The Unconservative Disposition

I received this great question in the anonymous comments:

What you call a conservative disposition seems to be the normal human disposition. What would be its opposite and where do you see it?

Yes, it’s normal to get attached to people and the traditional ways of doing things. But it’s not the only approach on offer. The unconservative disposition (I’ll call it the fluid one) is very much in existence and it’s having the conservative one for lunch.

Here’s an example. The Math and Stats Department needed a secretary. It’s a real need because they have a large operation and absolutely do need clerical support. What would you do if that situation arose and you wanted to solve it from a conservative approach? Let’s assume that, for reasons completely outside your control, you can’t hire. Your largest program can’t start the semester without a secretary. What would you do?

You’d reassign a secretary to Math and Stats, right? Find a program that’s smaller and doesn’t need much clerical help and you’d reassign their secretary to Math and Stats. Is that what you would do? Congratulations, you have a conservative disposition.

But that’s not at all how it was done at my university. Everybody got reshuffled. My secretary went to Math and Stats while Anthro’s came to me, History’s went to Geography, Geography’s went to Chemistry, and Chemistry’s ended up in English. Which, in turn, sent its secretary of 18 years in the same workplace to Anthro.

We are at the beginning of the semester. Having every department train a new person at this very busy time disrupts everybody’s work. It seems like the most unproductive way of handling things. Secretaries spend half the day trudging back to the buildings where they worked for many years to visit old buddies, use the vending machines they like, get coffee from the best coffee cart which, of course, is located at the corner of their old building. It just doesn’t taste the same if it’s not from that familiar coffee cart!

The mentality that finds what I just wrote incomprehensible and that believes “you should never let a good crisis go to waste” is the fluid, anti-conservative mentality.

I talked yesterday to a colleague who accepted early retirement. She doesn’t want to but she’s not allowed to teach European history, which is her specialization. Instead, she’s pushed into teaching colonial American history. And she can’t because she doesn’t know it or have any interest in it. If you think it’s ideological, it’s not. She’s the wokest person known to humanity. But the Dean says, and I quote verbatim, “I don’t understand this weird attachment people have to teaching within their specialty.” He doesn’t understand attachment. He sincerely doesn’t get why you’d want to hold on to the field to which you have dedicated decades of your life. And then we expect him to get the pain of an office worker who misses her friend at the copy center and her tradition of walking together to the same vending machines at the same time every day.

Disruption for its own sake is what fluid mentality is about. Disrupt, change, reshuffle, “just move.” It’s a coherent and consistent way of being in the world. It’s very real and all the fancy people have adopted it.