“For young, American, urban college grads, we are living in probably the top one percent of lives that have ever been possible… but the politics of this group often presents as so pessimistic and furious.”

I have been thinking about this quote, from Vox journalist Jerusalem Demsas in an interview with Anne Helen Petersen, pretty much constantly since I read it in Peterson’s newsletter Culture Study.  Peterson asks Demsas what she’s thinking about, what she might write about next, and she raises this conundrum. “Of course, there are so many things to be angry about,” she acknowledges, and if this anger is motivated by empathy, that’s great—but young(ish), urban college grads probably are not “the most empathetic” of generations to ever walk the earth. So what gives? 

I have a hypothesis. Or rather a constellation of ideas that may or may not add up to an actual educated guess at explaining this phenomenon, which is perhaps about explaining myself to myself (again).

Because I’ve been thinking about the moral value of knowledge, too, and the demands of it, and I very deeply believe that the things you learn about often ask something of you—what will you do now that you know that the clothing you buy is made by folks working in sweatshops, for example, or that the American diet and industrial agriculture has devastating effects on our climate? But I have also been plumbing the limits of this relationship, since I’ve been in school for approximately 1,000 years, and I have learned a lot of things, and I am so exhausted and disheartened and angry because I have learned over and over again how impossible it is to live in these United States in the year 2021 and not contribute in some way to the massive burden of suffering shouldered by people and animals and other forms of life around the world. (This is the entire plot of season three of The Good Place, so you don’t actually have to do a Ph.D. in humanistic social sciences to learn it and can instead just watch a comedy show, hooray for all of us.)

There’s a side quest here about “awareness:” why was my entire youth a series of “awareness” campaigns, with pink garbage bins for breast cancer as if people thinking about breast cancer once a week on trash day would heal those experiencing it? And there’s another thing, more relevant to me, about gatekeeping: what does it mean to judge people as good or bad less by their actions than by their knowledge, or more accurately, their facility for describing the histories and systems that shape their lives and the lives of others? I am a teacher! I in fact spend a lot of time and effort supporting young people to develop both that knowledge and that facility! And yet I am wondering persistently now: 

What does it mean to make moral judgments of people because they do not have knowledge that they have, in fact, been denied—by school systems, by dominant groups reinforcing the status quo, by state legislatures banning instruction about enslavement or laws that limit learning about human reproduction? And what does it mean when—because—that ignorance has devastating impacts on other people and the world?

What does it mean to see knowledge as a good, worthy aspiration when it can be used to protect but also to target and to harm?

And then there’s this—perhaps most personally relevant for the way I manage myself and my own existence in the world: what does it mean to believe that my knowing about something, and indeed my facility to talk about why it is bad, makes the world better?

I finally read Sally Rooney’s Normal People this year or last—a pandemic year. There’s a scene where the main characters attend a protest against yet another instance of overwhelming violence that the state of Israel perpetrated against Palestinian communities in Gaza, and Marianne realizes that she will live and die in a world of extreme violence against the innocent. I think about that all the time, too, because what does it mean to know that and to know so much about the kinds and types and impacts of the violence committed? Does it do anything but make me small and sad—or, more aptly, “pessimistic and furious”—despite my enjoyment of “the top one percent of lives that have ever been possible” for a woman like me? Does it just make joy into an enemy, and particularly the joy of those who do not have the particular burden of knowledge which is the most crushing to me at that moment?

I think I thought, at one time, that knowledge was a solution—if we knew better, we would do better—and I know now that we have known many things for a long time, and it is rarely lack of knowledge that stymies the solutions to our collective suffering but rather things like the will of the powerful to bear the cost of change. And I also know that my pessimism and my fury have not clothed the naked or fed the hungry or sheltered a weary traveler. Compassion does that.

Katie Van Zanen

Katie is a doctoral student in English and education at the University of Michigan. She loves the New York Times crossword puzzle, advice columns, oceans, and dogs of all kinds.