The trauma of teaching my daughter how to ride a bike has got me thinking about the ways that easy paths, easy streets, are at the ready, right there, front door and back. I've noticed that both my kids don't like taking on hard tasks, the grind, practice, and frustration of learning a sport, say, or the discipline of reading. And, I'm the same way: I avoid cooking complicated meals or dishes; I haven't read Badiou's Being and Event; I don't have the patience for gardening. There are so many other, easier, options readily available.
I can pick up some prepared foods at my local grocer and combine those with rice steamed in the rice cooker and easy salad. I can read shorter books, or, let's face, indulge in tabloids or simply continue to read authors already familiar to me--it's much easier than learning a new philosophical system. And, I can hire a gardener. Paul is different. He cooks. And, he is doing a ton of work on his house right now, scraping and getting ready to paint the back stairs/fire escape.
Many students also want to take the easy road--do enough to get by, write just to "express themselves" rather than doing actual research (in my students' cases they usually rely on citations to books assigned in class; so, I've had to introduce arbitrary, awkard requirements to cite a certain number of books or articles in their research papers; for non-research papers, they generally rely on lecture notes and leave the actual texts asides). And, of course, there are always prepackaged papers and the file of old papers at the fraternity house, problems that have long accompanied the education of the privileged who really don't need to bother because they will have jobs, opportunities, or perhaps trust funds to catch them when they graduate and direct them down yet more easy streets.
Why don't more of us go for slow food and sustainable living? It's hard. My sister just returned from visiting friends in Oregon who felled the trees from their land, took the trees to be turned into timber, and built their own house. The get water from a spring and heat it themselves. They are careful about using electricity, buy organic, and recycle and reuse everything they have. This is hard work.
Why do it when you don't have to? When you can drive to a Starbucks and get a soy latte? (In this week's NYTBR Stanley Fish reviews a book about how liberals became tax-raising, latte drinking, sushi-eating, body-piercing, NYT reading, freaks. When I saw it, I thought, hmmm--well, I identify as a leftist not a liberal, but still, what's wrong with that description, it certaintly fits me.) Why worry about global warming, WW3, and the collapse of democracy when you can enjoy The Devil Wear's Prada (I loved the book and the movie), when you can watch reruns of House and Nip/Tuck (again, favorites of mine)?
Easy options are given to us--it's easy to listen to music, find funny videos online, find outrageous utterances by horrid politicians that one can self-righteously deconstruct. It's easy to keep on going, paying the bills, worrying about what to wear, what to eat for dinner, how the furniture is arranged. All this is easy.
Many Americans, it seems to me, are like me in that they, too, take the easy street. We all do. If we didn't, we'd be out in the streets screaming at the top of our lungs, risking our lives and our careers.
Joe Bageant has a better discussion of shopping, blackmail, and slow death.
Hi, Jodi. I think one of the reasons is that we canot completely ignore "meta-physical" things even when we can get easily "physical" things. Just as you cannot stop asking "why", this attitude, I think, comes from nowhere on this pysical world. In other words, there is somthing makes you unsetteled on the pysical comforts, that is, desire to transcend this physical world.
Second, I would like to remind you that displine is not vanished completely. It changes its form and survives on to these days. I would rather say the connection between power and disipline is loosened and it becomes more relevant with the art of life as Foucault think it over in his last years. We should carefully trace this development at least for the time being.
In conclusion, easiness is welcome but we are human beings and not a mere animals, so we sometimes want to behave as a human being. This is, of course, a kind of irony but I think it is also a ray of light on the ruins and rubble in this world.
Posted by: Anonymous | July 18, 2006 at 11:48 AM
Sometimes, though, the hard is hard because it is misguided, one is working against one's instincts, or against one's suppressed knowledge. And sometimes the easy is easy because it is the next step, which has been prepared for.
That said, I guess there is also a way of being easy that is kind of a short-circuit -- easy because really, nothing is being attempted. But once one thinks about what one is doing, is it still easy? I could spend all day surfing the web, but would I feel easy about that? I'd say, no. But perhaps the destructive aspect of this easiness is that it completely fails to engage with the ever-present difficulty (which, in this case, manifests as self-disgust after a day on the web).
Posted by: hugh | July 18, 2006 at 12:58 PM
On easiness I come back to the concept of debt.
The use-part of easy is easy - we want easy because it's not hard.
The exchange-part of easy is the tough part. What are we giving up when we have a Starbucks or buy at Amazon (apparently the end of independent bookstores).
When you expend work and as a result you can claim the ease for yourself - there is a satisfaction that (for me) is rare - like eating a real tomato. But like most of what is easy, I know I'm going to have to pay.
It makes me feel a little uneasy.
Posted by: pebird | July 18, 2006 at 09:47 PM