This piece is part of Letters on Pragmatic Hope, an essay series in which Wesleyan professors and administrators reflect on a daunting question: How can students act with purpose and efficacy amidst an increasingly authoritarian environment? The series aims to gather responses from a diverse group of Wesleyan faculty, offering a vision for how students can turn despair into pragmatism and action.
Why learn and create in and through all that is going on right now? Study? How? Here’s my answer, up front. Humans who pursue learning amidst inevitable death, in the terror of a crisis, do so in a hope practiced amidst the terrors of peace.
That’s it. But it’s not simple. I have actively pondered the How-Now-to-Live question nearly every day of my adult life: It has long been my close companion.
Three weeks into my freshman year I listened, petrified, as my friend’s car radio announced a 7.7 MW tremor had hit Taiwan just 30 miles from where my family lived. Over 2,500 people were instantly killed in what became known as the 921 Earthquake. I was in Los Angeles and supposedly reading “The Odyssey.” I spent a week refreshing the news, hearing about life in tent camps, and catching stories of friends and family taking disaster supplies into the mountains. Why learn?
Two weeks into study abroad I was coming back from the Bodleian Library through an Oxford mall. A crowd was forming around a TV shop’s live news broadcast: Tourists and locals alike stood gasping, moaning, and weeping as smoke poured out of the Twin Towers, and then they fell.
The next day we were taken to Stratford-upon-Avon to watch Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.” Little did we know it was an unexpected foreshadowing of the ongoing fall of the republic. You all were born into that aftermath: 9/11 was weaponized into the War on Terror and the PATRIOT Act was used to redefine civil rights. With all that is going on, why learn?
In the aftermaths of those experiences I made terrifying life decisions. I opened my heart to falling irrevocably in love. I took a tutorial in writing poetry. I unwound the faith of my childhood and re-began pursuit of the divine. I passed on a job that would have quickly paid $100k/year. I started to prepare for a vocation teaching and studying the Middle Ages. I chose love, learning, faith, hope.
To many these choices did and do reveal me to be both stupid and privileged. Sure. But while I myself am surely a moron, were these choices unwise? I had realized crises and disasters (both personal and collective) were perpetual, that they would never cease. My question had become: What will I do with my time, anytime?
You know well that many people think everything we do, here, is a waste, the detritus of privilege. Poetry while there is poverty? Dancing when there is death? Singing where there are sick? Astronomy amidst starvation? Many at Wesleyan even hold this view; they find ways to tell you to shut up, grow up, get real. The view calls itself pragmatism and means this: Learn to accumulate money, because money is real and it matters.
There sure are a lot of reasons to think this way. Circumstances ranging from extreme privilege to extreme desperation will incline you towards it. A Wesleyan degree is worth more than my house! I’m not! Going to waste my! Shot! But play it out. At some point in life you will confront the question: How much money (status, power) will I accumulate before I start living out my desires for what matters? The lower that number, the more time recovered for what is truly real.
I want to tell you about one more crisis in my life, but a different kind. One night when I was in eighth grade the auntie I knew as Dodo was over. That night she brought a present: a wooden shoe shine box. It had a drawer for polish, a tray for rags and a brush, and a platform on which to set a foot. Aunt Dodo sat me down in one of my Dad’s shoes, showed me how to shine, and then made me shine her shoes until I got it. Then she said something like this: Jesse. I’m giving you this box so that you never worry about whether or not you will have enough to eat. So long as you can shine shoes you can make enough to feed yourself each day and be okay. Now don’t worry about that for the rest of your life.
Aunt Dodo passed this last year, still living a simple joyful life. And no one ever gave me a more meaningful gift. I still have (and use) the box, but the gift wasn’t the object so much as the lesson. You don’t actually need so very much to get on, so try to get on with what matters. Love, learning, faith, and hope.
Pick a crisis. Inflation. A so-called pragmatist might say, why are you learning to tell stories, read Syriac, study cell structures? Look at the economy! What this pragmatist means is (a) above all protect yourself against the loss of monetary capital; and, (b) if you can, end inflation for yourself and everyone. But this sort of pragmatism is short-sighted and quite literally idiotic. It ignores that inflation is just the most emergent emergency. Will it be inflation that stops you from learning wildly, passionately, and with abandon? When would you restart?
Crises, disasters, and emergencies do not create new life conditions. They demolish our ability to postpone confronting the perpetual terrors which persist even in peace: means of survival, fear of isloation, nature of existence. Will my moment of crisis come today, tomorrow, or next December? It doesn’t really matter, it is out of my hands. The crisis I am really doing something about is the everyday crisis confronting the reality in which I live, and move, and find my being. Why, when bombs may fall, do we find humans writing poetry, painting, reading, or singing? They practiced hope. Death comes for us all. Will we live so that death becomes us—in the sense that we are prepared to wear it well?
Don’t let people convince you that setting your mind alight like this is selfish. Great horrors are fought in everyday choices. Austerities, genocides, pandemics, wars, terrorisms, fascisms: All these are only truly addressed by that which we must always confront: How have we become so separated, and how can we find each other again? Learning amongst others is a path to that fellowship which is real peace—it is our only real means of survival. And learning is a form of life which does something special—it possesses a magic like that of producing, sharing, and eating food together.
Learning is the form of life around which we all at colleges and universities set our table. Given that, wasn’t it astounding that no education institution in the USA decried the slaughter of Gaza’s professoriate and the intentional demolition of its universities? When peace is made, won’t learning be essential? Even after people like Lee Mordechai (my colleague in Byzantine Studies and a professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Aryeh Neier (a Holocaust survivor and co-founder of Human Rights Watch) published statements that Israel was committing a genocide in Gaza, many still take public offence to ideas like: Innocent people should not be getting killed, or bombing civilians must stop now, or let’s find a powerful but non-violent way to try to stop genocide, or let’s not invest in guns or missiles or drones.
What I and some other professors decided to do, in the face of this particular genocide, was to turn to what we are both employed to do and called to do in the practiced habit animating our every day: Learn together. Some of us are specialists in the histories and societies of the region, some are just good facilitators. Together we sought to help enjoin as many as were interested in studying: What is going on in Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, and why?
We called this fellowship the Palestine Seminar. Palestine, since that is the historical name for the region over the past millennia. Our community course site explains the seminar as “a non-evaluative collaborative course open to anyone and everyone in the Wesleyan community … whatever your perspective, your backgrounds, and relationships to this topic, and whether you are a student, staff, or faculty member.” We described the controversial normalcy of our activities just like this: “One ‘do what we are able to do and what we are good at’ answer we put together as scholars and teachers: Study, question, learn, educate, and inform one another in our community.” Depending on the semester we still meet twice-weekly, monthly, or quarterly. We’ve had academic readings, sharing sessions, and speakers. We’ve listened, read, watched, eaten, wept, argued, changed minds and hearts, and in all: made community.
For a number of us one memorable meeting was “With Others in Suffering / Solidarity.” All Wesleyan was invited: “American responsibility keeps Palestinian suffering and death at the forefront of all of our minds, even as we also are ‘with others’ in Ethiopia, the Maghreb, Myanmar, the Sudan, Ukraine, and many other places. Come as you are and/or bring poems you have written or read expressing the idea of being with others in suffering/solidarity.” Everyone’s experience was their own, but I can say that some conflicts carried into the meeting that day were carried out in fellowship if not friendship.
Why learn? Can it mean anything to learn about a people while they suffer under terror and genocide? What I know is that learning—like eating and like falling in love—creates community. Or, to put it more spiritually, it generates fellowship. And, as it turns out, fellowship—you might call it humanity—is the only practical, real, material, absolute answer to genocide. You cannot kill them: In every way that matters they are you, and you are them. How can we learn, now? That is how, and why.
Only the quotidian answer (What to do with the remains of every dying day) can answer the urgent cry (What to do in the face of this new horror). Why learn, why create in a time of rising fascism? Why learn, why create in a time when a secret police force is sent into cities on an ethnic cleansing mission under the cover of immigration enforcement? The question is really the same: Why learn, at all, ever? To learn, together, is to open community to every willing other. It is a living out of one very real answer to the fundamental question of existence. Some of you will laugh. But I am not joking. A university claims to be a model society. Not a façade but a real and better society which—so the goal—models a future which graduates try to manifest in the world. As long as that is so you are not (primarily) at university to learn what to do, you are here to learn how to be together with every other. Love, fellowship, community: These are the preconditions for peace. I am here to learn that with you because my habit of hope holds this as our only possible path. Because for me, loving others is the only act of hope that has ever seemed the least bit practical.
Jesse W. Torgerson is an Associate Professor of Letters, History, & Medieval Studies, and can be reached at jtorgerson@wesleyan.edu.
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