“History Lives in Us Whether We Learn it or Not,” Part 3: What Happens When You Don’t Learn it

Popular culture presents history as a series of technological improvements and corporate powers as heroic improvers of society. The stories historians tell are often less simplistic, but also, strangely, less likely to be believed. Education occupies an uneasy place in North American culture, and this is why history itself, as an academic discipline, is a central preoccupation of Severance.

In episode 1, at the anti-dinner party hosted by his sister and brother-in-law, we learn that the protagonist is himself a historian of WW1 and a former professor. This scene is a painful reminder of our collective lack of historical sense, and of the reduction of general education in history to rote facts and interesting anecdotes with no real value to our current moment except to amuse ourselves.

(image from Metawitches)

Upon learning of Mark’s area of expertise, a guest attempts to starts a conversation about it.

Guest: Oh, okay. Well, I got one for you. I was just reading this think piece about the comparative levels of violence and warfare throughout history.

Mark: Oh.

Guest: Oh, nerd alert. War porn, I know (chuckles). But anyway, in it, he said that the people actually called it the Great War. Apparently, it would have been a faux pas to have called it World War 1.

Mark: Oh.

BIL: Is that right?

Mark: Hmm. Well, uh . . . (stammers) . .. you know, no one would’ve called it World War 1  ‘cause World War 2 hadn’t happened yet.

(The guests marvel at this revelation before Mark’s sister chimes in.)

Sister: Mark’s late wife, Gemma, was an educator as well. Russian literature.

Another Guest: Oh, I love literature.

(Transcript courtesy of TV Show Transcripts)

Mark’s nerdish academic pursuits are treated as an adorable affectation or hobby, unimportant to real life by the anti-dinner party guests, who I assume are members of the intelligentsia (rather than intellectuals) – a term which comes to us from Russian literature. “Intelligentsia” are educated social leaders who are distinct from, and may even be in conflict with, the intellectual and creative. While this is a nuanced term with varying colloquial meanings, suffice to say, in moving from literature professor to corporate counsellor entrusted with ensuring employee productivity and satisfaction, Mark’s wife, Gemma, is transformed from an intellectual academic into a member of the intelligentsia–or, as some corporations might say, a "thought leader."

The apparently left-leaning high-brow anti-dinner party guests are painfully unaware of history, but eager to prove they also have intellectual hobbies –one read a think-piece giving him an interesting historical anecdote he had never heard of before: WW1 wasn’t called WW1 at the time! This is obviously idiotic, but the guest beams with pride at having conveyed this pithy fact –he can dabble in the harmless hobby of history just as well as the professor! This scene is hilarious, but also painfully recognizable to any intellectual or creative person. The professor, characteristically hems and haws, unsure of themselves (pfft, they don't really know anything after all), while the think piece reader is articulate with confidence.

As Mark is no longer a professor, his supposedly dead wife is revealed to be the robotic severed counselor, and Mark meets the anti-Lumon resistance at the abandoned university campus where he used to work, there is a looming sense of education having been dismantled, restructured, or disappeared – a project which is, coincidentally, now actually in progress all over North America. Strangely, although they view the severance process as inhuman, the anti-dinner guests – like most North Americans – view education as severed from regular life, and the purpose of Mark’s history knowledge is only to perform a work-function that cannot have value outside of a specific paid employment.

But the show suggests that history is indeed very important to know. If we do not know our history, we do not know ourselves. Despite not knowing it, Helly is an Eagan. History lives in her and acts through her. She can only interrupt this process once she finds out. When she learns it.

We also discover in this first season that severance does not change people as much as we think it does. For example, both Mark’s innie and his outie feel compelled to unsever, seeming to come to the same conclusion independently. And, upon learning that this outie was a history professor, his innie is impressed and curious – what a cool job! You can tell he would love to do something like that. But this contrasts with a popular narrative about education, which goes something like this: too much education, for too many people, or the wrong kinds of people, or the wrong kinds of education – all of which may render the education useless on the job market – is harmful to the individual who receives the excess education. This view of education sees learning as a potential cause of dissatisfaction. The premise behind the severance process likewise adheres to the notion that people never crave what they do not have. According to this narrative, we can prevent dissatisfaction by placing strict limits on education – who can receive it, what kind they may receive, and how much. If we can prevent the wrong people from wasting time in college, we won’t fill their heads with hopes and dreams and questions. The innies are supposed to be similarly happy with their ignorant lot.

And yet, they are not. In this dystopia, the employees of the severed floor as well as the left-leaning intelligentsia at the anti-dinner party suffer from intellectual starvation. In response, they greedily gobble up think pieces and self-help books by public intellectuals like Mark’s brother-in-law, who is using his PhD to profit from this widespread famine. (This part is not speculative; it is happening right now.)

(Image from Metawitches)

Because Americans have an ambivalent relationship to higher education, it is a common-place to put down college nerds and idealize (wealthy) college avoiders and drop-outs. Elizabeth Holmes capitalized on this popular trope. Holmes, descendant of a powerful company emerging from the gilded age with unproven patent-medicine type health claims, with her strictly scheduled productivity and success regime, was – most bizarrely – lauded for her inability (or unwillingness) to complete a university degree. The paradox of American ambivalence about education can be summed up in the way Holmes was presented in her heyday: while dropping out was congratulated, the fact that she was accepted into a prestigious university also impressed her dupes – she dropped out of a really good school!

A general distrust of the over-educated and education in general is expressed in American literature and culture throughout its history. This is partly explained by the reason higher education is valued. Academia’s value to most Americans is wealth acquisition. Since achieving wealth is considered the highest value, knowledge is only valued in so far is it enables one to achieve wealth. And if you can achieve success without it, that proves it has no worth. This devaluing of any knowledge that does not directly contribute to wealth makes severance a reasonable choice: if you only need some of your knowledge to do a job, why activate all of it at once? And if there’s no need for all that knowledge at work, why do we even have it? Wouldn’t it be better – more efficient – to limit the amount of knowledge we possess? So say the education reformers who want to limit or eliminate certain areas of study altogether – such as history – in favour of training students only in what they need to know to be effective and obedient employees. The severed floor retroactively learned coding instead of history, as so many politicians now wish for our youth. But instead of having to take knowledge away, how much easier if it were never there at all …