To untangle the detritus of culture in our time, Interdisciplinary Studies affects a useful posture. At Athabasca, for instance, at the Master’s Degree in Interdisciplinary Studies “you will learn to think holistically, critically, and reflectively. You will find the connections and points of overlap between specialized and generalized knowledge.” AU’s Interdisciplinary program is called MAIS, an acronym redolent of the manna of our continent’s earliest human occupants (who subsisted in part on maize/corn). As a graduate I can attest that MAIS is a wonderful program – worth far more than the price of admission, so to speak.
Besides the panoply of course material on offer, ranging from creative writing to interpersonal psychology to personalized course syllabii constructed in unison betwixt oneself and one’s tutor, the pedagogical outcome of the program is uniquely individual. Students learn to see that, even amidst the most hallowed ivy-draped canvas, full of pomp and circumstance and folks who graduate to become apparent Masters of the Universe, a great divide exists between differing academic disciplines. These varied approaches, often termed silos, tend to be in either open or taciturn conflict with each other’s worldviews.
Now silos, for those of less agrarian origins, are generally filled with materials that, over time, ferment and become useful fodder for animals. It’s called silage, logically enough. Occasionally, as happened in my elder’s living memory in BC’s Fraser Valley of my childhood, a silo’s inner zymology creates so much heat and a vacuum as air is inhaled and exhaled by yeasts and bacteria, that the silo will literally explode. While comedians make hay about all the hot air emanating from politicians in far away capitals, the organic truth of the silo reveals that whenever a lot of one thing is stuffed into a sufficiently enclosed canister, a roiling inner turmoil can explode out into the world. Maybe this helps to explain all the unbecoming freakout sessions one finds online in the social media sphere—folks always seem to be emotionally outraged in a manner not conducive to critical thought or devil’s advocate inquiry.
This extends to disputes in academia, too, such as the way the realm of psychology obsessively focuses on notions of individuation, treating the interior life of the mind as though we each are characters in a Jane Austen novel. By contrast, sociology takes the birds eye view of society, by and large, seeing it as an immense mechanistic realm where much of our life is forged out of our background and beginnings such that our apparent conscious agency appears as an afterthought. And then there’s the hard sciences, in the popular imagination especially, where much of who we is best understood through an algorithm of genetics and chemistry, rather than the meanings we make and create through our conscious effort. In the end as learners we’re left to sort through the jumble of certainties (often plied by social media influencers in a manner that would surely induce a blush to the cheeks of even the cheapest 1920s snake oil salesman or travelling preacher). To pick through the randomness and refuse of facts and events and make some use of it might be the ultimate academic skill we strive to attain – like dung beetles of academia, if you will.
But it can’t all be work, and, just as creatures of the wild relish their tasks, if for no reason as they know nothing else, each in its nature knows to rest and recuperate. As humans this means, in part, learning to not take ourselves so very seriously.
In our more expansive moments we know that our lives are not only limited in duration but our minds are limited by the ways by which we define and acquire truth. It helps to stop what we’re doing and take stock. Even in mid-sentence, in mid-lecture, in the middle of what would be a raptly-attentive classroom discussion for a brick and mortar pupil, we can lie down and take a nap like a newborn. This moment of instant change involves a sudden appreciation of those mindlessly mindful moments of pondering where, like lion cubs bellied up to the colostrum bar, our soulful eyes rise to the horizon and we ponder the meaning of life and our place within it. These dazed and dawdling interjections to our studies can remind us to not take ourselves or our discipline so very seriously, the better to apply that most priceless of life skill to our studies: the acquisition of true perspective, true context, toward our lives in the real world.
The 20th Century author Henry Miller, in the midst of a deepening horror at the vacuity of the Hollywood script-writing industry, wrote to a friend “when I do nothing I find I like it immensely. One can do nothing here because the surroundings themselves are sufficient.” California’s beauty, akin to much of our wonderful country of Canada, reminded Miller that the core starting point of his life’s struggle, his desire to express in words the horror of his urban life, had relieved him of that which had driven him forward. Like a dung beetle placed in a huge terrarium with enough fecal matter to keep him satiated for the rest of his days, Miller was able to look out on the world and find bemusement at the passing realm. And if, through the views we discover in our studies, we, too, lean to wonder about the meaning of myriad aspects of the society we see and our place within the cultural constellation, our distance education will surely have proven its worth.
Animals, like ideas and beliefs and trends, all come and go with the days and the seasons. But in the end, wherever we go there we are. And to separate ourselves from excrescence of cultural upsets and live-streaming verbal diarrhea, might be the highest outcome of higher education. With the acquisition of a distant-yet-knowing view of the societal morass in our midst we might also, metaphorically like the singer Lou Reed, learn to look askance at:
“all the Jim-Jims in this town
And all the politicians making crazy sounds
And everybody putting everybody else down”
When we separate ourselves from our ideas that may be where we most realize the variety of ways to get our proverbial dung ball where its going – the better to find our academic purpose.