Columnist Daniel Kington argues that students cannot cease fighting against oppression simply because the struggle is deemed irrational.
While campaigning for BARE’s Student Senate bid last semester, I stopped one student in front of Baker Center to speak with her about our campaign goals. She was generally supportive and acknowledged that she, like many students on Ohio University’s campus, has experienced the burden of student debt and rising tuition. And yet, after listening to my spiel for a minute or two, she said, “You’re never going to win on tuition. It’s a lost cause.”
That caught me a little bit off guard — usually the Ohio University Student Union’s reputation for fighting (often successfully) against tuition hikes was seen as a real selling point in our canvassing for the senate. And yet that student, hugely sympathetic with our cause, told me that our continued resistance was — and she used this word — “irrational.”
To her, and to everyone who would agree with her, I want to say: I understand where you’re coming from. It does not seem strictly rational to think that we can win something (like free tuition) that would require a fundamental reallocation of the state’s resources. It seems especially irrational to think we can win something (like campus democracy) that would require a fundamental restructuring of our entire society. However, the idea that we have to be rational when striving for political change is one created under the unilaterally flawed understanding that our society has always been destined to take that shape and that it is now incapable of fundamental change. When you really pull it apart, that idea is laughable. And yet, it is fiercely engrained within all of us to varying degrees.
The reason that idea is so entrenched? It is a belief created by the dominant systems of power in order to maintain those systems of power. You will almost never hear a politician, emersed in the dominant, current structure, admit that we could shape our nation’s political and economic system in a completely different way and be just fine. “Everyday Americans” too frequently listen to those politicians on the news and read about them in the papers, and so any options beyond the scope of the current model begin, very quickly, not to seem like real options.
That concept (it is the concept of cultural hegemony) is the same reason that we, as a nation, fear any iteration of non-Western society so deeply. To think of strange people with their funny languages, funny clothes and funny customs living within political systems that have completely different constructions (or no constructions) of "development," is a huge threat to our own understanding of humanity and humanity’s place within the world. It threatens our notions of "progress," and it threatens our vision of ourselves progressing through time. So we paint those other cultures, and indigenous groups especially, as somehow operating within the past. Doing that allows us to view huge swaths of the human population as headed, quite naturally, toward Western society’s current iteration. It allows us to view ourselves as advanced and all others as primitive.
I know that latter point seems like a tangent, but the gist is this: Our society dismisses the possibility of there being any other way. And our society does that so successfully that we begin to believe that any conceptualization of another way is irrational, meaning objectively unrealizable. However, as I’ve tried to briefly outline above, objectivity and rationality are concepts created by Western civilization with the end of Western civilization in mind.
If every student in the world just sighed, dismissed the struggle against austerity and rising tuition as irrational, and decided to move on, then public education would almost certainly disappear — virtually overnight. If we chose to succumb to climate change, sexism, racism and class-based oppression, then those things would only get worse. Of course, there is a place for the "rational" fight: for lobbying and reformist efforts, seeking to make those situations concretely better in small ways. But I believe we also have to recognize that our society wants us to see no true alternative to those varied forms of oppression. And we have to recognize, too, how skewed and biased our society is toward the current way. We have to try our best to unlearn the dogmatic ideals of "objectivity" and "rationality" to begin searching for a new way.
Daniel Kington is a sophomore studying English and a Student Union organizer. He is also an officer of the Sierra Student Coalition. Do you think fighting against rising tuition is irrational? Email him at dk982513@ohio.edu.
