Marx saying “I told you so”: class struggles are real, and the government takes the side of the property owners. It’s true that these active gratuitous assaults on labour movement are all perpetrated by Republicans, but they are just further assaults on unions that were already weakened with Democratic complicity. (Republicans have recently taken on the sadly amusing habit of calling Obama a “socialist.” Would that it were so.) I haven’t been a Marxist for a long time, but this year’s events go a long way toward making me one – not just in terms of the problem of alienation, where I’ve already discussed my agreement with Marx, but also with respect to his more central issue of class conflict.

But what I also said about Marx before still applies: he was wrong about the future. There was and will be no new preferable order. The Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson quoted an anonymous “someone” as having said “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”; as it turns out, Jameson himself had said something like this in an earlier work. I think it’s hard to dispute this quote. There is a varied number of disasters, some narrowly averted, that could mean the end of humanity: global nuclear war, emerging pandemic, change to the natural environment that comes too quickly for us to stop. But humanity going on after capitalism? It’s not entirely unthinkable, but at this point it’s very difficult to envision what that would look like, when the only really serious attempt at an alternative not only failed, but destroyed millions of lives and families along the way.

Just as before, I think there’s a close parallel between Marxism and Christianity – though rather than Jesus and the early Christians, I’m thinking here of probably the most profound and influential Christian thinker, Augustine. What Marx and Augustine share, to use Greek medical terms, is a combination of penetrating diagnosis and wrong prognosis. Augustine is quite right to point out his central “chastened intellectualist” theme of human weakness: when we make attempts at self-improvement, the persistence of our bad habits shows us just how hard it is to be better, even how much we rationalize the bad habits to ourselves. When we place our individual weakness beside the terrible crimes committed by other human beings – some of the worst having been committed in Marx’s own name – it is easy to see the power of Augustine’s mistrust of human virtue, like Marx’s insights into class conflict and alienation.

Yet Augustine’s way forward is no better than Marx’s. In his eyes, our troubles will be resolved by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ if we open ourselves up to his grace, allowing ourselves a perfectly virtuous and happy life after death. But I’ve noted before that I don’t see any reason to believe in such a thing; and even if I did, I would have significant objections to worshipping the God he describes, who damns human beings to eternal torment.

Augustine and Marx, then, both insightfully diagnose a problem but leave us without a good solution. I used to think Buddhism offered us a good way out of this dilemma, through a critique of hope: accept that the world is not as it should be, and just deal with reducing your suffering. But then Buddhists have their own kind of hope, which I also find wrong-headed: the idea that suffering can be entirely eliminated, that we can reach a state of nirvana. In Buddhism too, we face a powerful and perceptive diagnosis in the Second Noble Truth, with a misinformed prognosis in the Third.

What the poor prognoses of Marx, Augustine and the Pali suttas all share, indeed, is hope, optimism: an optimism entirely uncalled for given their pessimistic diagnoses. There isn’t going to be a new social order, and we’re going to remain surrounded by a suffering that ends in death. Nor, as the Stoics and Epicureans that Augustine criticized might think, will we be able to make ourselves good enough to transcend our evil or our suffering. No, things don’t look good for humans, and there’s no straightforward solution in sight. All we can do is keep stumbling through the evils of life – we can pursue the difficult, but worthy and surmountable, task of finding enough joy, truth and interest in life to make it well worth living.

because: a manifesto

It took me a while to figure out the reason for this, but I came to see it quite clearly: for most left-wingers, the good is fundamentally political. The place to focus our efforts, in changing the way that things and people are, is on the inequalities, oppressions and pollutions of the state and the corporations and wealth it regulates. Conservatives, at least social conservatives, often do not think this way. Our big problems are with ourselves. It matters that people become better, more virtuous; even when they do obsess about politics, it is as an attempt to make people better in some sense. An interesting example is Rod Dreher, one of the conservative bloggers I linked to in the earlier post: while his blog was originally called “Crunchy Con” (as in “conservative”), it later just took on his name, and now is called Macroculture – the emphasis has been steadily less on politics and more on culture, and the blog has gotten steadily more interesting (though less popular) as it went. This is an attitude I tend to be largely in agreement with. My deepest debt to Buddhism is that it saved me from politics, made me focus on problems with myself and not with the world.

The question I’ve then come to ask myself is: why haven’t I become conservative myself? I don’t mean a movement Republican, for that question is easily answered: George W. Bush, and his ideological successor Sarah Palin, represent an abhorrent combination of procedural, symbolic and substantive wrongs, many of which would count as wrong from any ideological standpoint. ̇When his writings were primarily political, Dreher was a fierce critic of Bush on conservative grounds – the enormous expansion of government and the deficit, the wars of choice, the incompetence in the face of Hurricane Katrina.

But why not become a more skeptical right-winger like Dreher? This is where the question gets more philosophically interesting. I’ve sometimes found it perplexing that in the contemporary right wing, social and cultural conservatism is often joined with economic libertarianism, extreme liberalism in the classical sense (and the inverse is true on the left). The justification for this connection is often articulated by right-wing bloggers like Dreher and William Vallicella: government social intervention on behalf of the disadvantaged, the centrepiece of a left-wing political problem, makes people worse. It discourages people from working hard and being thrifty, makes them lazy, less virtuous. Under a left-wing social-democratic government, the good people who work hard and save to get rich are punished, while the lazy are rewarded. Right-wingers typically maintain some modified version of the Protestant ethic chronicled by Max Weber, according to which wealth is, if not a sign of God’s favour, at least a deserved reward for a virtuous life spent working hard and saving.

And where I depart most from such a viewpoint is not in the idea that the government should avoid the promotion of virtue, nor in the belief that social programs may discourage work or thrift. Rather, it is in the idea that hard work and thrift are themselves virtues. It is this conceit – typically American but hardly unique to the US – that I disdain.

Hard work and thrift are often associated with real virtues, such as temperance and patient endurance. To put in long hours earning money, one must have the ability to put aside the desires of the moment and endure present hardship for future benefit; this ability is an excellent character trait. But it is not a virtue in itself; indeed, especially in the US, it often becomes a characteristic vice. As I argued last week, this is the real problem with “convenience”: spending money to save time is a futile and unworthy pursuit if all we do with that time is make more money.

Marx was wise to emphasize alienation – our work lives are lives lived for someone else, they take us away from the things that are most important, in the name of money. Most of us need to work, but if that becomes our priority in life, we have bad priorities. The iconic Silicon Valley entrepreneur who works 90-hour weeks in order to make millions – this seems like a right-winger’s model of a good human being. In my view, however, such a person is seriously deficient. I’m hardly the first to make this point – Bertrand Russell put it far more eloquently – but it is all too absent from contemporary political conversation, especially those of self-professed conservatives. The thrift and saving that makes many millionaires, too, can easily degenerate into miserliness, and a capitalist economy often rewards the latter even more than the former. The self-made rich, even if they have come by their money entirely honestly, are not necessarily any better than the rest of us, and may well be worse.

Beyond all this, of course, there is the basic point that hard work and thrift are often not related to economic success; one can easily compare Paris Hilton to Mexican immigrant families who struggle tirelessly and still can’t make ends meet, or any number of similar examples. This is of course an important point in deciding where on the political spectrum one will fall; but it interests me less here than the wider point about virtue. Even if wealth were awarded entirely in accordance with effort and labour, it seems to me that it would still be worth offering some government support to the needy, and doing so would not necessarily affect the people’s character for the worse.

the most precious element any human has, the very measure of his individuality — time…. Everything we value, from love to lucre, takes time. Time is the measure of the conflicting demands put upon us, and as such is the measure of our very selves. It is the one commodity that turns out, for each individual, irrevocably, to be finite. (111, emphasis in original)

Seen from this perspective, there is nothing frivolous or optional whatsoever about “convenience.” This is true whether we live a worldly life seeking worldly ends or a monastic one seeking liberation. Without a belief in rebirth, we do not have anything like the infinite eons Śāntideva envisioned in which one could progress slowly on the bodhisattva path. He thought it was urgent for us to become monks and dedicate ourselves to liberation in this lifetime, because if we didn’t, we wouldn’t get another chance for billions of years. Yet just as importantly, eventually, after some unimaginable amount of time, we would get that chance, in a way that now seems unlikely at best. Without rebirth, death places an absolute limit on our time. Saving time is in a sense saving a life – for when we speak of “saving” a life, all we can ever mean is prolonging that life, which is in turn to say giving that life more time.

Saving time, then, can be among the noblest of human goals. The reason “convenience” looks so suspect, however, is that very often it doesn’t really save us time, doesn’t actually add anything to our lives. The biggest trap is the pattern all too familiar in the US: one spends one’s money on conveniences (convenience foods, labour-saving devices, and so on), in order to save time – and then spends the newly available time making more money, much of which itself is spent on conveniences. Little if anything is gained here. One might well argue that little time is genuinely saved. For too often we are trapped in the belief that our paid work should be our life’s fulfillment when, as Marx long ago noted, it is by definition alienated: to the extent that we work for pay, we work for others and not for ourselves. We might be lucky enough to find work we enjoy most of the time, but there is no reason to expect that paid work should be any more fulfilling than cooking or washing the dishes. Perhaps we are still a little too wedded to what Max Weber called the Protestant ethic, which rejected the use of money for pleasure and enjoyment (vacations, eating out, beauty products) but endorsed spending it on “comfort,” an idea not too far removed from “convenience.” The idea of making money to save time to make more money may have made sense within the dour world of Calvinist theology, but it’s a little bizarre that the rest of us would continue to follow it.

Still, these points all raise a related question: what, exactly, should our time be used for? Suppose that, as Marx imagined, we really could “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner” – should we do all of these? Thanks to the heroic work of the early twentieth-century labour movement, most of us have two days a week on which we can do exactly what Marx says – at least if we do not raise children in addition. But how then should we make decisions about how to use this precious “spare” time? Should we indeed spend the day in pastoral and agrarian pursuits followed by dinner, and then write critical philosophy in the evening – or should we spend the whole day doing one or the other if that’s what we love? Or should we play games and sports with friends and loved ones? Or should we raise children and spend the time doing that? Once we realize how finite our time on earth is, the way we spend it comes to take on great importance.

It would be nice to think that the academy was some sort of exception to this rule; but it’s anything but. People go into academic work because they love to think and read and write and teach. But in a research-oriented job where one is paid to think and read and write, one must do it according to established disciplinary boundaries that do not necessarily make sense for one’s work: in my field one writes either for “philosophers” who value only precision and logical rigour, and care little or not at all for the great ideas of the past; or for “religionists” who care only about an accurate representation of the past and not about what that past has to teach us. If one tries to cross the boundaries, one is hurt far more than helped. And even if one is comfortable with those boundaries, one cannot simply take the time to learn, understand, absorb; one must write and be published, even if one would rather take the time to read and learn more before doing so. As for that vaunted “academic freedom”: for the majority of people employed in academic positions, there is no such thing. I started this blog only once it seemed likely I would not have an academic career in the long term; for I try here to speak my mind openly, explore my passions and intellectual curiosity, in a way that all the world can see. As long as I sought an academic career, I was deathly afraid that search committee members would discover that my views were not what they wanted to hear, and promptly exercise their wide-ranging arbitrary powers to deny me a livelihood.

And then there’s teaching: often in subjects that have little to do with one’s own passion, and equally often to students who do not care. That’s not even to mention the oft-required bureaucratic committee work, work that most academics relish far less than either research or teaching. Between these three alienated commitments, an aspiring philosophy or religion professor often has less time to think about philosophy than one who is outside the academy. And to do all this, in the vast majority of cases, one must effectively abandon friends and family, move to a place to which one has no ties and may well despise – and all of this is what one does if one is lucky, if one does not join the majority of PhD graduates who teach courses for less than a living wage.

To enter the academy, to try and write or play music for a living, to sell homemade crafts – these are often failed and futile attempt to avoid alienation, one which only leads one deeper into oppression and false consciousness. As an adjunct professor, one is exploited far more ruthlessly than any unionized factory worker – and the work that one does is scarcely any more one’s own than is the product of a modern factory. Marx would not be surprised to see that colleges and universities – even now that they’re run by the Sixties generation of former radicals – are alienated capitalist shop floors like any other. We want to think that the university is a place for the free exchange of ideas, outside of alienated market labour; it is anything but. It is one more site of capitalist exploitation.

The more I experience the capitalist workplace, the more I see that Marx’s diagnosis was right. Where Marx was wrong was in his prognosis of a better system. Bart Ehrman portrays Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet – one who thought that the Day of Judgement was coming in his own lifetime. Marx thought the same: the last would be first and the first would be last, a new order would come in where justice would prevail and humans’ true ends would be fulfilled.

Jesus and Marx were wrong. There was no new order. Once they were gone, their hopes were dashed. In the 150 years since Marx wrote they have not been fulfilled; nor have they been fulfilled in the 2000 years since Jesus’s lifetime. It’s been long enough in both cases to think that if the prophecies have not yet been fulfilled, they may well never be. And to me, this is where Buddhism comes in, another reason why I find the Buddha’s thought profounder than Marx’s. What Christianity and Marxism share above all is a sense of hope – a hope that history has so far falsified. Buddhism, on the other hand, offers us a critique of hope. The world is never going to get better. What we can do is work on our own suffering, and that of those around us, in the midst of our alienation and oppression. As the bumper sticker used to say, I feel so much better ever since I’ve given up hope.

Or, if you can’t handle that kind of pessimism, at least consider this. Marx was always cagey about his vision of a future society, what a non-alienated world would look like – it was supposed to arise out of the reflection of alienated or exploited groups. And yet he did offer glimpses, especially in the early work that focuses most on alienation. In the German Ideology, Marx speaks of a better world where one could “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind,” as opposed to the specialized, mechanized world of alienated capitalist labour. My father, explaining this passage, once mentioned a time he had been flying first class and discussed Marx with a wealthy heiress sitting beside him on a plane. He had mentioned this passage to her, and she replied: “I can do that right now!” The difference was just that Marx hoped to see everyone, not just the aristocracy, have such an opportunity for self-definition.

And yet here’s the thing. Thanks primarily to the work of twentieth-century labour unions – often allied with Marxists, especially in places where their gains were strongest, outside the United States – many of us now have some of our lives to ourselves, where we can define ourselves in this way, independent of our alienated careers. If we can manage to find the 40-hour work week that our grandparents fought so hard for, we can certainly hunt in the morning, fish in the evening, and be a critical critic in the evening – on the weekend. Even the rest of the week, we might have several nights on which we can do at least one of these things. Alas, these days the work week seems to be getting longer; any fights in this regard are to maintain the status quo, not to make things better or bring them any closer to a non-alienated utopia.

Still, the benefits are there if we accept them – and, I suppose, if we don’t have children. Marx didn’t seem to think much about that part: even if we all had the resources to hunt in the morning and criticize in the evening, who would raise the kids? Friedrich Engels took up that question some, but Marx himself didn’t. Still, to have children is a choice which many people undertake, and undertake for their own reasons, not as part of a bargain with an employer; whether or not children actually make them happy, people have them because they believe they do. If we don’t take that choice, and we fight to keep the rights our grandparents fought for (as so many people today do not), then we may well be able to do the things we love in life without getting paid for them, do work that is a genuine labour of love. The work I did in academia was not my own. It was alienated labour. But this blog, I am happy to say, is not. I am lucky to have the chance to do some work that is all mine.

Riffing on a “digression” in Plato’s Theaetetus, Critchley comes up with a creative definition: the philosopher is one who takes time. Plato’s Socrates contrasts such a philosopher to the lawyer, the “pettifogger,” the specialist – for whom time is money, for whom a result must be reached quickly. It is likely not a coincidence that Socrates made his living from stonecutting, not from philosophy. The “digression” is introduced when Socrates’s interlocutor asks “Aren’t we at leisure?” and Socrates replies “It appears we are.” The pettifogger asks “What do I need to know right now, for this practical purpose?” The philosopher explores the bigger picture, takes the leisure to explore at length.

This picture of the philosopher seems to describe Socrates very well – or the monastic philosophers like Buddhaghosa or Śāntideva or Aquinas, who were charged to spend their lives in contemplation, and were fed and clothed and housed for doing so. It might even describe the tenured research-university philosophy professors of the 20th century, who had a guaranteed income for life as long as they showed up to teach a few classes and refrained from having sex with their students.

But what a different world faces the young man or woman who dreams of being a philosopher today! Our elders and betters tell us incessantly: figure out what you love, and then find a way to make money from it. And with the exception of a few (very, very rare) independent philosophers like Ken Wilber, to make money from philosophy is to be a philosophy professor. And those who aspire to be philosophy professors today epitomize a lack of time.

Noelle McAfee notes: “the academic system robs even we supposedly otherwordly philosophers of the leisure of time. There is a constant pressure to rush through things to get things done.” I wouldn’t say “even” us philosophers; rather, especially us philosophers, for whom the academic job situation is so dire. In graduate school and as a junior professor, there is a constant sense that every moment you spend at leisure could rob you of your only chance to ever get that semi-mythical leisured state of tenure – a state which the majority of current PhD candidates in philosophy and religious studies will never have. (If you’re unfamiliar with the apocalyptic state of the academic job market in the humanities, see here and here for a primer on the current situation; and see the acute analyses of Marc Bousquet if you would like to think it’s ever going to get significantly better.) McAfee tries to address the situation with the stopgap time-management measure of taking 20 minutes for every professional task she undertakes, thus creating a minimal amount of leisure for each task. Within the unfortunate position of the junior academic, that may be the best you can do. But it’s not very much. When you are teaching four courses a semester and struggling desperately to simultaneously publish articles in the knowledge that you’ll never get tenure without them, the idea that you can have any “leisure” is entirely implausible, no matter how you arrange your time.

Instead, if one is really to live the leisured philosophical life that Socrates and Critchley speak of, why not seek leisure in the more conventional sense? If we fight to hold on to the imperilled work schedule our grandparents fought so hard to get – a 35-40 hour week, with sick days and a few weeks a year of paid vacation (much more than this if we live in Europe) – and we don’t have children, we can have genuine leisure time, genuine spare time in which we can think about philosophy at a slow, leisurely, thoughtful pace. Such a job is the complete antithesis of the academic philosophy career track. Which is to say that one can best be a philosopher in Plato’s or Critchley’s sense if one has a completely unphilosophical job.

It seems to me, then, that a young person can most truly be a philosopher today if – like Socrates and Spinoza – she does not try to make of philosophy a profession. For them, philosophy was neither career nor hobby. For them, as for the nearly-extinct tenured professor, philosophy was genuine leisure. Their path seems the surest route for the aspiring young philosopher now.

At lunch I talked to a professor who was surprised to find that students had a hard time using a wiki; other attenders tweeted their surprise that most students had never used blogs before, when the students text and tweet and use other technologies so regularly. How could the students have a hard time with these technologies when they’re so tech-savvy?

Here’s the trick: undergraduate students are not “tech-savvy,” not in the sense that previous generations think of that term. The older we are, the likelier we are to equate “uses lots of technology” with “loves technology.” But 20-year-olds are not tech-heads. They do not, as a group, “love” Facebook any more than older generations love cars or telephones. For them these technologies are simply there, and useful, just like books and staircases. Texting and wikis do not fall under the same category in their minds, any more than books and staircases do.

I’m old enough to remember when information technology per se was new and exciting, when computers were not just a part of life. But they’ve been a part of my life for long enough that I don’t put them in a category, the way people older than me do. At a job interview a few years ago, the search committee asked me: “How do you use technology in your classes?” The question blindsided me. I set up online discussions and had my sessions videotaped for online learning and used PowerPoint-like presentation software and stored readings as online PDFs and did my gradebook on a spreadsheet and sent paper grades by email, but I had never grouped all of these together. To do so felt a little bit like Borges’s “Chinese encyclopedia”. Far as I can tell, the undergrads feel the same way as I did, but more so.

And so I wonder whether we should simply try to stop talking about “technology,” even “information technology.” Making predictions is a dangerous game, but I bet that in 30 years, when my generation are the old hands and today’s undergrads are in charge, colleges and universities will not have departments of “information technology.” Instructional technology, the field I’m trying to enter, will just be a part of pedagogy, of teaching and learning; tech support will be grouped with facilities management, the people you call when the classroom temperature is too high. Technology will be categorized by function, not by the fact that it is “technology.”

Technologies are tools. I’ve previously admired the wonder and gratitude that older people feel for technology. But youth have a wisdom of their own. They know that Twitter is useful for some things, texting for others, pencils for others, glasses for others. They don’t need to be told the thing we keep hearing at conferences in the field: that instructional technology needs to be about the instructional and not the technology, digital humanities about the humanities and not the digital.

At a panel on blogging in the classroom, Elaine Garofoli tweeted: “blogs strike me as being very old tech. Been there, done that.” Many other participants retweeted and seconded and thirded this claim. But what’s wrong with old tech? We might think we need to switch over to all the latest technologies to keep up with Twittering and texting 20-year-olds. But they still use cars and pencils and staircases. It’s just that for them, instant messaging and Google Buzz are part of the same toolkit as the staircases.