Paul Tough's article "The Class-Consciousness Raiser" from last week's Times Magazine is a mildly interesting profile of a woman (kinda funnily) named Ruby Payne who teaches teachers how to get along with lower-class students. Their culture is different, dig? Apparently, "Foucauldian" types (this word is actually deployed) hate her. Quack quack. Now, I think her basic idea is perfectly meritorious, but the article does raise some doubts. First, she believes, as so many people now bewilderingly seem to do, in the Force:
Then in 1993, after moving to Texas, Payne read a book that had a profound effect on her: ''Creating Money,'' a New Age-infused guide to ''the spiritual laws of money.'' It's an odd book, ostensibly dictated to the authors by two ''spirit guides'' named Orin and DaBen. But Payne was inspired. ''The book said, Make a list of what you want in your life and ask the universe to bring it to you,'' she told me. ''So I did. I wrote: 'I want a life without financial constraints. I want a life without institutional constraints. And I want to make a difference with children.' And it happened!''
Payne's ideas about class differences in perceptions of "everything from time to love to money to language" also sound a bit wonky:
In a few words, Payne explains how each class sees each concept. Humor in poverty? About people and sex. In the middle class? About situations. In wealth? About social faux pas.
Maybe this is just my middle-class sensibility talking, but don't the "situations" that I admittedly find so hilarious subsume people, sex, and even -- I hope I'm not trespassing on anyone's castle here -- social faux pas?
And, despite the fact that my mind is too scattered now to really put this point convincingly, I think there's something very telling and tragic about the conjunction of, on the one hand, Payne's noble New Age (but also modernist) wish to live "a life without institutional constraints" and, on the other hand, her preaching of the importance of lower-class adoption of upper- and middle-class personal stylings (what she calls "the hidden rules"). She's too smart and too awake to the transcendent qualities of the human spirit (yes I went there) to think that situations are really more funny than people or sex, or that poor culture is really inferior to rich culture; but the facts of institutional constraint dictate, albeit unjustly and arbitrarily, that submission is the price to be paid for membership in the elite, with all the benefits that brings. I'm sure she's right about the situation (giggle -- sorry, can't help it, was raised that way) as it stands -- you can't get a job without possessing pointless, irrelevant social grace X or Z -- but what sticks in my craw about this kind of analysis (which, if I remember correctly, David Foster Wallace uses at some point to justify foisting his version of grammatical purism onto recalcitrant black college students) is how quickly the injustice and arbitrariness fall out of the picture. It's like: shrug. Wink!
Same thing: Mrs. Keyhole received a comment on her thesis, from a respected professor of English, saying something to the effect of "I see that you don't obey the no-split-infitive rule. While some people do reject its authority, some don't, so you may be distracting your readers." This really got me (though not Mrs. Keyhole, bless her heart) angry: here this professor was, signalling her awareness of the idiocy and baselessness of the "rule" only to reassert its power! And what -- for the sake of the fogies and their all-too-rockable boat? Doesn't this line of argument suggest that we should never change anything, since someone somewhere might not be ready for the shock? Isn't this exactly the kind of limp gradualist whining that Martin Luther King, Jr., attacked in "Letter from Birmingham Jail" ("the appalling silence of the good people" who think that time on its own will wash away everything bad)?
Payne, in her oscillation between the vain hope for a life without institutional constraints and the total resignation to those constraints (regarded as lacking justification yet weirdly, robustly resisting change), is a miniature portrait of life without Unger. Look, people: we can never be totally free of institutional constraints, but we can be more free than we are now. Can't we?
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