I have reflected much in recent years on what it means to work as an academic, to be a teacher. I think the most useful things I teach are not particularly or uniquely mine (languages, some great old poetry and culture that existed before me and will most likely endure after), and I don't want or need to be honored a great deal for them. A good historian, a good storyteller, has some place in decent society, I think, but trying to turn that place into a Distinguished Chair of Royal Astrology with free food for life and junkets around the world is not really ethical.
Academics could use more humility, as a species. I am fortunate--or not, depending on your point of view--in that my own mediocrity and historical circumstance (coming up in a time when too many qualified teachers exist) combine to make humility necessary, and relatively easy, for me. I can enjoy delving as deep as I can into culture that I find fascinating, without the burden of climbing a career ladder that does not exist for me (chasing tenure via publishing and service work, i.e. too many meetings whose greatest accomplishment is to waste time).
Some people seek a kind of personal identity from their career, an identity that tied their life up with being a certain kind of person. I started out in this manner, too, and naively thought that I could be a Mormon academic, i.e. that this identity was not only possible for me, but that it was good. Experience has shown me that I don't really want to be either a Mormon or an academic. If that is all that I am, if I get to the end of my life and can say only that I complied with some basic institutional protocols and had all my paperwork in order, then I will be profoundly sad.
A good friend died recently, and I attended his funeral in a Mormon church (where he was an active member). While I really enjoyed learning more about his very interesting life (cut short too soon by a sudden heart attack), I found the bishop's sermon at the end quite disappointing--an empty series of cliches whose bearing on lived experience was so little that the meeting would have been better served had he chosen to remain silent (as indeed he threatened to do at the beginning of his remarks). This experience confirmed what the past has taught: I cannot go back to being a good Mormon. It just won't happen. I lack the ability to force myself into a headspace where I need to hear remarks like those uttered by this well-meaning bishop without rolling my eyes.
When I first realized that I could not be a good Mormon, I thought perhaps to salvage my usefulness to society by being a good academic. My last decade working in the university has cooled me to that prospect. Most of the jobs I applied to fresh out of grad school are now jobs I would not want. Thank goodness I did not get most of them! While I really enjoy teaching, I have no illusions about being the gatekeeper to any knowledge required for human survival or thriving. Tuition is too expensive. The academic publishing industry is mostly a waste (to which I am grateful not to have contributed much as yet: when and if I do make something, it will never be required reading and I will never be offended that you haven't heard of it). The petty squabbles, the endless bureaucracy, the trading of favors, the snubbing and backbiting, the pretentious institutional claims to omniscience, etc.--all remind me vividly of the worst things I encountered in Mormon churches! I like sharing time with students looking at interesting culture. That we live in a moment wherein this activity affords me a small living is miraculous, a miracle that could always end at any time, and I would retire grateful, not shattered.
So, where do I find my identity? I could look in many places, but the ones that suggest themselves to me are all smaller than established American institutions seem to want. I have no interest in becoming identified with a race or a political party or any other giant mob of people belching smoke about how great they are in some vast process whose workings are inscrutable unless you are Hegel or P. T. Barnum. I love my wife. That is something I identify with, consistently. I love my kids. I love my family--the people I grew up with, and those I have become related to over the years by marriage and other accidents. I love my friends, especially the friends I have who aren't forced to be with me because we work in the same industry or found ourselves enrolled on the records of the same megachurch. The people I have studied jiu-jitsu with are some of my closest adult friends, as many of my closest childhood friends were fellow students of taekwondo. A few Buddhists, too, and the occasional Mormon (in or out of the institutional church) have also shown me personal kindness and interest that I still appreciate. These people are all over every ideological spectrum anyone might construct. They have no single commitment to any one idea or institution that joins us. What I love is their character, as individuals, something that cannot be abstracted away into skill-sets (let alone replaced effectively by mere intelligence, artificial or otherwise). I want to help these people, to spend my life with them, to get better at the things we do together; beyond that, I have no interest. Saving the nation with my vote is as futile to me as saving political science with publication, or saving my soul with an appropriately stodgy ritual. As long as I can have people I trust around me, I don't mind so much how we live. The right people make living in tents--or shoddy, overpriced cardboard boxes like the one I am in right now--just fine. Constant access to electricity and water is nice, but we can even find ways to work around that (especially if we know our local history!).
The real secret to life, I am starting to think, is finding good people and then doing what needs to be done to commit yourself to them, to become a member of some group you can respect that remains intimate enough to respect you back. Eventually, that respect turns to love. Wisdom teaches that I cannot reach the entire world with these goods: they require the kind of intimate, personal investment that will not be mass-produced, globally distributed, profitably monetized. Whatever nonsense the world at large is up to--in the courts, in the churches, in the universities, so many domains of petty gods who imagine they aren't the devil--it will never amount to anything I can love, ever again.
