A Day in the Life
When we wake up in the morning, most college students enter into a life of routines. We go to the bathroom and brush our teeth. We take a shower and get dressed. We eat three meals a day, and several snacks. We go to class and read some books. We work, and we work out. We take breaks and we take naps. We use computers for research and writing, and for e-mail and gaming. We drive to the store to pick up some things we need. We watch TV and we listen to music. We say our prayers and we go to bed. We're very busy, but we're not making history.
Except, of course, that everything we do (and a lot that we don't do) makes history. To a great extent, America 's environmental history is the record of our changing routines and their environmental impacts. So "A Day in the Life" looks at some of the most common actions our days in some uncommon ways, unpacking the causes and consequences of the seemingly insignificant aspects of our everyday lives. It looks both at our intentions-the conscious choices we make-and at the unintended consequences of our lives.
At college, we often say we want to teach students how to change the world. But the fact of the matter is that they already change it every day, right here, right now, on campus. In general, we Americans only think we're changing the world when we think we are. But, in fact, we probably change the world more when we're not thinking because we're conforming to the institutional expectations of the culture-expectations inherited from a world and a worldview that pre-dated ecological consciousness. Institutions are patterns of human behavior established in societies to help people live their lives without thinking through every decision. Sometimes, though, they also make us oblivious to the obvious.
"A Day in the Life" shows what economist Thomas Schelling calls "the tyranny of small decisions." Day to day, our lives are made of small decisions. And the total of all our small decisions is American culture, which institutionalizes those decisions, and expresses them as common sense. If you want food, common sense tells us, you go to the grocery store. If you want food at college, you go the cafeteria. In either case, going with the flow of common sense usually involves us with industrial agriculture and sets us against the sustainable flows of nature. The same is true in other areas of our lives.
For this reason, many of us are unsatisfied with the way our lives reflect our core values. As Peter Marin suggests, many Americans aren't sure that they live in right relation to the world. “For many of us these days, at the heart of our relation to the world around us, [there is] an ethical tension or a sense of moral ambiguity. In the first place, we are aware of the nature of the world, the kinds of suffering and injustice at work in it; and, in the second place, we more or less dimly sense the ways in which our own roles and station amount, at best, to a kind of unintentional complicity with much that we abhor.”
“Thus,” concludes Marin, “we are often at odds not only with the world but also with ourselves, for few of us choose to live in relation to the world, or have the chance to live in relation to the world, in ways which reflect precisely how we feel about it. Whether this is enough, in itself, to make us guilty of anything is a question perhaps only a god might answer; but such questions of guilt and responsibility nonetheless nag at us beneath the surface of consciousness.” We haven't yet adjusted our everyday actions-or our institutions-to our deepest values.
But the “tyranny of small decisions” is also the opportunity of small decisions. As individuals, for example, we could be what Wendell Berry calls “responsible consumers.” For Berry , this means meeting our needs-but not our every desire. It means paying attention to the quality of what we consume, and the health of the systems, both social and natural, that provide for us. To be a responsible consumer, then, is always to be more than a consumer. It's to be a student, a worker, a parent, a partner, a neighbor, a world and local citizen, concerned with how our practices of consumption affect our children, our loved ones, our neighbors, our countrymen and the countryside, as well as the world, both human and natural. It's to extend the circle of love and care from our private lives to the world. It's to develop an extended ethics of action, paying attention to the moral ecology of everyday life.
The stories on these pages come primarily from Jim Farrell's teaching and learning. For many years, St. Olaf's introductory course in American Studies has included a museum, where students analyze the facts and artifacts of American life. The final project for this course on contemporary culture has been a book titled Habits in the Heart: A Day in the Life. Each student writes a chapter for the book on an everyday occurrence, looking for the cultural rules and patterns involved in beliefs and behavior we usually don't think twice about. They write about waking up and taking naps, about taking a shower and taking a coffee break, about working and working out, about e-mail and other males (and females too), about eating in the caf and drinking at parties. They write thoughtfully and beautifully, illuminating the seemingly simple routines of our lives.
These assignments seemed so good that in 1996 Farrell assigned them to himself. As Dr. America , curator of the magnificent (but wholly imaginary) American Studies Museum , he began to give radio tours of American everyday life. In these tours, the good doctor challenged what Leslie Prosterman calls "the law of inverse importance," which generally requires academics to write most about things that most people don't do. Intensely interested in the significance of the insignificant, Dr. America complexified American culture, helping people see both why we act the way we do and how we might act differently.
Most of the essays in "A Day in the Life" have been inspired by St. Olaf students, and by conversations among students. Some of them are originally Dr. America 's. We hope all of them will help you understand your participation in the moral ecology of American life, and the power of the small decisions in your everyday choices.
Where to go next:
|
