In praise of Option Three

Sarah called me at about 1 in the morning the other night, in tears. She had just gotten back from Berlin, where she had visited a concentration camp, and the experience left her deeply shaken. She talked for an hour or two, using the sort of pseudo-metaphysical nonsense language she favors when she's trying to make sense of emotions. I didn't really know what to say to her--I know quite a lot about the Holocaust, have a nearly almost photographic memory, and tend to intellectualize most things. I suspect that's why I'm so often accused of lacking overt emotional responses to things: I think strong emotions are largely dependent on surprise, and I make it my business to learn as much as possible about things that I attach emotional significance to for the exact reason that I don't want to be surprised.
At any rate, I wasn't exactly sure what to say. "No kidding" didn't really seem apt. She asked desperately what anybody could do about it, and I remembered a line from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon: "Well, what can we do? I sort of intend to spend my life ensuring that nothing of the sort ever happens again."
Which is silly, of course. I'm a student of history. I know about the Holodomor in Ukraine, the Armenian genocide, the Khmer Rouge, Rwanda, Darfur, the Germans with the Herero and Namaquas in Namibia, Pakistan in the Bangladesh War of 1971, Burundi in 1972, East Timor, the entire founding of the United States, and so on and so forth. Human history consists largely of lunatic attempts to bring about our own extinction and it shows every sign of continuing that trend indefinitely. And that's just instances of systematic extermination of discreet populations and doesn't begin to encompass the unspeakable scope of human suffering both today and throughout history. I think about these things all the time --perhaps that is the logical consequence of intellectualizing such things rather than reacting emotionally. Her emotional response will run its course and she will become wrapped up in her everyday life again in a few days and will think no more of it, unless it's brought up in conversation. I envy her that, I think.

More to the point, I really do want to spend much of my life working as best I can to slow our inexorable march towards omnicide. My primary concern, however, is largely ecological, since short of nuclear war, people can really only kill other people into the low millions before the white northern hemisphere starts feeling squeamish. Given another hundred years of our current rapacious attitude towards the environment, however, and humanity will be reduced to a few hundred survivors at the north and south poles--all of whom will have very brief, cancer-ridden lives due to the massive holes in the ozone layer.
The point here is not entirely to be alarmist. As I am frequently assured, the market will find solutions to all of the staggering ecological problems, and that may be true. But that requires that somebody get to work on it, and since I have little faith in the capability of most other people, I'd really rather I was one of those people.
Besides, it's just good capitalism. If you know for certain there is going to be an enormous captive market emerging within a certain timeframe, wouldn't you want to be the first one in the strongest position to dominate that market?
Which brings me to Option Three from the last post. I've actually been thinking a lot about the aforementioned Neal Stephenson book lately, which I read when I was in New York at the Model UN back in the spring. In it, one of the protagonists is a fairly regular, nerdy guy who (although quite intelligent and capable) would probably spend most of his life attached in some unsatisfactory way to a public college in California were it not for his friend who a) has plans and business models and b) knows people, and knows people who know people. I see a certain analagous situation with my potential future and the more I think about it, the more attractive it becomes. Besides, the guy in the book got to hook up with a hottie who owns and operates an ocean salvage company in the Phillippines and then found a lot of gold.
Consider the popular objections to Option Three. It would mean descending into the noxious depths of Business and Government, rather than the pure, clean world of academia. But I have no illusions about how much change academics are capable of bringing about, and I have even fewer illusions about the changes possible on a middle-class income. If you are poor, you are irrelevant.
Another objection: it would mean eventually, inevitably, being surrounded by the sort of bloodsucking soulless neoconservative sorts who dominate both Business and Government. Distasteful, yes. But to those of you who raise this objection, I say: would you rather have one radical left-wing Horvatian socialist lunatic rubbing shoulders with the high-and-mighty, or none? Wouldn't that hopeless, futile attempt at leftist input be worth it? And isn't a stubborn exercise in futility right up my alley?
A poor college professor is going to rarely, if ever, be in a position to offer advice to governments and businesses on how to make their actions ecologically sustainable, let alone get paid for it. That seems like a pretty strong argument in favor of Option Three.

In other news, it's cold here. I woke up at about 2:30 in the afternoon yesterday (since I stayed up all night listening to election coverage) and found that the sun was setting.

What I'm Reading
Jasper Ridley, Garibaldi
Bob Woodward, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987
Dambudzo Marechera, Black Sunlight
Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things
Jaroslav Vanek, The General Theory of Labor-Managed Market Economies
David Schweickart, Against Capitalism