Is this real life?

There is some truth to this, no doubt. Over winter break, I watched a great deal of coverage of the Republican primary, but during the arduous academic month of January, I lost attention to what Romney said at the debates or what Paul may or may not have said 20 years ago. Yet during that time I also researched and wrote a paper about how modern Muslim societies treat women based on interpretations of the Quran. This is not to say that reading scholarly journals and books serve as a replacement for being aware of current events. I just wonder if we are too quick to label everything that is not Princeton “real.”

Many people rightly reject the notion that is often present in political pandering that there is a “real” America. The cultural narrative that elevates “small town America,” for example, as the better or more real America is an absurd notion that ignores the commonality and realness of every part of America. So why do we, as otherwise full inhabitants of the world, readily accept the notion that the part we live in is not a real part?

The argument that we live in an unreal bubble seems to be based on the fact that we are sheltered, that what happens outside Princeton does not affect our lives and vice versa. This idea is itself flawed because it ignores how many among us have families who were severely hit by the recession, or how many of us have had to take out personal or family loans, or take more than one campus job, in order to pay for our tuition. But more importantly, it misses the point.

If we believe that getting a campus job would make this place more real, then we fall into the same trap as those who say that farmers live in real America but New Yorkers don’t. Realness is not measured in terms of difficulty. Everyone equally lives and interacts with the real world. Some people’s existences are harder than others, some people have more problems than others, but to say that some people’s lives are therefore more real than others is utterly ridiculous and allows us to retreat into a sort of carefree non-world.

If I think that life here at Princeton isn’t real, I allow myself to think that my actions have no consequence. In this bubble, I can do whatever I want, and eventually I will leave it and confront the real world. But of course our actions have consequences. The papers you write, the books you read and the conversations you have shape you into who you are. The time you spend studying, drinking, training, acting, partying is not borrowed time in a kind of timeless Narnia — it is a substantial chunk of the finite amount that you have. Princeton is neither a playground without consequence nor solely training for “real life.” What we do here immeasurably affects ourselves and those around us. These “unhistoric acts” as George Eliot would call them are far from meaningless and instead contribute profoundly to our reality.

Yes, of course, we need to have more civic engagement with the world around us. But not because that world is real and ours is not. Saying that either puts Princeton on a pedestal, from which we deign to help those less fortunate than ourselves, or degradingly condemns us to a realm of unappeasable guilt, from which we try and always fail to do something good for the “real world.”

We instead must motivate an increased civic engagement precisely because of a shared reality. Everyone in the world should have a stake in his or her community, from the people we drive by on the way to work to those halfway around the world. We do these projects that encourage kids to read or provide teens with HIV testing because we recognize that we share the community and commonality of this “real world.” We love our neighbor not because of any other-worldly injunction, but by virtue of his being our neighbor, and our recognizing the humanity we have in common.

So this is by no means a call to ignore the world outside our ivy-covered halls. But let us not call that world real and, by extension, the world inside this bubble fake or imaginary. We don’t have to wait and, indeed, we cannot wait until we walk through the FitzRandolph Gate until what we do starts to matter in the “real world.”