Barbara Ehrenreich: "Premature Pragmatism"

The setting was one of those bucolic Ivy League campuses where the tuition exceeds the average American annual income and the favorite sport is white-water rafting – so far, in other words, as one might hope to get from the banal economic worries that plague the grown-up world. The subject, among the roomful of young women who had come to meet with me, turned to “life after college” - :if there is one” (nervous giggles). “My dream was to go into psychiatric social work,” offered a serious young woman in overall and a “Divest Now” button, “but I don’t think I could live on that, so I going into business instead.” When I protested and said that she should hold on to her ideals and try to get by on the $30,000 or so a year psychiatric social workers earn, she looked baffled, as if I were recommending an internship with Mother Teresa.
“Ideal are alright when you’re young,” declared another woman, a campus activist who certainly seemed to fit the age group for which she found idealism appropriate, “but you do have to think about earning a living.” Well, yes, I thought to myself, we older feminists have been saying for some time that the goal of higher education for women is not the “MRS” degree, but when did we ever say that it was banking?
Not that a little respect for the dollar isn’t a fine thing in the young, and a useful antidote, in my day anyway, for the effects of too much Hesse or Kahlil Gibran. But no one in the room had gone so far as to suggest a career in almsgiving, washing lepers’ feet, or doing literacy training among the Bushmen. “Idealism,” to these undergraduates, was defined as an ordinary, respectable profession in the human services. “Realism,” meant plunging almost from pubescence in to the stone hearted world of finance capitalism.
Ehrenreich 2
I find this mindset, which you will find on almost any campus today, “premature pragmatism,” and I’m quite qualified to comment because I, too, was once a victim of it. I had gone to college with an intellectual agenda that included solving the mind-body problem, discovering the source of human evil, and getting an tentative reading on the purpose of life. But within a few months, I had dropped all that and become a chemistry major – partly because I had figured out that there are only meager rewards, in this world, for those who know the purpose of life and the source of all evil.
The result, twenty odd years later is pretty much what you’d expect: I’m an ex-science major with no definite occupation (unless you count “writing,” that universal cover for those who avoid wage slavery at all costs), and I’m still obsessed with the Ultimate Questions, such as What It’s All About and Whether the Universe Will Expand Forever. I could have turned out much worse; I could have stayed in chemistry and gone into something much less idealistic like nerve-gas or plastic, in which case I might have become rich and would almost certainly have become an embittered alcoholic or a middle-aged dropout. The point is that premature pragmatism didn’t work for me, and I doubt it will work for any young person intending to set aside a “Divest Now” button for one reading “You have a friend at Chase Manhattan.”
Yet premature pragmatism has become as popular on college campuses as, in past eras, swallowing goldfish to impress ones friends or taking over the administration building to demand a better world. There has been a precipitous decline, just the seventies, in the number of students majoring in mind-expanding but only incidentally remunerative fields like history and mathematics. Meanwhile, business – as an academic pursuit – is booming: almost one-fourth of all college graduates were business majors in 1983, compared to one-seventh in 1973, while the proportions who major in philosophy or literature have vanished beyond the decimal point to less than 1 percent.
Erhenreich 3
Even more alarming to anyone whose own life has been scarred by premature pragmatism, is the decline in “idealism” as expressed by undergraduates and measured by pollsters. In 1968, 85 percent of college students said that they hoped their education would help them “develop a philosophy of life,” etc., etc. In 1985, only 44 percent adhered to such lofty goals, while the majority expected that education would help them “earn a lot of money.” There has been, in other words, almost a 50 percent decline in idealism and a 100 percent increase in venality, or to put it less judgmentally, premature pragmatism.
I concede though, that there are good reasons for the hard-nosed pragmatism of today’s college students. They face rougher times, economically, than did my generation or the generation before mine. As economists frank Levy and Richard Michel have recently shown, today’s baby boomers (and especially the younger ones) are far less likely than their own parents to be able to buy a home, maintain a family on one income, or to watch their standard of living improve as they grow older.
So the best comeback for the young woman in overalls would have been for her to snap at me, “You think I should live on thirty thousand dollars a year! Well, perhaps you haven’t noticed that the National Association of Homebuilders now estimates that it takes a yearly salary of thirty seven thousand dollars a year to be able to afford a modest, median priced home. Or that if I want to send my own eventual children to a college like this I will need well over fifty thousand dollars a year. Or are you suggesting I rely on a rich husband?” And she would have been dead on the mark: in today’s economy, idealism is a luxury that most of us are likely to enjoy only at the price of simple comforts like housing and education. The mood on campuses isn’t so much venality as it is fear.
But still, premature pragmatism isn’t necessarily a winning strategy. In the first place, what looks like realism at age eighteen may become sheer folly by age thirty-eight. Occupations go in and out of corporate favor, so that chemistry, for example – which seemed to be a safe bet two decades ago – has become one of those disciplines that prepares people for life in the retail end of the newspaper business. The same may eventually happen to today’s campus favorites – like law, management and finance. At least it seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the Earth can sustain, and that human civilization will collapse when the number of, say, tax lawyers exceeds the world’s total population of farmers, weavers, fisherpersons, and pediatric nurses.
Erhenreich 4
Furthermore, with any luck at all, one becomes a rather different person at age thirty-eight than one was at age eighteen. The list of famous people who ended up in a different line of work than the one first embarked on includes Clark Gable (former lumberjack), artist Henri Rousseau (postal clerk), Elvis Presley (truck driver), St. Augustine (playboy) and Che Guevara 9physician). Heads of state are notoriously unprepared for their mature careers; think of Adolph Hitler (landscape painter), Ho Chi Min (seaman), and our own Ronald Reagan. Women’s careers are, if anything, even more unpredictable, to judge from my own friends: Barbara (a biochemist turned novelist), Sara (French literature professor now a book editor), cousin Barb (anthropology to medicine).
But the saddest thing about today’s premature pragmatists is not that they will almost certainly be unprepared for their midlife career destinations, but that they will be unprepared for Life, in the grand sense, at all. The years between eighteen and twenty-two were not given to us to be fritted away in contemplation of future tax shelters and mortgage payments. In fact, it is almost a requirement of developmental biology that these years be spent in erotic reverie, metaphysical speculation, and schemes for universal peace and justice. Sometimes, of course, we lose sight of these heroic dreams of youth later on, as overdue bills and carburetor problems take their toll. But those who never dream at all start to lose much more – their wit, empathy, perspective, and for lack of a more secular term, their immortal souls.
But what about the fact that it take nearly a six-figure income to achieve what used to be known as a “middle-class” lifestyle? What about my young ivy League friend forced to choose between a career in human services and what she believes, perhaps realistically, to be an adequate income? All I can say is that there is something grievously wrong with a culture that values Wall Street sharks above social workers, armament manufactures above artists, or, for that matter, corporate lawyers above homemakers. Somehow, we’re going to have to make the world a little bit more habitable for idealists, whether they are eighteen or thirty-eight. In fact, I suspect that more and more young people, forced to choose between their ideals and economic security, will start opting for a career in social change. “The pay is lousy,” as veteran writer-historian-social-change-activist Irving Howe like to say, “ but it’s steady work.”