One of the few virtues to living such a peripatetic life is that it allows me to hoard nostalgia. According to Don Draper, nostalgia is “a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone,” and it can be shocking how often and unexpected those twinges can be. They accumulate with every relationship severed, every suitcase packed, every “let’s-keep-in-touch” email sent. That unheimlich feeling that you get when you see someone for the first time in twelve years and realize that although their hair and clothes and eyesight might not be the same, there’s still something familiar about them is nostalgia too. If anyone ever feels like a melancholy, nostalgic soak, I’d suggest fetching yourself a nice glass of whisky and clicking through the Facebook photo albums of those of your high school friends whom you haven’t seen in a while.

In other words, nostalgia isn’t the sole preserve of retirees, grandparents, and college professors. Instead, it’s an easy self-indulgence, one that requires nothing more than an ironclad belief that things used to be better.

And that makes nostalgia a very fraught thing. It’s perfectly possible, for instance, to feel nostalgic about things that you wouldn’t ever want back. Take, for example, the poor reception to the recent remakes of Knight Rider and The Day The Earth Stood Still, or the half-resurrection of the new wave band The Cars. On a larger scale, the aftermath of the second World War still “exercises a powerful hold on the British imagination,” according to historian Robert Hewison, even though nobody would ever want to go back to postwar Britain. Clearly, some things are better left in the past.

Meanwhile, feelings of anxiety or helplessness in the face of large, impersonal forces, can trigger that kind of politicized nostalgia that, as the perpetually red-faced, foaming-at-the-mouth Frank Rich will tell you, can turn into screeches of resentment and calls for the arresting of all political change per se, in the name of a golden age that never really existed. For example: Virginia governor Robert McDonnell’s attempt to promote “Confederate History Month” was an attempt to conjure up the romantic, Gone With The Wind-type images of antebellum Virginia without all that messy slavery business. Or the firestorm over the Texas Board of Education’s historical revanchism (“Texas Gives the Boot to Liberal Social Studies Bias,” reads the state Republican Party’s blog), in which matters of historical interpretation were settled 10 to 5 along party lines. Beware politicians who wield the past for any reason.

It’s not the case that this is the only mixture of politics and memory that’s based on half-remembrances and partial truths, of course (there are still plenty of viable Communist parties in Europe!). But nostalgia, because it’s so easily accessible, has a nasty way of turning into unthinking reactionaryism, as our friends in the Tea Party have a way of reminding us at least once a week.

To quote Milan Kundera: “In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.” In other words, it’s better to leave nostalgia where it belongs, as a sentiment that’s best suited to private thought rather than public action. (I leave the question of cultural nostalgia open for debate; after all, no remakes whatsoever means no Bewitched on the one hand, no Battlestar Galactica on the other).

Which brings me to the point of all this hand-wringing. The idea for this series, Keywords, came from a book of the same name, written by Raymond Williams in 1976. That book tried to explain those kinds of words that everyone knows the definition of until they think about it a little bit harder — art, culture, society, liberalism, and so on. It was a modernist project in every sense: it sought to delimit, once and for all, the lexical boundaries of these words and the sum of human knowledge on them. A big task, even for such an influential literary critic as Williams.

This series, on the other hand, has been much more solipsistic, and intentionally so: who am I to hold forth about huge abstractions, when I can barely wrap my mind around my daily experiences? In that sense, it was a really more of an in-joke that only I knew about (until now, that is). But the study of concepts is a bit limiting — one should either go big or go home, and I guess I’m not interested or patient enough to write a book along the lines of Mark Kurlansky’s Cod just yet.

I thought about ending with the kind of treacly platitudes that seem to be appropriate for such occasions (here’s what I thought of just now: “In the end, everyone has to find his or her own keywords.” Get it?). But I’ll refrain, just this once: after all, it’s time to move on to the next series of self-indulgences.

Of course, every commentator or pundit worth his or her salt is equal parts journalist, polemicist, and gadfly, some with a dash of liar thrown in for good measure. But now, non-journalists of all stripes can instantly broadcast their anger, often times long before their conscience can catch up. Shame? How twentieth century.

And at a time when any jackass can publish their dumb thoughts whenever they want, there are bound to be some large-scale breaches in the social contract. Thus Alice Hoffman, an author known more for her magical realism than her vitriol, suddenly unleashes a (relatively G-rated) Twitter outburst after a snippy review of her novel The Story Sisters ran in The Boston Globe. Or the first commenter on a story about historian and essayist Tony Judt’s battle with Lou Gehrig’s disease, writes, “There is a God, it seems.” Or John Stossel attacks the writer of a retrospective on Billy Mays as being “an elitist young author.” (Full disclosure: obviously, that author is me, and what’s actually ridiculous about that blog entry is that that Stossel calls Billy Mays a “free market hero” and a “public servant” completely without irony. Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

Small wonder, then, that there is a general decline in civility — a trickle down of anger and thinly veiled hatred, which leads to Tea Parties, outbursts of “You lie!” in the middle of presidential speeches, and plenty of stress eating.

This is not a new observation; musician and “digital pioneer” Jaron Lanier has just written a book that, in part, discusses the “culture of nastiness” on the web. But you don’t need to be Yoda to realize that the amount of sheer vitriol coursing through our collective veins also scares people. Ted Koppel thinks as long as we are angry, “our national pendulum will swing wildly between anarchy and authoritarianism.” So did Hannah Arendt: she wrote that totalitarian states worked because they managed to harness the “self-centered bitterness” of an “atomized and individualized society,” whose members were more likely to tear each other apart than do anything constructive.

But is there a moral here? Beyond emphasizing the need for the “undo send” feature to become standard in Gmail, I’m not sure that anything can be done to change the way people interact with an email link or a comment box — even if they do realize that there’s a human being on the other end.

I’m getting dangerously close to making a pompous generalization about human nature, so I’ll stop short and let someone else do it for me. The very first strip of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts is a pretty angry one. After “good ol’ Charlie Brown” walks past a boy and a girl, the boy turns to no one in particular and says, “How I hate him!” It set the tone for fifty years of lost baseball games, destroyed kites, and unrequited love from the Little Red-Haired Girl. What incivility; what pessimism! And what a glimpse of truth. That first strip is shocking for the same reason that YouTube comments, Pitchfork reviews, and NBC’s treatment of Conan O’Brien are shocking: they reveal the casual callousness and undercurrent of anger that permeates everyday life. No one ought to be surprised about all of this, but, like Charlie Brown, who always tries to kick the football even though he knows that Lucy will just pull it away at the last second, we never quite allow ourselves to believe the worst in other people — or ourselves. Maybe that’s part of the reason why we’re so angry all the time.

The old grey donkey, Eeyore, stood by himself in a corner of the forest, his head on one side, and thought about things. Sometimes he thought sadly to himself, “Why?” and sometimes he thought, “Wherefore?” and sometimes he thought, “Inasmuch as which?” – and sometimes he didn’t quite know what he was thinking about. So when Winnie-the-Pooh came stumping along, Eeyore was very glad to stop thinking for a little, in order to say “How do you do?” in a gloomy manner to him.

“And how are you?” said Winnie-the-Pooh.

Eeyore shook his head from side to side.

“Not very how,” he said. “I don’t seem to have felt at all how for a long time.”

“Dear, dear,” said Pooh, “I’m sorry about that. Let’s have a look at you.”

Introspective, cheerless, and vaguely addled, equal parts crank and cynic, a wet blanket in a world of cheerful optimism – this is the quintessential pessimist.

Or maybe it’s David Brooks of The New York Times. His impish grin and penchant for loud shirt-and-tie combinations masks, I’m convinced, reveals the psyche of a man stranded on a desert island with no hope of rescue — i.e., one on the very edge of shattering altogether. Sure, he delivers the standard political commentary and boilerplate eulogies for public figures like Ted Kennedy or Irving Kristol — no different from the stable of op-ed writers in most major newspapers. But the farther afield he goes, the wilder his aim gets; he criticizes celebrities for being insufficiently awed by contemporary events, and predicts one day that psychology will someday “replace misleading categories like ‘emotion’ and ‘reason.’”. And is it simple coincidence or a terrifying grasp into his subconscious when, in one column, he describes his total disillusionment with Republicans (“Are they really my guys? Do I have guys anymore?…I feel politically closer to Barack Obama than to House Minority Leader John Boehner (and that’s even while being greatly exercised about the current health care bills).”, and then in another column five days later wonders what would happen if a gamma-ray burst sterilized half the planet?

No faith in party identity, in high or low culture, in any political or economic institution at all: Brooks is starting to sound like a journalist version of Mad Max, a lone wolf who has nothing to rely on but himself in a post-apocalyptic world. Instead of Eeyore’s understated melancholia, we get the intellectual equivalent of someone windmilling their arms; at any rate, both seem a bit unbalanced, and both certainly qualify as pessimists. And nobody is exactly clamoring for their respective company, either in the Hundred Acre Wood or on the halls of political power (Tom Friedman, not Brooks, got to play golf with President Obama last month).

I’m caricaturing slightly, but my point is simple: nobody likes a pessimist. Or at least, nobody likes a pessimist except in the abstract. People can admire long-dead ones like Orwell, Camus, Milgram, or Nietzsche from afar, but faced with a pessimist in the next cubicle, however, workplace behavior guides recommend a strategy of forbearance, along with a healthy dose of amateur psychotherapy. And according to a study done at the University of Pittsburgh, pessimism might kill you, “as bad as having high blood pressure…when it comes to cardiovascular health.”

In other words, be warned, pessimists: having a disposition that’s slightly less than sunshine-y is like painting a bull’s-eye on yourself that all but invites sociological experimentation, heart disease, and the self-righteousness of others. Forget smokers and fat people as the last frontier of socially sanctioned discrimination: pessimists bear the brunt of a lot more social abuse, much of it subconscious. But in the era of hope and change, what chance did we pessimists possibly have to begin with?

The main problem, I think, is that people conflate those who make negative comments with those who have a wide range of unpleasant or anti-social personality traits; it’s an instance of the fundamental attribution error writ large. I’d rather drink with optimists because they’d probably make for pleasanter company, but I’d rather take advice from fellow pessimists, who (for their sometime lack of social graces) at least tend to better recognize the limits of reason, ability, faith, and the world around them. Good intentions and chirpiness are, in my opinion, no substitute for a firm grounding in reality. It’s certainly mathematically possible that there are happy, well-informed, non-delusional optimists somewhere out there, but I can’t think of any (if you can, though, let me know about it).

At the end of the day, it’s easy to keep Eeyore and David Brooks, and by extension, pessimists in general, at arm’s length. Eeyore is a voice of gloom in a fairy-tale world, which means he’s unnecessary by definition; Brooks is too concerned with his political orphanage (which is boring and self-absorbed) or bizarre distillations of big ideas (which never quite work in a mere 22 column inches) to take seriously. It’s too easy to box the co-worker in the next cubicle as a hypochondriac — even as you patiently wait for his or her heart to give out — just as it was too easy for Spiro Agnew to tar his political opponents with the (William Safire-penned) phrase “nattering nabobs of negativism.”

But that gives short shrift to the pessimists who do have something important and informed to say. The best example, of course, is Nouriel Roubini, “Dr. Doom,” the economist who defied conventional economic wisdom and correctly predicted the mechanics behind the “Great Recession” — the imminent bursting of a housing bubble, the collapse of investment banks and the credit market, bank losses numbering not in the billions but trillions of dollars. He was, of course, dismissed as a “permabear,” and economists and policymakers alike ignored what turned out to be uncomfortable truths for the simple reasons that, as far as I can tell, nobody likes to be told that they’re wrong, and nobody likes a pessimist.

It’s a story that dates back to Homer’s Iliad, in fact. Cassandra, the daughter of the Trojan king Priam, was given the gift of prophecy, and then cursed such that no one would believe her predictions. She warned Paris that kidnapping Helen would lead to the fall of Troy, and tried to convince fellow Trojans not to bring that big, mysterious wooden horse within the walls of the city. And obviously, no one believed her.

Replace the Trojan horse with mortgage-backed securities, and you have a cautionary tale for the twenty-first century. And, I hope, it gives you a compelling reason to listen to your local pessimist once in a while, even if you can’t bring yourself to sympathize with them. Not all of us are stuffed donkeys.

The idea of home is enshrined in our cultural consciousness, not to mention legal tradition: It’s a promise of stability, security, and safety from the outside world. It’s exactly the opposite of the bewildering world of Craigslist ads and sublets that faces a new adult, forced to fend for him- or herself after college. Each piece of paperwork, from insurance forms to utilities contracts, is a reminder that you are simply an end-user, whether of space or power or the maintenance crew. Security bars on first-floor windows and multiple levels of locks are a reminder just how far removed you are from the relatively carefree world of American suburbia for those who, like me, grew up there. The paper-thin walls that separate you from your neighbors (but not the noise that they make) are constant reminders that you’re stacked, Tetris-like, on top of dozens if not hundreds of others.

Gradually, you start to feel like the place you go back to after work is not a refuge from the daily grind at all, but simply a place to perform a different set of repetitive tasks — cooking, cleaning, watching TV — than the ones you perform from 9 to 5. It’s amazing how much something, or rather someplace, to which we didn’t give so much as a second thought for our entire childhoods becomes a source of constant, low-level anxiety and irritation once the lease and utility bills are actually in your own name.

It might seem like this is just another case of Gen-Y militant self-absorption or nostalgia. After all, twentysomethings aren’t the only ones who have forgotten what home means during adolescence and early adulthood and who then spend the rest of their adult lives trying to piece it together again. For all of the public hand-wringing about the decline of the traditional family or the erosion of local pride, nobody is suggesting that Americans are radically rethinking their idea of home.

And yet the issue has been at the front and center lately. The arrest of Skip Gates made commentators trip all over themselves to finesse the twin issues of race and obeying authority for partisan points. It wasn’t until later that people started pointing out, in the words of British expat Christopher Hitchens, “a man’s home is his Constitutional castle.” And, as the news reminds us daily, we’re living in the middle of an economic nightmare thanks to George W. Bush’s promotion of the “ownership society,” which was based around cheap cars and big suburban houses.

In fact, the effects of the Great Recession on home ownership might go well beyond the mortgage-derivatives market. In March of 2009, Richard Florida’s article in The Atlantic Monthly, called “How the Crash Will Reshape America,” argued that the the American economy has irrevocably shifted away from manufacturing and toward “idea-driven creative industries.” It’s a familiar narrative, one in which places that produce goods — the Rust Belt, the Sun Belt, and much of the Great Plains — will continue to contract, while places that have high concentrations of “creative” workers and businesses — New York, Los Angeles, Silicon Valley — will grow.

More importantly, Florida says, the new economy “will require a new kind of geography as well, a new spatial fix for the next chapter of American economic history.” Suburbia was “the geographic expression of mass production and the early credit economy,” but now, with easy credit gone and industrial pollution no longer a compelling reason to escape the cities, it no longer makes sense — and may not even be possible — for nearly 70% of Americans to own a house. Low-density suburban sprawl and the new creative economy, according to Florida, are fundamentally incompatible.

Furthermore, Florida argues, home ownership is bad for the economy. People who own a house are more likely to be unemployed but no more likely to be happier or have better self esteem. Tax incentives and artificially low mortgage rates encourage people to buy more house than they need and spend the money they would otherwise use on other sectors of the economy. At the same time, just when industries that reward flexibility and mobility are beginning to drive the economy, homeowners find themselves increasingly unable to sell their home, unable to move, and at a significant disadvantage in the new creative economy.

The solution? Encourage renting and urban development. Stop propping up regions and industries that cater to the industrial economy. Expect people to pull up stakes and move far more frequently than they have since World War II. And say goodbye to home ownership, white picket fence and all, as a cornerstone of the American dream.

If Florida is right, then it seems like Gen Y is going to be the first in 80 years where less than half of us will own houses. It will be just another way in which economic reality is going to force us to rethink our ideas of success and stop comparing ourselves to our parents. The American home as we knew it is turning out to be an illusion, a kind of Santa Claus myth writ large, and in its place will be something a lot more like the annual game of musical chairs that dormitory-bound college students and army brats go through. Instead, we may have to think of home less in terms of a McMansion, and more in terms of the contents of a U-Haul.

As a wise Klingon once put it, “if there is to be a brave new world, our generation is going to have the hardest time living in it.” It’s a maxim that’s just as true for the twenty-first century economy — and the twenty-first century idea of what makes a home.

Forget the debate over health care — the real political spectacle of August 2009 has been the protesters who have disrupted town hall protests with an especially virulent brand of partisan rancor. As Maureen Dowd put it, Obama’s agenda has been derailed by “ugly scenes of mostly older and white malcontents, disrupting forums where others have come to actually learn something,” with the kinds of outlandish claims that make the Birthers seem downright amateur in comparison.

Everything about politics is designed to kill rational thought. Even at its best, according to the journalist and political observer Timothy Garton Ash, political discourse boils down to a contest of half-truths and sound bites, “in which each party attempts to present part of the truth as if it were the whole.” At its worst, in the words of George Orwell, “political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Political ads take full advantage of our subconscious, since, with enough repetition, people will remember insinuation and misinformation regardless of its truthfulness. Political “analysts” on TV are typically just partisans who mostly exist in order to state the party line over and over, while giving both sides equal airtime has somehow become the antidote to bias. And just as it’s easier to spend an hour in front of the TV than an hour in the gym, we’ve let ourselves trust partisans, ideologues, or even politicians themselves to give us the unprocessed truth rather than find it out for ourselves.

To me, the most disturbing thing about this particular brand of crankishness is not that they’ve been tricked or duped into “hijacking” a national debate, or that their rhetoric goes beyond the pale of normal political discourse. Sure, it’s absurd to think that cries of “I want my country back” is a constructive response to the healthcare debate, but it’s not that much different from what Howard Dean said in 2004, for example.

Instead, what compels these people to stand up and shout down good-faith political dialog worries me the most. It suggests that they’ve completely and unquestioningly embraced their role as partisan puppets. They buy and wear shirts that say “Proud Member of the Angry Mob.” They rely on professionals to come up with their talking points for them. They disrupt these town halls not because they have anything constructive to offer but because they’re guaranteed the applause of their sympathizers, and the attention of the media — why else would the person who “confronted” Arlen Specter and accused the senator of trampling on the Constitution spend more time looking at the crowd than at Specter himself? Carlos Watson was on to something when he suggested that these protesters are motivated by “thinly veiled hate.” Protesting health care is no longer a protest against just health care.

In other words, The Mob embodies the worst in the political process. Clearly, it thinks that its audience does not consist of the kind of people who think through the merits of an idea. It believes that the best way to kill an idea is to do anything but debate: to scaremonger, to intimidate, to drown out dissent; it strains truth, taste, and credibility, but never the brain power of its audience. It feeds on approval from the like-minded and on any kind of response from the opposition; it is impervious to counter-argument. It is motivated by deep cynicism about the value — which is to say, the political traction — of honest dialogue, and it makes it easy for everyone else to be cynical in return. It is the slow, agonizing death of free thought and reason, even though it flies the banners of individualism, patriotism, and middle-class appeal.

This is nothing new: politics and thinking have never really mixed. The only difference is that members of The Mob advertise this fact, in word, deed, and t-shirt. Am I wrong to think that this is nothing to be proud of — or am I just too far behind contemporary political culture?

Once the words on my lesson plan have dissolved and recombined into unintelligible constellations of letters as if they were made not of twelve-point Garamond but of alphabet soup, I realize that I can’t put it off any longer. It takes a supreme effort of will — the kind required to confront a roommate about his dishwashing habits or to ask someone out on a date — but I manage to force my mouth to move: “Good morning, everyone.” By then, I’m on autopilot, and for one more week, I’ve spared myself the humiliation of bolting out the door in front of my students, but only just.

Illustration by Priya Rajdev.

No matter how many times I go through this weekly struggle, it still takes me the same amount of effort to get through each week’s lesson. It’s not that I hate teaching, that I’m cavalier about my job, or even that I’m bad at it: I won an award for teaching last year, which is lying in a desk drawer somewhere because I don’t feel right showing it off to anyone, least of all myself. Nor are my students the problem. They are almost always motivated, eager, and deserving of the reputation that they deserve as Notre Dame students (and even when they’re not, even Domers have bad days).

Still, I spend a lot of off-the-job time worrying about exactly what it is I’m put in front of these kids to do. Obviously, I have to teach them about whatever the course topic is. But come the end of the semester, what are they going to take away? Have I failed as a teacher if they don’t remember the significance of the Carolingian Renaissance or can’t rattle off the names and regnal dates of Inca rulers? And if not, then what good was it to teach these things to them?

The boilerplate answer is that my efforts, combined with those of my humanistic colleagues, are supposed impart to my students critical thinking skills, factual knowledge, aesthetic sensibilities, and to generally create a “complete” person. Unlike the sciences, humanities teachers don’t teach foundational skills (reading, writing), but rather “ways of thinking.” That is, my objective as a history teacher is to try and inspire my students to think, read, and write historical sources and historical analysis like I do, or at least like I am supposed to do. Although we’re not trying to make our students into carbon copies of Ayn Rands or Harold Blooms or what have you, we are at least trying to make them see how these people saw their field and their world.

By doing all this, I’m supposed to help them along their way to becoming part of “the fellowship of educated men and women,” to borrow a phrase from one of the speakers at my own commencement, just by teaching them, say, the history of Western Civilization.

If that’s not enough, I can tell myself that I’m at least helping my students on the path to material success. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 30 percent of the adult American population holds a bachelor’s degree or higher. Yet that elite 30 percent earns, on average, at least twice as much as those with a high school diploma, and those with advanced degrees, four times as much. Put another way, a bachelor’s degree will earn you about $2 million over the course of a lifetime, which, you might tell whoever pays your tuition, is not a bad return on investment. The Institute for Higher Education Policy, meanwhile, reports that college graduates enjoy higher levels of saving, increased personal and professional mobility, an improved quality of life, better consumer decision making, and more leisure time.

I have a problem with both of these lines of reasoning. First of all, most people would (and should) balk at the idea of reducing four years’ worth of education into mere statistics and skills-building or a cost/benefit analysis. I do, too; a lot more goes on than you can quantify or qualify. But I also can’t believe that all those lectures, readings, and discussions always and necessarily turn empty-headed freshmen into erudite graduates.

Never mind those who buy into conspiracy theories, get their “facts” from political partisans, or know more about celebrity gossip than world geography – those targets are far too easy, and are commented upon far too often. Consider instead that nearly half of all American college graduates — 42 percent, according to the National Endowment for the Arts — never read another book in their lifetime. That bears repeating: nearly half of those people who, upon receiving their bachelor’s degree, supposedly entered the company of educated men and women will knowingly and willfully shut themselves off from the single best (albeit, most demanding of thought and effort) source of information, entertainment, and intellectual expansion.

Thoughts like these are part of the reason why I stay awake some nights wondering exactly what the value of my job is, and why some days getting in front of a class feels as futile and self-defeating as trying to fill a shot glass with a fire hose.

That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy what I do, or that I don’t think my students enjoy my classes (at least, according to their course evaluations). But I do find it disturbing that my entire profession can’t even define what it does. This is not a problem that doctors, janitors, or IT people have.

We teachers, for the most part, can only impart knowledge. Even the most advanced college-level classes, whether in the sciences or the humanities, teach you facts, theories, arguments, “ways of thinking,” and so on. It’s all fairly brute-force, but the advantage is that it’s as measurable as a utilities meter. Whether or not the student pays attention, the teacher has proof that he or she did in fact teach this subject on this specific day and had his or her students read this text or perform this experiment on that day.

Wisdom, on the other hand, is something wholly internal and personal, something that can’t be measured in test results, dollars, leisure time, or quite possibly by any rubric at all. It might happen after spending years in a safe and moderated classroom environment studying everything from history to physics to music, or it might come from just reading philosophy for eight hours a day. When it comes down to it, all we can do as teachers is place students in contact with so many products of the human experience that they are as likely as not to find some small thing that makes them think, and that makes them wiser for it.

But through lack of interest or ability or any number of other factors, not everyone is going to become wiser — to “get it,” in other words. Before the altar of wisdom, the teacher is completely powerless and the student is completely accountable. And it’s the reason why we humanities teachers can’t exactly explain what we do to anyone, even ourselves.

If that’s the case, and I exist solely as a conduit of information that may or may not help my students grow and mature, then maybe I shouldn’t be so anxious about what I do. At the very least, it would save me from having weekly bouts with sleeplessness and anxiety.

Of course, it might also be the case that the liberal arts are simply designed to provoke a deep-seated sense of restlessness and world-weariness in its students. If so, I can safely say that I’ve taken that lesson to heart. This might be a form of wisdom, too.

True, this is the land of shuttered steel mills and auto plants, where city governments and ordinary Hoosiers alike find it difficult to make ends meet in the post-industrial economy. About ten miles east of where I live is the town of Elkhart, where almost half of the RVs in the United States are manufactured, and which, consequently, has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country at 18.8%, almost double what it was last November. About an hour northwest is Gary, the hometown of Michael Jackson and consistently one of the most dangerous, most economically depressed cities in America; its downtown area looks like Sarajevo in the early 1990s. Even South Bend, a college town that’s not all that college town-y, consists of a struggling downtown area that’s kept alive by the University of Notre Dame, and not much else. Thanks to media attention and political maneuvering – Barack Obama visited Elkhart as a candidate once and as President once – northern Indiana has become not only the poster child for the recession, but also an enduring image of the Rust Belt.

But it’s not just economic circumstance driving the Midwest’s poor reputation in the rest of the country; it’s also the vague perception that there’s something wrong with the people there. Take your pick of stereotypes: we’re supposed to be overweight and undereducated, rednecks and hicks who care more about fried food and guns than global warming and sound foreign policy. Urbane and sophisticated are not words that come to mind, but methamphetamine is. Even gentler caricatures make the entire region look thoroughly mediocre, as if its residents were as monotonously flat as the landscape (Garfield, for example, is supposed to be set in Muncie, Indiana). As a friend of mine, and a lifelong New Yorker, observed, it took Michael Jackson to make Indiana sound remotely interesting.

So it should have come as no surprise that the 2008 election stirred up long-simmering resentment against these Midwestern stereotypes. But the attempt to push back against them not only failed but turned into a train wreck, from both a political and a public relations standpoint. For every human interest story about voters thinking through the issues or discussing them rationally, there were two headlines about angry Wisconsinites, Ohioans, Minnesotans, and yes, even Hoosiers, acting out their worst stereotypes to a T. There is no question that the spectacle cemented the Midwest’s reputation as a hotbed of ignorance and fanaticism. Recently, Frank Rich passed a triumphant death sentence on “a dwindling white nonurban America that is aflame with grievances and awash in self-pity as the country hurtles into the 21st century and leaves it behind.” In no uncertain terms, he wrote, the Midwest’s decline is all but complete – and devastatingly total.

Consequently, I’m no longer surprised when people ask why I, a young and (presumably) ambitious person, voluntarily live in this part of the country. The Midwest has been on the fringe for so long that it’s turned into a national punch line, one that allows people to believe that the entire place is infested with fringe lunatics or hopeless dullards.

It really does bother me that people let themselves believe that the sort of people who shout things at political rallies are anything close to the average Midwesterner. And it’s not it true that most Hoosiers are accurately represented by their fictional counterparts, who tend to be petty and incompetent (Jon Arbuckle, Major Frank Burns from M*A*S*H), stupid (Woody from Cheers), or just downright unpleasant (Captain Janeway from Star Trek: Voyager, Moe from The Simpsons). It can’t possibly be the case that there are disproportionately more idiots, rednecks, and bores per capita in the Midwest, and it’s certainly not true that you have to live in Indiana to have a distorted view of the world.

I suppose I ought to defend my adoptive home state at this point, but ultimately I’m just ambivalent about it. Yes, it is difficult to find people around my age and with my interests in a city whose population is mostly families or college students, because so many of them have migrated the two hours north to Chicago. Yes, it can get depressing when I can go an entire day during the summer (when the undergraduates have all gone home) without seeing someone who’s within five years of my own age and unmarried. And no question, there aren’t as many civic or cultural events in South Bend as there are in other places where I’ve lived, like Boston or Portland, Oregon.

On the other hand, I can’t really say that my life is that much worse for living here. Periodically, I get the vague sense that I’m not as fulfilled as I should be, but then again I think that’s a standard feature of the post-college early- to mid-twenties, at least for liberal arts graduates. Mostly, I’ve learned one big, take-away point. In the Big City, there are so many opportunities to do hip, artsy, “it” things that you can get your entire existence handed to you by the arts and leisure pages if you want. In northern Indiana, it takes a lot more imagination and effort to stave off boredom (but luckily, your social circles are probably just as bored as you are). Does that mean that one is necessarily better than the other, or that one offers a qualitatively richer way of life?

Let me put it this way: I’ve lived through three earthquakes in my life, and one of them happened in Indiana. Not bad for a flyover state.

Mostly, it’s hard to think of celebrities as normal people: they’re either lesser men or supermen, as the case may be. Farrah Fawcett, Ed McMahon, and Michael Jackson always existed in that otherworld of fame and fortune: they spoke or sang or acted for us, but never to us. Michael Jackson’s Thriller might have been the soundtrack to people’s youths and Ed McMahon might have introduced Johnny Carson to the American viewing public every night for over 30 years, but they always stood just out of reach, their rapport with their audience as artificial as their stage makeup (or plastic surgery). And because of that distance, it doesn’t seem so odd to see old footage of any of them on TV, in the prime of their career: they created museum pieces, whether instances of pop art or flashes of musical genius, that were perfectly complete, with or without an audience. Their music, or acting — their art, in other words — exists entirely separate from their personas.

But we, the viewing public, also act as if anyone who shows their face on television enough deserves to have their lives combed through. And without any real, meaningful interaction, celebrities become blank slates for their fans to obsess over — hence the enduring interest in every lurid detail of Fawcett’s illness, McMahon’s bankruptcy, Jackson’s bizarre personal life, in the never-ending search for something relatable. And celebrities are happy to oblige, to a point. Their public faces are carefully orchestrated, in order that they never appear too individual, and cross the boundary of relatability. Even their quirks tend to be non-issues: Jennifer Aniston eats mayonnaise sandwiches; Angelina Jolie is really a private person at heart; and Bruce Springsteen demands raw oats in his dressing room. This is the stuff that allows People magazine to have almost half a million more readers than TIME, and a million more than Newsweek. We buy their creative output because it’s extraordinary, and then by fixating over the minutiae of their lives we try hard to make them ordinary — or worse.

Once they stick their necks beyond that threshold, they open themselves to a torrent of abuse. William Congreve might have said that hell has no fury like a woman scorned, but then again he had never heard of TMZ.com — or its readership. We watch to rubberneck, sure, but also to heap scorn on others’ apparent failings, especially if doing so reflects well on us. Meanwhile, we keep ourselves tuned in: there may not be anyone left who likes Paris Hilton non-ironically, but she still somehow manages to stay affixed in the public consciousness.

So whether it’s likened to a drug, a food, or plain old lust, fame becomes a psychological addiction. It’s not just the relationship between a performer and his or her adoring fans, it’s a mutual, infantilizing dependence. The silent validation of people we don’t even know drives us not only to google our own names but to become shameless self-promoters in order to boost our search rankings. But then we make a point to remember which Hollywood stars are dating and which ones are feuding, who’s released the latest sex tape, and the thousands of other gossipy factoids. And, on top of it all, there are plenty of people who make a point to mock the very idea of celebrity, but who are hypocrites about it all the same, either because they are knowingly cynical about it, or because they wish they were.

Oliver Cromwell once remarked that people who cheered him for being famous would have cheered just as loudly if he were going to be hanged. He at least understood the illusion of celebrity.

But true public intellectuals emerged only with twentieth-century Cold War writers, many of whom were European: Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, Václav Havel, and even George Orwell (though he would have never considered himself one). They were literate, learned (though not always formally), and passionate. They transcended political and ideological dogma, and in many cases fought to understand, engage, and combat it. They wrote books. And they have been endangered since the moment of their birth, according to books like Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Russell Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, and Richard Posner’s Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline.

In their place, says this litany of cognitive decay, we have the modern pundit, who trades in innuendoes and sound bites rather than ideas and principles. They thrive on reducing politics into a kind of soap opera: all plot and no story, designed for visceral rather than cerebral effect – hence the full-throated outrage of Bill O’Reilly or the sneering sarcasm of Rachel Maddow, for example. Tacked on to these mass-media pundits are the majority of political bloggers, whose authority depends on neither expertise nor hands-on experience but on sheer popularity, which is achieved through vitriolic or snarky commentary, a refined sense of self-promotion, and enough money to pay for web hosting. Although it seems rationally absurd to take political direction from anyone who can be described as a “pundit,” since many are either current party operatives or self-made ideologues, we do it anyway — to the general detriment of civil society.

But political scientist Daniel Drezner paints a much sunnier picture of American intellectual life in his May 2008 essay “Public Intellectuals 2.0″. He argues that there are plenty of intellectuals around (he lists 65), that the United States has a preponderance of them, and that their audience has not really shrunk because it was never big to begin with. In fact, the only real difference he sees between the intellectuals of today and those of 50 years ago is that most contemporary ones come from social science rather than humanities backgrounds. And to top it all off, he says that blogs have not killed off long-form intellectual discourse but have become “a powerful complement” to the printed word, either acting as a sandbox of ideas or as a speaking platform for those otherwise without access to one. With lowered expectations on the one hand and the promise of an internet-fueled democratization on the other, an intellectuals’ renaissance seems all but inevitable.

So if Drezner is right, then we are on the cusp of a revolution of ideas; if the traditional narrative is right, intellectuals are dying off thanks to a paucity of venues in which to promote their ideas, a decrease in their public stature, and a fragmented and inattentive audience. And amid all this hand-wringing over whether they are coming or going, one question remains: what is it, exactly, that intellectuals do?

There’s no question that intellectuals are “opinion-leaders” — and although any idiot with a blog can claim to influence public discourse in some small way, at least prominent academics and authors get a disproportionate share of web traffic, which means that they exert a proportional influence on mainstream media’s coverage of the blogosphere. Still, the intellectual’s stock and trade has always been in ideas and words, whether in the form of pamphlets or blog posts. And while it might be easier than ever to get ideas out there, it’s not clear that doing so is a public good.

Let’s start with the period between September 11 and the Iraq War. For the right, the years of the Bush administration marked a political heyday, with neoconservatives above all directly influencing foreign policy in a way that few, if any, intellectuals since Henry Kissinger and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. have done. But neoconservative thought proved disastrous in practice. It went into the idea mill of the White House policy team, and came out as the “Bush Doctrine,” which was based on a series of fictions — and not just ones about the existence of weapons of mass destruction.

That is, neoconservatives grossly underestimated both the effort required to reconstruct a nation’s political and social fabric, and the difficulty of spreading American ideals abroad. They reduced the world into an ideological binary, with supporters of democracy on one side and terrorists/”Islamo-fascists” on the other. They believed that the post-September 11 world was entirely without precedent, and that the attempts of other nations to impose their political systems through force (the U.S. in Somalia, Britain and its imperial colonies, the USSR in central Asia) had no bearing on their calculations. And when neoconservative intellectuals outside of the policy realm took a step back and engaged in ass-covering en masse (see, for example, Peter Berkowitz’s “The Neocons and Iraq”), they, in the words of historian Tony Judt, “focused their regrets not on the catastrophic invasion itself (which they all supported) but rather on its incompetent execution.” Daniel Drezner points out that “the dismal performance of intellectuals in proximity to political power” has always been a universal, and that neoconservatives are no exception. They resemble the bomber pilot “King” Kong from Dr. Strangelove more than anything: so dedicated to their ideology that they are willing to ride it into the ground, even if it’s been discredited by both historical precedent and contemporary experience.

The same period marked leftists’ failure to seriously oppose the war in what Judt called the “strange death of liberal America.” Those leftists who attempted to oppose the war from a “scholarly” (as opposed to “political”) perspective had no effect on foreign policy or on their own cohort. “Security scholars” Stuart Kaufman and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson termed this practice, rather pretentiously, “Weberian activism,” whose goal was to “intervene in a political debate without giving up [our] scholarly credentials.” Trying to draw such a distinction is fair enough – but if “Weberian activism” succeeds only in giving its practitioners the (slightly smug) attitude that they never compromised themselves, it hardly seems worth the trouble. At the same time, other leftists such as Christopher Hitchens and Thomas Friedman became some of the war’s most prominent cheerleaders. They lost sight of the intellectual left’s traditional hard-nosed skepticism and suspicion of all political ideologies. Leftists have become either toothless or rootless, and if they could only look back after the fact and say “I told you so” — especially to those who should have been its spokespeople — then what good were they?

In other words, although most intellectuals might be kings in the free-floating world of discourse, they haven’t managed to make much of a splash outside of it — and neocons are the exception that proves the rule. The Iraq War is just one case study of failure among many. With a few exceptions such as Nouriel Roubini, intellectuals didn’t — couldn’t — see the approaching economic train wreck. They couldn’t bridge the ideological divide on global warming. They haven’t managed to rehabilitate the idea of increased government intervention in the free market or the creation of a stronger social safety net or reframe mainstream views of major ethical debates (although Ross Douthat has made a good start on the politics of abortion). They haven’t even successfully debunked the neoconservative attempt to reduce the world to a Cold War-minded clash of civilizations.

Ironically, all of this might explain the Faustian bargain that the neocons made with the Bush White House. One of the reasons that Cold War intellectuals could thrive was that they reacted so strongly against totalitarianism at precisely the moment when it seemed poised to overrun the Western world — everyone agreed on the threat and its severity. Nowadays, there’s nothing to react against, no common ground on which everyone can base their ideas and expect an attentive, fearful audience (the postmodern fate of political discourse? identity politics run amok?).

As a result, intellectuals have become outsiders, either in terms of real political power or mainstream media attention, and even ones with broad platforms have a hard time translating their ideas into action. And so the impressive array of statistics that Daniel Drezner marshals in order to show the endurance of intellectual life doesn’t get the entire picture. Web rankings and hit counters show that people are reading the words that intellectuals write, but is getting someone to look at a page tantamount to getting them to engage with the ideas on it? If an intellectual is doomed to be detached from all reality — due to an inflexible attachment to ideology, or due to the self-imposed oblivion of “Weberian activism” and highbrow media outlets — they could do worse than leaving a mark on the outside world.

My point, I suppose, is that intellectuals’ soaring aspirations have to contend with limping reality. They have apparently reduced themselves to a kind of social guilt reflex — a castrated social conscience — that can criticize and analyze the past just fine but has trouble making much of an impact on the present and the future. In vain, intellectuals strive to retain their credibility and distance from the political machine; or else they ally themselves with that machine and, by doing so, become a grotesque parody of their former, powerless selves. And they have restricted themselves to a small cognoscenti that pays attention to literary and culture magazines (or their web presences) and university-sponsored lectures.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are left in a kind of cognitive darkness, without access to the world of intellectual discourse, and without any idea why that’s a problem. Because, by and large, it isn’t: we’ve forgotten the power of ideas.

For the record, I’d like to be wrong about all this.

Growing up, I learned a lot about success. We Millennials were, after all, raised in a “culture of praise”, primed to think about the world almost exclusively in terms of our own potential. But during the boom years of the ‘80s, ‘90s, and ‘00s, it was easy to keep failure at arm’s length, an intellectual bogeyman that no one reasonably expected to experience. The “ownership society” prevailed; Gordon Gekko, from 1987’s Wall Street, became an unintentional hero, while the Masters of the Universe grew accustomed to ballooning paychecks. Some of that success even trickled down to the little guy: nearly every year since 1994 set a record for the percentage of American households that owned their own homes, reaching its peak at just under 70% in 2004. Even religion hopped on the success bandwagon, with televangelists like Joel Osteen claiming that God has a lot to offer us instead of the other way around, and making millions in the process.

In short, everything from pop culture to politics reinforced the idea that a tangible American Dream — a house, an education, and a retirement plan — was within everyone’s reach, and that failure was a kind of personality trait, one generally found alongside ugliness, laziness, or basic stupidity. Consciously or not, the United States became a nation of hyper-individualists and Social Darwinists. And those same hyper-individualists and Social Darwinists raised a generation in the image of their own, late-life success, sheltered from want and groomed to believe in themselves at all costs.

So when the members of the “Me Generation” crawled out from under their parents’ umbrella, they were bound to be just a little bit socially maladjusted. It’s probably no surprise that they isolate themselves in the real world even as they invent and reinvent themselves in the virtual one, and demand automatic As for effort in the classroom and constant praise from their bosses in the workplace. Yet who could have predicted that they would also manage to create the first counterculture — hipsterism— that has never opposed the mainstream in any meaningful way?

It turns out that wearing keffiyehs and snorting cocaine is not the same thing as agitating for social change (simply voting for Obama doesn’t count, either). As the growing tribe of hipster-haters has pointed out, time and again, hipsters are just consumers like the rest of us, if maybe a little more militant about their choices. Their brand of “counterculture” simply boils down to a specific set of musical, literary, and fashion tastes, combined with a melodramatic (but unspecific) world-weariness and an overdeveloped sense of contempt. But hipsters offer no alternative to the culture of consumption and success; they have no real social rebellion to make. Having lived too long knowing only prosperity and wish-fulfillment, they cannot imagine giving it up for the sake of a political or social ideal. Self-perpetuation for its own sake: the end goal of the culture of success, and the end goal of hipster culture as well.

It’s especially ironic, then, that we Millennials, who have generally shown ourselves incapable of rejecting the culture of success, have become that culture’s victim in another way. By now, it’s well established that misguided financial innovation and bad investments — all driven by the financial industry’s desire to make money well past the point of common sense, and all but encouraged by deregulation — led to the current recession. But guess who has to deal with a disproportionate amount of the fallout? According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, only about 20% of the class of ’09 had found a job by their senior spring, and as early as August of 2008, business writers warned that the job market made it a “bad time to be young.” The headline “College Graduates Face Tough Job Market” (or some variation thereof) has, I’ll wager, appeared at least once in almost every local newspaper and newscast in the country, but even summer gigs and minimum-wage retail and service jobs for those youngest members of our generation are drying up, too.

So in the space of two years, we’ve seen the economic security promised us by our parents’ society crumble beneath the weight of mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps, and we’ve learned that believing really hard in ourselves doesn’t insulate us from brutal economic reality. Just when we thought that the brass ring of success that we’d been promised all our lives was in reach, we’ve realized that, instead, it’s time to reassess, retrench (a.k.a. move back in with parents), and reacquaint ourselves with failure.

Because other than apple pie and baseball, there is nothing more American than a fear of failure that borders on neurosis. It’s the flip side of our stereotypical optimism and can-do attitude, which supposedly won us a World War and a Cold War and gave Larry the Cable Guy a catchphrase in the process.

But given failure’s relative absence from middle-class life for the last few decades, no wonder we’ve got a strange relationship with it. And the Age of Irony practically demands that we distance ourselves from emotion and experience with that sneering, self-aware humor that fuels everything from The Daily Show to gossip rags. We’ve found a slideshow of Schadenfreude in the middle of the stock market crash, and even made the word “fail” into a catch-all interjection to brand any sort of comically bad situation, from injuries to badly-drawn diagrams. Between callous laughter on the one hand and a purposeful dilution of the word on the other, it’s clear that we fear failure — all the more because we’re so profoundly unfamiliar with it.

And why shouldn’t we fear it? There’s nothing romantic about failure. It’s degrading, it’s stressful, it involves fear and shame and all kinds of unpleasant emotions with which we as a generation have had so little prior experience. It’s certainly possible to live a life without running the risk of failure, medicated by drugs, alcohol, cable TV, or any number of meaningless pursuits designed to blot out thought and emotion.

But proper, abject failure has its upside. To recover means that you have stripped away pretenses and inconsequential things, and made hard decisions about your wants, needs, and goals. It requires a kind of self-awareness that you probably have not had reason to demand from yourself so far. To quote J.K. Rowling:

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way… The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.

So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

When Rowling delivered this speech in June of 2008, she acknowledged that her advice about “the fringe benefits of failure” bordered on the “quixotic,” and that like so many other commencement speeches, they would probably be discussed earnestly and at great length for a day or two and then forgotten altogether. Now, in the middle of the biggest economic disruption since the Great Depression, her words seem almost prescient.

We Millennials live in one of those moments that will profoundly shape our generation, if not our society, for a long time. And it’s fair to say that most of us haven’t done much to define ourselves so far. We’ve let ourselves believe that prosperity could be eternal, and that acting out of self-interest and a sense of entitlement is a perfectly acceptable way to live. But that security blanket has long been frayed, and it’s falling apart right before our eyes.

There’s no question that many of us are about to get that first bitter taste of failure. The challenge will be coming out of it more confident in ourselves, and more thoughtful about what we believe. Maybe some will find that failure, contrary to our neurotic fear of it, has some fringe benefits after all. With luck, that might prompt us to rethink our definition of success, too.