The dialectic of enlightenment: Nerds vs. Frats

Before I came to America to study, I had watched a pretty embarrassing share of teenage movies about teenagers in high school. One such movie was "Mean Girls." I remember thinking it was all hyperbole and congratulating myself on having escaped such a pre-adolescent fate. And I said to myself in my best Tiny Tim voice, "How unlike this ridiculous movie college shall be! No such childish categories exist! God bless us, every one!"

I know better now. I know that the fundamental divide on all campuses is the nerd-frat binary opposition. Nerds and frats are antithetical terms in a campus-wide power struggle. Yet up to this day I cannot decide which I detest more — the nerd or the frat boy. On a two-hour bus ride to see Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos at the Metropolitan Opera, I had the misfortune of sitting in front of a curly-haired boy whose mouth had mysteriously been replaced with an evil perpetual motion machine. As he launched into a spiel about eigenvalues and Indonesian cuisine, I felt a hernia developing. By the time we reached NYC, my hitherto healthy and functional ears had turned gangrenous. I lamented their passing.

"Enough already!" I wanted to shout. "Yes, I know you have read many books. I know you are the ubermensch of quantum physics. I know you integrate numbers over the weekend for fun and have eaten strange though unfortunately not poisonous dishes in Sardinia, Jakarta and Addis Ababa. But your arrogance offends me thoroughly!"

The two-hour bus ride back was equally sonorous, by which time I had stuffed paper napkins in my ear and was cursing in Chinese. Perhaps he thought this was a particularly Asian way of saying, "please continue, O great master," for he began to speak louder. His voice was like bubonic plague; it slowly infected the bus. People began twitching violently. When the bus stopped outside the U-Store, students ran out screaming. Some brave people stopped to carry the dead.

On the other hand, there are the frat boys and the sorority girls. The concept of a fraternity/sorority is entirely alien to me, but it obviously encompasses an exclusionist mentality that often turns destructive. In my darkest moments I substitute images of frat boys drinking industrial vodka and popping each other's collars for little bright-eyed youths whistling the Horst Wessel Lied while dancing in their pajamas with the cutesy bundle-of-sticks motif. One such dark moment occurred while I was quietly studying with friends in my room on a Saturday night. All of a sudden, the fire alarm went off, and everyone in the building had to evacuate.

As it turned out, a bunch of drunken frat boys had thought, with the clarity afforded to them by liquor, that it would be a good idea to empty a fire extinguisher on the landing of my dormitory, thus setting off the fire alarm. Standing in the cold with my friends, I made a mental note to begin a large collection of happy-faced voodoo dolls with popped collars and baseball caps.

It seems that, on the surface, fraternities are just societies that explicitly endorse secrecy in order to drink and go crazy, often at others' expense. It's like Lord of the Flies, except the island is a frat house and the sailors aren't going to come and break up the party. The men drink and the women turn themselves into bundles of social signifiers for the pleasure of the men. Sometimes they make up for it by holding charity events. But there's more to it than meets the eye. At the heart of it is a fantasy of homogeneity, an exclusion of minorities and a totalitarian structure of trust, secrecy and ritualistic submersion into a self-proclaimed elite, a.k.a. the popular people. And so it is for the annoying, loudmouthed nerd, a.k.a. the smart set, for whom elitism is constructed through a vocal process of signification of intellect. Both of them push others to the sides of their lives. They are at the center of their universes, and the rest of us must listen to them and clean up after them. Though they seem opposed to each other, they possess the same spirit.

I am glad that there are those who do not embed themselves in this dialogue between frats and nerds. Free radicals who have escaped the rigid latticework of social relations, they are voiceless. They eat their meals quietly in a corner of the dining hall while reading a book. You would hardly notice them. They do not show off and they do not set off fire alarms. Standing above and beyond the reach of the dialectic of frats and nerds, they transcend this spectacle as an Aufhebung. Johann Loh is a freshman from Singapore. He can be reached at loh@princeton.edu.