Do Your Homework

I never did my homework. The homework got done, usually by quickly copying a friend’s homework before the first bell rang, or by rush jobs in class before the class in which the homework was due. Almost never, though, by sitting down at home and doing work. I rarely studied for tests. Generally didn’t do the assigned reading. During classroom instruction, when I wasn’t doing my homework for a forthcoming class, I doodled or daydreamed. Somehow I got through high school with mostly B’s, just good enough to keep my mother off my back and to qualify for my college of choice, NYU. (At the time, NYU didn’t have anywhere near the prestige it does now and I knew that becoming an acting student would hinge more on my audition than my grades.) My attitude was poor, my grades mediocre, my study habits nonexistent.

I can’t tell you how much I regret all of that now.

With news of West Virginia University cutting the heart out of its liberal arts offerings as a sacrifice to the Gods of Profitability, I’m reminded of my own deliberate act of academic self-sabotage. It’s one of my biggest regrets in life. I wish I could somehow go back in time and beat my younger self about the head with a Trapper Keeper. “Pay attention!” I would say, “Do the work!”

Why?

Because high school is the last chance most Americans have to obtain a rudimentary liberal arts education, that hodgepodge of classes in the natural sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities. The value of these classes isn’t only in their subject matter. Memorizing obscure historical dates and the standard order of multiplying two binomials (FOIL, literally the only thing I remember from Algebra I) has little intrinsic value beyond making you a decent Jeopardy contestant. Instead, what these classes do, at their best, is teach students how to think.

Pictured: not me.

A comedian friend of mine called Natasha Leggero once told me that she didn’t have a thought in her head until she was 30. I laughed, but it was only much later that I realized I didn’t have much of a thought in my own head until I was well into my 40’s.

We take the concept of “thought” for granted. I know I did. For too much of my life, I believed that thought was the ability to process information. And, duh, it is. Data comes in, we make some use of that information, and boom - snack time. But that’s only functional thought. Fundamental but algorithmic. It’s the thought of monkeys and machines. What’s different about humans is that we have the unbelievable capacity to not only absorb information but to analyze it, turn it over in one’s mind, fold it in on itself or expand it outwards, criticize it, combine it with other thoughts, and come to some conclusion, or, perhaps, to use it as a springboard for some other, novel area of exploration. We possess the ability to think deeply, which is one of the singular joys of our humanity.

Nobody ever told me this when I was in high school. Nobody ever told me this in college, not even when everybody was high.

That’s the true purpose of the liberal arts education. It’s also the reason these programs are under threat. Look at the other states in which books are being banned, colleges defunded or mangled. West Virginia, Florida, Kansas, Missouri. What do all these states they have in common?

Yeah.

The traditional liberal arts education is Socratic in nature. It’s about questioning. What do you think and why do you think it? These sorts of thoughts inevitably lead upwards, until they are directed at power structures. The Republicans who lead the states mentioned above aren’t interested in their power being questioned. I don’t mean their individual power, although that, too, is the case. I mean the “conservative” power structure that keeps these hollow men in their employ. There is nothing wrong with traditional conservatism, a conservatism which uses these same questions to resist rapid change, to reason for temperance, or to advocate for various policy positions.

But that’s not today’s conservative movement, which is rooted in an anti-science, anti-intellectual worldview which waves the Bible in one hand and tax cuts in the other. It’s a nonsensical clusterfuck of absurd culture war talking points designed to distract its constituents from the fact that they’re picking your pocket. It’s a shell game. It’s a lie. And for it to continue working, it requires as many stupid people as possible.

The ability to think deeply is the enemy of stupidity. And that’s what this is about. All of it. The book banning and the climate deniers and the blatant fear-mongering. It’s about dangling shiny objects over here so they can fuck you over there. For some, yes, it’s also about a dangerous vision for a white theocratic America. Those people have made common cause with the plutocratic set who just want to strip-mine American for parts and leave you holding the bag. This isn’t new. What’s new is that the veneer of respectability has fallen from its face. It’s ugly. Worse, it’s deliberately stupid. And it needs you to be stupid too.

Deep thinking will not lead to any political party. It won’t lead to any one point of view. Far from it. Deep thinking won’t even be consistent because it will often take us to conclusions which contradict our own beliefs. The proof that “conservatism” wants to discourage this type of thinking is in the conclusion I just outlined. “Conservatism” doesn’t want you to question political allegiance, point of view, or contradiction. Whether that type of “conservatism” comes from the Left or Right is irrelevant. The goal is the same: obedience. It just so happens that, in this country, right now, it’s coming from one political party and its embodied by one man who has never had a thought deeper than “tits”.

“Tits…”

I wish I had paid better attention back then because it would help me understand my world better now. It’s a world, frankly, that leaves me mystified more than ever. I don’t like feeling dumb, but I prefer my dumbness be as clear-eyed as possible. So I think about this stuff to the best of my ability and I hope you do, too. What is the rallying cry of the anti-intellectual right when they want to seem smart? “Do your own research!” Which encourages people to seek out low-quality, confirmation bias information. To combat this inanity, I would ask people to do something more rigorous. Instead, I would say, simply, “Do your homework.”