The Hegemony of the Practical

What a silly thing Love is. It is not half as useful as Logic, for it does not prove anything, and it is always   telling one of things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true. In fact it is quite unpractical, and in this age to be practical is everything. . .

~The disenchanted student in Oscar Wilde’s The Nightingale and The Rose

Lately I am crushed by the power of Practical.  The Practical has a place certainly—we all need to consider the locations at which our internal and external reality meets and parts—but I am astounded at how our thinking short-circuits when we hear that word. Very often when someone says “but I have to do what’s practical,” they need give no further explanation than that. If we cannot sell a piece of art then our future as an artist is impractical, if we cannot make money farming organic then we have failed to be practical, if we spend all day making idli or sourdough batter from scratch when it can be purchased at the store for a fraction of the time then we are not practical.  We need give no further evidence of the need to jettison these pursuits in favor of Practical alternatives then simply using this word of great power.

The unquestioned superiority of being Practical gives it a hegemony over other possibilities, a hegemony that makes it easier for us to disbelieve in things we once believed when it is discredited it on the basis of practicality. The hegemony of the Practical is something I link to fast paced consumer culture and rapid results capitalism.  It means the valuation of all things material, measurable, saleable and concretizable over choices and things that do not have this quality. It is most evident in a snapshot, short-term analysis, which makes a future prognosis based on the immediately and obviously evident material or literal value of something.  In psychology it is seen in a result oriented (versus depth oriented) psychotherapy where action is encouraged over reflection. In those we know and even in ourselves, we can see the dominance of the practical in the way we choose or dismiss our internal emotional realities.  When I have worked at mental hospitals, I have noticed that psychiatrists and counselors often decide who is healthy and who is unhealthy based on their own sense of what is practical to think or feel.

The hegemony of the Practical shapes us into greater material efficiency, but it robs us of our imagination by over-valuing the concrete. It is the reason that we cannot understand the metaphorically rich language of the psychotic or the poetry of the sensate world. It is the word people sometimes use when they drop out of therapy for financial reasons or when they explain why they waited four years before they started talking about a great grief or loss. The unquestioned Practical is the great dismissor: it is often what facilitates authentic feelings to be discredited or passed over.  It is the voice that tells us to buck up, get going, and stop reflecting. It wields the sword that threatens us with disappointment and breakdown if we believe too deeply in lasting romance, magic or stories.