“Am I a Snob?” Well, Sort of : Socialism, Advocacy, and Disgust in Woolf's Economic Writing

Summary

This paper is dedicated to a childhood friend, Maria Fleuette de Guzman, who died unexpectedly June 2 at the age of 45. Although we grew up with very similar abilities and similar life beginnings, her path diverged from mine, minutely at first, but with each divergent path opening up different opportunities and leading to significantly different lives, class statuses, respect accorded to us, and bodily health by the time we both turned 45 last summer. Theorists of complexity call such dramatically different outcomes despite only minute differences in initial conditions the “butterfly effect” after the discovery by Edward Lorenz that minute divergences in initial weather conditions can lead to drastic differences in the weather as it unfolds—a butterfly flapping its wings in China, the saying goes, can cause a hurricane in Miami days later (Mlodinow 194). The butterfly effect on a lifetime means that a chance encounter with a mentor, or a future partner, or a cop at the right place at the right time, or the wrong place at the wrong time, can precipitate a headwind, or a tailwind, or a hurricane that changes the course of a life ifwe examine it in hindsight. Hindsight, as Leonard Mlodinow argues in The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, tricks us into imagining portents when there are at the moment of an event's occurrence, only probabilities (196). In 1965, no one could have predicted that the life trajectory of my friend as it would appear in hindsight to her survivors in 2011.

Clearly one's life path is not completely subject to the random accident of birth or the frivolous whims of chance. Our actions and decisions do have consequences, as I am fond of reiterating to my students. If I finish college (or don't), if I get married (or don't), if I join the army (or don't)—certain options open up to me as a result of those actions, and other options close.