Foucault my life

Students consider a lot of factors when course selection rolls around. We consider the credits awarded, the professor’s reputation, the course material, the location, the time, and the chance of getting that elusive A. But we don’t usually consider the wider context of our choices: how a college class will equip us for life outside the chambers of the ivory tower. This myopia becomes problematic when you consider what the real world might look like in the next few decades.

My former high school librarian, now a dear friend, often rants about the “power-down” that is on the horizon. We exchange emails regularly, and his typical correspondence is a wonderfully poetic and pessimistic take on the calamitous times we live in. Here is but a taste: “My only take on the human species these days: Die off by the billions. I have no other way to put it. We are too many, so overpopulated and obese and sick-looking, that it seems to me anyone with a shred of common sense would come to the same conclusion.” This column is largely an homage to his emails, a sarcastic imagining of the myriad ways he has suggested the world might end, a playful exposition of the futility and fatalism of our current path.

In a recent typically cheery email, my former teacher provided some unsettling advice: “If I could attend any one education program right now, it would be lessons in learning to live off the grid … Anything for self-sufficiency, anything to remove myself from the reality of the ticking time bomb we find ourselves under.” In the next week, Columbia students will select their courses for the coming fall. As they furiously scan course listings, few students will contextualize their choices in the wider scheme of potential global catastrophe. The question that emerges is a troubling one. If we are to take the advice of my sage friend and only choose classes that teach self-sufficiency in a world without the grid, what classes ought we to choose at Columbia?

I’ll put the answer up front: The prospects are bleak. A search in the Directory of Classes yields no results for the terms “shelter,” “self-defense,” “horticulture,” “first aid,” or “blacksmithing.” There is a dearth of technical, pragmatic classes that operate outside the realms of abstraction. The closest thing Alma Mater can offer is engineering courses that require fabrication skills, but even these are predicated on the use of elaborate machinery. We would like to think that all have the potential to be the father in Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” or Robinson Crusoe, or Bear Grylls, or even some Vermont hippie who knows what mushrooms to forage. We all believe that intrinsic to our humanity is some deeper survival instinct, a treasure trove of evolutionarily encoded knowledge that will sustain us when the fire and brimstone rain. But it simply isn’t true. And our preoccupation with the status quo, with the acrobatics of the mind that make Columbia such a sensational and stimulating environment, only blinds us to our frailties.

On Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the Columbia student occupies the very peak, seeking self-actualization through a heightened morality, creativity, and knowledgeability. We have been blessed thus far not to have to worry about safety and physiological needs. Well, it looks like ascending Maslow’s hierarchy is a Sisyphean task, and mankind is poised to let the ball roll back down into the Dark Ages. And when the world powers down, when systems of governance and of finance, of laws and of markets dissolve, self-actualization will come to mean diddly.

So we are stuck. Unsure if there is any real cause for concern, unwilling to rock the boat so much as to go “Into the Wild” and subsequently die an embarrassing and ridiculous death at the hands of some berries, we are left to blissfully attend our seminars on The Archaeology of Sex and Gender. But for those of you who are now worried by your lack of preparedness, there remains one means of recourse. Perhaps it makes the most sense to take philosophy. For if one cannot do anything to halt the doomsday clock’s slow ticking, then perhaps being able to deconstruct the epistemological and metaphysical meaning of this metaphorical clock will provide some semblance of comfort to a wanting mind. As the mushroom cloud grows on the horizon line and everything you have known and loved is vaporized, at least you’ll be able to ponder what Michel Foucault would have made of the unfolding events: Twentieth-Century Philosophy, V3301.

Esfandyar Batmanghelidj is a Columbia College first-year. He is a member of the rugby team. C.U. in Hell runs alternate Thursdays.