In George Orwell's bildungsroman "Such, Such Were the Joys...," he talks about having "suck" with the headmaster and his wife. "Suck" was pull, influence, an insider's hand that got the sucker sweets, attention, position. The term also had its smarmy side, as Orwell explains with an unflinching saddened anger. Inevitably, having suck abraded any self-dignity a person might feel down to simple self-interest, reduced altruism to calculation. In a word, individuality got bought off and any impulses to rebel against the arbitrary despotism of the headmaster and his wife were shunted like old rail cars to a sideyard of envy, greed, and bitching one-upmanship. Orwell, through the lens of his gawky adolescence, focuses for us the dry rot of tyranny, the unavoidable ossifying of the soul that the pursuit of favor incurs.
But is there anything really wrong with this? Isn't this how the world works? You have to go along to get along, the politicians say, and we all have our tales of compromise. Perhaps Orwell is wrong, merely cranky because he could never get suck, and he simply disguised his crankiness and failure in his usual smooth prose. Don't we, after all, have an obligation to look out for ourselves?
The answers to these questions are not easily extracted from the world; they depend in large part upon how powerless one is. To one who has in some sense arrived, who has enough money to pay bills and enough leisure to enjoy money left over, it's easy to argue that integrity ought to be preserved at any cost precisely because one's integrity is not being challenged. One is not racked by any particular envy, not subservient to any interest (even if one is a subordinate at one's job), and answers largely to one's own drummer. This is an easy integrity, an integrity by default because unchallenged by any venom, an integrity of righteousness.
But the answer is not so easy for someone who dances to another's piper. Integrity at that point becomes only one among other options, to be donned when the occasion demands or permits. The only route for the powerless to travel toward the crumbs dropped by the powerful is, to borrow Paul Simon's phrase, to "slip-slide away," play the Artful Dodger among egos built like the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. At these murky depths, surety is not so clear. While the moralist in the bathysphere may believe he's penetrated the darkness, the truth is that the lantern fish prowling the darkness for each other with their phosphorescent twinges of bait rule this ethical niche.
Isn't there something absolute, though, some dike that needs no fingers? Must everything be relative, subject to political negotiation? Let's take Phillips Exeter Academy, touted by Time as "the most prestigious secondary school in the country." In the deed of gift, John Phillips declared in 1781 that the essence of the Exeter education was the teaching of goodness with knowledge and the learning of the real business of life. If any place is a mecca for educational and ethical sanity, Exeter would seem the best candidate, a place which appears to preserve some version of the absolute pieties.
Yet it only takes a semester before one starts hearing about "college suck," those things which, when on the resume, will sufficiently impress an admissions officer to recommend a student for election. I hear students recommend to each other doing one activity or another for suck, regardless if the activity is enjoyable or not. The students get the message clearly and quickly, as they usually do: You gotta have a job, right? Right. And it's better to have a job that pays a lot? Right again. And you gotta get into a good college, better an Ivy than UNH, to get the papers that get you the job? Right three times. So I'm going for suck because if I don't, I'm not gonna get my brass ring.
Unimpeachable logic, of a sort, and a logic that we faculty don't do much to dissuade. Oh, we talk long and earnestly with students about learning for its own sake and the importance of answering to one's own conscience, and it takes with a few students; but it's mostly palaver. Our actions here speak more loudly. We say not to be overly-concerned with grades, we even chide students for being "grade-grubbers," yet we don't change the system so that grades aren't a temptation. We talk about not going to college and instead going out to discover the world. Yet we maintain an athletic college placement office that begins its indoctrination at the beginning of the junior year. The students have the inside story: the "real business" of life is to do the things that get you somewhere, that give "suck." The rest -- exhortations to the joy of learning -- is blather.
So even the best at its very best replays the old conundrum: the powerful, the faculty who are comfortable and adult, offer to the powerless, the adolescents, an empty ethic, an ethic not good for another decade or so. The powerless, in their turn, go about business as they see it. Perhaps Orwell, then, was being merely ethically archaic when he detailed the damages of suck, a man superbly out of touch with his age.
And yet that assertion just doesn't sit right. The students may be right about how they see things, but it's not a "right" in the end worth being right about. For suck is never done without a cost, an arrears in the soul that manifests itself in dissatisfaction and anxiety and emotional discord. Of course the ethical repugnance of suck needs to be balanced with the real-life necessity of compromise, but in the end suck ought not to become a habit because the price is too high. No matter what the cost, integrity is the better, if not the easier, option.
Cyril Connolly, in his book Enemies of Promise, says that Orwell as a child was never a "stage rebel" but a real one. Suck is stage rebellion; integrity, real rebellion. We faculty would do better to teach that real business rather than the business exposed by our hypocrisy, and we would all do better to do less stage managing and mor living.