Bootstraps and Muck: On College Debt

Graduation = Debt

In this little morality play staged by OWS protesters, actors parody the "Get a degree, get a good job" narrative we all grew up with. This is one of the Occupy issues that hits closest to home for me. My wife and I have had to face the harsh reality that the story we were told proved untrue: while we probably make more money than if we hadn't gone to school, we are so burdened with debt that, in terms of a simple financial cost-benefit analysis, we may as well have skipped those long years of education. It's hard to pull yourself up by the bootstraps when your soles are stuck in the muck.

Eric Hoover, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, reports on a petition going around to get 1 million students to refuse to repay their student loans. The signers are willing to accept the consequences, but also seem to be betting that their numbers will send the kind of message that will change the system first. The "system," here, means the colleges, according to Hoover. Protesters seem to be accusing colleges of operating for profit margins rather than providing an affordable degree. 

If only. Colleges probably could do more to control their costs. From what I can see, there is certainly a lot of non-academic expenditure in our colleges, but this is also part of the competition to attract and retain students. The expectations of "the market" have changed from not just getting "an education" but having all sorts of extracurricular and supplemental services and activities that provide some kind of finishing school for moral development. In our current economy, we can't continue to provide this experience at a rate students can afford - that is, given their poor job prospects on the other end.

So I'm not sure it is just, or even primarily, colleges. But it's also not "just" the students who (at least seem to) demand this experience. Expectations are probably somewhat out of whack; students are probably not as prepared for the sacrifice school may entail as they ought to be. But they are surrounded by a culture that is pushing them toward school, including a president who wants to get more people into community colleges and, by extension, to finishing four-year degrees.

Nor, I think, is it as simple as a bunch of punk, spoiled kids not wanting to "get a job" to pay back their debt. Besides the obvious "what job?" question, there is the fact of rampant underemployment. We have jobs; they just don't pay.

This is where I stick most, however. As much as I would benefit from such a systemic change, or a "student bailout" as some are calling it, I have a hard time wrapping my head around the logic. I took the loans knowing I would have to repay them. While I was assured my education was a good investment, there was no cosmic guarantee that I would get that great job that would allow me to quickly get out of debt and begin to live the high life.

If I default on my mortgage debt, the bank takes back the house and it's their problem. Maybe not the most moral decision, but economically it makes some sense. But there's nothing the government can comparably take back should I up and quit paying my student loans. The American people have invested in me and the contribution I, through my education, can make back to the community. To default would seem a betrayal of that contract.

But the point the Occupy movements are making is that the contract was broken on the other side first. That is, the government has increasingly become an extension of corporate interests that do not share the values which our education is meant to support. They permitted the creation of an economy that traded not on crop futures but on people's futures, that rewarded not the creation of goods and services but of fantasy "assets" that contributed not to the common good but to the pockets of the wealthy elite. Bankers, brokers and CEOs are getting record bonuses and we're fighting about whether teachers are getting paid too much.

We all know what is really valued, figured in terms of where we put our money - and it's not our farmers, teachers, or artists. It's not our pastors or social workers or even the people on the assembly lines making our TVs and cell phones. My wife cannot afford to provide mental health services to lower-income people because she has to earn enough to pay back her student loans. Factor in that a major health insurance provider has lowered its compensation rate and it gets even more frustrating. 

The thing I don't understand about the conservative "get a job" perspective is how big businesses are the only institutions in this country that are beyond scrutiny. They'll put up with prosecuting individual misbehavior only because it allows them to say it was only a few people. But this is not an economy that rewards pulling oneself up from one's bootstraps, anymore. It rewards gambling with other people's money and shrugging your shoulders when you drastically cut your workforce. It's a value-less muck that needs moral leadership in all areas and all at once - government, businesses, banks, colleges, students, and workers. 

Why can't we agree that some things - the poor, the widow, the orphan, but also the worker, the land, our food, our communities - and profit is not a value above all others? 

Synonyms for Christian

I have been thinking a lot lately about Christians and the world. Every time I get involved in a Christian subculture I am impressed anew with the capacity of Christians to be tribal, insular, self-protective, complacent, passively submissive, and even fearful. Christians have done a good job of raising "good Christian kids" who go on to become "good Christian," which as often as not means "good American consumer-capitalists." I am far from convinced these are synonymous.

Think about it. Which of the following describes the Christians you know?

complacent		visionary
docile		loud
passive		activist
"sacrificial"		transformative
cooperative		imaginative
tribal		community-building
insular		embedded

Which of them describe history's famous followers of God, like Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton, Solzhenitsyn, Mother Teresa, Peter, Paul, Moses - or Jesus himself? They're not all opposites, exactly, and the second column isn't exactly meant to be a list of specifically Christian attributes, but it seems to me that Christians should have more of the second column than the first. Obedience and submission to God and his moral law do not strike me as the same as obedience and submission to injustice and indignity just because it is perpetrated by "our" government against someone else (the working poor, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan, usually). If Christ doesn't make a real difference in our lives - and in our lives as Americans - then how can he be relevant to anyone?

New Review: Anne Overstreet's Delicate Machinery Suspended

If you haven't checked out Englewood Review of Books, yet, this might be a good excuse. They've just posted my review of Anne M. Doe Overstreet's new collection of poems.

Warren Buffett: Complete Socialist?

John Stewart once again proves that the best defense against Fox News is to take a second to think about what the talking heads are saying.

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World of Class Warfare - Warren Buffett vs. Wealthy Conservatives
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Dooble: A Miscellany: Taxes on the Super-Rich Don't Hurt Jobs?

People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.

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via dooble-a-miscellany.blogspot.com

Warren Buffett wants to pay more taxes.

Taxes on the Super-Rich Don't Hurt Jobs?

This isn't anything new - I think it was MoveOn.org that had an ad featuring millionaires asking to have their taxes raised - but it's important to hear Warren Buffett say it as the "super committee" prepares to look at our national budget problems.

Among his most interesting points (made with pesky facts) is that higher tax rates in the 80s and 90s corresponded with job growth, while the last ten years have seen the reverse:

People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.

 A friend of mine also shared this graph that shows our budget problems starting with GW Bush's wars and economic policy, which, disappointingly, Obama has not done much to counteract. How is it we're so incapable of having civil, adult conversations about these things with a moderate pragmatist in office?

Restoring Participation (Williams's Grace and Necessity)

Participation in Western thought is usually a bad thing. Anthropologically, participation is the stuff of witch doctors and medicine men, the belief that one can be simultaneously oneself and inhabit the spirit or body of a crocodile or lion or river. Philosophically, it's a kind of group-think or convention that Socrates tried to break free from by asking what words meant. In the first sense participation is contrary to the integrity of the self; in the second sense it is the opposite of reflection, i.e., of philosophy.

In the latter half of his first essay in Grace & Necessity, Rowan Williams briefly discusses Jacques Maritain's use of participation in its theological sense of the "illuminating intellect."The idea seems to be an extension or implication of being made in the image of God. We are equipped with this illuminating intellect, which is "the reflection of God's formative mental activity within our own," a kind of "participatory awareness," below the surface of consciousness (preconscious, if anything; certainly not subconscious), "that resonates with the patterns of God's action in the created world."

What's this have to do with art?
The implication for art is, I think, clear enough. It suggests the artist attempts to listen to or perceive how, in Maritain's language, "things are not only what they are," how they "give more than they have." This presumes God's continuing activity in Creation to which our minds respond, and it explains in part why art always has a transgressive nature. Art in this sense reveals the "active intelligible life of the object" by denying its merely physical and perceptual boundaries, taking it up and rearranging, reorienting it to display it to us as a fresh thing (maybe even a thing always in need of freshening, thus of art).

This also clarifies how art is not, for Maritain, a product of the will or intention of the artist but still an act of intelligence. Art begins not with an idea, concept, or will but a sense, an intuition, or even perhaps a desire to know a thing intimately. It proceeds with an attention to the work itself (recall previous post) rather than to some purpose for the work, and so remains free, at least intrinsically, from moral judgments.

Williams shows that Maritain does at last recognize that art and morality begin to converge with respect to the world the work offers to us. We almost inevitably ask "whether a world laid before us by an artist is desirable for the kind of creatures we know ourselves to be." Theoretically, then, the work may be aesthetically beautiful but morally repulsive.

Or, more likely, morally problematic or stained. I think of Lars von Trier's Antichrist, a stunning film that disturbs and horrifies without the sensationalism and pornographic violence usually associated with the genre. It raises tough questions about the reality of evil and our modern attempts to explain or counsel it away, and it is just painfully beautiful visually. But ultimately von Trier's world is characterized more by darkness than light, held in the grip of an evil that will not be repressed and that offers no solution save desperate tears. It's for this reason that I really don't recommend the film to people - it's too dark, too hopeless, and it wants to burden the viewer with its own despair. Pan's Labyrinth might fit this category for me, too.

One last thing about participation
Williams doesn't explain how participation in Maritain isn't the bad thing philosophy thinks it is, but we might turn to David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite for help (sort of - it's a dense book, so whatever help it provides comes only after some serious work). In brief, Hart argues that the traditional understanding of the Trinity is of true difference, meaning God himself is a relation to himself. That is, there is no higher unity of the Trinity, which would make the persons of the Trinity lesser gods or mere aspects of God. In other words, in Christian theology, there is "difference at the origin," and difference does not collapse or resolve into some unity, nor does it represent some violence done to an originary unity but remains a harmony and a peace.

Basically, Hart refutes postmodernism's anxiety of participation by rejecting not only the modern thought it critiques but the heart of Western metaphysics itself, the theory of the One and the Many. The revelation of the Trinity, Hart argues, is that unity is itself diverse, contains differences that do not dissolve into one another. Creation is diverse, multiplex, abundant because it reflects, finitely, the infinite diversity and abundance of God's own nature.

Thus, if we sacrifice the concept of the autonomous self and the violence of either unity or division, participation becomes a joining in the dance, the invitation of love itself.