More on the challenges of youth
Posted on | July 21, 2005 |
Bourdieu again, this time maybe (?) a little easier to read:
Endowed with the same academic titles of nobililty, that is with the same essence, the young and the old have merely reached different stages of fulfilment of their essence. The career is merely the time of waiting for the essence to be fulfilled. The assistant lecturer shows promise; the master has realized his promise, he has proved himself. This all contributes to a world without surprises; and helps to exclude the individuals capable of introducing other values, other interests, other criteria in relation to which the old ones would be devalued, disqualified. Noblesse oblige: it establishes simultaneously the right of succession and the duties of the successor; it inspires aspirations and assigns them limits; it offers the young an insurance which, being of the same order as the assurances offered, implies patience, recognition of the distance and therefore the security of the elders. Indeed it is possible to get the assistant lecturers to resign themselves to have nothing for so long and to such an advanced age, to hold merely subordinate positions in a hierarchy where the intermediate degrees (which moreover are few enough) are defined only negatively through lack of certain attributes attached to higher positions, only because they are guaranteed eventually to have it all, and all at once, to pass without transition from the incompleteness of the assistant lectureship to the plenitude of the professorship, and, by the same token, from the class of impoverished heirs to that of legitimate title-holders.
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