// end of the world //
Spring 2006
The End of the World: Revenge of the Tool
Avi Zenilman
Idealists fail. It's what we do.
Brooklyn is built on a heap of failed manuscripts. Iraq is nowhere near peace, let alone liberal democracy. For every Believer or n+1 there are n+685 little magazines whose first issues are also their last.
Like many of us, I spent my first few years of college enamored with my revelation that in some way we'll all fail. I became one of those overblown freshman skeptics. I wrote off Brooklyn and Baghdad as inevitable collateral in the war against naïveté, and I refused to write anything of actual substance for a campus publication.
I didn't want to look like an idiot, and I wanted high ground from which to piss on everyone else's bright-eyed and bushy-tailed undergraduate ideals.
And then I got in a perfectly normal argument with my father, who, as if on cue, popped the bubble of my cynical pomposity. "What kind of person do you want to be?" he demanded. I delivered a rambling disquisition about how I wanted to navigate between the structural and the normative, between what I could do and what I should do. He looked at me as if I had thought myself up my own ass. He shrugged. And he replied: "You could just be a good person."
It was true. I had used my hubris as a way of avoiding the hard work of trying to be right and relevant. Behind my avoidance of idealism was fear of the possibility–the inevitability–of being wrong. And I hadn't realized I was a cliché until after the fact, when I realized how stupidly wrong I was anyway.
And there it is. Folk wisdom, at least the kind that doesn't involve putting butter in your socks when you have the bird flu, seems to have a knack for getting some big things right. And for me, Papa Zenilman's folk wisdom pushed me over the edge into my second college revelation: while it's true that idealism is not a virtue to be applauded for its own merit, it's also true that idealism is an essential tool. Ideals are necessary, and those who try to dismiss them are moral cowards.
Pretending that life is simple is a way of avoiding problems, and throwing up my hands and saying "life is complicated" is just a passive-aggressive way of saying that life is simple. Being on the right side of history means nothing if I'm convinced think I live outside it.
So here I am, on the back page of this magazine—and here you are, reading this magazine to the very last page. Yes, any political, cultural, economic, legal, or intellectual prescription you take from these pages—or from any other magazine, journal, book, or agitprop documentary—is probably bound to fail. But that's OK. These pages are weapons if you hold them right. They are idealism as a tool, idealism put into the service of the search for Really Good Ideas.
Now all we have to do is not screw them up.
Brooklyn is built on a heap of failed manuscripts. Iraq is nowhere near peace, let alone liberal democracy. For every Believer or n+1 there are n+685 little magazines whose first issues are also their last.
Like many of us, I spent my first few years of college enamored with my revelation that in some way we'll all fail. I became one of those overblown freshman skeptics. I wrote off Brooklyn and Baghdad as inevitable collateral in the war against naïveté, and I refused to write anything of actual substance for a campus publication.
I didn't want to look like an idiot, and I wanted high ground from which to piss on everyone else's bright-eyed and bushy-tailed undergraduate ideals.
And then I got in a perfectly normal argument with my father, who, as if on cue, popped the bubble of my cynical pomposity. "What kind of person do you want to be?" he demanded. I delivered a rambling disquisition about how I wanted to navigate between the structural and the normative, between what I could do and what I should do. He looked at me as if I had thought myself up my own ass. He shrugged. And he replied: "You could just be a good person."
It was true. I had used my hubris as a way of avoiding the hard work of trying to be right and relevant. Behind my avoidance of idealism was fear of the possibility–the inevitability–of being wrong. And I hadn't realized I was a cliché until after the fact, when I realized how stupidly wrong I was anyway.
And there it is. Folk wisdom, at least the kind that doesn't involve putting butter in your socks when you have the bird flu, seems to have a knack for getting some big things right. And for me, Papa Zenilman's folk wisdom pushed me over the edge into my second college revelation: while it's true that idealism is not a virtue to be applauded for its own merit, it's also true that idealism is an essential tool. Ideals are necessary, and those who try to dismiss them are moral cowards.
Pretending that life is simple is a way of avoiding problems, and throwing up my hands and saying "life is complicated" is just a passive-aggressive way of saying that life is simple. Being on the right side of history means nothing if I'm convinced think I live outside it.
So here I am, on the back page of this magazine—and here you are, reading this magazine to the very last page. Yes, any political, cultural, economic, legal, or intellectual prescription you take from these pages—or from any other magazine, journal, book, or agitprop documentary—is probably bound to fail. But that's OK. These pages are weapons if you hold them right. They are idealism as a tool, idealism put into the service of the search for Really Good Ideas.
Now all we have to do is not screw them up.
//Avi Zenilman, CC ‘07, is majoring in American Studies. He is the Managing Editor of The Blue and White.