VII.A.
Modeling socialization and
education
1.
socialization
might
be defined as the process whereby you attain both a social role
, i.e., an ‘external’ status as
a type of agent with characteristic activities,
and an individual self
, i.e., an ‘internal model’ of
yourself as a specific individual with
characteristic traits. education
might
be defined as the process whereby authorized representatives of the society
intentionally equip you with knowledge you would otherwise be unlikely to
attain, and thereby help determine just what sort of role and self you would
have. The two processes interact to establish both °vertical relations of power
between groups raising unequal claims and horizontal relations of solidarity
inside a group raising equal claims°.
2.
It is quite problematic to construct a model that would cleanly distinguish
between these two processes. A sparse model might stipulate that socialization
foregrounds commonalities and promotes
uniformity among people, whereas
education foregrounds differences and
promotes diversity. But this model is
inadequate on both sides: socialization proliferates diverse groups of uniform
insiders confronting outsiders, while education applies uniform standards to
produce a wide scale of successes and failures. A richer model might stipulate
that socialization foregrounds intuitive conformity
within
your social group of family and peers,
whereas education foregrounds publicly
measured competition
against
your school group of classmates. Being
‘normal’ in society is thus more respectable than being ‘average’ in
school; the ‘average grade’ (e.g., a ‘C’ in the U.S.) may be interpreted
as a failure
to
surpass your compeers, although you didn’t actually ‘fail’ (e.g., by
getting an ‘E’ or an ‘F’). But this second model is still too sparse,
since socialization also fosters competition between groups, while education
also demands conformity with the restrictive role of the ‘learner’. Besides,
the competitive or conformist tendencies of the society naturally carry over
into its schools.
3.
Or, our model might contrast the more inclusive
drift
of socialization with the more exclusive
drift
of education. Aside from outright disability or pathology, fairly few people
fail to become socialized, and may receive institutional treatment by therapy or
confinement (VIII.126). In education, many people fail and have to fend for
themselves in unspecialized jobs
as
‘unskilled labor
’ or else go unemployed
and
live in poverty (cf. VII.56, 67). This model foregrounds the assignment of responsibility
, which socialization puts more on society
but education puts more on the individual
(VII.19,
56). In this way, education resembles the ultimate ‘seller’s market’: the
clients (learners) are not respectfully asked what ‘product’ they want but
firmly instructed what ‘product’ they will take, and are told to blame
themselves if they can’t use it (VII.75). Yet again, the model is too sparse,
since the ratio between social versus individual rights and responsibilities is
regulated by dominant °legitimizing ideologies° and by the °dialectic between
power versus solidarity°,
e.g., whether the interaction between teacher and learner is °confrontational
or cooperative° (VII.112). Moreover, the individual is a product of society and not just its opposite pole (cf. VII.10, 85).
4.
These problems for designing a model which cleanly distinguishes socialization
from education suggest that the two are in practice seldom fully distinct either
as personal contexts or as cultural and institutional frameworks; and that their
mutual relationship is deeply problematic. The major problem, I submit, is once
again the °fundamental contradiction
between inclusive theory versus exclusive practice in modern Western
societies°. In theory, the benefits of socialization and education are equally
open to all citizens, such as participation in democratic government and public
schooling; in practice, the great majority have only limited access. And again,
elaborate strategies have evolved to °legitimize or mystify° the practical
exclusion and to protect the theory of inclusion from being openly discredited
in ways that might trigger a °legitimation crisis° (Habermas). The systematic
and ‘savage inequalities’ (Kozol) in the society are either simply ignored
or else explained away as the workings of free-market forces, random accidents,
or individual flaws.
5.
To explore how this situation evolved, our model might define socialization and
education as two °adaptive
action
spaces°. In each space, people select and perform actions and interactions
during the evolution or a person or group, and construct scenarios of the
current situation in respect to individual and social agendas. This model
enriches the model of evolution
proposed back in III.43ff: a person is a °life-system seeking to make progress
and to reach critical mass in order to
gain emergent properties by actualizing
a richer role or self with more amplified capacities for action and interaction°,
e.g., when you have attained the expertise
needed
for an advanced school degree or a prestigious job. Conversely, °regress occurs when your role or self is alienated, possibly to the point of critical dispersion°, e.g., when you fail and drop out of school
or get ‘deskilled’
for a monotonous mechanical job. In this evolutionary model, social and
educational status are not static traits or possessions,
but, like ‘texts’ or ‘discourses’ inscribed on a person, are dynamic
evolving models whose ‘meaning’ is determined by the °convergence of
multiple constraints in the current context°. Actualizing
contexts
empower you to realize your human
potential more fully, whereas alienating
contexts
disempower you by steering your
evolution to suit the sources of power. Our fundamental contradiction would now
be encountered between an inclusive theory of universal empowerment (to ‘be
all you can’) versus exclusive practices of widespread disempowerment (to
‘do what you’re told’). The unavoidable result is a monstrous loss of
unactualized human potential (cf. VII.7, 10, 29, 66, 86, 118).
6.
In ordinary experience, evolution is gauged by the pursuit of goals,
ranging from a fairly closed set of material needs for food, shelter, and
clothing, over to an open set of non-material needs for recognition, acceptance,
respect, privilege, and so on. If a problem
is defined as a probability that a goal might not be attained (III.76), then the
goal-seeking activities of ordinary life might be described under the concept of
general problem-solving., e.g., using
‘breadth-first search’ to evaluate all the options before choosing one, or
‘depth-first search’ to pick one option and pursue it single-mindedly
(III.225). Yet this concept does not apply directly to getting ‘socialized’
and ‘educated’, which are not so much tangible goals in themselves but
rather the main adaptive action spaces in which you pursue your goals with
characteristic strategies. The degree to which a strategy suits the agent’s
goals within his or her scenario can be termed its adaptive
value.
7.
An °ecologist model of evolution°
would describe not just whether a goal is attained but whether its pursuit and
attainment count as
toward
sustainable life°. Here, we can build upon the model of °goal-planning°
proposed back in III.227 with three main parameters for strategies. First, short-range
strategies rush to achieve the goal, whereas long-range
ones assess the goal in respect to broader future conditions. Second, confrontational
strategies
assert
your goals by denying other people’s, whereas cooperative
ones
balance your goals with theirs. Third, destructive
strategies
bring
losses of resources of material and data, whereas constructive
ones bring gains. Social and educational progress can thus be defined as °modifying goal-seeking activities
and scenarios away from short-range, confrontational, and destructive strategies that may maximize immediate benefits for the
agent but alienate self or other, over toward long-range, cooperative, and
constructive strategies that share benefits and actualize self and other°; regress
moves just the opposite way into selfishness and alienation. Such progress
obviously does not result from the mere passage of time or by continued advances
in population
, production
, or technology
(cf.
III.43, 52, 227; VII.21). Instead, modern society presents a vast panorama of
progress and regress alternating, mixing, or conflicting, as diverse groups and
ideologies compete for the hegemony and empowerment to set the agenda of
dominant goals and to pursue strategies with high adaptive values for their own
scenarios. As the 20th century draws to an ominous close, the ratio of empowered
to disempowered grows radically skewed, while the world economy shifts from
industry to information management, and from one high technology to a still
higher one. The maximum profits for a tiny portion of the world’s population
are being financed by the maximum loss of human potential (VII.5) in an
unsustainable spiral that is simultaneously destroying the material means for
future progress (cf. I.2, 9; II.104; VI.43; VIII.59).
8.
What is usually called a ‘social or educational problem’ might be more insightfully
described as a pattern of °alienating,
weakly adaptive strategies adopted by the disempowered°. Such people
resemble °life-systems self-organizing along the boundary between order and
chaos°. They disperse into strategies whose °regressive adaptive value°
is
both behavioral in falling back on
quick, reflex-like tactics, and cognitive
in fragmenting and suppressing data to evade chronic limitations in knowledge
and processing resources, thereby enforcing ‘depth-first search’ and
suppressing ‘breadth-first search’ (in the sense of III.225). So a °regressive ideology
comprises
a set of ecologically unsound beliefs and attitudes° that save time and effort
by counselling simple frozen routines for solving problems and seeking goals,
and by invoking pejorative stereotypes as grounds to disempower other people.
The routines may excuse you from even understanding
your problems while you invent alibis or conspiracy theories for blaming them on
some handy scapegoats or imaginary conspiracies (cf. VII.33ff).
9.
A regressive ideology generates alienation when problems are approached this way, especially the
problem of how to define the self. Continued alienation in turn engenders the neurotic
solutions described by °third-force
psychology°, for which Karen Horney has defined three main types. The °self-effacing solution subordinates your goals to those of other
agents°; the °detached solution
withdraws from interaction°; and the °expansive
solution imposes your goals upon the agendas of other people°. The expansive
type is the most obtrusive, and can be further divided into three subtypes. The
°aggressive-vindictive type
disempowers other agents, illegitimizes their goals, and punishes them for any
real or imagined opposition°; the °perfectionist
type claims the right to assert your goals over other people’s by virtue
of flawless performances°; and the °narcissistic
type claims that right as a reward for being highly attractive and charismatic°.
All of these solutions and types can be easily identified in modern society,
often mixed within the same agent (I recognize all of them in myself). But
public attention, especially in mass media such as cinema, highlights the
aggressive and the narcissistic types, often at extreme intensities (VII.24;
VIII.117). Alienating and regressive
problem-solving strategies are displayed as glamorous and alluring without
regard for their severely unsustainable effects on society — a °characteristically
modern failure to connect° (cf. I.4;
VII.22).
10.
These trends nicely fit
the agenda of °consumerism and the
ideology of growthism°, which counsel
you to use any means you can to maximize your own benefits. You might then adopt
the °reified solution of defining your self by the commodities you possess°
(cf. I.12). Instead of exerting the effort and creativity to °actualize your self°, you just join the °alienating and hectic cycles of surplus accumulation and consumption
in the narcissistic gratification fantasy°, relentlessly fomented by
advertising and marketing, that doing so places you among the elites (I.8, 12,
16, 28)
. Identifying your
self by your commodities can only be a phony °actualization and empowerment
that in fact alienates you while suppressing data about your individual
potential and your connections to society, and keeping you near a neurotic
threshold of critical dispersion°. Every prospect of giving up your commodities
or merely slowing down your accumulation is mistaken for a direct attack on your
selfhood (VII.33). You justify your aggressions in deploying °confrontational
or destructive strategies° against
other people because you believe to be acting in ‘self-defense’; from the
same neurotic standpoint, long-range cooperative strategies appear to trespass
on your ‘individual freedom’, which is to be won by defying and victimizing
society (VII.31f, 45). You are open to hatred
, prejudice
, greed
, and selfishness
, each being a °subcritical state
close to a dispersion into violence°
(°unpredictable chaos with high energy and low data°) — losing some of your
human properties and relying on no competence except the atavistic skills of
brute force.
11.
Or, if you abandon your
expectations for maximum benefits, then you may drift into a °self-effacing or
detached adaptation°. You reduce the efforts you invest in your goals and
accept your own disempowerment as an inevitable and final scenario. You are now
open to ignorance, stupidity, and laziness,
which are subcritical states close to dispersion into apathy
— a general degradation of competence (cf. VII.14, 84f, 113, 154, 193).
12.
If so-called ‘social
problems’ are indeed regressive and alienating strategies and solutions with
some adaptive value, then they can never simply be ‘fixed’ or
‘eliminated’, e.g., by doling out harsher punishments to violent people or
shinier enticements to apathetic people. Such tactics can at best make cosmetic
adjustments of the symptoms without addressing the real problems, rather like
trying to cure neurotic people by threatening or bribing them. °Ecologically
sound progress° can be achieved only by °creating contexts of equitable
empowerment wherein actualizing strategies become widely available and feasible°
(cf. VIII.144); then, people can develop their potential and pursue their goals
without bursting into violence or sinking into apathy.
13.
In theory, this
‘progress’ should result spontaneously from socialization and education; in
practice, the results are uneven and unreliable, due to the °contradiction
between inclusive theory versus exclusive practice° (VII.4f). Both processes
afford a complex mix of occasions for actualizing or alienating and for
empowering or disempowering. Socializing people should help them recognize and
make the most of their roles, but may also encourage them to desire goals in
contexts wherein actualizing strategies seem unavailable and alienating ones are
selected instead, e.g., embezzling money instead of earning it. Similarly,
educating people should empower them and offer them ‘social mobility’ by
providing the knowledge to support long-range, cooperative, and constructive
strategies: being a °data amplification° (in the sense of III.46), knowledge
can be acquired, created, and shared without expending great material resources
or confronting other ‘knowers’. Yet a fiercely competitive system of
education that applies °uniform standards
in order to produce differences in
individual merit° disempower the learners and imposes confrontational
concepts of knowledge as data whose adaptive value is highest when other people don’t know it or don’t
even have the right to know it.
And here too, high goals may seem unattainable through actualizing strategies,
so that alienating ones get selected, e.g., cheating on examinations (cf. VII.113).
14.
To assert that violence
and
greed
or
apathy and stupidity
have
some regressive adaptive value is not to assert — as folk-wisdom does,
ignoring anthropological evidence to the contrary (VIII.74ff) — that they are
all universal
or
inescapable components of ‘human nature’ evolving ‘up’ from animals
through ‘primitive’ early societies. The really ‘universal’ factor is
that all life-systems are designed for goal-seeking and problem-solving
operations; yet the more °enriched and amplified the life-system, the softer
the coupling whereby this design can set the agenda of goals and the choice of
strategies° (cf. III.49f). During evolution, the human repertory of strategies
has become diversified; the ‘primitive’ ones persist beside the more
‘advanced’ ones and can be deployed when you feel disempowered or
obstructed. In effect, °alienation enforces a regressive ‘backward
evolution’ during the individual’s life by dispersing the resources needed
for progressive actions°.
15.
And instead of just
saying (again as folk-wisdom does) that people do ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’
actions
because
they ‘can’t help it’ or are ‘incurably evil’, we might say that the
‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ actions are alienated plan-steps toward goals the
agents strongly desire but do not expect to attain through ‘good’ or
‘right’ actions. Their goal-planning is restricted by the °data-suppressing
strategies
they
have adopted to defend against the complexity and novelty of modernization°
(VII.8, 10, 46; VIII.114(e), 142f).
They therefore do not assess their actions from a healthy perspective, and
regard their victims as stereotyped representatives of the alienating society
and thus as fair targets for aggression (VII.22). They take the same dim view of
‘legal codes’, which we could define as state-sponsored prohibitions of
specific aggressive strategies held to endanger the ‘social order’ and its
distribution of resources and rights. For these agents, legal codes are merely
the rules of an unfair game they feel unqualified to play and entitled to
subvert.
16.
In such a situation,
social and educational progress cannot stamp
out ‘social problems’ like violence and apathy but can only °empower
people to evolve amplified strategies for devising and applying actualizing
solutions° to life’s problems. They will then achieve a healthy perspective
for making wider the °connections and understanding the consequences and
alternatives for their actions°. An °ecologist program for socialization and
education can join in developing the discoursal strategies and practices for
such an empowerment° (cf. I.33, 60; III.3, 97; IV.163). But we must first seek to grasp the essential °control
principles°, of which five can be provisionally stated here. For our first
principle of resource limitations,
goal-planning entails a claim to a share from a limited supply of material and
data. Scarce resources lead goal-planning to highlight confrontation, e.g., by
enforcing narrow claims through physical strength and military prowess; ample
resources highlight cooperation, e.g., by recognizing broad claims through
redistributive legislation. In small, simple societies, socialization can
regulate most claims, but when the society gets larger (more population) and
more complex (more types of relations), education produces specialists who can
make extra claims in return for such °progressive actions as amplifying the
supply of resources by developing more constructive strategies°, e.g., methods
of subsistence that increase and protect the supply of edible plants and animals
in the environment.
17.
For our second principle
of claimable human rights, the actual distribution of benefits,
including social and educational advances, depends on who can effectively claim
human rights, quite apart from the official ideology. As political and economic
history reveals, a society moving toward larger and more complex organization
typically encourages broader participation in production and consumption by
granting wider rights in theory that only gradually become claimable in practice
(VII.4f, 27). Socialization steers the actual claiming, while education
increasingly assumes the function of precisely ranking claims and refining the
ancient legitimation that ‘those who are strong in reason are by nature
masters and rulers of others’ (Nicholas of Cusa, II.5) (cf. VII.60).
18.
For our third principle
of legitimizing ideology
,
the distribution of resources and rights is made legitimate by at least one ideology,
broadly defined
as
a cognitive and behavioral system that constrains the scenarios for actions,
interactions, and participants by deciding what counts as ‘natural’,
‘normal’, ‘proper’, ‘correct’, ‘valuable’, ‘decent’, and so
on (cf. VIII.C). The more obtrusively unequal the distribution is, the harder
the ideology works to mystify it in order to fend off a °legitimation crisis°
(VII.4) and to repress counter-ideologies demanding °social progress toward
equality°. Our model can highlight the central polarization between left-wing
ideology
holding
that human rights are inclusive and equal
in theory although social
conditions can create inequalities
in practice;
versus right-wing ideology
holding
that human rights
are exclusive and unequal in both theory and practice.
This polarization requires careful attention because it is unstable in at least
five ways: (1) an inclusive theory, e.g. democracy, may stand in a fundamental
contradiction with an exclusive practice, e.g. militant monoculturalism; (2) to
fit the principle of limited resources, the concepts of ‘inclusive’ and
‘equal’ are always relative, i.e., ‘more inclusive and equal than under
alternative policies’; (3) both sides make allowances for real inequalities,
though only the right-wing insists that these are natural, inevitable, and just;
(4) both sides advocate ‘freedom’ and ‘human rights’ without saying who
shall get them or how; (5) both sides have, in some historical contexts,
constructed totalitarian systems of government. Consequently, many commonplace
labels for political orientations or groups, especially ‘liberal’ and
‘conservative’, are only vaguely positioned in terms of ‘left’ and
‘right’; indeed, this vagueness has adaptive value for mystifying the actual
policies behind these labels — who or what should be ‘liberated’ or
‘conserved’. The whole spectrum has been shunted, putting the liberals in
the center and conservatives on the far right, while the left is spread across a
mosaic of groups and programs struggling, against a torrent of hostility and
distortions from the mass media, to °consolidate the disempowered sectors of
the population behind a coherent ecologist agenda°, e.g., along the lines
recently set forth by Hilary Wainwright. Discourse is unstable too. The concept
of the ‘free market economy’ can get thematized by liberal discourse to
challenge aristocratic and bureaucratic restraints in the 19th century, and by
conservative discourse to defeat government regulations and slash welfare in the
latter 20th century (VII.31). Or, ‘economic growth’ means to liberals
general prosperity for labor while the state encourages job training and
unionization; to conservatives it means higher profits for owners, managers, and
elite professionals, especially in °showcase industries° while the state
subsidizes new technologies and reduces corporate taxation (VII.31). Or again,
‘prosperity’ rates high employment over controlling inflation for liberals,
but rates low inflation over controlling unemployment for conservatives
(VIII.48, 63). In each case, °ideologies
contest the meanings of topical
expressions: what is adaptive for one side is maladaptive for the other°
(cf. I.122; VII.29, 49, 54, 79; VIII.4, 42, 64).
19.
For our fourth principle
of regulated success
, the adaptive value of social and
educational practices is judged by how well they rank more successful outcomes
over less successful ones, and both of these over failure. These rankings are
the least urgent in a small, simple society with ample resources, and get more
urgent when the society becomes large and complex and resources grow scarce.
Channels for succeeding or failing get steadily diversified, most visibly
through an educational system wherein specific performances are constantly
assigned a competitive rating in numbers (VII.62). The skewed ratio between the
few successes and the many failures is mystified by our °Western ideology of
individualism and the myth of individual merit°, whereby every person is
responsible for their own fate and, aside from mere ‘bad luck’, gets just
what they earn (I.6). Modern education can resolutely profess an inclusive
theory empowering every person with equal chances to succeed or fail, but has
naturally evolved to favor exclusive, disempowering practices that reproduce the
skewed patterns of success
and
failure
(VII.4)
— quite apart from the intentions of the educators themselves (VII.62, 87,
169).
20.
Our fifth and final
principle of instrumentality
concerns
how and how far a given social or educational activity of learning or performing
effectively determines what your status will be and what resources and rights
you can claim. Instrumentality is direct when
the activity anticipates or lays the groundwork for activity in your chosen
career, e.g., when you train to be a fast runner and later become an expert
soccer player; it is indirect if it
improves your claims to a good career but does not support your activities on
the job, e.g., when you practice doing arithmetic by hand and eventually become
an accountant who does all calculations on a pocket computer, your good grades
in math merely having helped you get into business school. An activity is non-instrumental
if it in no way helps you to get or practice your career, e.g., when you study
math in school but end up cooking in a fast food outlet; still, these activities
can have a recreational or socializing value that support your general resources
by enhancing your health (e.g. jogging) or your knowledge (e.g. reading
historical novels). Finally, an activity is ornamental
when it confers prestige irrespective of its instrumentality, e.g., when the
children of the elites learn Latin.
21.
In the Center countries
of the ‘West’ (a fuzzy but handy cover term for Europe, the U.S., and
Canada), we can quickly agree that our age is a ‘modern’
one but not about what that means. In recent years, °modernism and
post-modernism° have been subjects of lively controversies among authorities in
various fields, e.g., Stanley Aronowitz, Marshall Bernam, Jean-François Lyotard,
Matei Calinescu, Fredric Jameson, and Henry Giroux. Their assessments have been
quite disparate, due to problems of distinguishing the
historical base of modernism from the wide range of progressive and regressive reactions to it. We can certainly discard
the folk-wisdom that the evolution from pre-modern stages into modern ones
automatically constitutes ‘progress’;
and that a modern ideology (or ‘outlook’, ‘philosophy’, ‘policy’,
etc.) is always a ‘progressive’
one (VII.7). And we have good reasons to expect that political
theory in the future will reconceptualize the ‘modern’.
22.
We might undertake to
design a dynamic model of evolution in terms of connectedness
. In °pre-modern societies
°, both people as social agents
and their contexts of interaction are interconnected
though well-defined relations within the community between social roles (e.g.,
priest, warrior, hunter) and individual selves (e.g., a prominent individual
esteemed as a generous host). During modernization,
these interconnections gain complexity
in a °paradoxical trade-off°. On one side, society grows more diversified
and specialized as new jobs and technologies are proliferated, e.g.,
creating complicated hierarchies of ‘middle management’ in place of shop
stewards. On the other side, society also grows more uniform and despecialized
as people °conform to consumerism with its global trends and fashions and as
jobs are deskilled into simple-minded operations°, e.g., when °Center
industries farm out the production of isolated machine components to low-paid
labor in poor nations along the Periphery°. The decisive issue is whether this
complexity trade-off will be °integrative
or disintegrative°, and current
developments certainly point to the second outcome. The access to specialization
is being restricted to relatively few people, many of whom are more concerned
with raking in profits than with sharing their knowledge and skills or deploying
them in the service of any °ecologist program°. And the uniformity of °consumerism
is heavily competitive in accentuating the tiny differences among alternative
brands of the same commodity and marking off groups of consumers for each°. In
such a society, the individual agent also undergoes a paradoxical trade-off: as
the array of available data grows larger and more diverse, your own sense of
your role and your self becomes less clearly circumscribed. The continuity once
provided by cultural traditions and family histories yields to a mosaic of
incidents or episodes wherein your own participation seems accidental and
irrelevant (II.127). Your actions are connected to society in multiple ways you
can no longer understand or control, so you actually feel disconnected (‘left
out’, ‘excluded’, ‘unwanted’, ‘unloved’, etc.) (III.97), and may
be driven to perform grossly °maladaptive and unsustainable actions° to ‘get
back at society’ (VII.15). The °failure
to connect° thus deserves to rank as the most dangerous ‘social
disease’ of modernization, with a °regressive
adaptive value for surviving when things get increasingly interconnected and
steadily fewer people understand how° (cf. I.4; VII.10; VIII.2, 8, 55, 113f,
132).
23.
Evidently, high social
complexity can lead to the social
overload of the individual agent in the wake of urbanization, mass
communication, industrial conglomeration, and so on. The overload relates to the
°behavioral and cognitive resource
constraints° described in III.H. Required to act in modern contexts, you
confront high demands for attention
(e.g., monitoring inner-city street scenes for impending dangers), motor
precision (e.g., driving high-speed automobiles), and perceptual mediation (e.g., not seeing the finished product in which
you install one circuit-board). You suffer stress from multiple anxieties, noise
from crowded diffuse environments, and lack
of feedback from not knowing how your actions are being rated. You hold lower
motivation and interest
when you have to do repetitious, alienating, or fragmented tasks you didn’t
pick, or when you can’t see how to solve your problems, or when you must work at an arbitrarily fixed
timing. The ensuing °degradation
and overload° in turn drain away
the resources you desperately need, until you feel utterly trapped. You are then
prone to attack your problems with °short-range, confrontational, and
destructive strategies° — you simply don’t command the resources to
weigh and implement progressive strategies (VII.10).
24.
To appreciate the dual
alternatives offered by modernization, we might view society in a °connectionist
model as a self-organizing system, whose two main operations are to excite or to
inhibit the strength of the connections° (cf. II.102; III.248ff). A °progressive
orientation, typical of left-wing
ideologies, actively seeks to renew
connectedness by seeking consensus among agents and convergence among
knowledge domains°; its results include internationalism, socialism, labor
unions, affirmative action, environmentalism, multicultural education, and
electronic internets. A °regressive orientation,
typical of right-wing ideologies,
actively seeks to deny connectedness
by withholding the status of valid human beings from whole groups or layers of
society identified by simplistic, obtrusive differences like race or religion°;
its results include isolationism, fascism, racism, sexism (or genderism), job
discrimination, corporate raiding, deforestation, religious fundamentalism,
book-burning, and technological warfare. In a continual tug-of-war between left
and right, °democracy seeks to run
the state by a consensus of its voting citizenry°, while °capitalism diversifies and specializes the production and
consumption of commodities while enforcing the uniformity of consumerism°. The
oscillations between left and right depend critically on the ability of specific
groups, such as workers versus management, to identify their own interests with
the interests of the state and its institutions. The left succeeds only if it
can create organizations whose operation and leadership can equitably distribute
the rights and benefits of society among ordinary citizens, and fails if it just
creates another greedy, selfish elite (as in the former Soviet Union). The right
succeeds only if it can build a coalition of groups who agree to share the
rights and benefits among themselves and deny them to the rest, and fails if it
galvanizes wide resistance to its inhumane policies (as in the former Union of
South Africa). The contest between left and right seems destined to decide the
fate of our ‘modern world’ within the next century. Shall we have inclusive
liveable coexistence and moderation — or exclusive tiny islands of voracious
luxury in a sea of violence and poverty? If we believe the mass media,
exclusivity is clearly winning out. But ‘news’ is a special mode of
discourse that thrives on stories of money, power, and conflict. And those same
media are largely owned by wealthy right-wing interests (VII.34) and have
decided that intensely aggressive confrontations — violence, robbery, murder,
warfare, and so on — shall dominate not just the ‘world news reports’ but
the ‘world entertainment industry’ (VIII.117).
25.
The same ominous dualism
pervades the products of modernization. ‘Modern technology’ can create the
instruments for reskilling people into more technical, higher-paid jobs, but can
also create ones for deskilling them into lower-paid jobs as mere button-pushers
and custodians for machines. ‘Modern divisions of labor’ can lead to more
active collective participation of workers in management and production, but can
also hide subtler forms of control and deskilling by management in the design of
the workplace and its machines. ‘Modern information processing’ enables
wider access to huge data banks, but also new tools for codification, secrecy,
and deception. ‘Modern democracy’ can broaden communication between the
government and the governed; or it can be a more efficient and devious
marketplace for servicing wealthy special interests. ‘Modern education’ can
devise curricula and methods that offer free access to knowledge
and
careers among a wide range of social and geographical learner groups; or it can
ensure the success of the traditional elites and the failure of the rest more
ingeniously than ever. At present, modernism mainly projects its darker side: a
world of ruthlessly aggressive and narcissistic agents (VII.8, 10).
26.
This pervasive dualism
is now being inherited by post-modernism,
a diffuse movement seeking to transcend modernism (II.121). Challenges to the
progressive aspects of modernism lend a regressive cast to post-modernism, and
vice-versa. So ‘post-modernism’ has been used as a label for projects
ranging from the self-indulgent exaltation of indeterminacy and irrationality
over to a radically democratic empowerment of marginalized or repressed social
groups, such as women and minorities, often collectively called ‘the Other’.
So far, the central arena has been discourse,
sustained by articulate figures in anthropology, sociology, political science,
education, philosophy, literary theory, and so on. Moving onward into programs
of concrete action will be difficult
and precarious, given the diversity of projects and fundamental distrust of
modernist claims, both from the left and the right, of holding the lone
‘true’, ‘correct’, or ‘rational’ position or of prescribing to
society how it should behave (cf. II.119).
Besides, how do we °empower groups who have deeply internalized their own
disempowerment°, e.g., women who have been convinced that the traditional role
as ‘housewife’ in unpaid domestic labor is a ‘noble and sacred duty’
(VIII.65ff)?
27.
A further dualism
emerging from modernization has been the hugely influential and pervasive shift
within socialization from monoculturalism
toward multiculturalism, whose
motives and impacts have not yet been adequately explored. If, as I have argued,
°actualizing human potential hinges crucially on exploiting the rich functional
interactions among language, cognition, and society°, then °multiculturalism offers the
most strategic ambience for asserting human connectedness in a modernized world°
(VI.41; VII.101, 112, 128; VIII.2,
29, 123) — the cultural correlate of the modern °‘meta-paradigm’ for
integrating alternative scientific theories° (cf. II.2, 132; III.181). But this
insight faces a formidable opposition that we need to assess in terms of
cultural, political, and economic history. The long-range evolution of social
and economic systems have brought steadily wider ranges of cultures into contact
while assigning them diverse or inconsistent status. The term ‘culture’
itself remains disputed between an inclusive sense subsuming all the customs of
a group of society versus an exclusive sense singling out individuals with
specialized knowledge (VIII.4). The exclusive sense of ‘high culture’ has
remained chiefly in the purview of the ‘upper classes’, while inviting
strenuous aspirations from the ‘middle classes’ and frankly disempowering
the ‘working classes’ (VII.59). In the Center countries, these classes have,
over time, partially adopted the forms
of higher-class culture, e.g., diet, clothing, and housing, without
internalizing its content, e.g.,
respect for intellectual achievement. Nonetheless, the whole society of multiple
classes in those countries could at least implicitly subscribe to an official ideology of monoculturalism as long as cultural diversities
either were kept from view, e.g., by confining distinct cultures to live in
ghettos, or else were commodified, e.g., by popularizing the music of the rural
working classes. Symptomatically, the term ‘monoculturalism’ has remained
absent from the public discourse of its adherents, even after the counter-term
‘multiculturalism’ gained prominence; the mainstream prefers to remain
invisible, as if it were simply the normal and natural order of the world and
not a programmatic ideology (VII.41, 58; VIII.19, 43).
28.
Yet monoculturalism is
no longer well-fortified against the rising interconnectedness of modernization
and multinational capitalism. By the time two World Wars had broken down
cultural traditions and social or geographical barriers and had enormously
mobilized and rationalized industry and technology, cultural change was
inevitable. The °broadening of civil
rights in the Center nations° ensued when the women and minorities,
increasingly engaged in production and consumption, got organized to demand
state guarantees of equality. The ‘civil rights movement’ brought visible °social
progress in furthering cooperative, constructive policies about claimable rights°
and in discouraging some of the more obtrusive strategies for discrimination.
Minority cultures gained prestige, but tangible rewards in education and the job
market were still touted for assimilating to the mainstream monoculture. And the
real material gains were modest — largely limited to the public sector, where
governments could control employment policies — and are now being reversed to
maintain the °economic growth of the elites against the worldwide effects of
overpopulation and overconsumption of non-renewable resources° (VII.31;
VIII.73).
29.
On a global scale,
moreover, the picture remained grim. Throughout the century and intensifying
after World War II, international capitalism has developed vast networks for
drawing profits into the Center. Paradoxically, the Periphery nations rapidly
became industrialized on a vast scale and yet the majority of their populations
only got poorer. The same Center governments who were granting human rights at
home were forwarding the interests of their banks and business communities by
exerting economic and military pressure to block human rights in the Periphery
countries and to keep down the prices of foreign labor and raw materials
(VIII.54). Those countries were brought under the control of financial
institutions of the Center like the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund, who handed out easy loans with crippling interest rates and kept devaluing
the currencies of the Periphery. Laws for guaranteed employment, minimal wages,
worker safety, or land reform were actively discouraged by collaborating with
local elites and oligarchies to rig elections, bankroll insurgents, topple
left-wing governments, and install military dictatorships (VII.36; VIII.53). The
resulting hardships ensured that Periphery nations would never become
economically stable enough to resist foreign control, and that their most
capable citizens would emigrate to the Center (cf. VI.59). This talented
multicultural labor force completed the picture of international exploitation
for shielding the profits of the stagnating Center economies despite the global
recession that soon followed upon post-war prosperity. A major side-product was
a far greater diversity of cultures and languages that found the Center
governments and their institutions quite unprepared or disinterested in
multicultural policies and multilingual education. Ironically, multiculturalism
has attained truly global dominance in the midst of a frankly adverse
geopolitical situation, where its °meaning is violently contested among
competing ideologies°, and its °capacities to actualize the broadest range of
human potential°, asserted in VII.27, are going unrealized or are being flatly
denied.
30.
The long-range formation
of huge industrial conglomerates through mergers, corporate takeovers, leveraged
buyouts, and so on, and the subdividing and deskilling of labor has naturally
rendered °multinationalism abroad far more profitable than multiculturalism
at home°. The control over the world economy by multinational corporations
and banks has become so powerful that Center industries have total freedom to
move along the Periphery to wherever prices, wages, and worker benefits happen
to be the lowest and governments offer the most favorable terms, such as
agreeing to ‘privatize’ state-owned industries or abetting overpopulation by
opposing birth control, officially to protect the ‘sanctity of life’ but
really to ensure cheap labor (VIII.26, 48, 53, 55). Multiculturalism has
therefore lost out to a multinationalism that assists the conservative plan to
loudly deny the very existence of the global recession while quietly
implementing ruthless policies to deflect its impact onto the lower classes at
home and the poorer nations abroad (VII.34, 47; VIII.55). ‘Free market
economy’ now designates a well-disguised system for manipulating markets and
economies to shield the profits of large industries and rich classes (VIII.44,
49, 54, 58). The polarization of the now multicultural Center societies has
accelerated to the point where the term ‘rich nation’ no longer applies, but
rather: ‘nation with a shrinking rich class and a growing poor class’.
31.
Here too is a monumental
°failure to connect, enacting a regressive adaptation° (VII.22). And the
Center does indeed display a field day of °right-wing ideologies actively
denying connectedness and deploying short-range, confrontational, and
destructive strategies° (VII.23). In one Center country after another, °right-wing
conservative governments have been voted into office by a coalition between the
upper classes and monocultural contingents from the middle and lower classes,
who agree to share the rights and benefits among themselves and deny them to the
rest (VII.24). The wealthy and their spokespersons in government and the media
are exploiting widespread dissatisfaction and anxiety over deterioration in such
areas as jobs, housing, and public services, and luring a voting block of
citizens with promises of a new ‘economic growth’ to be gained at the
expense of working women, minorities, and immigrants. The program is always the
same: °creating ‘economic growth’ for the elite by handing out big
subsidies, incentives, and tax breaks to the showcase industries who finance the
coalition, while creating ‘economic shrinkage’ for the rest by slashing
social services like schools, job training programs, scholarships, worker
safety, welfare, and unemployment compensation° (VIII.49). The state saddles
the public with the costs for expensive new technology whose profits will go
into private hands (V.79; VIII.52), while pushing whole sectors of society
toward poverty. A battery of devious tactics are now being deployed in
legislation, bureaucracies, law courts, and other institutions to quickly erode
and reverse the gradual gains in human rights and civil rights over the last
century (cf. VII.28f). The crime waves caused by rampant poverty are met with
vast inflations of police powers for seizing and jailing minority persons, who
get stereotyped as crooks, thieves, drug dealers, and so on (cf. [695] in
VIII.34) — just while the conservative leaders and their big backers show
their devotion to the ‘free market’ and ‘capitalism’ by busily bilking,
embezzling, and laundering millions of dollars.
32.
To legitimize these
policies, public discourse shifts the blame for economic hardships onto the
people who suffer them. Cultural minorities are easy targets, as they have been
throughout history: the more distinctive the culture, the easier it is to
recognize by simple-minded criteria and the more vulnerable to misunderstanding
and ignorant prejudice. These targeted groups are made into scapegoats for the
economic recession that has in fact been caused by greedy, short-sighted, and
wasteful economic policies for stimulating ‘growth’ (I.9; VII.28).
33.
A °well-financed
right-wing discourse campaign° in Center countries is now proclaiming the goal
of eradicating multiculturalism and multilinguism and restoring monoculturalism.
Like all projects to °force uniformity onto social diversity°, the goal is
unreachable and deepens alienation. But the real goal is to °disempower
multicultural groups° and keep out immigrants on the pretext that they are
interlopers and parasites posing a grave threat to ‘society’,
‘tradition’, ‘civilization’, ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, and so on
— all right-wing code-words for the °supremacy of mainstream white male
middle- and upper-class culture°. By this tactic, the New Right discourse °transforms
the victims of discrimination into victimizers° and devises °conspiracy theories° making alternative cultures and
their defenders into conspiratorial agents of the very discrimination being
directed against them (cf. VII.44-47; VIII.71). The same discourse °denounces civil rights guarantees as intolerable interference with
‘liberty’ and ‘equality’°, yet perversely °invokes civil rights like ‘freedom of speech’ to protect its own abuses° (VII.34, 45). In this scheme, the
defense of democracy is an attack, while the New Right attack on democracy is
its defense. And a general public of well-intentioned but gullible citizens is
being led astray by irredeemably evil left-wing plotters — intellectuals,
radicals, communists, gays, satanics, etc. etc. — who will slink back into the
shadows or go to prison when they
are properly exposed by the high-minded defenders of society on the Right (cf.
VII.41, 45).
34.
In terms of °third-force
psychology° (VII.9), the New Right movement could be aptly described as a °mass
collective neurosis of the aggressive-vindictive type° (VIII.116,
136), now seriously proposed as a style of public and private action and
discourse from presidents, prime ministers, congresses, and parliaments, all the
way down to the most ordinary citizen interacting in situations of individual
life and family. At its lower intensities, the discourse of the New Right
invokes broad mystified concepts like ‘national identity’ to illegitimize
multiculturalism, e.g., in the American National
Review:
[691] current public
policies have an unmistakable tendency to deconstruct the American nation,
[e.g.] official bilinguism and multiculturalism (22 June 1992)
[692] multiculturalism is
far more than a radical ideology or misconceived educational reform: it is a
mainstream phenomenon, a systematic dismantling of America’s unitary national
identity in response to unprecedented ethnic and racial transformation […] if
immigration is not cut back, the multicultural thrust will be simply unstoppable
(27 April 1992)
At
higher intensities, the fairness and neutrality of mainstream culture are
contrasted with the intolerance of civil rights advocates [693] and the
deceitfulness of welfare recipients and immigrants [694]. Here, the
aggressive-vindictive strategy of transforming victims into victimizers is
extended by °transforming the defenders
of victims into offenders°, tapping the mainstream’s mounting fears of
being threatened in their human rights and selfhood when they expect any loss of
wealth and power (VII.10; VIII.71). Following an old tradition, the authority of
°classical notions of ‘truth’ and ‘fact’ gets harnessed for
authoritarian moves° in polemical conflict [693-94] (e.a.) (cf. III.7;
VIII.43):
[693] Nobody is less able to
face the truth than the hysterical
‘anti-racist brigade’. Their intolerance is such that they try to silence or
sack anyone who doesn’t toe their party line [Sun, 23/10/1990]
[694] The time has come to state the
truth without cant and hypocrisy [and] to face the
facts without […] being called
racist [Mail, 9/10/1990] [vd 1991:19->1992 D&S)
[695] Our traditions of fairness and tolerance are
being exploited by every terrorist, crook, screwball, and scrounger who wants a
free ride at our expense [Mail,
28/11/1990]
At
these high intensities, New Right discourse generates a wide °motivation gap° of the supposed conspirators, e.g., why the
‘real racists’ are publicly denouncing racism instead of smugly welcoming it
in silence. The gap is either ignored or else filled by attributing
pathological, criminal, or satanic tendencies that justify a forfeiture of human rights.
35.
The intensity peaks in
violent hate speech once confined to graffiti in public toilet stalls but
now an accredited medium for public declarations, as when Pat Robertson, a U.S.
TV evangelist and presidential candidate, vilified the proposed Equal Rights
Amendment during the referendum (it was defeated) with a mailing campaign which
read in part:
[696] It is about a socialist, anti-family political
movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children,
practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians. [quoted in Time,
27/9/1992, p. 16]
Such
strident intensities of °aggressive-vindictive discourse° might seem to defy
all belief, but, in the socio-economic context of ‘cultural war’ has a °significant
adaptive value° in at least four ways (cf. VII.47f). First, it is tailored to a
target audience of somewhat neurotic white male voters who are already angry or
scared about the rights gained by women, minorities, and immigrants, and are
desperate for pretexts to suppress them. Second, it lashes individual citizens
into furious acts of symbolic violence and terrorism, e.g., the assassination of
civil rights leaders, which the government can sanctimoniously deplore. Third,
less extremist right-wing discourse is made to sound moderate in comparison,
such as the supposedly scientific or philosophical books trading on °popular
scientism° (in the sense of I.3) and purporting to prove that ‘economic
growth’ is incompatible with equal human rights, or that the darker races are
genetically less intelligent, or that the Jewish holocaust never happened, and
similar myths. Fourth and finally, the New Right extremism gains simply by
setting an aggressive-vindictive style for public discourse that is
automatically °right-wing and regressive in maximizing confrontation and
destruction°. It goads the opponents into counterattacks that can also be
seized as evidence of ‘intolerance’ against ‘free speech’ (VII.32, 45).
And it keeps the interaction near the threshold of °critical dispersion into
physical violence, defined as unpredictable chaos with high energy and low data°
(VII.10, 25). Each act of violence against women, minorities, or immigrants —
or against anyone who defends their human rights — becomes a public statement
within the total right-wing discourse against equal rights and can be rewritten
into an act of morally justified self-defense against criminal ‘terrorists’,
‘crooks’, ‘scroungers’, ‘witches’, ‘baby-killers’, etc. etc.
This same discourse is sustained by mass media hungry for sensationalism and
largely owned by wealthy conglomerates naturally sympathetic to the right-wing
agenda (VII.25). Indeed, media discourse has converted the imaginary conspiracy
into a widely accredited reality, mystifying the actual causes of the global
recession and blocking effective counter-measures such as °ecologist programs°
and family planning.
36. I have emphasized the discoursal factors in modernization and multi-culturalism to suggest the scale of the task facing a °critical science of text and discourse° (cf. VII.54) . It is not enough to °demystify the regressive New Right discourse that turns the world upside-down by transforming victims into victimizers, and human rights advocates into depraved conspirators°. After all, much of this discourse is becoming quite frank and open, while the more mystified discourse with its noble-sounding buzz-words, like ‘free market’, ‘liberty’, ‘law and order’, ‘patriotism’, ‘family values’, ‘Christian morals’, ‘right to life’, and so on (I.7; VII.32; VIII.77), is flatly contradicted by New Right activities like raiding corporations, laundering money, burning books, setting immigrants on fire, gunning down doctors and civil right leaders, and bankrolling foreign dictators and death squads (VIII.53). In the 1990s, the real agenda of the New Right to seize control of democracy in order to suspend it is so thinly disguised that its official agenda can be believed at face value only by people who are staunchly determined to do so. Nor does the New Right have the slightest intention of conducting a fair or rational debate with their opponents, whom their own discourse tirelessly dehumanizes and criminalizes. Since they couldn’t win such a debate, their discourse must establish, by sheer vicious repetition, that the other side doesn’t deserve a hearing. The New Right counts not on the truth of justice of its arguments, but on the raw power of its wealthy friends and heavy guns to shield it as long as possible from the doom of sheer demographics, when the minorities will unite into large majorities, and the lives of billions of poor people will be so unbearable that jails and executions finally lose their famous power to intimidate and compel. Beyond that point, the New Right agenda means a society disintegrating into universal warfare in a world not even the richest can comfortably enjoy.
37. The larger task of our science is to °develop more effectiv e and general strategies for progressive discourse and for cooperative, constructive interaction° (III.186). We cannot of course make sure these strategies will be widely accepted. But we can be fairly sure that such strategies will not emerge unless they are expressly developed by a °transdisciplinary ecologist program° uniting the intelligences and aptitudes of all of us who uphold the conviction that freedom and equality are meant for everybody .
VII.C. Education in ‘crisis’
38.
For decades, people have
been diagnosing and publicizing the ‘educational crisis’, yet have reached
no consensus about how the ‘crisis’ came about or how it might be
alleviated. Common accounts have relied on an egregiously simple-minded and °confrontational
targeting of scapegoats°: the administrators ‘not using discipline’, the
teachers ‘abandoning the basics’, the learners ‘being lazy’, and so
forth. The considerations outlined in the foregoing sections of the chapter
point to a quite different and more complicated account: the crisis is a natural
outcome of the °modernization within societies and the regressive reactions to
cultural diversity°, and particularly of the °failure or refusal to make
connections°. While modernization has been making the population of learners
sharply diversified, school systems
have either remained uniform or else
struggled to become even more uniform.
Remedial programs, legislated requirements, mandated core courses, city-wide
busing, statewide curricula and textbook adoption, nationwide standardized tests
— they all treat diversity as the main problem to be solved with
well-intentioned bureaucratic measures for reimposing uniformity. But actually
overcoming diversity would require reversing modernization — not just setting
back the clock and turning history around but somehow ironing out the whole
long-range evolution of individual and social identities. This requirement
defeats all the measures despite the good intentions.
39.
It is not surprising
when a society in crisis has its educational system in crisis, and when
discourses about the educational crisis divide along the usual ideological
lines. Both liberals and conservatives purport to seek uniformity but differ
starkly in their methods: the one side by offering
enticements to become uniform
(e.g., open-door admissions and minority scholarships), and the other side by threatening
punishments for not becoming uniform
(e.g., bad grades and expulsions) — a split we shall see again in the
socialization of emotions in children (VIII.116f).
Yet paradoxically, both sides also favor ideas that lead to diversity:
multiculturalism for the liberals, and rigid social stratification for the
conservatives. At all events, it is doubtful whether modern citizens want
to be uniform or whether they can be
even if they wanted to. Much evidence indicates that citizens are defending
against modernization by clinging all the more strongly to their own cultural
identities; deciding to become uniform might well seem like severing the last
web of connections sustaining the self — the ultimate plunge into alienation.
40.
For the liberals,
education offers a forum that can sensitize people to human rights and can
support the evolution of actualizing strategies to enhance these rights in daily
practice. These goals require broadening the opportunities for education and
compensating for existing inequalities. So the ‘liberal ideology’ of the
1960s tackled the ‘crisis’ by placing education among the ‘civil rights’
to be expanded through programs like ‘equal opportunity’, ‘open-door
admissions’, ‘student loans’, and multicultural and multilingual education
(VII.228). These inclusive policies can been traced in the discourse of Jimmy
Carter (looking back) [697] and of Bill Clinton and Al Gore (looking ahead)
[698]:
[697] My administration
emphasized the federal government’s role in compensatory education — helping
to remove inherent inequalities among student opportunities that remained even
after the best efforts of state and local authorities. In practically all
states, the most effective schools were concentrated in the most affluent
communities […] the worst schools tended to be in areas where the need for
special attention to many students was greatest […] one of my strongest
convictions was that every academically qualified student should have the
opportunity to attend college. We achieved this ambitious goal before I left
office, with additional student-aid programs (Keeping Faith)
[698] We have to work hard to see that every American
school has a challenging rich curriculum, and that every teacher has the
opportunity to develop the skills that he or she needs to teach well. […] We
must […] reduce the education gap between rich and poor students by increasing
Chapter One funding [federal support to poorer school districts] and by giving
schools greater flexibility (Putting
People First)
Yet
Clinton and Gore also joined the usual call for a ‘national examination system
to measure our students’ and schools’ progress’, which would surely create
less flexibility (VII.70) and would
still enforce exclusions in practice for the sake of inclusion in theory (cf.
VII.4).
41.
For the conservatives, education should just channel learners through
into jobs or joblessness as in the past but with faster, cheaper, and tougher
methods. Attempts to sensitize learners about human rights and alternative
cultures are vigorously reviled as intolerable intrusions of ‘politics’.
Just as °mainstream monoculturalism° remains invisible (VII.27), conservative
ideology pretends to be no ideology at all (VIII.43; VIII.19, 43):
For
many liberal and left academics, the university is […] a site constituted in
relations of power and representing various political and ethical interests.
[…] Neo-conservative educators believe that the true interests of the
university transcend political and normative concerns and that the latter
represent an agenda being pushed exclusively by left-wing academics who are
undermining the most basic principles of university life. [Yet] the
neo-conservative attacks against affirmative action, ethnic studies, radical
scholarship, modernity and anything else that threatens the traditional
curriculum and the power it supports represent a particularized, not a
universalized view of the university and its relationship to the wider society
[…] Underlying this form of criticism is the not so invisible ideological
appeal to the ‘white man’s burden’ to educate those who exist outside the
parameters of civilized culture; the rhetoric betrays the colonising logic at
heart of the reactionary political agenda that characterizes the cultural
offensive of such groups as the National Association of Scholars. […] The
claim to objectivity, truth, and principles that transcend history and power
[…] is nothing more than a rhetorical mask that barely conceals their own
highly charged ideological agenda. (Henry Giroux, Border
Crossings)
As commented by Newsweek late in 1992, the ‘cultural war’ — a phrase from Pat Buchanan’s keynote speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention (VII.34) — against ‘liberals’ ‘in the non-elective part of society, in the academy, the media, and the arts’ dovetailed with the Reagan-Bush Administration’s ‘legal efforts against affirmative action’ and its ‘campaign to defeat “politically correct” emphasis on minority viewpoints in the classroom’ (Garry Wills). The liberals in schools and universities were duly added with vigorous fanfare to the group of °conspirators whom New Right discourse blames for all the problems of society° (VI.33). Again with eager help from right-wing media and ‘massive infusions of outside funding from a familiar list of far-right foundations, think tanks, and individuals’, the New Right has, in the words of Stanley Fish, ‘mobilized a powerful coalition of disgruntled professors, nostalgic alumni, anti-academic journalists, concerned parents, and suspicious citizens, in face of a threat they have brilliantly fabricated’. ‘Whatever the truth about the relative strengths of the warring forces on the college campus, the conservative backlash has certainly won the media battle’ with their ‘story of subversive youths and ethnics and nihilists who are at once a lunatic fringe and a threat to a strangely endangered center, a story of epistemological evil emerging from some unfathomable impulse to destroy and lay waste, a story of reason under siege, of the decline of culture, of the abandonment of standards, of the triumph of barbarism’. ‘Here is the classically fissured shape of paranoid thought, in which absolute power and absolute vulnerability are simultaneously dec