veridiction:s

There are dead zones that riddle our lives, areas so devoid of any possibility 
of interpretive depth that they seem to repel any attempt to give them value or
meaning. They are spaces, as I discovered, where interpretive labor no longer 
works. It’s hardly surprising that we don’t like to talk about them. They repel
the imagination. But if we ignore them entirely, we risk becoming complicit in
the very violence that creates them. - David Graeber, 2006

It is time to state a new understanding of cynicism, following a few developments within and without cynicism itself, to account for what cynicism looks like in a new climatic and catastrophic regime. It is time to detect and modify those new cynical modes of response that leave our environment in the hands of destructive forces.

I will propose cynicism as abandonment, in which cynicism will no more be recognized as an attitude, a negative one, in an economic environment, but a search for small uplifting regions of inner experience concurrent with abandonment of larger zones of ecological (including human) exhaustion.

The cynicism of the 20th century was, in retrospect at least, not sustainable. For Peter Sloterdijk, cynicism was a mechanism of coping with modern economies, building in security for self-identity from the caprice of working life to which one held on externally for earning a living but capitulating the meaning of labor and value in retaining (a sense of) control over one’s private feelings and intellect. This strategy was one of the mode of sacrifice, of one’s productive energies as well as the milieu of consumptive and productive economy. It was moreover a middle class strategy, suitable for those who did have work and a home to be cynical for.

The cynicism that fenced the inner experience from ongoing erosions, cleared the grounds for “identity.” Quite a lot of events culminated into a segmentation of populations into identities, e.g. market segmentation and later on social networks technology. These matters are critical now about but beyond the purview of this text. The contribution of the strategy of cynicism of fencing those parts of the mind that could justifiably be protected at the cost of whatever found itself beyond: an honest remark, the risk of speaking up, feedback on errors necessary for correction, moral engagement tout court, etcetera.

However, the juice is finished and people are burning out even while capitulating regions of their lives to save what’s left. Psychological coping with structural defect is untenable. Soft skills too wear out when dealing with hard problems.

What had taken place in human communications (“honest remark” and the like listed above), had increasingly taken place everywhere. Engagement with neighborhoods is relatively abandoned, by those who have to move out, those who feel too cosmopolite to bind with their hoods, those investors who only have one concern, those policymakers who have tried everything except addressing the root causes and those policymakers who cannot succeed in engaging sustainably all other stakeholders. Concern about sustainability is everywhere superseded by the stronger forces that are there to make things and humans move through: nothing should bind to the place, which must be soon ready for transformation for higher modes of exploitation.

The reader can extend this example of neighboorhoods to other “landscapes.” I mean to be very inclusive with what belongs to this category of landscapes. Otherwise I would be saying nothing new here. A good contrasting example can be a corporation of governmental department. Here too, we can see people moving around and doing things. But this place is in fact abandoned. The engagements are cynical. Not as an attitude, not consciously, but plainly in their extensions temporally, effectively, affectively. The contracts are temporary, the plans are watered down in every aspect so as to be affordable and insult no one, the risk of mentioning errors is too great, credits for accomplishments are distributed awkwardly, the communications are read carelessly, the social talks don’t touch on any matters of importance. Those who hang on have learnt not care, not because they are evil. No–and this is the point–they know they cannot afford caring.

Likewise we leave a piece of land empty of what we call biodiversity. This example is familiar.

Even if in all these examples the work of abandonment is never done, it is just a reason for further emptying out.

In numbers we abandon numerous landscapes sooner or later. The feeling of cynicism is avoided by leaving the landscape were cynicism germinates, even if this landscape is where living takes place, or decisions about a highway trajectory, future investment, or an algorithm that could discriminate is made. Thus cynicism as affect is no longer a concept that would help us detect this destructive version of the cynical reason.

These organizations learn to continue without care, and bind labor and force not by adding care but by punishing deviance and dissent. We speak here of organizations where bureaucracy is entrenched and institutions that hold on to out-of-touch calculations, trickle-up hierarchies, and an economy of expendable human resources (among other materials). But even if the feeling of cynicism is replaced with a new breath, the act of abandonment has been definitely and ultimately cynical.

Thus response is added on top of cynicism, because the way to taking on the root causes is diligently gated by those who, we are learning to say, “benefit from the current situation.”

I already implied that abandonment is not particular to those who, so to say, are exploited or exploit themselves. It is a general mode of response. These same groups who “benefit from the current situation,” those who we can call the irresponsible responsible guardians, their calculative organization that inflexibly call the shots and command the scripts, they divest from zones they consider unfit for business–zones previously exploited and sacrificed. They themselves feel abandoned, moreover, whenever they fail to reproduce the business identity. “In your suit you’re someone, without it you’re nobody.” They take not-caring as their ultimate motto, having learnt as MBA freshman or otherwise to minimize the cost of winning.

Let us be clear that the job of “business,” its birth right, is to only speak positively of solutions, solutions that are ready to be sold, or can be promised. Solutions that promise a future profit. It is its job to excavate new and cheerful opportunities. In this definitive sense every businessman is an idealist, just as any entrepreneur is “creating a better world” and pragmatic too. But on the same grounds business has to remain silent on the much larger group of problems that invite no business solution. Business speaks of cheerful opportunities even if the enunciator and the interlocutors are staring at a scene of a disaster, a ghetto, or tortured landscapes. As if one can pick and choose what critical and collective problems one finds attractive to tackle! It should be clear, business cannot replace the hard work of politics.

But also urban spaces and infrastructures, with the famous examples of Detroit or Flint Michigan, are left behind in their toxicity by the value that was extracted from them. Values that now “positively” infest other promising landscapes. And at the same time, castes of lower order leave their deserted lands where the slowly unfolding catastrophe has devastated their livelihoods. We can now put the movement of refugees out of their burning homes and the movement of  urban “human resources” leaving science, government, and (its subsidiaries,) and corporations, into one picture. We are all in a flight. The difference is that some of us can retreat into zen jobs and tiny green bubbles, based on what they have extracted and accumulated from the landscapes they now have left, while others end up between and within the walls that prevents them reaching the inhabitable bubble. There isn’t enough place on an earth that is becoming tinier and tinier as we abandon it further.

Surely, enough minions figure will remain to occupy existing positions in institutions. But trust and enthusiasm will everywhere plummet and recedes into a silence of negativity.

And I emphasize again. I speak of minions, but none of us, none of these groups are cynical in attitude, or cynical in consciousness. It is a basic fact of life, and it is that one thing that economics got right: that everyone does his and her best. So no, the landscapes are cynical and our strategy to deal with them are intelligible even if complicit.

Thus every landscape is abandoned, however differently, by its sustainable parts and supportive attachments, left either to decay or peak in exploitation.

Herein lies the advantage of talking of cynicism within a story that is otherwise not new to many ears. It identifies a concerted response in humans that allows us to put into a one picture the process of de-civilization, be it in an office within a skyscraper where bizarre talks about the newest conspicuous consumptions or advancements in exploitation take place, or be it large stretches of land skinned and devastated, a the good old distrust in the capacity of others to think. Its original point is that, as such, the retreat to a “local community” or “just doing one’s job” will be counted as a cynical reaction, an abandonment of a world which sooner or later will, once again, intrude our bubble; whereas re-engagement with abandoned zones, ruins, and decaying institutions will become a new question and a new invitation for amor mundi.

Its originality too is that it does not exempt anyone. It is about those lower on the ladders of hierarchy who abandon their ambitions, and also those higher in the hierarchy who abandon the care for their subjects. It is symmetrical and recognizes neo-cynicism as a common material condition, not a psychology. Hence my use of the word “landscape.” It is not a matter of “those others” who are mistaken, misinformed, misled, compromised, polarized, and those who want to retreat into their gated parcels. This is a direct warning to the reader. It should point toward us, more than it would point to “others,” those others in whom we have abandoned our hope and our connection.

We cannot go back, of course, to the never-resolving promise of a globalization. But neither is it possible to isolate a region of the earth from the havoc and toxicity that we have spawned elsewhere. Refugees will always try to reach our bubbles to which we fled first, awakening our bad conscience–a conscience which we will violently try to expel! Retreat is part of the problem, and the only solution moves in the direction of reclamation and distribution of all areas of responsibility, especially since we now have disturbed almost everything.

——–

Retreating into one’s mind and bubble, characteristic of both the 20th-century cynicism and the 21th-century zen neo-cynicism, will not save us; it will add to the destruction even if passively, by merely failing to act up against it. Retreating into smaller lives, moreover, is a privilege of those exactly who can nevertheless consume the world and inherit a better part of a still unjust distribution of the consequences of the environmental mutation. It means the evasion of our political prerogative, that is, our inevitably collective problem.

Retreat is a psychologization, neatly in line with the impoverished metaphysics of sorting things out in no more than two categories of being, psyche and world, culture and nature. It might make the greater world a little better, or a little less worse. But it does not compensate for the necessity to reclaim–a reclamation that will not be easy in any regard, considering that we are occupied with so many bad habits. We will have to work this out later, since this is an expansive topic. My focus here is on the subtle but crucial difference between cynical retreat, which is proliferating, and reclamation, its necessity. Most crucially we should dare to suspect cynicism in positive talk and as inconsequential–that is, merely psychological–attitude, if want to begin distinguishing problems from solutions at all.

I should say more on my meaning of psychologization. I mean by it examples such as promotion of psychological techniques, e.g. mindfulness meditation (which increasingly tends to desensitize than to sensitize to experience and experience of thought in particular), psychotherapeutic internalization of response to oppressive conditions, gaslighting and propaganda techniques, catering to mere images of facts, or more radically the fundamental confusion between information (the response to which is “OK”, meaning correctly received) and knowledge (the response to which is substantive and differential). I also mean the reduction to “opinion” of plain facts (not scientific facts; see H. Arendt’s Truth and Politics), expansion of the marketing and communication dispositifs that create mere images forming curtains between insides and outsides, etcetera.

These are historical movements that isolate experience from the world and have been positively employed in following the doctrine that nature is deterministic and a domain exclusive to science and scientists, whereas the psyche is the domain of the freedom of individuals, however impotent. However, an isolated psyche is nothing more but a psyche compromised and neutralized. The impotence is programmatic to a habitual 20th-century politics that misidentifies it as a solution to the problem of mass upheaval and popular uprising. Such impotent psyche cannot orients itself in the world except by following some external authority without an ability to examine and judge.

To understand, but also to modify the new cultures of coping, its neo-cynical variety, we should respond to the demand of de-psychologization and prevent falling back into nature-culture and mind-world dualisms. psychologization of human response to material exploitation has, in the end, exacerbated our condition.

This is no different than going from the perception of cynicism as attitude to cynicism as a material effect on all landscapes. For longer now, we have understood cynicism as a psychological condition and response. But now we can speak of factual abandonment, in line with reality. We can detect cynicism in its silence, a silence that is a very loud representation of those bio-poor landscapes that laying waste or are being wasted.

Even if things appear in a very positive light in a situation, we will nevertheless see the darkness that surrounds it: in the words of someone who speaks of ‘taking care of oneself’ (but did you give up on caring for the world?), ‘I leave that to the scientists’ (but they need your help), or ‘nature will resolve with or without us’ (and yet our irresponsible responsible guardians don’t let that happen).

The same holds for business talk. In its positivity we should learn to detect and name what it lays waste in silent darkness–both in its downtrodden back offices, its displaced sights of production, as well as the landscapes that it empties out. This is necessary because the prerogative of optimism and the entrepreneurial and networking etiquette of always being upbeat has become part of the problem. We don’t want to find ourselves remaining positive within an ever-shrinking area of life and experience.

We should dare to be integral and address the difficult silence. We have to become able to recall what we previously had given up personally and collectively, or in reverse, what landscapes have left us hopeless and are in need of our care. And thereby we can sense, again, what regions of existence are calling for our concern and care. And not only that, there might be a reward waiting for us: the experience that, yes, the world is more spacious than our enclosed and colonized psyches and lives, a world that can prove yet again that it is accommodating and inhabitable.

———

What happens after detecting, naming, and struggling to reclaim depends on particular and situated responses, not to be generalized. The net of generalization is now surely too thin and infirm to extend over all the complex landscapes. But above all, the point is to resist expelling those cynical landscapes from our minds and to resist being satisfied with one’s parcel only, leaving the movement of business as usual to its devices. However it happens, the lesson remains: out of sight is never out of existence.

This sounds like good sense and thus hopes to reach the being of the reader. But it can also be regarded as old news. “Of course we try to care.” “We are already working full capacity and cannot take on board more than that.” Or it can be seen as empty words or “it’s easy for you to talk.” It can read as a cynical text itself (it does not deny being part of the contemporary). Or the response can be “and what solutions do you propose?” I believe this text has done sufficient work if it has sensitized us to the displacement of cynicism and enabled us to spot it where is happens and shift course at any juncture in life where cynicism dissuades to care and have us close our senses.

“We already care” is indeed a legitimate reply, but I am certain that only a very small group can so exclaim. The persuasion of others to care also instills the hope that the task will become less difficult and exhausting. But the question of structures that dissuade care remain a question and to the same extent the task of care remains doubled too: one of caring for what is damaged, “a damaged planet,” but also care about the forces in place that do the damage.

Thus the in shifting the cynical response to one of care (to an old and healthy cynicism that does care about the state of the world and the varieties of existence), it will not be a matter of caring for what we encounter in peril, and caring for the landscapes where we now are, and those landscapes which we gave up previously. No, its second layer is that of following the lines from place A about which we care to place B and C and perhaps further, that is, Bs and Cs that are responsible for shaping place A.

…

And for those of us who keep to our humble contributions at the limits of home and work (and I have done both), this should be a question for us, one that demands examination, whether we are not living in a bubble that we have built to merely keep out of sight those parts of existence that make us feel desperate and cynical. Whether this neo-cynical way of life will prove sustainable. The real and good cynicism might after all be the one that actively engages with whatever is imperfect in the world. Our world is indeed not ideal and very complicated, the cynic knows, but it remains our world.

Vanaf hier doet het geraas van brandstofauto’s, met vogelgeluiden er tussengeworpen, denken aan een waterstroom, mits hij zich dat voorneemt. Dat is waar de wielrenner zit, verwijderd van de weg door een dozijn bomen. Hurkend tegen een zomereik, om zijn strakke wielbroek niet te beschadigen, met een appel in de hand, houdt hij zijn ogen vast op een blikveld geheel gevuld door een schimmenrijk aan groen en bruin. Het is halverwege de dag, en halverwege zijn rit. Nog niet tijd voor de Duvel is zijn koeltas.

De zomerse bries is miniem, die hij nog mag voelen op het nat van zijn hemd. In dat hemd voelt zijn bovenlichaam zich strak doch in ruste. De benen willen wel doortrappen. Zijn kop voelt leeg en lichtjes licht. Zijn ogen stellen het liefst nergens op scherp. Het concert, of evengoed de chaos, waarmee de bladeren dansen heeft de maatsoort van de muzen zelf.

Wat als er in dit beeld twee gele vossenogen hem aankijken? Daar bijvoorbeeld, waar de schaduwen zich stapelen. Hij wenst zich te bevinden in dat bosbeeld, een wens die hij werkelijk ziet worden als een Einsteiniaanse holte, van hem af opengetrokken te midden van de struiken. Als hij zelf een vos was, zou hij zich vanaf daar een weg slaan naar het gebied waar mensen nog nooit een pad hebben gevonden… Zijn benen duwen hem rechtop. Gauw en zacht is hij bij de struiken, waar hij niet omheen kan. Hij stapt erin. Zijn zachtheid breekt onder het geweld dat hij enkele takjes aandoet. Vogels verstillen de één na de ander in ongenoegen. Er is geen weg, dan ook geen weg terug. Hij neemt enkele stappen waarmee hij steeds sterker zijn eigen betrapping hoort. Wat doet hij mal, denkt hij. Mensen lachen hierom.

Enkele stappen verder lijkt dat lachen luider te worden; wat in zijn hoofd galmde lijkt door het bos te weerklinken. Hij volgt zijn rechter oor naar achter de struiken en enkele scheefgegroeide bomen.

Daar zitten zij op een veldje te schateren, op een heus Perzisch tapijt dat te klein is voor de vier jonge mannen en vrouwen, met ontblote bovenlijven. Twee meter naar links staat een joekel van een retro arcadespel. Het lijkt of ze nog lachen om een grap die lang geleden is gemaakt.

Op dat moment kijkt de jonge man met een zwarte kop op naar hem. Voor hij iets zegt loopt er nog een jonkheer tussen de bomen rechts uit. De snaters gaan dicht en de blikken mikken op hem. Hij houdt een fluit in zijn handen. Deze richt hij tot zijn mond, maar stopt vóór de fluit zijn lippen mag voelen. Hij draait het hoofd, kijkt naar de wielrenner en zegt: je bent je Duvel vergeten. De wielrenner voelt zijn hoofd van schaamte schitteren. Een zweetdruppel komt op zijn wenkbrauw tot stilstand. Zijn romp houdt zich met grote spanning bij elkaar en zijn voeten willen op de loop. Zonder teken keert hij zich om, snakkend naar het biertje. Het is nog maar halverwege de dag.

voor MdP, 23-6-2020

The problem with writing is this: it is like a gifted horse, and still you should look it in the muzzle, even dissect its guts, and then put it together again for you to work.

It is given and it is a gift. Not as in a talent or something that only a few have. Unlike horses everyone is given this little but wild beast of writing. You can’t buy it in the store. And often enough, you can’t get a different one. A good writer of fiction cannot suddenly decide to write poems. An academic writer cannot switch to short columns for newspapers. Knowing to write a thing is not knowing to write everything.

Those who are and those we consider accomplished writers in any category, have more or less tamed their writing beasts. Better, or worse, they have cut it into peace, put it back together and succeeded in giving back its life! They can ride it and get around. They are master, and still without luck they would have had no chance. They are given a second gift. If they have a horse that is fit for racing, they must be lucky enough to have an accessible race track just in their surroundings. The thirst of a word-lover for trivial alliterations can turn out to be deliver entertainment to thousands. It always takes a certain privilege to be able to develop one’s particular gift. This is maybe what I want to say.

Trivial maybe, but with writing it is a problem. With all our different writing beasts, we do always end up competing in the same kind of competition that is only good for one particular kind of creature. We call it academic writing. It is not so much a disaster to get a talent for aphorisms or poems to write academically as it is to have it write in that formal style before, with emphasis here on chronological order, the horse is confidently trained for its main tendencies, disciplining its foremost and strongest passions and obsessions. Maybe a person can become good in writing formally, but if she like to jump around for physical satisfaction of her bodily impules, she will never get to writing for which she is somehow certificated.

If a pony is lined to race with running horses! The horse and the rider will know from the first moment of looking at the competitors, the length of their legs: I am not made for this. And if no know is given as to other skills, other ways of being and being accomplished, the it is easy to think: I am a loser. I am good for nothing; Nothing, meaning, for all that which the duo knows it is good for. And so if they are not aware of this other practice, this other show, this other purpose for horses, they could only despair, or keep running in hopeless determination that ‘only doing you best matters.’

Common knowledge is what we attribute to Albert Einstein: no to judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree. Yet we send our kids to school, and to college and university, and, whatever they learn, we hammer on ‘standardized testing’. That is, even though the young humans are most probably vastly different in how they get in touch with the world, different in what brings them into life and makes them enthusiastic, we still hammer on judging them by the same measure that should not have to do with their specific nature. Thus we repeat after Einstein and after that think it is still fair to just do otherwise.

Well, that may happen to be fair, for example with algebra the basic knowledge of which better be common to all. But take again the example of writing, even creative writing, that academic program made up for those who want to write non-academically! The problem with this writing is that we don’t even have sorted out neat categories of it. Even if we have categories of fiction and non-fiction, proza and poetry, and even detailed subdivisions though not without ongoing discussions about their propriety, nothing can work here to prescriptively exclude or condemn the gift of an exotic and even incorrect young one. Maybe what I want to say is this: that even if there is a person who cannot make sentences at all but put words one after the other, not only there is meaning in such a listing of words, since it is impossible for anyone to be completely arbitrary with speech production, but that it can be judged only after it has been encouraged and developed so that we can recognize its accomplished shape. If we write off a wild beast, even after years of trying to tame it, then still, it is our failure to sculpt it, not the beast’s. It will even be the beasts success who has resisted us succesfully and retained it raw wildness.

We are far removed from common and uniform standards of writing. For this reason we have to accept the raw and wild style that exist out there. Writing is not yet completely domesticated, and maybe happily so. What we need to culture is not the method of disciplining of our young to fit within the few categories we think exists, but at least just as much our capacity to listen to and read those text that in the first place seem incoherent, incomprehensible, or lacking in vocabulary and style. This are of emphatic and empathetic reading is the more important as it widens our capacity to grasp meanings beyond standardized manners of communication. It increases our confidence in dealing with new unknowns, wild beasts that we, before, never thought to encounter. Wild beasts or, for that matter, re-surging gods like Gaia whom we have to learn to deal with anew.

The number of recognized practices organized around the power of this beast of writing, is nowhere near to capturing the diversity of actual writing tendencies, of word arts! Just think of how many potential Joyces, those who are savvy with pronunciation and dialects on paper, more than they are talented with their reference to clear and distinct ideas, are put off by formal judgment and education. After years of schooling, how many graduates have stopped even writing in their diaries because they are made to feel inadequate about their capacity to write ‘formally’? Yes, they lack in skills, as everyone does who is a student. But why not attend to the joy of writing as much as we attend to discipline? And how many pupil, who later become students, have in fact had proper encouragement and education in writing? How many individuals, after having been ‘corrected’ for their grammar, spelling, and having received vague commentary on their style, have quit writing because they expect no further response as to their content and meaning? How many students have come to deplore writing because no teacher has cared to place informal writing next to the flat styles of the ‘communication discipline’. There is not even much care to separate the styles of communication writing, rid of all discursive specificity, from scientific styles, which can only live through that specificity. Too often is scientific writing confused with the registerless ‘informative’ style. How qualified are we then to judge? Aren’t just repeating the examples with know of our masters and want to see ourselves repeated without really knowing why our examples are better? How many students, having been implied that sufficient writing is reproducing the likes of current examples, don’t not why they should keep reiterating empty words after they have received the diploma’s? (And how can many find satisfaction in merely repeating their masters with docility without themselves becoming masters of their creations?)

How many wild beasts on paper have rotten away without ever getting the chance to see what shape they can accomplish after some nourishing and polishing evolution? It is our obligation to give any gift a chance (at least for anyone who still thinks that grace is sacred and the most sacred thing is grace) and not give it final judgment before we have properly unwrapped it, examined it, brought it to it full potential, and understood it. Chew on every word and you will the master of telling it exactly as it should.

Het is een van die dagen,
noem een woord en het verbladert.

De zon schept schaduw op maat
onder knisperend jongblad,
de wolkenunie neemt de spitse kantjes
op van de weerkaatsing en
trekt zich verder ineen
als weerbarstige wenkbrauwen, waar
bloemen met lust voor buigen.

Hemelvocht houdt zich nog even op
in hoopjes zucht. En zo is het,
onstuimig klimaat, dat de zomer
door druppels heen binnen komt groeten,
een seizoen die de dichter slechts uit verbasterde
kinderheugenis of vervreemde
reisverslagen kent, als ‘heerlijk weer’
besteld door de bond der tijdelijke reizigers
uit een plat noordelijk hoek van Eurazië.

Reisverslagen wel, die nooit
wegwaaiden uit de streken
waar ze aan ontsprongen zijn.
En streken waar mannen met knoestig
huid zich nog verder in de lege
verte wegstaren, waar ze de papieren
niet voor hebben om er te komen.
In die verte vervagen ze. Niet meer,
onder eigen boom, herkennen ze,
de aanblik van hun voorouders.
Niet de zomer maar gemis
aan briefjes geld vult
hun handen, bladeren waar ze
op kunnen schrijven, noch kauwen.

En dat is nog een teken, hoe
de komst van het seizoen als niet eerder
het vooruitzicht in zulk onvoorspelbare
kruimels als nu tart, hoewel het
ook nooit anders had gewild. De bloesems
openen de oren naar de vink en merel en
het enig nieuws is vreugd, en toch, het zaad
dat in mij, mens, is geplant, is dat van
zorg en lange duur. Het staart ook
weg, van wege het groen en de druppels:
komt er nog een seizoen hierna?
Zullen deze woorden, die van mijn ouderen,
nog zin maken, twee graden hier vandaan?
Komt er nog ooit een van die dagen
die op dromen mag lijken
uit een bekende reis?

If for nought the sun
comes stale me swoon
from my dull eyes’ bays;
simmers awakenness
in my lungs’ tangles;
sieves my day into
there way and there vain,
—
for less my teachers
put me to night’s coil,
which is where my light
trembles, weaving
clouds vigorously
(though not past cotton,
where lovers tainted
maroon the gift of
my fast rooted past.)
—
But we’ll meet at dawn,
we who’ve arched over
The murk of dozen
drowsy illusions;
we toil on our routes,
sinews wail the while,
to lay woven gleam,
unabated all-warmth,
sun-flooding breeze,
to those lying late,
dormant in their wool,
(for the beloved ought,
in seamless divine fuse,
hold right that day ‘n night
light relays straight for nought.)

Wat nu te doen met de alfa’s?
Ik bespreek nog een laatste veelgehoorde bezwaar jegens de geesteswetenschappen voordat ik met een voorstel kom: ‘maar de geesteswetenschappen zijn toch niet voor iedereen en maar slechts voor kleine elitaire groepen die zich deze vrijheid kunnen veroorloven?’ Incorrect. Zelfs als ze klein zijn, zijn het niet per se vol met rijkeluiskinderen. Omgekeerd juist, de geesteswetenschappen zijn nog nooit voor zoveel mensen toegankelijk geweest als nu en dat dreigt nu terug te vallen tot een elitestudie. En als de gewone student geen Deens studeert is het maar omdat de overheid hem bang heeft gemaakt over zijn toekomst en zijn passie. De geesteswetenschappen moeten een stap verder worden gebracht in het democratiseringsproces: ze moeten toegankelijk worden voor iedereen die klaar is verder een proces aan te gaan van menselijke en geestelijke ontwikkeling.

Verdere democratisering is geen gevaar voor de hoge academische kwaliteit van de opleidingen; de geesteswetenschappelijke opleidingen moeten nog steeds hoge eisen stellen aan de studenten en dat kunnen ze doen als de overheid er niet op aandringt dat ze haalbare opleidingen moeten ontwerpen. Goede begeleiding en betrokkenheid van studenten en docenten zorgt voor tijdig afstuderen en niet het vergemakkelijken van toetsen en verschralen van leerdoelstellingen. Het hoge niveau van de opleidingen zullen voor self-selection zorgen: je kiest voor een geesteswetenschappelijke opleiding als je dat echt wilt en kunt, niet als je een carrière wilt of genoeg geld hebt.

Geef zekerheid en ontvang schoonheid
Het voorgaande brengt mij tot het volgende voorstel. Bekostig geesteswetenschappelijke opleidingen anders dan de opleidingen van andere faculteiten die volgens het huidige stelsel redelijk of goed kunnen functioneren. (Zeker wil ik het niet uitsluiten dat andere faculteiten ook financiële veiligheid verdienen. Het is goed om te luisteren of die ook hervormingen van het bekostigingsmodel willen zien.) Faculteiten geesteswetenschappen, die al sterk onderwijsgericht zijn, krijgen een vaste, op input gerichte, basisfinanciering vanuit de ministerie op basis van een goede student-docent ratio. Dit komt neer op niets meer of minder dan de verduurzaamde uitvoering van het advies van commisie-Cohen, Duurzame Geesteswetenschappen. Binnen dit fundamenteel raamwerk kunnen de details van wet en beleid worden uitgewerkt.

Hun onderzoeksbekostiging kan hetzelfde blijven functioneren als de rest, of los van het onderwijs worden aangepakt. Kwaliteit wordt bewaakt door kwaliteitsindicatoren voor Geesteswetenschappen van KNAW. Kwantitatieve prikkels en financiële voorwaarden worden tot een minimum gebracht. De overheid geeft hiermee blijk van vertrouwen in de kwaliteit, ernst, betrokkenheid en inhoudelijkheid van de geesteswetenschappen.

De geesteswetenschappen vormen een aanvulling op, en geen concurrentie voor vakgerichte opleidingen. Ze kunnen dan ook een goed aantal minors organiseren voor studenten uit andere faculteiten en toegankelijk contractonderwijs bieden voor de academische ontwikkeling van een grotere groep burgers. Andersom organiseren alfa, gamma en wellicht medische faculteiten minors voor studenten geesteswetenschappen om verder een koppeling tussen soorten kennis te bevorderen. Zulke interdisciplinariteit is onmisbaar in een tijd waarin maatschappelijke problemen als klimaatverandering, economische transitie en internationale verhoudingen zowel natuur-technische als wel sociale en geestelijke uitdagingen bieden. Goede voorbeelden zijn al te vinden in opleidingen als Future Planet Studies en Europese Studies aan de UvA, Liberal Arts & Sciences aan de UU, of Industrial Ecology aan Delft, Leiden en Erasmus,

Het principe voor dit alles is dat het bevorderen van de geestelijke ontwikkeling van alle burgers, en dus ook de geesteswetenschappen, de overheid dichterbij diens doelen brengt dan het intomen van vrijheden omwille van dezelfde doelen via economisch-kwantitatieve imperatief. De metafoor hiervoor: de pijl recht naar het doel gericht zal op de grond belanden, de pijl omhoog gericht kan het doel raken.

– Over de schrijver:
Nima is student geweest aan drie Utrechtse faculteiten. Hij was actief in studenteninspraak en studentenactivisme. Hij is promovendus geweest aan de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen. Nima heeft geen affiliatie met politieke partijen of politiek actieve groepen. Hij draagt de toekomst van de wetenschappen in Nederland en daarbuiten een warm hart toe.