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The following is an excerpt from David Masciotra’s book-in-progress, Faith That Won’t Die: Death, Defeat, Sex, and Spirituality in One Rust Belt Town:
One of the most often repeated clichés in American culture is that life is about the “journey and not the destination.” Anyone with any familiarity with American culture, however, knows that it is an efficiency-obsessed, results-driven, success-centered utilitarian marketplace more than it is a nation. As a priest friend of mine puts it, “In America all that matters is you go home rich. You may go home neurotic and psychotic, but if you’re rich that’s fine.”
When I leave work I don’t go home rich. I’m currently a member of the oppressed minority known as adjunct instructors. I teach literature and writing courses to students in their late teens and early 20s who sense that, as Warren Zevon would put it, they were “in the house when the house burned down.” The majority of young people, for a long time, have viewed higher education as a printing press that after four years hands out laminated VIP passes to get them beyond the velvet rope and into the American dream of middle-class home ownership, career stability, and consumptive excess. Now, with reports of a depressed job market looming large, many of them feel that the bet they’ve placed, with government money that they will have to pay back, is less a roll of the dice than a turn at the roulette wheel. The very real possibility that they will graduate into not only a culture of debt—in which they owe thousands of money with interest—but also a closed door society—in which they cannot find good jobs to help them make those payments—terrifies them.
The recession has pulled off a miracle previously thought impossible. It has made American college students more cynical. Their questions are almost all utilitarian—“What does this have to do with my career?” “What is the point of this?” etc. When I asked them “what the point” of an education is, nearly every student answered with some variation of “to get a job.”
It seems that many college students are treating an education like they will treat the rest of their lives by judging it solely it on its merits of “success”—its quantifiably measurable result. An education is only good and worthwhile if it lands you a job. A job is only good and worthwhile if it lands you a big paycheck. The paycheck is only good and worthwhile if it can buy you expensive, trendy things. A relationship is only good and worthwhile if it leads to marriage, and gives you someone with which to share your complaints about work and the spoils of your paycheck. Always industrious, Americans are managing to turn the financial collapse into an opportunity to deaden a culture that already amplified the slogan, “He who dies with the most toys wins.”
Oddly and ironically enough, I’m in one of the few subversive positions perfect for undermining results-obsessed thinking and providing people with an antidote and alternative. I teach English literature at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, Ill. I ask students to analyze, scrutinize and, most importantly, internalize stories. English courses are one of the few places where young people are made to read, consider and appreciate stories in which the ending is only one part among many. Within the narrative, the conclusion is penultimate, but not ultimate. No one will seriously argue that the point of reading literature is merely to see how the story ends. The story is a conduit for carrying across a certain feeling—a sensation—about an insightful moment in the characters’ lives that resembles a moment the reader could easily have. The reader can then use the intellect to understand that sensation and reach a conclusion about how he can live his life. That precious and rare moment of introspection, self-examination and self-criticism is why literature presents one of the finest moments for moral exploration.
The opportunity for moral exploration emerges when people read stories in which details and decisions cannot be judged in financial terms or evaluated by precisely measurable criteria. Details and decision have value based on their moral merit, spiritual sustenance, and existential power.
Literature’s powers of relatability are enhanced by the empathetic compact within all good stories—something that philosophical or psychological theories do not have. An open-minded reader is in the position to empathize with literary characters and therefore consider complex situations that bear resemblance to their own from a variety of angles.
Not only are Americans encouraged to live their lives according to results-based thinking, but they are also encouraged to consume an endless amount of stories in which the result is the only thing that matters. Popular entertainment has very little story and follows a pretty simple and straightforward, linear, outcome-oriented narrative: “Who is the killer?” “Will the hero save the world?” “Will the couple get married?”
Then there are the petty political obsessions of punditry, which tally up points in the win and loss columns for President Obama, the Republican Party and the Tea Party as if these insular victories had any effect on the vast majority of the American people. Politics is today’s version of tomorrow’s history, and while that may interest some people, it will always fail to fill in the gaps in the hierarchy of historical fact. Historical fact moves along a continuum of progression and regression in which, again, the results are what really matter.
Fiction liberates the reader from that continuum simply through the fact that, as the name implies, it is made up. Just because it is made up, however, doesn’t mean that it isn’t true. The great promise of fiction is that it will tell a lie so marvelous it will contain more truth than what it is: factual. The freedom of not worrying about factual accuracy, and therefore not caring much for the result, allows a person to examine much more important insights within the story. It also allows a person—internally—to live moment to moment within the story. It allows that person to size up and scrutinize each detail, find its meaning and value, and take those meaningful enough and use them for sustenance and strength in her own life. Reading great literature gives a person more strength than pleasure because it contains a crucial education.
