Some people have dreams (in the “aspirations” sense, not the nightly explosions of the subconscious sense) of athletic achievements, others of mastering the market, still others of nylon notions of “love.” I on the other hand, dream of the public outworking of lines of argumentation.
SGA held a “constituency dinner” tonight, proving that even amoungst the poor and overly indebted (read: college students) politics still tries to make room for lobbyists. Although it was for and by the SGA they elected to serve food not mediated by the school’s food service (an idea I will return to later). The dinner went as could be expected: pizza and pop topped with complaints about certain annoying policies or disagreements about certain groups’ funds. Economics ruled most of the discussion, straying at most to give a nod towards developing the stumbling campus-wide recycling program.
I mostly nodded and looked calm.
It seemed that neither the SGA officers or the students were actually interested in anything I would identify as important (the cohesiveness of, or lack there of, the curriculum for example). The issue that surfaced in my mind during the time I was there was food. Not because I’m obsessed with food, or because the the pizza was particularly good, but because the food provided by the college is not generally good (I should note that I have great respect for those who work in the food service areas, this is not in any way directed at them). There is something to be said about SGA ordering pizza for this dinner. It is not as simple as a complaint against the food provided, but how the food is provided.
A college, especially a small liberal arts college, seems to be an ideal place to make use of local foods. It is a substantial but not large community that has a relatively stable population. On top of that it is in the middle of Iowa, in a town surrounded by farmland. The nature of the discussion coupled with my insane attention to contexts prevented me from raising the issue at the time. As I walked back to my apartment, ideas about how it was that the school could begin to make use of localized food walked my thoughts. Of course a rationale had to be given for the switch, which meant the current system needed to be shown as broken, a task I was relatively sure I could sufficiently take on through the use of ethical arguments. I imagined giving a lecture on how local food would be the ethical choice, a notion in reality dogged by my own self-awareness of how boring I am to most people. Of course in the narrative, my speech inspires action and change because the argument is taken seriously as argument, again another stop-gap for the reality of this ever occurring.
As I moved from this subjective romanticism to more pragmatic ideas, a further chain was added to the follow through. For this to actually happen, for someone to take it seriously it would have to be justified not merely on moral grounds but on economic grounds as well. As a self-styled Marxist wannabe, this proposition was thoroughly evil. My internal story then moved from an affective speech to a subversive intended-to-fail speech of protest–a martyrdom of potency. But this soon gave way to the tragic reality of the situation. Except in cases where the ethical impact of something is so large it refuses rationalization, the economic rules.
Lacking economic justification, the response would be something like, “While we see why you think the issue is important, the cost of the proposal would be too high to justify. A college is also a business after all.” What does it say about our society where such a statement is not only intelligible, but common?
This is an instance where I would love to be wrong, but am doubtful that I am. Maybe one of those tragic necessities know as economists will set aside the conceptual problems associated with promoting an ethical issue not as ethical but as economic and save the day. However, we can then ask if such a means is justified by the end…
