I guess old habits die hard because the first day of class I sat at the very front row, in the very first seat munching on a bag of chips – naturally, I was stress eating. I mean it was the first day of class.
Humanities has always been a topic of interest for me, one of my fortes, yet it felt so surreal to simply sit in the first two seminars as a complete mute – I was so afraid to speak.
Being possibly the only token conservative, I expected the class to be an extremely liberal playground for social justice warriors to rant about their problems and political correctness. Thank goodness I was wrong because it was surprisingly very academic-centered and non-partisan so that’s a good thing!
As I became more acquainted with the class material, I became more immersed with political debates, listening to opinions from both the left and the right. The seminars became a basis for civil discourse while my personal indulgences in debates became a private arena for thought and self-reflection.
In retrospect to the first week, one of the most memorable things in Edward Said’s “Politics of Knowledge” was the idea of identity politics – the tendency for groups of people to form exclusive political alliances on the basis of gender, religion, race, creed and so forth whereupon Said actively combats this by reminding his audience that withdrawing into one’s identity – such as pride for one’s country or ethnicity alone – is not enough as this myopic attitude renders people incapable of possessing different viewpoints. Instead, it is the individual’s duty to become educated in all subject areas from politics to culture before developing a stance.
While this was published over four decades ago, Said’s topic on identity politics – amongst a plethora of other categories – remains an ever prevalent subject in today’s society. I’ll only give a few prime examples such as Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and the LGBTQ+ community – all alliances, or monopolies I should say, which cherry pick specific groups of people while disenfranchising anyone who either refuses to be pigeonholed into their categories or disagrees with them. Newsflash: you get blacklisted.
Each of the aforementioned movements, while sweet-sounding and innocuous are all deeply rooted in victimization – the idea that these people are systemically oppressed by a lurking, omnipotent patriarchy. Crazy, when you spell it out right? I’d go on, but I’d digress – the point is, the very thing we’re taught to fight against in school happens to be the very thing we turn a blind eye to the most.
Another one of my favorite topics were Rousseau’s and Volney’s polarizing opinions on whether or not the human race was reaching a decline or an uptick, respectively. For Rousseau, the human race is at a perpetual state of decline.
Despite being one of the most educated scholars of his time, Rousseau argued that advancements in the arts and sciences were a pernicious field as it sought to bring humans further away from their morals and virtues as they became more enthralled with technological innovations – the printing press, despite holding the purpose of promulgating different ideas to a wider audience, became the very prime example of human failure. Hmmm, this definitely took me a while to process; how could something so useful be a downfall to civilization? I guess you could say every invention, every deed, is part of a double edged sword.Let’s take a look at the internet, which is just a digitized printing press. According to polls as late as 2015, about 3.2 billion of the world’s population has access to the internet; compared to a decade and a half ago, only around 738 million people purchased internet. Certainly, Google, Bing, Yahoo, and search engines overall are one of the most powerful resources for finding information and answers-on-demand in today’s society. In fact, Google alone reaches up to 3.8 billion search queries a day. Yet, how much of the information presented is actually accurate? Social media platforms such as Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook have all recently joined the bandwagon of becoming reliable, newsworthy outlets. It’s silly when you list out a mode of entertainment as informative. But when you think about it, it’s ridiculous how many millennials and Generation Z extract their knowledge from Twitter and Instagram posts without so much as questioning the origins of the source. According to Pew Research’s statistics from 2017, 67% of Americans report getting their source of news from social media outlets; 55% of those are ages 50 and older; meanwhile, 78% of those below the ages of 50 – and are more tech savvy – rely even more on social media as the basis of their knowledge on current events. As a result, blinded outrage on social media is translated as awareness and lengthy posts with its two cents and a smattering of six-syllable SAT words are taken as doctrine.
Now let’s take a look at television. On average, about 57% of Americans rely on television as their source of news information. Breaking it down, Fox and CNN, two Republican and Democratic powerhouses, receive about 1.72 million and 826K views per day – both respectively – from Americans between the ages of 25-54. Yet, how many of those Americans take this as a grain of salt, or search for a modicum of evidence outside of their political sphere and local news channel?
Again, the point is, have we really become more educated in regards to our technological advancements and our means of sharing information which aren’t just limited to the printing press? The answer is, we’ve become more ignorant – we’ve become significantly more lazy by relying on information from anyone and anywhere rather than committing to our own research. Tragic.
On the other hand, Volney is the optimist who believes that trial-and-error will lend men the ability to better himself. While technological advances have allowed man to better himself, America is well past its heyday – think of America as a peak and we’ve past it so it’s pretty much a downhill slope here on out. Sorry Volney, that’s a TKO right there for you.
And lastly, today in our final seminar, Amalia posed the question of whether ruins were one of the many costs of an empire. Well, let’s take a look at empires; they’re simply a collective formation of humans, mortals, hence the death, destruction, and ruins of an empire is not a cost, it’s a natural life cycle. What is immortal and possibly both a cost and a benefit is the legacy it leaves behind – and this isn’t just limited to empires, it’s applicable to all the individuals and groups within that empire. Take WWI, WWII, and the Vietnam War for instance; the former two hold the indelible legacy for its gruesome grapple between superpowers, but also earns the reputation as an American victory that is the embodiment of fighting for freedom. The latter however, is remembered as a flop and till this day remains disputed as to whether Americans should’ve set foot on Vietnam soil or not. Another relevant example would be the effects of capitalism versus socialism. I mean come on, why is this even question, but unfortunately in today’s media, it is. Let’s dive right in: capitalism clearly works – just look at America, Canada, Japan, England, really any country with a free society flourishes from capitalism. What about socialism then? Clearly it doesn’t. First and foremost, if socialism did work, we wouldn’t pose the question as to whether or not it does; we’d jump straight in to whether or not the ends justify the means? In this case, if we look at the means, there’s over 100 million deaths under socialism/communism which accounts for more than the Civil War, both World Wars, Cold War, and the Vietnam War … COMBINED. Insane, huh? Let’s just toss that question in the garbage along with political correctness. But going back to the point, regardless of how you look at an empire, pretty much the entire world has been part of different empires for the past 2,500 years; but like humans, empires are mortal and thus cannot live on, but it is the legacy of the people within those empires that leave an irreparable account in history.
Works Cited
Davidson, Jacob. “3.2 Billion People Now Using Internet Worldwide | Money.” Time, Time, 26 May 2015, time.com/money/3896219/internet-users-worldwide/. Accessed 06 December 2018.
Shearer, Elisa. “News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2017.” Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project, Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project, 7 Sept. 2017, http://www.journalism.org/2017/09/07/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2017/. Accessed 06 December 2018.
“How Many Searches per Day on Google in 2018?” Ardor SEO, 22 Aug. 2018, ardorseo.com/blog/how-many-google-searches-per-day-2018/. Accessed 06 December 2018.
Otterson, Joe. “Cable News Ratings: Fox News Breaks Records, MSNBC Posts Significant Growth.” Variety, Variety, 28 Mar. 2017, variety.com/2017/tv/news/cable-news-ratings-fox-news-msnbc-1202017940/. Accessed 06 December 2018.
the reason behind the crumbling of a civilization 