May 4, 2000
E-mail a Response
Tearing Away the Mask
Opinion
So what is the North Façade? Well, I have tried to focus my writing first on Cornell, since I am quite convinced that you cannot find a better education anywhere without being surrounded by complete dorks.
Here, our biggest problem lies not in the rankings but in the non-academic world: namely, we have no culture! The problem is exactly what inspired my moniker, "The North Façade". For like the puffy North Face jackets that obscure the human shape inside of them, the blandly generic Cornell culture silences individual expression.
Our music scene consists of the same mix of "Jock Jams" being pumped out of every party and bar. The creative arts play second fiddle to the same repetitive mixers and formals. Nobody goes on dates.
All of us in the same clothes for the same Saturday night devoid of human vibrancy. The flat culture is perhaps best described by an actual example I witnessed:
[Two girls approach without breaking stride]: "Hey Melissa, how are you?" [turning slightly mid-stride] "Good, how's it going?" [not sure whether to stop now] "Pretty good, um" [both stop, laugh sheepishly, and face each other]. "So, how are you?" "Not bad, how's everything going?" "I'm okay… hey, how was your formal?" "Oh, pretty good, yeah - you know. What are you up to now?"
"Oh, I'm just trying to study for that prelim. I got three points below the mean on the last one so I'm trying to study harder." "Well, I have a 15 page paper, and a problem set, but then after that I can relax, I hope." [smiling] "Well, good luck on that!" "Ok, you too!" "See you later." "Ok you too."
And that was a word-for-word transcript. Now, I agree that these facades make for seamlessly smooth social settings, sans strife, but in general our surroundings are also sparse with stimulation! Our unvaried environment provides less novelty for the mind, thus stunting development and aborting the entire purpose of college.
Ultimately the main culprits are you and me. We are the ones that spend more time talking about due dates than ideas, and more about prelims than feelings. Our generic manner of dress and speech puts up a façade in front of each one of us. People can't get in to find out who we are, and our personalities can't get out and develop.
Like I said, I love this place, but let's tear down the façade and start relating on a more human level.
Of course, even more important than our little affairs at Cornell is the world around us. Here the facades holding hostage human values grow more complex, but it is still possible to identify one that I believe will be the most critical for our generation to break through.
As I rationalist, I have to question the façade in front of the World Trade Organization that keeps it entirely behind closed doors, without elected representation. This stuff - the new world economy - is simply too important to have built by corporations meeting in secret. Blinds protect the world's architects from the everyday people that are their clients. In a similar government it would be called unconstitutional.
Still other facades make it easy to hold these curtains closed. First, since our generation grew up in complete affluence without having to work for it, we have the warped perception that things naturally work out, and don't require active involvement. Our parents have a different perspective.
The affluent could benefit from the perspectives of everyone else. But these people suffer from still another façade: that science and global politics are too far removed to be of any concern to them. Unaware of the paramount relevance these issues have, or even worse turned off by scientists and politicians that don't care to (or even know how to) communicate with normal people, the important voice of the majority will disappear into the chasm.
Our big challenge will be to cross a mountain with a few people immobilized by affluence and the rest by indifference. Yet this paralysis is induced entirely by perception, so the remedy can come through the media and culture at large. Change the balance of ideas in the air, and suddenly everyone can move again.
The North Face is supposedly the iciest and most impervious part of any mountain. Growing up in Ithaca I'm used to strange lays of the land, and have since moved on to spotting the contortions of the human landscape. Amidst these contortions, I see distortions of truth: masks that shroud the viewer from honest information.
So every column I have searched the landscape like a suicidal mountaineer for the most impervious façade I could find. And every time I have tried to map it out on Page 5, traversing the steepest parts with all of you, until at the top we can look beyond to the true view that lies behind the curtain. I hope you have found it as rewarding to read as I found it to write - thank you. Nathan Wilson was a graduate student in the College of Engineering. He'd like to thank the faculty of Neurobiology and Behavior, who care more about undergrads than anyone. To influences M. Francis, Guru Gomez and Fishnet Martinez, and Uriyoan Colon, with love. Most of all, he is thankful for the editors that really write the columns - Navneet Gill, Farhad Manjoo, and especially Amanda Reed '99 who gave me a chance to write in the first place. The North Façade appeared every Monday.
|
|
