Last night on a British discussion show called Hard Talk, the host, a tough black woman who is the ultimate, no-holds barred devil's advocate-to-end-all-devil's advocates, asked Canada's Stephen Lewis, the UN Representative for Aids in Africa, whether he is ever frustrated, fed-up, ready to throw in the towel, simply because this monumental medical and humanitarian task is too massive to contemplate, let alone act upon. Let alone solve.
"Of course not," he said. "What good has ever come out of futility?"
Ah, futility. Despair. The acknowledgement that the world is a cruel, unfair place, and that we are doomed to small lives made even smaller by the realization that life is short and death is long.
This is what we can learn in university, what we should learn, but I think too much of this concept has permeated our daily lives, to the point where effort itself and the urge to help your fellow man has become a quaint, almost antiquated position, rather than the driving, relentless force it should and must be.
One of the advantages of a liberal-arts university education is that it allows you to examine and roll around in your heads concepts that you had never considered before -- or, if you had thought about them, such an education gives you a forum to discuss these ideas in a little more depth than your Grade 13 high school English allows. (Oh, that's right -- there is no more Grade 13, or OAC, in Ontario high schools anymore. But you get the point. I hope.)
The most interesting class I took in my freshman year at York University in those long-ago and far-away autumn days of '94 was called 'Psychology and Politics'. I had no idea what I was in for. I was a film major who loved movies and novels. Period. Any ideas about psychology I had were probably formed by Alan Thicke (a Canadian, by the way, from Kirkland Lake, Ontario) on Growing Pains, his character being a stay-at-home psychiatrist dad and all. (If you think I'm joking, you probably don't know how much t.v. I used to watch.) What I knew about politics came from Oliver Stone's J.F.K. and Spike Lee's Malcolm X. And maybe the old 'Royal Canadian Air Farce' (on the radio, before they had their t.v. show) and the political sketches on Saturday Night Live (Dana Carvey as Ross Perot and the elder Bush, and Jon Lovitz as Michael Dukkakis in one of the debates, saying my all-time favorite line: "My parents were little people. Little, swarthy people...")
The teacher's name was Paul Roazen, a skinny, crusty, curly-haired bespectacled old character. A few things impressed me right away:
1) He was an American. I'd never had an American teacher before. (I'd met Americans before, of course, in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and Buffalo and Orlando, but had never had much of a, I don't know, conversation with one.) This was different. This was exotic.
2) He had not only written books, but had actually published them. He was a Freud expert, Roazen was (and presumably still is, if he's still alive), and I was stunned, floored by the fact that I could actually go to the York Library and read books written by somebody who was teaching me. I barely knew who Freud was, but I was greatly impressed that Roazen had interviewed Freud's relatives -- sister, cousins, the whole extended family. (He may even have tripped on the carpet in their homes, which would have been a Freudian slip.) I remember reading his book 'Brother Animal', not because I was interested in Freud, really, but because it was very cool to read a book and have the author of said book mumble 'good morning' to me on a twice-weekly basis. I didn't get many published, bona-fide authors speaking to me at my high school in St.Catharines. Of course, I can't really remember, now, ten years on, what 'Brother Animal' was actually about, but that's irrelevant; the fact was, at the time, he had written it, and I could read it, and that was enough.
3) Roazen had actually been employed, lectured, taught at Harvard. I was amazed by this. I knew that Harvard was a real, honest-to-goodness, like, I don't know, place, but it existed in some other, distant realm of existence. (It still seems to, actually.) The closest I'd been to Harvard was watching that Joe Pesci movie With Honors with Greg Gaspari and Eric Daigle at the Town Cinemas on Geneva Street in St.Catharines, the one starring Brendan Fraser and Joe Pesci, the one where Pesci plays a homeless person who crashes lectures at the school. ("I may be a bum," Pesci says, "but I'm a Harvard bum.") I would have been impressed if Roazen had actually been to Harvard, if he'd walked around the campus or checked out the dorms or even eaten in the cafeteria of the place; the fact that he had been a lecturer there, well, that was enough to make me want to listen to him. And I did, sitting in the front row of the lecture hall each and every morning of the class, watching as he strolled into the room looking like he had something very, very important to say.
4) Roazen refused to use a microphone, the little ones that professors attach to their lapels. The fact that professors got to use microphones at all impresed me; the fact that this dude refused that honor made him an intriguing and eccentric fellow right from the first day. I didn't know why he abandoned the mike, until I heard him speak. The thing is, Roazen liked to speak. He liked to roar. He liked to lecture without notes and pace the room and bellow not only to the back of the room, but to the back of the room beside the one he was teaching in.
("Become who you ARE!" he screamed one day, quoting Nietscheze the week we were reading 'Beyond Good and Evil.' He loved that line, Roazen did. Because of him, and his intensity, so do I.)
Two anecdotes that sum up his character, as I remember it:
Anecdote one:
The morning after the Academy Awards. A bitter-cold, snowy March day. Roazen sits at the desk at the front of the lecture hall, reading through the results of the Oscars in the paper. He looks mystified. He shakes his head. He looks up and startes at me, 'cause I'm sitting in the front row, right in front of him. In the line of fire, so to speak.
"I haven't heard of any of these people!" he says, almost in an accusing tone, as if I had had something to do with the fact that the Best Supporting Actress winner remained a mystery to him. I said nothing, smiling a goofy freshman smile. What was I supposed to say? (I wanted to say: "Sir, you're a sixty-five year old neurotic intellectual who gets off on interviewing Freud's sister -- why should you know any of these people?") He continued to stare at me, then sighed, at what I'm not sure. Maybe his own age, or my inability to explain modern Hollywood's social structure. Maybe both.
(I used to think he was an out-of-it old coot for not recognizing even the most famous of actors, until I found myself in Asia for five years, scanning the Internet and reading about the latest celebrities, muttering: "I haven't heard of any of these people!")
Anecdote two:
Roazen was speaking passionately, roaming the room, and then he looked up and noticed that one student, a freshman girl (freshwoman?) I recognized from my film class, was not taking any notes. (Actually, in Canada we usually just say 'first-year', not 'freshman', but anyway...)
"You're not interested in what I have to say?" Roazen asked her. "You can remember all of this?"
"Oh," the girl said, somewhat surprised. "It's not that. The thing is, I'm a film major?"
Roazen glared. "AND?"
"And so, you know, I don't feel the need to take notes? Because pen and paper and all that kind of stuff are on the way out? Because film is the future?" Every sentence ending in a question.
Roazen, stunned. Roazen, speechless. Roazen, still. Unmoving. The only thing moving was his head, as he scanned the room, looking at the rest of us for help, support, understanding. I saw his whole life flash before his eyes -- once, he had been in the same room as Freud's sister, unlocking the secrets of the the master's mind; once, he had been at Harvard, teaching the best and the brightest of America's elite; and now, now, here, here, he was in a lecture hall in North York, Ontario, Canada, of all places, far removed from Vienna, light years from the ivy-league of Boston's best, and --
Ah, but it was pointless. He sighed, and continued his lecture.
Roazen's class was the first one that royally, even galactically, messed with my head.
Because he set it up in an interestingly sly and deceptive way, you see.
The first book we read was John Stuart Mill's 'On Liberty'. Mill was the nineteenth century British child prodigy who had read all of Shakespeare and most of Milton by, like, eight or something ridiculous. (Ah, but by age eight I had read all of WEST COAST AVENGERS and X-FACTOR and ALPHA FLIGHT, the jewel in Marvel Comics crown, as far as I was concerned. WEST COAST AVENGERS being the California branch of the the regular Avengers, the super-hero team with Captain America as their leader, usually accompanied by Thor and Iron-Man and the Hulk and Ant-Man and the Wasp, and they're usually based in New York, right, but then they started out this L.A. branch, see, and I bought the first issue, the one with the super-archer Hawkeye as their leader, bought it at Muskie Bay cottages in the north of Ontario while I was on vacation as a kid, and I saw on the Net that Hawkeye is now a bad guy, went crazy or something, which is blasphemy, in my book. And X-FACTOR had the original X-Men back together, because, unlike the movies, Wolverine was not part of the original group, no, he didn't join until, like, the seventies. This is the group that had Angel and the Beast and Marvel-Girl and, best, of all, Iceman, who was so cool, literally, and I remember he got his own limited series, four issues it was, and I read the first issue sitting in the still-being-built kitchen of our new house on Evangelista Court, by the lake, dust all around, me sitting on the unfinished counter, and oh do I remember that. And ALPHA FLIGHT, well, that was a Canadian super-hero team based out of Ottawa, which was really, really cool. Their Captain was Vindicator, later Guardian, whose suit resembled Captain America's, except with a Canadian flag instead of a Yankee one, and he actually looked quite a bit like a Canadian-made super-hero called Captain Canuck, who was also very cool. So I don't think John Stuart Mill had read any of these Marvel Comics, you know, so he had his flaws, he did. That's all I'm saying.)
Mill patented the idea of utilitarianism -- the greatest good for the greatest number of people is what's best for society. People are logical, rational creatues, Mill stated. If you give them the opportunity to do good, to look after others, to help out society, mankind will choose this option. Mankind will take care of its own and look out for its own.
Sounded good to me. Made sense. 'On Liberty', the text, was a bit dry, but hey -- the guy probably popped it off in an afternoon or two, right? In between composing symphonies or establishing the British legal system or whatever he did in his spare time.
And then, well, then Roazen gave us the next text to read.
Doestoevski's 'The Underground Man'.
(I'd never heard of it. First thing I thought of was that old Gary Coleman t.v. movie. You ever see that one? On the right track, I think it was called. The one where he played this shoeshine boy in the New York City subway system who had never, I mean never, been above-ground, on the street, amongst the people. Not even for a hot-dog or a ball game. Lived in a coin-locker, he did. Can you believe that? And I saw that when I was very young and very impressed, him being Gary Coleman, and all. I mean, c'mon -- this was Arnold from Different Strokes. And here he was living underground. And at the end of the movie, he actually walked up the steps, up, towards the light, the light of the street, of day, of out there, and I remember that very clearly, watching that ending with my brother on the small t.v. in the family room of our old house on Bayshore Crescent, and what a wonderful feeling that was, triumphant, really, to see little Gary rise, conquer his fears and go up, and if you laugh or scoff at my emotions towards an early-eighties Gary Coleman flick, go ahead, be my guest, but I guess that means that you have never been young, or you've forgotten what it was like, forgotten how glorious such a piece of art can be, forgotten what it's like to be moved so powerfully, so forcefully, so much at so young an age.)
The exact specifics of the narrative escape me, but the 'underground man' was a depressed, lonely creature who haunted the streets of, what was it, Moscow, maybe? Disconnected from society. Distrustful of fellow man. Alone.
"Yes, yes, yes," Roazen argued. "Man is good, man is rational, man is proper. But what about this quote from Doestoevski's hero?"
Sometimes it's fun to smash things.
Again:
Sometimes it's fun to smash things.
The truth of that floored me. The undeniability of that wiped me clean. He was right. Sometimes it is fun to smash things. How does Mill explain that?
I realized that they had designed this course to screw with my head. They had succeeded.
And the rest of the semester was a fascinating examination of how indiviual psychological inclinations affected the course of large-scale political systems. They started by introducing conventional outlines (a la Mill) of how society should and will be run, and then they introduced, Roazen and his teaching assistants did, an element of darkness, savagery, even malice into the equation. How can these two streams co-exist?
We'd go to the lecture twice a week and then go for a smaller tutorial group to discuss what Roazen had talked about.
Much talk was about the nihilistic 'underground man'. I remember my t.a., a long, grey-haired dude in his late thirties, saying: "There is no such thing as a nihilist, because a true nihilist would kill himself."
Hmmm, I thought. I think I wanted to ask: Um, could you explain 'nihilism' again? But I didn't.
This was the same t.a. who stated: "When Marx died, he was not a Marxist. I repeat: When Marx died, he was not a Marxist." I remember realizing that this was supposed to be impor-tant and momentous, what he was saying. I nodded. We all nodded, the other students and me. The tone was very solemn. The t.a. let the silence build, crest, disappear. I think I wanted to ask: Um, could you explain 'marxism' again? But I didn't.
(What do you want? I was eighteen. And, um, come to think of it, if you do understand Marxism, drop me a line, will ya?)
The point is (and I do have one, or I did, or I've forgotten it, but it's here somewhere) that a lot of what university is good for is introducing young minds to concepts they have not encountered or considered before.
It's good to learn about nihilism. It's good to learn about the dark side of man. It's good to ponder that. Art, the best art, concerns itself with the dark, inevitable downslide of human existence. We are doomed, the best art says. It recognizes the fallibility of man, and the inevi-
tability of that fall. That's what makes drama, drama -- the conflict of our futile strivings.
But in the real world, in life, outside of the movie theater and the lecture hall, away from the world of the novel, such thinking leads...nowhere. Nothing can be built on nothing.
And I think Western culture has created a kind of negative vortex centred around the denigration of possibility and the triumph of cynicism, where all sincere, guided, directed effort can be deemed passe and, even worse, naive.
The great danger is that nihilism can seem to be viable amonst young people.
Why bother to stop AIDS in Africa, we ask. What's the point, we wonder. Do-gooders be damned. Best to wallow in our own negativity and refuse to begin.
But there are people out there who are emerging from the underground. Who are seeking a better way for their fellow man. Yes, yes, as the shoddiness of most of the world attests to -- sometimes it is, it is fun to smash things. Students need to be taught that. They need to know that their negative, destructive impulses are not unnatual, no, not all -- they're human. But you remember Animal House? Remember Tom Hulce, trying to decide whether or not to sleep with the teenage chick, and there's a devil and an angel on each shoulder, whispering in his ear? That's our education, giving us the good and the bad of life. Kids have to know about that. Need to know about that.
To give, extend and embrace those sentiments, though, out in the real world, to use the root of those dark and dangerous feelings as a philosophy and an approach towards life, can lead only to spiritual and moral bankruptcy.
It can only lead down.
In another class, 'Good and Evil', I learned about Plato and the cave. We're all in the cave, unsure of the world beyond. We all have faulty perceptions. We're all misguided. We all acknowledge the evil that men do.
But my hero as a kid sure as hell wasn't Plato, and I learned a similar lesson early on.
Let's call it The Gary Coleman Doctrine, shall we?
You're either Gary Coleman living in the subway, refusing to go up, comfortable in the darkness. Or you can take the leap and walk the steps and see what's up there, in the light, while everybody else stays down below, in the cold, comfortable in their complacency as they watch and listen to the trains go by, carrying people to and from work, all day long. While they sit, and suffer, and revel in their misery.
