Episode 28 - Doing The Good You Can Do Even In Bad Organizations Or Societies

I had an interesting, you might say, joking exchange, but only partly tongue-in-cheek with somebody on Twitter today, and it's very emblematic of a sort of mindset that I see quite a few people slip into.And the exchange was about the current state of academia and how everybody in it has abandoned truth and justice as values. And now they're all schemers or grifters or pick whatever else you want. And this is a kind of common complaint that you see about institutions or societies and their capacities to corrupt and co-opt us when it comes to our values and the formation of our character and moral action. I've seen analogous statements made over decades by a lot of people who say things like, well, if you're living under capitalism, you're always living off of somebody's misery, so none of the actions that you do can ever truly be good. And I've always been suspicious of these totalizing, what should we call them, accusations laments general criticisms that we see being made because in point of fact something that is a very common even ubiquitous aspect of our experience if we're paying attention is that at least some of the things that we do seem to matter.And I'm not saying that they matter in the long run in the sense of having lasting effects that can't be in some way undone or undermined or exploited or even turned against us in some way. I'll acknowledge that that's all true. Anything that we do can go bad in some way or at least just be neutralized but the mistaken line of reasoning that a lot of people fall into which then I think you can say leads to mistaken feelings or affects or moods is this notion that if you can show that there's a vulnerability, a contingency to things that seem good not being so in the long run, that maybe the consequences of our actions that we intend, they don't pay out, or pick any other way of conceptualizing this that you want.Basically, the idea is that we're within a bad institution or a bad system where people don't have the right mindset, where there are perverse incentives, where the good that you do could be harnessed for bad in some way that you really can't do anything good. And again, I think this goes against the experience that many of us do have in our lives, something that we should trust, but not 100%, that we do see that the things that we choose, that we advocate for, that we make possible, do bear some fruit at some time of goodness.So I want to come back to academia. And I will say that it's not as if there was ever a wonderful golden age the way that some people want to portray it, where everybody in the academy was all about truth and justice and the furthering of their discipline and expanding of human knowledge. The schools have been beset by all sorts of other motivations on the part of people who partake in them for as long as I've ever been involved in them. And if we look at literature, we can see that that's the case as well. You see people who are essentially driven by careerism, looking to step up the next rung of the ladder, writing books that don't need to be written, blocking other people so that they can be the important person, whether it's as an administrator or as a scholar or as a teacher, whatever it is that you've got.Even people involved in creating new institutions within the institutions or engaging in advocacy work, right? There's a lot of turf warrior mindsets going on and people could want to be the sage on the stage and have everybody thinking they're smart and cool. You could also, I suppose, be in it for the money in most academic institutions in the United States.That may have been a good bet at one time. It sure as hell hasn't been from the time that I was in graduate school in the 1990s onward, when the job markets were already getting pretty bad and salaries were going down and academic work became more and more precarious to where we are today. So people can have all sorts of motivations. And, you know, the idea of the college or university should be run like a business that's been around since I was a student that is corrosive, just as much as when hospitals that are supposed to have the ends of taking care of their patients and alleviating pain and helping people to practice good preventative care get worse. absorbed into hospital groups, which then are bought out by companies that are primarily interested in shareholder value and not in the ends that it's supposed to serve, we could come up with all sorts of other analogous cases.But none of that means that while you have your own range of freedom within these institutions, that you can't actually do the right thing. Now, you may have somebody looking over your shoulder. You may have policies put in place that seem dehumanizing, that are exploitative of students or patients or customers or whatever it's going to be. But that doesn't take away your own capacity to choose.And I see a lot of people who give in to a kind of despair unnecessarily where they say, well, there's nothing that I can do. So I hate it, but I need to make a living.I need to hold on to my position. And if I were to leave, maybe somebody even worse would take over somebody who isn't bothered by this sort of thing.None of that is entirely illegitimate, but it doesn't have to be the mindset that decides what you're going to do. You can adopt a number of other possible ways of doing things. You could be like Socrates, for example. who recounts the story of when his city had been taken over by the oligarchs, and he was told that he needed to go get somebody who, you know, after he brought them in, would probably be executed unjustly by these 30 tyrants. Socrates just didn't say anything, and he went home. He didn't find the guy. He was like, well, I guess if they're going to kill me, they're going to kill me, but I will do what I'm going to do. That's an option. right?You just keep doing the things that you think you ought to do and you might get fired. You might get attacked in various ways, but you can also like just not make a explicit stand and do the things that nobody's actually told you you can't do and keep on doing those good things. And you can still appeal to whatever better instincts people have. You can sometimes embarrass the people who are in charge.If you're getting a lot of heat from administrators about how you're supposed to be doing things to your students that you don't really want to do and your students don't like, you could shame them. in certain ways and you can drag your heels and not do them well so I don't buy this notion that unless you can produce lasting change at the top none of the things that we do down at our low level where the proverbial rubber hits the road really matter or accomplish any good and I will say this to bring it to a close.We don't actually know most of the time what lasting good we're doing by the work that we do with other people or with material items or with animals or anything like that. And it's a mistake, I would say, to assume that we have something like a God's eye view where we know when we do something precisely what its long-term effect is going to be. We just try to do our best.And I think that, you know, some people will not do their best and they'll say that they're doing their best, but most of us are trying our best, even if we're not giving 100% all the time, even if we're just giving 80%, I think that's great. That's better than 0%. And we should just keep on with what it is that we're doing, even if we feel like it's unsuccessful or futile or counterproductive, because in most cases we don't actually know. Now that would be very different if you were, I don't know, designing some piece of technology and you know that it's going to be used for terrible evil that's that's a different kind of case than what we're talking about in academia, or if you're working in a hospital group, or you're working for an insurance company, or you're working in a government position, or any other thing like that.So these are just a few reflections, and I guess I'll sum them up by saying that that motto of fighting the good fight — It doesn't matter so much whether we're getting the support from above or the opposite of support. We can still choose to do what we know to be right or what we even just think and suspect to be right in a probabilistic way, even if other people from outside are saying, oh, there's no point to that. Or our colleagues and co-workers who are burnt out and jaded try to tell us that it's not going to matter.That's up to us. That is a choice that we get to make. So that's what I do in my practice. And I hope that maybe hearing this, if you're wavering, can help you to say, yeah, I'm going to do that as well. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe