Icarian Flights

Saturday's episode of the Slate Money podcast led off with a discussion of President Biden's recent decision to grant partial debt relief to some student loan borrowers, provided they are earning below a certain income threshold. The chief point they wanted to stress was that—however much the policy may seem to benefit a relatively privileged subset of the community (we live, after all, in a society in which only about half of the people will ever attend any amount of college)—we shouldn't be deluded into thinking this partial debt cancellation is a giveaway to the upper-middle class. To the contrary, the hosts emphasized, many of the people who will benefit most from the policy are those who enrolled in a program and never completed it—ending up with debt but no degree to reward them for the expense—and those graduating into low-wage professions. 

The policy is manifestly not, therefore, what it is often portrayed to be in the right-wing imaginary: a free gift of taxpayer money to spoiled kids with professional parents who saddled themselves voluntarily with debt in order to get MFAs. Such a person, the Slate Money hosts emphasized, is as much a fictitious bogey of right-wing punditry as the hypothetical food stamps recipients buying lobster and steak in the check-out line. It is, that is to say, a figment used to mine the rich vein of social resentment upon which conservative rhetoric feeds, not an accurate picture of the debt relief policy's typical beneficiary. 

I don't dispute anything about Slate Money's characterization on factual grounds. They are probably right, so far as I know. But I find it interesting that the archetype of the indebted MFA grad works so well for the purposes of stirring up public indignation, whether it is true or not. Supposing the policy were in fact aimed at relieving just such individuals as that, we might ask: would it be such a problem? Why do we want the hypothetical MFA grad to have to suffer and writhe for their sins? The argument seems to be that the MFA grad "ought to have known" going into the program that they would make little money coming out of it, and that it was not worth putting themselves to the expense of obtaining it. But this is to assume that money was their goal at the front end. What if it wasn't? 

And here, I think, we are getting closer to the heart of the matter, which is our society's fundamental ambivalence toward education itself. On the one hand, education is almost universally valued, because it is widely seen as the only or the best way to "rise" in our society. Education opens the door to better pay in the profession of one's choice, as well as to new professions that are accorded higher prestige because of the material rewards that attend them. When most parents watch their children go to college, therefore, they are hoping the experience will allow them to advance in society—or, to put the matter bluntly, to make more money. 

Yet at the same time as it opens the door to making more money, education also ruinously implants something fatal to monetary ambition: ideals. The exact mechanism by which it does so is not entirely clear. Very little about the appreciation or understanding of art, literature, or any of the humane sciences—I would wager—was ever successfully conveyed through classroom instruction. But to the extent that the mere fact of being educated prompts individuals to start thinking of themselves differently—to see themselves as budding artists or intellectuals, say—it may in the very act diminish their capacity to make money. In this way, education takes with one hand what it gives with the other. At the very same time that it is helping people to make more money, it is instilling in them reasons to be discontented with the mere pursuit of private means for their own sake. 

And this, I would posit, is the reason why our society feels so conflicted about it. On the one hand, all or most parents want to see their kids go to college. But they wish those kids would simply keep their focus while doing so, graduate with a marketable skill, and not be distracted along the way by dangerous talk of humanity, social progress, or personal greatness in realms outside of financial acquisition. In Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, there is a memorably poignant scene in which the chief character is graduating from college, and—regarding his parents who have arrived for the occasion—he reflects on the hopes they reposed in him that he would use his education to somehow advance in the world. And the cruel irony of it, he realizes, is that he will use his degree to do just that, but that it will be achievement not in the realms they envisioned for him, but in those "beyond the scale of their value."

This is indeed how it often happens. Parents and children agree that education should be used in order to advance. They may even both wish that it will enable the child to "do great things." But it often takes place that, through the process of education, the child's "scale of value" shifts (to use Wolfe's term). They start to define "achievement" and "great things" in ways that increasingly diverge from how their parents use those terms. A parent may think of these terms as referring to making more money or moving the individual—and, with them, the family—higher in social rank. The child, however, becoming perilously tainted with ideals as the educational process goes on, begins to wonder whether they might not aim higher than mere money-making: whether true greatness might not lie in acts of public charity or artistic creation, etc. Then, after all, one has moved beyond advancing an individual or a family: one is aiding all society!

This is, in substance, the problem that Thomas Hardy's protagonist Clym Yeobright faces, in The Return of the Native, and which ultimately proves his tragic undoing. Yeobright is a clever and relatively well-educated young man of whom the society of Egdon Heath expects "great things." And for a time, he appears to fulfill their hopes for him, by working in Paris and making good money in the service of a jewelry concern. But here, the snake in the garden of education rears its head. For the very brightness and relative learned-ness that enable Clym to advance in worldly terms—relative to his country forebears—also instills in him the sense of the inadequacy of those "worldly terms." He doesn't want to just make money, least of all in a frivolous profession, and he can't bring himself to find meaning or contentment in such a lot. He therefore decides he would rather serve humanity by becoming an educator of the poor. 

When she learns that he has thrown up his job in Paris and fastened on the pursuit of this rather chimerical education scheme, Yeobright's mother is appalled. With all his intellect and education, she cannot fathom why he would not want to "do well" in life. He assures her that he does want to do well, just not in the sense in which she uses the term. "I am not weary of [doing well]," he declares, "though I am weary of what you mean by it." (He has, that is to say, found a substitute "scale of value.") Later on, when he has hurled himself onto the heath outdoors to watch for the lunar eclipse that is to signal a rendezvous with his lover, he pines for a world where achievement is not equated solely with making money—one in which, as Hardy's omniscient narrator puts it, "personal ambition was not the only recognized form of progress."

Yeobright's mistake, in Hardy's view, is that he aims too high too quickly. And here again we find the fundamental tension within the pursuit of education. Parents want to put their kids through college so that they will aim higher in the world than the parents themselves were ever able to reach. But there is always the risk that they will overshoot the mark. Hardy—in the usual sardonic yet compassionate vein that distinguishes his tragic vision—suggests that there are three stages of advancement, which he calls the "bucolic," the "social," and the "intellectual." The bucolic, agrarian life is lived practically in the state of nature. Clym Yeobright, though born into it, is agreed on all sides to be destined to transcend those humble beginnings. But his educational scheme, Hardy writes, seeks to pull the community straight through from the bucolic to the intellectual stage, without first passing through a period of social advancement. And therein lies his mistake. 

Many people who send their kids to college in the hopes that they will strike it rich, we might say, are presently living in the "bucolic" stage. They want better for their children than to remain in such a state. They want their kids to advance to the "social" stage, instead, through financial gain. But the danger in the process of education is that—even as they are learning the skills needed to advance in the "social" realm, they are also being taught ideals that prompt them to aim for a stage even higher than that. As a result, the children miss a step. They go off to school and come back filled with aspirations and ideals belonging to the "intellectual" stage before first passing through the period of material enrichment. And this is precisely the kind of situation that leads to things like people getting MFAs that they can't afford to pay for. 

As Hardy emphasizes, most people cannot see further than one stage in front of them. "A man should be only partially before his time:" he writes, "to be completely to the vaward in aspirations is fatal to fame." This is the problem with Yeobright's plans, and those of many an aspiring MFA. It is best, Hardy writes, that people aspire to intellectual ideals only after the material have been satisfied. It is only among those for whom material matters have become "stale," he writes, that conditions are ripe for the move to the intellectual stage. To argue, by contrast, for a leap directly from the bucolic to the intellectual stage—or, let's say, the impoverished to the spiritual stage—"without going through the process of enriching themselves" is—says Hardy, in a felicitous simile—"not unlike arguing to ancient Chaldeans that in ascending from earth to the pure empyrean it was not necessary to pass first into the intervening heaven of ether." 

The result of Yeobright's error in seeking to skip a stage is that he proves a disappointment to his wife—who shares his ambitions for something grander and nobler in life but cannot see it unfolding on the heath—and ultimately indirectly ruins his health and prospects in a too-dogmatic pursuit of an idealistic vision. 

The public's view of the indebted MFA graduate is—one imagines—rather like Hardy's attitude toward Yeobright, except unleavened by the great author's compassion and humanism. (Hardy, one gathers, would prefer the Yeobrights of the world, even if their idealism leads to tragic and self-destructive consequences, and Yeobright's ultimate fate as a poor itinerant preacher is by no means portrayed as a bad outcome for him, however ruinous it may be to his wife.) The public regards the MFA grad as someone who skipped a step. They were right to aspire, the public thinks, by seeking an education. But they should only have aspired for the next rung up the ladder. From bucolic conditions, they should have sought the social goal of material enrichment. Instead, they aimed higher still, and sought to achieve through artistic creation, where the rewards are seldom monetary, but could be even more lasting in terms of social impact and immortality. 

The conclusion from this is perhaps that people should only undertake the higher aspirations once they have satisfied the material ones. But, the public's argument for this viewpoint is simply to point out the material hardship (namely, indebtedness) that often attends the act of skipping a step. And thus, petitio principii, they are assuming that which they should prove: namely, that money is the highest good. After all, the whole point, from the perspective of the person skipping a step, is that they have chosen to value something else more highly than making money. Thus, material hardship cannot itself be an argument against failing to pursue money: it is baked into the choice. 

All of this goes some distance, though, to explaining why the public wants so much to punish the MFA grad who has taken out loans to get their degree, and hates the idea of such a person escaping the penalty of their choice through partial debt cancellation. There is, the public senses, something Icarian about the flight from the bucolic to the intellectual stages, without passing through the stage of material advancement, and thus the individual who attempts it is guilty of hubris. Society, in seeking to punish it, is therefore merely stepping into the role of Nemesis, and performing their appropriate mythological duty. As Will Self wrote in a recent memoir, his own desire for an artistic career, rather than a merely money-making one, was an act "of hubris," because it was "daring to differentiate [himself] from the great mass of individual wills simply striving to exist."

The thought has often crossed my own mind—as it must so many people who nurse artistic and intellectual ambitions of any kind—that my life might have been better and easier in many respects if I had not been guilty of this hubris... if I had simply accepted early on that the point of a job is to make a living, and that the highest good in life is to perpetuate one's own existence or those of one's offspring. Yet... I can't help myself. The problem of material consequences results from the ruinous ideals I imbibed too early on in life, yet those same ideals are precisely the reason why I cannot accept material penalties as sufficient reasons not to pursue them.

However inevitable it may be that such a desire will be punished, therefore—however reliably people may suffer material consequences for insisting that they shall live for some purpose other than simply perpetuating themselves and advancing their own interests—there is nonetheless far more beauty and nobility in being destroyed for such a choice than there is in never aspiring to it. And Hardy agrees. The penalty of striving for the intellectual stage before one's material foundation is assured,  he writes, is that one must forfeit the "happiness and mediocrity" that attend what he calls a "well-proportioned mind." A person who values happiness more than they dread mediocrity, therefore, would do well to avoid the hubris of artistic striving. But for those who value beauty, greatness, and the possibility of immortality more than they fear material poverty, let us aim higher, aspire to what is beyond our grasp, and fall through the Chaldean ether in a tragical yet honorable plunge.