Christine GarveyI might venture to say that we don’t have control over anything, but we really want to. At least, observe: I am at the zoo on Tuesday, post-class trip, and I’m wandering around, looking at the tiger pacing around and walking along the ledge that drops down about a hundred feet so the tiger can’t escape and rip anyone’s heart out. I’m awed by this fantastically beautiful and fierce spectacle of nature. I make my way over to observation post two, to see what else I can see, and there are a few more observers. I squeeze my way up to the railing.
Next to me is a woman with a camera. She begins to call to the tiger, “Look this way. Look this way! Come on, turn around.” Are you kidding me? I mean, maybe that’s just something people say when they are trying to get a good camera angle. Whatever. But she was speaking it in a voice that was more than just self-reflective; it sounded like she was actually trying to get the tiger to listen to her. And I still would have been ok if she hadn’t added bitterly, when the tiger didn’t turn around, “Ok, don’t look this way.” Good God. Sometimes I just can’t take people.
Now I know everybody can’t be as enlightened and as at peace with nature as I am, but this little picture of tiger-commanding really accentuated some basic facts about human nature that are awfully annoying. People just have to have control over their environment, apparently. Human beings are, especially in this age of remote controls and buttons and things, appalled when things won’t go as they please, when the world doesn’t respond to their desires. I know this; when I was a kiddo I spent a lot of time making scenes over not being able to find specific LEGO pieces and freaking out over eating things that weren’t fish sticks. But I would expect adults to have grown out of not only the desire to control the world around them but also the belief that this is possible.
We, it appears, cannot merely observe; we must touch and manipulate and control. In classes, for instance. I have no quarrel with interactivity during class time, and class discussions usually are the only thing that can keep anybody awake. But some people seem to miss the point that there is a time for observation and understanding before there is a time for vehement and unrelenting questioning. We fancy ourselves smart here at Washington University, and therefore ripping on famous philosophers and writers comes naturally. I think we seek to insert our own limited experience into the discussion too early – before the question “Why is Plato so impractical and dumb?” is posed, maybe we should be asking, “What’s the context, how does this really work, how would this apply to life if actually used?” If you criticize things before you even understand them, you are just as deluded as the lady trying to woo the tiger. You have no control over something you don’t understand.
Maybe that’s slightly different than not being able to accept things you can’t control. Maybe more in line with this theme is the unreasonable demands people are always making on the University administration, often presented in the editorial pages here. Damn those ArtSci clusters, the lack of parking spaces, the big holes in the ground, obsession over the school’s national image, those long lines in Mallinckrodt and the tuition hike. Hmm. It appears that the school is God. With less money and less-qualified students, they can in fact provide more parking spaces and large sparkling cafeterias without even breaking ground anywhere. Blows my mind.
Look: the school isn’t God. No human institution is going to have control over everything. We’re all just trying to do our best down here. As unfortunate as the recent campus attack is, the school can’t do much about a determined attacker short of posting guards with M16s at the door of each dorm, and we all know how encouraging that would be.
So it looks like what we’ve really got here is, on one hand, an irrational desire to control our environment and have dominion over things we don’t even understand, and on the other, the willingness to hand over our fate to a patriarchal figure who will take care of all our problems for us. Either way, it’s stupid, and either way, we’re fooling ourselves. My prescription is a healthy dose of humility on the first hand – like, remembering that the tiger could and would rip our jugulars out if it had the chance – and on the second hand, repossession of personal responsibility – realizing that if our life is going to improve, it’s going to be because of us.
Dennis is a freshman in Arts & Sciences. He can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].