Anyone with a grievance has a dissertation.
Aphoristic sparks from one spiritual [PhD] seeker exiting the labyrinth
I woke early this morning, rolling my eyes: Anyone with a grievance has a dissertation.
“Having something to prove” is not quite the same thing as a grievance, but it tends to motivate psychologically for materializing the research that turns a chronic kvetch into a project you would willingly share with others.
Is anyone with a memory entitled to a memoir? Possibly. All that lays between energy and form is finesse. Patience helps, too.
Is the extent to which guilt operates as a driver (conscious or unconscious) in (white “Western”) peoples’ political imagination (and social behavior) demonstrative of the extent to which religion, especially institutional Christianity, still dominates the imagination of the collective? Because the program continues to run under the surfaces of individuals and families? Clearly the left cannot afford to stay dazzled by and invested in scientism while handing off all religious power to the right…
In graduate school / in academia I see many people who are ultimately motivated in their career trajectory by an unholy alliance of “guilt” and “having something to prove,” usually framed (in their psychologies and underlying emotions) as ethical or even religious. The responsibility may be to themselves; to their families; to their community; to their imaginary batch of disenfranchised to whom they have been assigned, the shadow of their privilege, where the money “would be” going “if life were fair”. Attachment to responsibility creates guilt and a need to prove oneself.
The liberal-minded person seeking higher education may be narcissistically driven to assuage their guilt, which is usually not “chosen” in this lifetime, but inherited, like whiteness or a trust fund. Somewhere along the line, they are encouraged to take their conditions personally. In the pursuit of higher education, they may tear themselves to shreds, either publicly (in research, teaching, and publishing) or privately (in intimate and work relationships). This is because they are trying to scratch that guilt itch. But the itch is just the ego, again. The more you scratch it, the worse it gets. And so academia is, by and large, the way it is: not particularly directly useful to individuals, nor any collective resistance. The balance between form and energy is off; there’s a need for finesse (to get people out of the system; to get the system off of people’s backs).
Academics—and all people sensitive and impulsive enough to feel and respond to the “call” to itch this guilt—often have the most inflated spiritual egos. The spirituality superiority says, “I am better than others because I meditate” (or pray, or fast, or avoid sex or orgasm, or cultivate compassion, or eat vegan, etc). It is an ego of pride-in-abstinence; on the outside looking in, it can read as the ghost of hunger, product of something like disordered [psychic] eating: an intensely present absence.
This spiritual ego becomes intellectual when it says, “I am better than others because I read; I critically reflect; I am certain of my position based on comparisons with others (to whose inner lives I am not privy) concluded by material data, and I feel ethically uncomfortable about those conclusions.”
It is an unacknowledged drive to “self”-annihilation—again, in pursuit of removing the stain of inherited upper-class guilt, mixed with the unsavory lower/middle-class hunger to prove oneself in a professional arena—that is driving many (white American “liberal”) academics; and therefore their efforts almost always end up self-indulgent and pretentious, that is, fear-driven and disconnected from the reality of others. There is no psychic safety in the mental isolation of research; even less in setting up and defending small like-minded camps. “Build risk into your practices,” as BC said on Sunday at our Artists’ meetup. “It’s important.”
Entrenchment of the fear that the privilege of access to education separates one from “the people” drives the seeker of self-transforming education further from others (those who primarily exist “off campus”) and deeper into ideology. Ideologies are delineated, and in some cases designed, by the fearful in order to acknowledge and “double down on” this painful experience of separateness, in an attempt to "understand” (dominate) that pain using the mind.
Ideology is not able to accommodate the needs of an individual seeker of transformation—not even the finally-losing-steam ideological cult of the individual, “individualism,” can satisfy one, not only because humans need each other (a truth now belabored by lonesome critics), but because ideology is based in belief, and belief is not the ground of religious being—ceremony is.
There are infinite yet-unknown forms of ceremony. Since I co-create with an awareness of the history of the New Age, for me, ceremony is scalable. It can be held “alone”;1 between two persons or beings; in small groups; en masse. My favorite, or at least most practical and frequent, is the act, the rite, of solitary writing; the devotion of time spent sitting-there, not the ideas or words themselves. Ceremony is. It is the waters of acknowledgment, refreshment, and loving attention offered to the ceremonial aspects of higher education that will drip through hard stone: of guilt; of hungering to prove oneself; of the struggle to connect with others, and to value and make choices from those connections.
Which is another way of saying: ego does not dissolve without ceremony. Scratch that itch! Unconsciously, Academia (the university), frustrated from within and without as it now finds itself, before it decomposes utterly, will likely yet continue to attract [spiritual] seekers of “self-transforming” education; not because it breeds and spreads palliative ideologies, but because it exists to administrate ceremonies of becoming and belonging.
Images:
Faye Dunaway in “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967)
Henry Fuseli, “The Nightmare,” 1781
Alex Katz, “Lake Light,” 1992
Alphonse Mucha
between you and You; you and nature; you and your art practice; you and God