Читать книгу The Nature of College - James J. Farrell - Страница 32

When students first encounter this “problem of invisible complexity,” they’re shocked and amazed. They often note that they had no idea that they have such far-reaching environmental impacts. This ignorance is interesting. The United States boasts one of the best systems of higher education in the world, and yet its students and graduates still don’t know the basic facts about the artifacts of their daily life. To a great extent, American society socializes its kids by obscuring the true nature of their lives.¹⁹ In part, this is the logical outcome of a system of specialization and division of labor. Following the logic of Adam Smith, Americans have embraced the efficiency of a system in which different people are responsible for different productive functions. And this is good. We get brain surgeons and rocket scientists, accountants, artists, and college professors. It’s good, we think, when waste management companies collect our garbage weekly. But specialized responsibility can be a curious form of irresponsibility. In its most extreme forms, it can lead to what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil,” in which individuals do a good job in a seemingly harmless line of work, but unwittingly contribute to systems of injustice. We can see now that American slave owners and Nazi concentration camp workers were complicit with systems of evil, but it’s always harder to see the immorality of our own time. Most of us are not evil, but we’re not always doing good, because our specialized cleverness keeps us from being mindful of the potentially harmful consequences of doing a good job of consumption. In our rooms, surrounded by familiar things, we feel at home, but we forget that we’ve also impacted the homes of people, plants, and animals around the globe, for better and worse.²⁰

American consumer ignorance is also the result of an economic system of comparative advantage. Historically, as different cities and regions of the country specialized in the products and processes that offered advantages in the marketplace, the social and environmental impacts of those methods of manufacture moved out of sight and out of mind. Home production of food, clothes, and furnishings was supplanted by factory production, and local tailors, cobblers, and furniture makers were replaced by factory workers someplace else. As a result, people lost the local knowledge of the consequences of their consumption, as well as the local cultures of care for neighbors and neighborhoods that regulated production, consumption, and disposal of wastes. More stuff came to consumers, and it was cheaper, but its real impacts and true costs increasingly moved away.²¹