This is the Right Thing to Say: On Learning to Choose Unwisely
A long time ago I was walking through a Cuban graveyard when I came across a man who claimed to be an angel. He took out his wallet, gave me a business card and said goodbye returning to the high-humidity mist from whence he had materialized.
I looked at the business card.
‘How about that,’ I thought. ‘The angel can paint.’
This little parable—assuming it is a parable—isn’t going to help anyone who has job anxiety surrounding their degree or is frightened about making money after university. What I mean to say is that in order to be cognizant of a state of uncertainty something extraordinary had to happen to me. But as I get older it seems to me that less and less extraordinary things are about these days. What has transpired over the past 4 years in North America, in the United Kingdom and in China is not extraordinary. Look to history: it will show repetitions, for the present is merely an echo of what has happened already. And being uncertain has its perks—Wittgenstein called it ‘scepticism’ and it meant you could never be wrong because you were always wrong. The problem is that if you are always wrong then it makes little sense to be uncertain about anything—unless there comes a day when we are certainly right about the colour of the sky, or the way we love our partner, or how utterly we despise a colleague. Seeing, loving and despising are almost always wrong, and carried out in a sense of intellectual impetuosity—for those who see, love and despise almost always believe themselves to be right.
I never saw any of the angel’s paintings. They were on exhibition in the Netherlands and I was short on cash. (This is the modus operandi in Cuba.) But I told the angel that I was worried—nay uncertain—about what adult life held for me in terms of money. The angel told me to not worry about money, for it would never do me any good. (‘I did buy the plane ticket to Cuba,’ I thought. ‘Maybe he’s right.’) And as I said before he disappeared into the mist.
I did not stop worrying the moment I’d been told to put away capital things. In fact, I began to worry more—human beings tend to do this, I find. We are always afraid of those people who seem to know more than us. What is often the case is that those people are of the mind that they don’t really know anything at all, and that there is nothing to know. I would like to say that if the Buddha were around today, he would have been locked up in point three seconds. Except what do I expect to gain from making such a statement? For, surely the basis of the example rests in the contradiction? I.e., I don’t want to be locked up; to have been heard saying that knowledge is in the eye of the beholder and that there really is nothing to know. After all, I like to think that I will end up teaching at a university: a place where knowledge is currency, and loans are scarce.
What is wrong with jail and what is wrong with there being nothing? I struggled for many years with alcohol addiction and am now sober. One of the recurring feelings—and I put great emphasis upon that word—among other alcoholics is that feeling of relief after being thrown in jail for doing something awful whilst under the influence. In that cell we find peace, freedom, and freedom of thought. We are free because we are not free—free from choosing unwisely. But there comes a time when the addict must learn that choosing unwisely is one of the great gifts of existence. It is the impetus for growth: the force or energy that charges the sap in the tree, extending roots and branches. The worst thing I can say about today’s students is that some are terrified of choosing unwisely. Some believe themselves to have a monopoly on freedom—but those who think they are free cannot ever see, love, or despise in any real sense. We must learn to choose unwisely, to take the low road, to spin endlessly like sperm in one of those old film reels they used to show in biology class.
We are free because we are not free—
free from choosing unwisely.
The angel had most definitely been to jail—but what I found most shocking was that he never used parables to get across what he was trying to say. He was a literal person who had been born in the ideological land of Cuba, and who had spurned the literary as every half-decent artist has done. But what do I mean to gain by uttering such a statement? This is the crux of the problem: should we be wanting to gain something from what we say on the topic of precarity, or should we be wanting to lose something? I want to lose the sensation that education is anything else than precarious, for I feel this to be true. ‘Education must be precarious; otherwise, it dies.’—for, in order to embrace uncertainty and the metallic Cuban daylight, I must feel that this is the right thing to say.
‘Education must be precarious; otherwise, it dies.’
Image courtesy of Walker Zupp