My first quarter at UCSC was well worthy of any young, liberal, activist student. My first class was mandatory. Each residential college at UCSC had an academic focus for first year students. At Kresge, at least in 1990, that focus was Postmodern Theory. "Being There" and "Ways of Seeing" anchored the course outline. Our TA, Brent, the person responsible for giving Tarantino the license to use the Banana Slug shirt in Pulp Fiction, brought his love for the movie "Total Recall" with him.
Postmodern Theory was a fascinating course. I learned a lot about representation and meaning in the age of communication and technology. Fitting for a kid who fancied himself an intellectual. (I really wasn't)
Second class in college was "Intro to Feminism" with the inimitable Bettina Aptheker. It was a class of about 300. VERY popular. Very difficult to get into. I wanted in! I fancied myself a feminist ally. (I still do) I wrote a 1000 word essay about what role feminism played in my life and why I thought I should be admitted to the class.
My essay was a story about my mom. She was a very strong person physically, mentally, and socially. She was a little brick wall of a personality back then. Take her or leave her, Mary was going to be Mary. Period. Even though I was a foot taller than her, I figuratively looked up to her in a big way. Tough. Smart. Unapologetic. Independent. Everything I had come to associate with feminism.
It worked. I was one of four cis, hetero white guys admitted to the class. The class itself is a whole story to be explored later, but suffice it to say, it was one of the best, most illuminating, infuriating, informative, and inspiring classes I took in college. Bettina Aptheker had the dry, wry humor of a 70s Woody Allen before we all realized what a misogynist creep he is, and the depth of knowledge and cultural insight that comes from years of rigorous academic study, keen insight, and a life spent as a political activist. Bettina is a powerhouse of a professor! Five stars. She goes to 11.
My third class that quarter was Phonetics. I picked UCSC because they had a renowned linguistics department AND an actual creative writing major. I had studied French for 9 years, Latin for 4, and German for 2. So... linguistics was the natural course of study right? OH MY GAWD HOLY SHIT WAS IT NOT!
It wasn't phonetics that taught me this lesson. Phonetics was a blast! Being able to read out loud languages that I did not understand at all was a particularly enjoyable, but useless skill! It wasn't until the tail end of the class that we started delving into phonology.
OH FUCK NO! Phonology, and linguistics as a whole is math! NOT MATH!
Nope nope nope. I'm going to be a photographer and writer. Nope nope nope. Linguistics is math and math gives me massive anxiety attacks. Nope nope nope.
Fall quarter wraps up. I do well in all of my classes. Another part of the reason I opted for UCSC as my college of choice was their lack of an A-F grading system. Back then, they had a pass/fail with a narrative evaluation system. I was tired of grades. I'd always done well in school. Almost always got As in my classes with the odd B here and there and one year of Cs when I took Intermediate Algebra because Algebra 2 made me borderline suicidal.
I was much more interested in learning where I was falling short in my academic studies than I was in a ranking of where I stood relative to my classmates. The narrative evaluations were great. "Insightful and exhaustive, but tangential, and a little unfocused." (Some things never change) The negatives of the evaluations were of far more interest to me because it gave me a focus, a concrete path to pursue to do better. Learn more.
Winter quarter. 1991. I'm 19. Armed with a bunch of feminist and postmodern theory, I'm freshly off annoying the crap out of my family during the holidays and ready for some new intellectual challenges. I need to knock some GEs off my list. Intro to Philosophy. Cool. Enrolled. Expository Writing. Check. Enrolled. Intro to Political Theory. Oh fuck yeah! I'm a young activist. Check plus! Enrolled!
Expository writing was fun. I was writing in my spare time anyway, so why not get some academic credit for it. The focus was on the narrative histories of American veterans. We read lots of letters and personal accounts of war from veterans between the Civil War and the brand spanking new conflict in Iraq... which I protested against, frequently, loudly, and gleefully. Seeing the switch in the tone of the writing between WWII, and Korea was striking. Even more astonishing was the radical shift in the nature of the narratives come Vietnam. I do well in the class. It's one I should have tested out of, but I just had to write an analysis of a Jane's Addiction song in my AP English test the previous spring now didn't I?
Intro to philosophy. Old dead white guys pontificating about the nature of reality. It's slightly interesting. I've already consumed a number of the texts in the class, but was now getting a far more in depth look into these works. I have a hard time really digging into the material. It's so disconnected from day to day reality. Yeah yeah yeah. We can't trust our senses as a source of empirical truth. Your finger isn't really split in two when you stick it in a glass of water.
Though I was never really a science person, I was the child of a highly logical electrical engineer who instilled in me an interest in and respect for the scientific method. Philosophy, at least what was taught in this class, seemed to fly in the face of the scientific method, encouraging one to explore crazy, abstract ideas in wildly non-scientific ways. The class taught what it probably intended to... that logic is a malleable construct and cemented my stance as an intellectual skeptic.
Third class of the quarter? Intro to Political Theory with J. Peter Euben. I can't remember which GE this one knocked out for me, but I was not expecting this class to be anything other than a requirement I needed to get out of the way and still learn something interesting in the process. NOPE! This class changed everything for me!
Professor Euben specialized in Greek Tragedy as political thought. He had a very defined focus of the responsibilities of the individual and the community as it pertained to a healthy society. The crux is this... in order for a society to remain healthy and meet the needs of both the community and the individual, a representative government MUST split their legislative focus equally between upholding the right of the individual while maintaining the welfare of the general community.
Without a balanced focus like this, society will suffer fairly predictable social ills. Focus too much on individual liberty and desires and you create a social environment with too many people who think they're leaders... and very little is accomplished for the general good when everyone wants to be in charge. Focus too much on the collective good and a society will not generate enough leaders to help move social initiatives forward. Too many drones maintaining the status quo.
This is a radical simplification of his core philosophy. Look up the Berkeley School of Political Theory as well as Communitarianism (worst name for a school of thought ever!) and you'll get a much deeper understanding of what he meant by balancing the needs and desires of the individual with the larger community.
Notable readings from this class were "Democracy in America" by Alexis DeTocqueville and "Eichmann in Jerusalem" by Hannah Arendt. If you want to understand the very core of my sociopolitical worldview, read these two books.
When I was 16 I read both Wealth of Nations and The Communist Manifesto. Several times. Most 16 year olds don't understand what Laissez-faire Capitalism is. Hell, most "educated" American adults don't. Even fewer 16 year olds know what communism is and how it differs from socialism. After reading the Communist Manifesto at 16 and not having anything resembling a reasonably well formed worldview, I went bonkers for Marx/Engels. I also knew that what the USSR and China were doing wasn't anything close to communism despite the name of their ruling parties.
Communism, to my malleable 16 year old brain, seemed like the best way to make sure that everyone was fed, clothed, housed, educated, and kept healthy. When I was 18 and could register to vote, I wrote in Communist as my party affiliation. There was no officially recognized Communist party in San Jose at that time. My registration came back. There was a socialist party listed on the registration form, so I checked the socialist box. As any good Marxist knows, the Great Socialism is a step in the progression toward a communist society, so there you go. I was a registered socialist.
Back to 1991. Peter's argument for Communitarianism as a concept (not an ideology) had the effect of fundamentally changing my sociopolitical outlook. Socialism and Communism are ALL ABOUT THE COLLECTIVE and NOT ALL ABOUT THE INDIVIDUAL. By their very natures, the communal focus creates power vacuums easily exploited by ambitious individuals who will invariably use that political power to enrich themselves at the expense of the collective. History has borne out this assumption pretty handily.
American society at this point, just coming out of the 80s, was a fascinating jumble of misplaced priorities. War for peace! Be an individual by conforming to fashion and musical trends. Greed is good. Champagne wishes and caviar dreams. The game plan for electing an idiot like Trump was being engineered. There was very little about the way the US ran itself that appealed to me. It was rampant individualism tainted by materialism and undermined by pressure to conform.
I also learned about the various flavors of Libertarianism during this class and... ugh. Just ugh. Communists who don't want the revolution on one extreme and "Fuck you. I got mine!" on the other end.
In taking this class with Peter Euben, I was finally given the tools and the knowledge to sharpen and hone my political world view. This class introduced me to the idea of the Nordic Model and the Third Way. That the only way to protect and nurture individual liberty is to nurture a society dedicated to providing for the community as a whole. This was the class that made a Social Democrat out of me. Socialism be damned. American flavored capitalism be damned.
The world didn't need to be "socialist or capitalist". There are fantastic shades of grey in between those two extremes. If anyone tells you that a single class can't fundamentally change your life, they're wrong. This class changed me at a very core level.
I've spent the last nearly 30 years lobbying for the idea of and studying the intricacies of Social Democracy. Wanna know why I bash on Bernie Sanders so much for his use of the term Democratic Socialism? It's because of this class and the intellectual path that Peter Euben set me on. I learned the concepts and theory. I read the history. I read, watch, and listen to the news. What he's calling Democratic Socialism isn't Democratic Socialism and his persistent, incorrect usage of the term infuriates me as a student of political theory... and as a citizen.
I digress. I'm a Social Democrat from the Berkeley School of Thought and a Communitarian (ugh... just simply awful name!).
After re-reading this... I'm going to give myself a Pass but note that I need to work more on structure and focused analysis rather than devolving into tangential tirades. I'm sure Peter would agree. #socialism #socialdemocracy #politicaltheory #feminism #linguisticsismath #capitalism #peopleangermeso
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