In Ordinary Men, Christopher Browning wrote of everyday German citizens, members of a police unit in Berlin, who were sent to Poland and there, practiced the messy slaughter of whole villages of Jewish children, women, and men. There are no all-encompassing explanations of anti-Semitism that Browning uses to distinguish these men from you and me: the commanders of the group found a way to tap into the basest of human emotions to make these men forget they were basic human beings. And so they killed.
Today, I read two articles back-to-back, and I was struck by the juxtaposition of ideas in them. I want to play with the arguments being presented, although ultimately, this thought experiment may be a failure.
In this morning’s NYT,
Anthony Lewis makes a point that is blindingly obvious to those of us who think about these things, but for which apparently, far too many Americans, including the squawkboxes on the Right, are oblivious. Namely, that people who live in glass houses don’t get to throw stones. (Or as their favourite moral exemplar said, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”)
Since the widespread outrage over the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Americans have seemingly ceased to care. It was reported yesterday that Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former American commander in Iraq during the Abu Ghraib scandal, is being considered for promotion. Many people would say the mistreatment of Mohamed al-Kahtani, or of suspects who might well be innocent, is justified in a war with terrorists. Morality is outweighed by necessity.
The moral cost is not so easily put aside. We Americans have a sense of ourselves as a moral people. We have led the way in the fight for human rights in the world. Mistreating prisoners makes the world see our moral claims as hypocrisy.
Beyond morality, there is the essential role of law in a democracy, especially in American democracy. This country has no ancient mythology to hold it together, no kings or queens. We have had the law to revere. No government, we tell ourselves, is above the law.
Over many years the United States has worked to persuade and compel governments around the world to abide by the rules. By spurning our own rules, we put that effort at risk. What Justice Louis Brandeis said about law at home applies internationally as well: “If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law.”
I intend no disrespect to Mr. Lewis, but my first reaction to reading this was a resounding “duh.” American foreign policy has never been one of consistency. Reagan’s lecturing the Soviets about their human rights violations in the 1980’s while financing death squads in Central America was the example I remember plainly from my college years, and even now, the sight of Elliot Abrams causes hideous gastric reflux. In those days, I took to the streets, attended demonstrations, wrote letters, picketed outside various defense facilities: in essence, spit into the wind.
Those of us now who are so horrified by what we are doing at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and in the streets of Iraq, are no longer spitting into the wind. We feel as if we’re pissing into a hurricane. The administration and the media have done such a bang-up job of convincing us that those people, who are not really human, those people were responsible for 9/11, and therefore deserve everything they have coming to them. Because, we are told, if we don’t nip this problem in the bud, we will experience a thousand-fold 9/11s. And thus, even treating prisoners like dogs, literally, is the right thing to do. Justice be damned.
And why not? We are, after all, the world’s superpower. And we know what justice is, really. Thucydides told us a long time ago, in The History of the Peloponnesian War.
For we both alike know that into the discussion of human affairs the question of justice enters only where the pressure of necessity is equal, and that the powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must.
I want to believe that the vast majority of the American people are as horrified by what is happening as I am. And here’s where the second thing I read this morning comes into play.
Bill Moyers has a lovely
piece at TomPaine today on the threat to PBS. I have not always been the biggest fan of PBS, especially when I saw evidence that they, too, were falling into the MSM, and not presenting an alternative view. But Moyers steps back from the news aspect of PBS to look at the larger picture.
He talks about the impact that being exposed to larger ideas has on the moral sensibilities of a people. Now, there’s no chance that I’m crawling into bed with Allan Bloom and E.D. Hirsch, but I did like what Earl Shorris had to say a few years back in an article he wrote for Harper’s about the effects of teaching philosophy to people who had previously had issues with working stuff out with their neighbors. And Shorris found that reading the liberal arts helped people to think differently about conflict.
Moyers has this to say:
Americans are assaulted on every front today by what the scholar Cleanth Brooks called “the bastard muses”:
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propaganda, which pleads, sometimes unscrupulously, for a special cause at the expense of the total truth
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entimentaliy, which works up emotional responses unwarranted by and in excess of the occasion
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pornography, which focuses on one powerful drive at the expense of the total human personality.About that time, Newsweek reported on “the appalling accretion” of violent entertainment that “permeates Americans’ life–an unprecedented flood of mass-produced and mass-consumed carnage masquerading as amusement and threatening to erode the psychological and moral boundary between real life and make-believe.”
How do we counter it? Not with censorship, which is always counterproductive in a democracy, but with an alternative strategy of affirmation. Public broadcasting is part of that strategy. We are free to regard human beings as more than mere appetites and America as more than an economic machine. Leo Strauss once wrote, “Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity.” He reminded us that the Greek word for vulgarity is apeirokalia , the lack of experience in things beautiful. A liberal education supplies us with that experience and nurtures the moral imagination. I believe a liberal education is what we’re about. Performing arts, good conversation, history, travel, nature, critical documentaries, public affairs, children’s programs–at their best, they open us to other lives and other realms of knowing.
The ancient Israelites had a word for it: hochma , the science of the heart. Intelligence, feeling and perception combine to inform your own story, to draw others into a shared narrative, and to make of our experience here together a victory of the deepest moral feeling of sympathy, understanding and affection. This is the moral imagination that opens us to the reality of other people’s lives. When Lear cried out on the heath to Gloucester, “You see how this world goes,” Gloucester, who was blind, answered, “I see it feelingly.” When we succeed at this kind of programming, the public square is a little less polluted, a little less vulgar and our common habitat a little more hospitable. That is why we must keep trying our best. There are people waiting to give us an hour of their life –time they never get back–provided we give them something of value in return. This makes of our mission a moral transaction. Henry Thoreau got it right: “To affect the quality of the day, is the highest of the arts.”
I have frequently said to anyone willing to listen to me, that I think the cutting of educational funding since the 1980’s is deliberate. An uneducated public is a docile public. A public that runs on video games, t.v., and celebrity magazines is not likely to consider the ramifications of torture.
Why are vast portions of the public discussing missing teens in Aruba and Tom Cruise’s latest love interest? Why are we not having public discussions about torture, foreign policy, and what the hell is happening here at home?
Cutting PBS and making prisoners piss in their pants are related phenomena.
Cross-posted at CultureKitchen
You give me a lot of food for thought. I have been concerned about the “dumbing down” that seems to be going on where education is concerned and my children. Seems like 10 years ago when my daughter was five there were a lot more really good documentaries on T.V. Now that my son is five I’m having a harder time finding good educational programs at times on T.V. and he is a total sponge for anything educational. I miss the good documentaries too that once seemed so easy to come by.
Bingo. Uneducated people are always easier to control.
As are lower income people preoccupied with the struggle to merely survive in today’s top-tilted economy. As are people who cannot get adequate health care, and are struggling with illness and disability.
As are higher income people who have become so convinced that sucess means accumulating more and more status and stuff, they have become indentured to the corporations who rule their lives, thus have no time left to pay attention to anything else.
People who feel powerless to change anything, for whatever reason, are always easy to control. Feed them mass media pap and pablum, and they will slurp it up as a welcome distraction. Try to talk about torture with them, or the right wing takeover of our government, and see the eyes glaze over just before they tune you out completely.
The kind of people we have elected to run our country now, know exactly what they are doing when they work to cut education funding, curtain the reproductive rights of women,and slash all social safety nets nad give cpoporations even more pwoer to control poeple livs. A powerless populace is exactly what they want and there are no limits to what they will do to create it.
Great diary, lorraine
It all seems so huge and interconnected. I do feel as if I’m pissing into a hurricane–where do we start to put it all back together? Maybe it’s my illusion that it was ever any different.
Here’s an example of when we led the world in moral conduct during time of war.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?O5A522D4B
Sadly, it wasn’t all that long ago.
Many people also believe that educational funds were (and are) being cut with the purpose of creating a docile society filled with poorly-educated consumers. Who knows if that was/is a master plan, or just a `meeting of the minds’ of certain aspects of the government, business sector, marketing, and people who both misunderstand what education should be, and those who understand it, but feel that other expenditures are more important? Remember, getting a degree in education today is not what most people think, and does in fact train future educators to (mainly) manipulate and control students.
Perhaps public school was only adequate for a brief time, in that students did get a comprehensive education which allowed them to be on par with people educated in other countries. Regardless, today public school (and most private schools) produce graduates that are truly uneducated.
I have taught at a large public university in Florida for the past 10 years, and can first hand document the comparison between foreign college-bound students and those from America. Its not just in science and geography that we are failing; most American students cannot think, argue, write, defend, present, or any of the higher order processes normally associated with educated people. I am lucky, honestly, if students can read, follow directions, and complete assignments in the most concrete manner.
As our society has gone through changes, students have evidenced the effects of a disconnect from proper teachers and proper education, and when they get to college, this disconnect is obvious, and further impedes the development of intelligence. In short, students have been handed watered-down materials with the goal of manipulation (of one type or another) for YEARS, and consequently are not interested in education at a heart level. Send them to a different place, or place them with a truly gifted teacher, and you will see in some students, this disconnect changes. But its rare.
So at this point, it would take more than a revolution in education to fix this, although that would be nice. I have mentioned before that we still have the ability to educate our own children, either through home school, or co-operative education, or some other alternative plan. If this isn’t done, it really doesn’t matter if your child is in advanced classes, or AP, or headed straight for the best colleges. Rote memorization, even of calculus, isn’t education. Most kids say they don’t remember their classes, or material anyway. Much like what adults go through, they say it’s all a blur. There are a few who are really detail-oriented, and do remember EVERYTHING, but are anxious most of the time and still aren’t processing and learning in a sane, effective way. If you want your kids to be different, consider home school.
Finally, at least here in Florida, the public universities are going through what has been termed a “purge” and liberal professors are leaving. Classes are becoming standardized, material has to be of a certain `balance’ to make our predominantly republican congress happy, and teachers are told to read from the (approved) text rather than teach. This results in NO academic freedom, and many educators here are worried. So there is a good chance that college cannot be counted on (at least here) to remedy the problems of a very poor early education.
The trouble is, I can’t recall any actual knowledge that is valuable to me, that I might have learned in school.
Almost everything I know about American history, I wasn’t taught in school. I primarily learned about it through reading my father’s library (in our basement), or watching PBS documentaries. Absolutely none of this stuff – about the Constitution, early American history, World War II history, etc – was taught in school. It also was not taught in college, unless you took electives. I don’t know what they were teaching us in social studies class, but it always seemed as if I had already read about it by the time it was covered (very quickly and shallowly) in class.
Geography? Never learned any of that in school. I learned it through my childhood fascination with maps and atlases. When I was eight or nine, I would kill time by obsessively writing down lists of features I “discovered” on various maps. (I was a strange child…) I used to be familiar with the name of every departement in France, and I could tell you where the Cardamom Mountains are. What earthly good that was, I don’t know.
That said, I was exposed to good books, sometimes controversial books, in high school English class – one book that stands out as a choice that might not be accepted today by school boards is Eldridge Cleaver’s “Soul on Ice.” Yep, I read that in high school, and not in an advanced class either.
I recently attended a university graduation where I had a bird’s-eye view of the proceedings. Each college within the university had its deans introduced separately, and in most cases the graduates in their respective schools gave polite applause as their deans were announced. But a few got wild and loud applause from their graduates – and it’s no coincidence that these are were the most outspoken and principled deans who usually have something specific to say about local and national affairs. This is what higher education should be all about, not about merely turning out “educated” tradesmen.
(whoops, I left a whole chunk out of that screed)
Which is why I am in agreement that gutting public television would be a key win for the right. Not because all kids watch PBS, but because some do — people who might grow up to become leaders in higher ed and influences on other young minds.
I agree on education. I deal with very few students whom I would call “intellectually curious.” I try to make them that, of course, and sometimes, I can push them in that direction.
But I find myself wondering if it it hasn’t always been so–that education in this country is a stepping-stone to a career, not full-scale immersion in learning.
Wow. Second time I’ve quoted someone (must be all that rote memorization!) but you’ve nailed it.
Reading for fun? You must be in the liberal elite. People will look at you as if you’re an alien species if you want emphasize learning instead of having your career mapped out to the no nth degree. Worst advice I ever heard, from someone who was touted as “respected,” was to not go to law school, but rather to enter into business because that’s where all the growth was.
We’re SOOOOOO focused on the next dollar b/c we know how the hell we’ll be treated if we don’t make it. I was taught to be independent and all, but damn, it’s just ridiculous these days. I’m not an ascetic either but at some point, just how much crap can one person buy?
Your experiences with students certainly echos what I have seen in “the world out there” over the past 15 or 20 years. It has been a multi-pronged attack coming at children and parents from all quarters. Ever since both mom and dad have had to work outside of the home just to make ends meet, things have really been going down hill. A lot of the blame, in my opinion is with TV. The parents and children have both grown up in a world that tv saturates. It is a time waster, a pacifier, an “entertainer” a zone out media. Its purpose for quite awhile has been to sell goods and services to the masses.
Those who haven’t grown up encouraged to read, encouraged to think, taught how to use critical thinking, taught and encouraged to question, to search out information for themselves, to use their imaginations productively. . .those are the majority around us. Even when I was in college 40 years ago, there was an emphasis on regurgitating back to the instructor what was given in lectures. Occasionally one ran into a really wonderful teacher who pushed you to think, to analyze, to weigh information, to form opinions based on available data and to back it up with supporting facts.
Very few people that I know in the general populace, or their children, have any interest in reading, in exploring different and challenging view points. Most of them as they struggle along to pay for all the gadgets and best and latest this or that have no interest in exploration or information. They want someone to tell them how to do it better and they are willing to believe what someone in “authority” says that is. What happened to curiosity, just because you wanted to know something or about something?
Our education system seems for the most part to be a “keep them occupied and off the street” mentality. I know real teachers are as frustrated as I am about their inability to be allowed to teach, and the total lack of interest in learning by most students.
Could this well be our “dumbest generation?” Perhaps. We are going to have to do something drastic to turn it around. For those that can home school, that is probably a start. This generation of children are smart, they are very capable of far more than they are being offered.
Ever since both mom and dad have had to work outside of the home just to make ends meet, things have really been going down hill.
I pulled this from your great commentary just to make one point: there are many moms and dads who don’t actually have to work outside of the home to make ends meet. They’ve simply bought into a debt-ridden lifestyle that forces them to believe that they must keep up with the Joneses i.e. just how big does your house have to be in order to raise a family? How many toys do your children really need in order to learn constructive play and fanciful thinking?
Don’t get me wrong here. Since I am a poverty advocate, I know the reality on the ground. Many people live in substandard situations where both parents do need to work outside of the home. American culture has been quite busy with the simplifying life movement and, afaic, that has to be encouraged. It’s almost the anithesis of the American dream of being the biggest, best, and most financially successful, but it gets to the heart of what ought to really matter – individual personal growth.
We can’t rely on outside institutions to change our realities. That has to come from within – within the individual, within the home. Outside influences can only serve to compliment those efforts or to destroy them. That is a huge paradigm shift and actually speaks to this religious struggle occuring in America at the moment as well. People have found that they are unsatisfied with life because they feel powerless to impose their standards on others. What they fail to realize is that, as Ghandi said, they must become the change they wish to see in the world. Then, and only then, can they possess enough humility to effectively “change the world”. North American culture is anything but humble. Thus, the friction.
All of this relates directly to the thinking I’ve been doing for my upcoming book on poverty. We have power. We must first discover where it lies because we cannot develop anything resembling peace of mind without understanding what our power is and how it can be reflected around us.
One more thing about morality: if you claim the moral high ground, you are destined to be pushed off that cliff many times over.
As for the issue of torture:
– Mahatma Ghandi
I agree with both of you Shirlstars and Catnip–we have created a culture where, given the fact that the standard of living (as measured by real wages) has been falling since 1970, we have a generation(s) of adults who are cycling as fast as they can to keep up with a mythical standard that is about as reality-based as fairy tales.
I am trying to live within my means. I am trying to convince my children, who have one lifestyle at their father’s house, to live within my means when they are with me. It is a struggle in this culture not to equate “love” with “things” or success with “things.” We look to outside validation instead of internally. And just as I see alcohol abuse and drug abuse as addictions, so too do I see excessive consumerism in the same vein. Buying the right house or the right car will not make you happy, but if you watch commercials or listen to people, you’d sure think so.
Right you are, and I had thoughts of reworking my comment to include that perspective. . .but felt others would either feel the intent or question it.
Thanks
I, too, have taught in a large public university in Florida (since ’92) and resigned at the end of the last semester because, in part, the students are stupider these days and I take no pleasure in rehabilitating their minds. Effete snob that I may be.
There is an overlooked fallacy in local control of schools, whether lower or higher education institutions, and that is the danger that comes from insularity.
One can not create a truly liberal education when the ideas of educators, administrators, and overseers are restricted to “how we do it here” because they have never (either physically or mentally) left “here.”
We will only create parochial education. Liberal, or far-reaching ideals dilute to conservative, or what is known and narrow, ideology. This will only lead to crabbed moral views, suspicion, and intolerance. In short — ignorance.
There are many other problems with the currently popular political influence in education, but this one arrived in the guise of the positiveness of more local control because: Bureaucrats in (fill in a capital city) don’t know better than rubes in Podunk when it comes to what ‘our’ children should learn.
Of course, the irony is that those in power in Washington are selling the exact opposite when it comes to educational “accountability,” and control of news outlets and the public airwaves. Bureaucrats of the “right” stripe know best.
How to defeat a giant? First cut off its legs (public education), then its head (public airwaves). Just don’t use the same knife.
The 1980s was a period where selfishness first became respectable, the idea of contributing to the common good became reasonable (abetted by the nascent academic far right), and so-called “taxpayer revolts” took hold. (“Greed works.”)
So I personally don’t think the assault on education is deliberate in the sense that somebody mounted a campaign (though the Murdochs certainly jumped on the bandwagon with a vengeance) but deliberate in the sense that more and more people began to feel that funding public services – like education – was not their responsibility. (You can see where I might have trouble with libertarians.)
But I think that many people regard this narrowing of intellectual and moral perspective as a relief. The sad fact is that most people – not just Americans (trust me) – abhor ambiguity and uncertainty, and prefer to shut out the world’s complexities.
The difference with respect to Western Europe is that most of those societies are somewhat better able to hold these tendencies in check. However, there are pessimists who say that Europe is merely behind the curve.
A lot more comes to mind than I can write right now – for me the sign of a good diary!
these are excellent points. There is a certain “fatigue” endemic in American culture right now. Sort of the burnt-out phase of too much partaking of too much stuff–all on a superficial level.
Having thought for a long time that “morality” must stem first and foremost from empathic ability and the will to practice it in unfamiliar situations, I am horrified at the self-important, selfish, self-absorbed and ultimately self-destructive tone of our current national psyche.
From our systems of education, to heath care to government, there is nothing to cultivate empathy for others, or even for ourselves outside the confines of a very narrowly defined conception of selfhood bounded by our roles as consumers, hoarders and “winner-take-all” individualists. Our value systems are all ass-backwards, our priorities confused at best….
I may write more on this later and am not sure this even made any sense….thanks, lorraine, for making me think, as always!
This made complete sense to me and I would love to track the rest of where you have taken this awareness to.
“I see it feelingly.”
Yes, you do. Site meter says close to 700 people stopped by this morning, spent a few minutes reading, and went on to the next stop. You used a link to yet another “reading room” on this open road of information and discussion. The best of the virtual and physical worlds.
People exchanging thoughts over a piece of copper, or through the air, anywhere on the planet, in an environment where time ceases to be a factor. Ten years ago anyone suggesting the possibility would have been declared insane.
We are having those public discussions – here, and around the world – but even those conversant in the medium sometimes fail to grasp the impact.
In “The Media Lab” (Stewart Brand, 1987) Brand asks Nicholas Negroponte how he is able to run the lab while circling the globe. Response? The fact that the e-mail he sent – written on a laptop over the Pacific ocean – arrived in Cambridge minutes after being sent begged the question.
In the same book Brand describes a trip to a fairly isolated Mexican village. Adobe structures, dirt floors, small gardens, and not much income. What they expected to find were people having no sense of the greater world outside the village. Instead they found a six-foot satellite dish bringing the world to the village.
Stories about Cruise, Aruba, Jackson, et. al. will – and have been – broadcast and seized upon by a large segment of “viewers”. Wrong place to look, wrong medium. Just give it a little more time, perhaps a few years at most. The global village is still being built, one connection at a time.
“Intelligence, feeling and perception combine to inform your own story, to draw others into a shared narrative, and to make of our experience here together a victory of the deepest moral feeling of sympathy, understanding and affection.”
Fairly accurate description of a diary I read this morning. Here. Visible to a global audience.
beautiful. Your analysis fills me with hope. Thank you.
Properly speaking, Vannevar Bush dreamed up something like this in 1945, and assorted other computer scientists have rediscovered it several times between then and now. Vannevar, however, did not entirely have his head screwed on straight, so your fundamental point may still be accurate.
The greater problem of not teaching philosophy and other humanities, is that we are not teaching critical thinking. We are creating generations of sheep. Education in our culture is more a mechanism of social control. We do not teach students to think so much as memorize and regurgitate. When one embraces philosophy or really delves into the subtleties of literature and art, they develop critical skills. They begin to analyze. That these abilities are sorely lacking in our culture is not only increasingly evident, it could spell our doom.
The most stunning thing about this torture scandal is that it appears that people don’t know what to think about it. Unless the media remind them that it’s wrong, they don’t seem to perceive it. Clueless sheep. As I’ve said before, it puts me in mind of the Milgram experiment. Stanley Milgram conducted research into how a nation of Germans could participate by action, or inaction, in the atrocities, and found that, not only could it happen here, it could happen anywhere, because humans tend to do what they are told. If a perceived authority says, “Torture that guy. It’s alright, ” people do.
The thing about humanities is that they actually help us transcend our animal brain, to develop independent thought.
absolutely. I rant on a regular basis about the fact that so few students coming into college have any critical thinking skills. But it’s the thing that people are afraid of, too. I could tell stories about how people think that “critical” means criticism–and thus, if you’re teaching kids to think critically about American history, well then you’re not a good American.
I have a good friend who works as an adjunct prof, in a couple of inner city colleges, who has reached a point of utter despair at the lack of critical thinking. It seems to be very difficult to elicit that kind of cognition in students who have been taught to never question the authority figure at the front of the room, and are graded poorly if they interpret something differently than that authority figure does.
Amongst the born-agains the anti-intellectualism is taken to new heights. I’ve heard these preachers literally say that intellectualism undermines faith, and is therefore to be shunned. I’m paraphrasing. Somehow they convey this without the big words I tend to use. Bush’s America is one of acceptance of any bit of total illogic from the White House as an article of faith, and the equating of jingoism with patriotism. We’re in a double-plus bad situation.
Proper mathematics education teaches this too. In high school, even here in Canada, we’re taught basic facts of mathematics that we’re simply supposed to accept without question. In university-level math education, we find that accepting these facts without question is a really, really stupid idea – not only has it taught us nothing useful, it’s taught us to accept things without question. As it turns out, none of the basic facts are as absolute as we were asked to believe. Most are a matter of definition, and are no more fundamental than the naming of axes on a graph. Instead, we are encouraged to question and demand or produce proofs for everything, and comprehend these proofs, something that many people simply cannot handle.
The same applies to the sciences. I got lucky and had physics and chemistry teachers in high school who insisted that we verify everything for ourselves in the lab. Many others did not, and, as a result, failed horribly at university-level physics.
While I agree about philosophy, teaching critical thinking extends into the sciences and mathematics as well!
This is also why the perception of university as “job training”, and the focus on the “practical” aspects of my field in particular (Computer Science), pisses me off so much.
Because surface and shallow never seems to do any diary you write justice and I’m guaranteed a couple of I.Q. points saved from free radical reduction if I’m willing to exercise my mind over your writings. I can remember clearly when I was in grade school eating up Wild Kingdom on T.V. or anything of that nature. If anything was coming on educational I was allowed control of the one T.V. that we all used to have, and my whole family, young and old used to soak it all up with me. Everything was introduced from a level field and very factual and we were all just glued to the narrators every word. After watching something of that type with the family I remember such a light hearted spirit taking over the house, a greater good had been served and we had all shared in it….the world is such a fascinating place and we all felt like we were a part of that. Now that we won’t be going to such places in large groups in our family rooms and now that we have little sense of community among us, where will our social conscience and awareness receive nourishment and inspiration? In church? That scares me!
nice point. Perhaps, because we’re so exposed to the world, but in such a superficial way, we can’t appreciate those moments anymore?
The ruling class of ancient Rome taught our corporate masters how to maintain their power and control the people. Now we don’t even have to bother to leave our homes to stay fat and happily entertained. Those of us who don’t want to be enslaved have joined the stream of our ancestors who resisted by educating themselves and avoiding the traps laid for them.
As always Lorraine, your diaries are a big part of my education. Thanks.
panem et circenses. How this current gov’t has learned that well.
Is also an applicable historical precedent. He agressively pushed the production of inexpensive radios. He not only recognized the potential of modern media to brainwash – he also understood that inexpensive brainwashers are a desirable consumer good.
Apologies if this sounds snarky, but I think the comparison is useful.
I believe the same thing.
I do not believe that it is a conscious decision, however, but more a product of culture – in particular “southern” culture.
Cultures do have different views on the importance of education – examples are jewish and asian immigrants – and the American south has a long history of active hostility to intellectualism and pointy-headed professors.
Such world views are in direct conflict with their view that ione only needs to know the bible and other forms of knowledge are dangerous.
I was at a family reunion (my husband’s mother’s side) this past weekend and heard one of his Uncles (by marriage, not one of his mother’s siblings) telling one of my husbands 23 year old cousins:
“You know, I have never read a book in my whole life. I mean, I’d rather read the Bible. I don’t hold truck with books. But you know, different strokes for different folks.”
I just had to walk away. I asked my husband later if I really heard him say that and if so, how his aunt could possibly be married to him. His, and my father-in-law’s response was: Oh, Joe’s weird, yes, no one much likes him. And my husband told me that his aunt has actually divoriced him at least once and left him more than once….They are in their late 50s …I just don’t understand people — how do they get that way?
I often despair of counter-acting the pervasiveness with my own sons — after all, it is a whole society out there and I am only one person….sorry to be so down, I just feel very tired today.
“You know, I have never read a book in my whole life. I mean, I’d rather read the Bible. I don’t hold truck with books. But you know, different strokes for different folks.”
Of course, Bible means book — technically books. It’s from the Latin biblia. That they do not see the irony!
Recommended reading:
This article, The Perils of Obedience by Stanley Milgram, recounting experiments he conducted at Yale, provides a chilling account of the power of authority and the lengths people will go to in order to please their “masters”.
His study clearly shows the effects of power on a person’s moral compass.
Notice I referenced Milgram, myself, up-thread. That study always comes to my mind, in connection with this torture non-scandal. I think people should be taking to the streets to protest these heinous abuses of power, but then I remember the faces of those unknowing subjects, obediently upping the voltage, while the screams of faceless “subjects” came through the loudspeaker. What went through their heads? Gee, that is a powerful shock, and it sounds like that person’s in pain, but that man has a lab coat on, and he says it’s okay.
His experiment was intended to show that Americans would never have done the things that the Germans did. His work proved precisely how wrong this hypothesis is. There is a lesson in this that I wish more people could see, who are not troubled by applying one standard to our citizens and another to non-citizens (not that this distinction has been made all that well, either). As we see in the current scandals about torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and in Afghanistan and elsewhere, American citizens can do terrible things. We are not paragons of morality as a function of being from the U.S.
Odd. Just two days ago I was thinking about Dr. Milgram and contemplating a diary about his research. A friend of mine got her Ph.d. with him as her advisor and some of the ‘background’ material is extremely interesting – and scary.
Milgram found that the ‘person off the street’ – quite literally – was willing to torture people if the action was covered by an overriding authority (the State) and an appeal to ‘They agreed/deserve it’ was made. Lacking either one would cause the test subject to cease. Proximity to the tortured didn’t make a difference. People would keep torturing even when the person was sitting next to them – writhing and screaming in (simulated) pain. One test subject my friend saw would grab a flailing hand and forceably place it on the torture device to ensure a good contact.
Hannah Arendt was absolutely correct when she discussed the banality of evil.
I have also studied the Milgram experiment and others that followed. Many people will obey any marginal authority. The motivation is overdetermined; fear that disobedience will engender punishment, and satisfaction in acting out aggression with impunity.
Those who give the orders take no responsibility because they do not perform the physical acts, and those who do the deed don’t feel responsible because they’re just following orders.
This human weakness, disturbing as it is in everyday practice, is exacerbated by war. Some of us remember terrible experiences in Viet Nam of average, nice guys who did horrible things rather than break rank. War negates all the rules, leaving people with nothing but group cohesion. Expulsion from the group is death. Are we surprised that few can stand up to their peers, let alone a superior, especially when the highest in the land seem to give (wink, wink) tacet approval ? Object to torture, and you could be next. Don’t object and you are as guilty as everybody else. This passive survival strategy leaves the field wide open for sociopaths to do their worst.
Add to this poisonous recipe a culture of “reality” TV that entertains us with humiliation and ridicule, “action” movies featuring decorative violence, and a big dose of macho mythology, and torture is hardly a surprise.
Milgram is not only relevant here because of the torture link. He had a broader agenda, and became concerned not only by the sheer number of ‘regular’ people who were willing to engage in a study that applied a (seemingly) real level of pain, but also by the reactions of the people in the study. For instance, numerous individuals seemed to know it would be wrong to administer shocks to an ailing individual, but could not say ‘no’ to the experimenter. They shook, cried, sweated, etc. but often did not say ‘no’. Later, many of these people indicated–and this is so important–that it STRESSED THEM OUT to just try to do the right thing. Imagine the ramifications of that statement. These weren’t the people who didn’t know the ‘right thing’ but those who did, but felt bad to be asked to do the right thing (in their words).
There are numerous other investigators that have hit upon this concept (trait?) in other ways, such as the psychologists who have studied temperament in children and noted similar behaviors in certain children (these children were the majority). And Horney documented neuroticism in detail, one of the main observable symptoms of neuroticism being the inability to speak up when necessary.
Our system of education reinforces this, as many on this thread have noted. Following this argument, the matter of why more Americans aren’t curious, or disheartened, or disturbed, or outraged by our treatment of detainees is only one outward sign of a deeper problem. Most people aren’t standing up for the ‘right thing’ in many areas, and are standing up–angry, or scared–for the wrong things, or when its too late to be effective.
Another great diary lorraine.
I wanted to briefly contend your point about the public education funding cuts being deliberate for the purposes of creating a docile public. I think the dumbed-down citizenry is a happy by-product (for the elites) – I’m getting a mental image of three guys guffawing at a dangling string.
Anyways, I do agree that the public education funding cuts are deliberate, but the purpose is to create another profit center in society. It’s an attempt to transfer these public moneys into privately held educational corporations. Public education was already a bargain of a subsidy for corporate America – now they want the whole hog.
More and more, people in this country confuse “training” with “education”. Bowles & Gintis, in Schooling in Capitalist America contend that American compulsory public education served two purposes – to shrink the market of available labor by keeping the bulk of teenagers in school, and to train the worker bees of tomorrow – conditioned to react to the bell, obedient to authority, etc. Moreover, very few students recognize the difference between education and training. The university students I teach, maybe 1 in 10-15 is intellectually curious. The others are there to get the requisite credentials for a job. That explains why they get so nasty when I give them a poor mark on their work – they paid for their training and credential, and I’m at fault for not “providing” them with it. We’ve gone from educating citizens to training workers.
Anyways, this reduction of funding for public primary education (and increasingly secondary education, as David Noble contends in these pieces)serves the purpose of turning education into a profit center and churning out docile workers for the corporations. The docility in the realm of public affairs, IMHO, seems to be of secondary consideration (but I’m sure no one up high is complaining).
Huh, that was some rambling, eh?
It’s always difficult to figure out if historical events have conspired to create an accident, such as a docile public, or whether it was a “conspiracy” of sorts. I’m not really sure which, but I do know that the stupider we get as a nation, the more brutal we become. I’m not linking intelligence to non-brutality, because, in fact, the decision to break down another human being to the point of them losing their humanity actually requires some degree of thought. But still, the complacency with which our culture greets these things is breath-taking. And now that Durbin has had to apologize, once again the American public can claim that “they didn’t know” what was going on.
“An uneducated public is a docile public.”
Damn. Wish I had thought of it.
That’s certainly part of it. The other part of cutting support for public education (both financially and in standing) is because of a market fundamentalism that decrees that any government investment not in their individual interest (i.e. defense and police and roads b/c hey–we don’t do public transportation) is suspect and therefore should be targeted for elimination.
But yeah, there is no democracy without an educated public–you’ve got to read and know there’s a Constitution in order to be protected by it.
Lorraine, well done, as usual!
This may have been true in the 1940s. It has not been true for a very long time.
Complete list of countries not ratifying Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).
United States of America
Brunei Darussalam
Iran (Islamic Republic of)
Marshall Islands
Nauru
Oman
Palau
Qatar
Tonga
Somalia
Sudan
The USA has also failed to ratify:
Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (OPT)
Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, aimed at the abolition of the death penalty (OPT2)
Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.
Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC)
Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict
Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography
International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families (MWC)
I work with lots of educated people. And I think many educated people in America simply don’t want to know what is going on. So it’s not just lack of education. It’s a far deeper problem in our society, a lack of cognitive dissonance.
— Slavoj Zizek, 2003
…I have the same visceral reaction to Elliott Abrams, a neoconservative before most of us knew what a neoconservative was. Despite his lies in support of war crimes and treason during the Iran-Contra phase of U.S. imperialism, Abrams has been working quietly in sensitive government posts for quite some time, but in the past couple of years has become Condi Rice’s point man, particularly as regards Israel, which he says should not talk with the Palestinians (until, at least, they admit they have no claims to their own land).
Abrams’s general attitudes can be gleaned from his comment about John Lennon’s death in 1980:
I still remember that Abrams was one of Koppel’s regular guests on Nightline in the 1980’s. The shit that came out of that man’s mouth used to make my head spin.
I recently had the honour of meeting Jose “Chencho” Alas, a former priest from El Salvador who now runs a humanitarian organization. Despite having been a victim of the gov’t, he was one of the most radiant human beings I’ve ever met.
Many of us are familiar with Hannah Arendt’s analysis of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi death camps administrator, in which she describes the perpatrators of horrific crimes against Jews as “banal.”
A quote from this article distills the essential evil of those persons (and institutions) that normalize unacceptable acts: They may. . .
We have not guarded well against this nation’s military creating some soldiers who are good little Nazis. And we have not guarded ourselves well against voting for various Eichmanns, either.
It’s hard for me to imagine why anyone on the left who points out the parallels between Nazism and the behavior of our current regime need apologize for doing so.
I believe that a politically conservative mind tends to be accepting of authority while a politically liberal mind tends to question it, especially on moral and social issues. This leads me to conclude that a politically conservative person would tend to be more banal.
Not to hop on the “framing train”(although I suspect I’ve been riding it unknowingly for the last two decades, or so), but I think morality is the wrong word for this discussion.
E.g. I’m lesbian; some people consider this immoral. Because morality is ultimately centered around cultural or religious principles, in order to argue that lesbianism is not immoral, I have to address how it is/was considered by religious belief, legal systems, etc.
It all comes down to who believes what, as to how effective such arguments are. On the other hand, ethics concerns itself with the greater good. The greater good can be quantified.
An example: lowering the speed limit, though it may infringe on the rights of better drivers to get where they are going more quickly, saves lives – a demonstrable fact. Thus even skilled drivers benefit from less accidents on the roadways – as they too are less likely to lose friends and family, and the cost of insurance is less for everyone, etc.
The greater good is not to be confused with the tyranny of the majority – which could also marginalize lesbianism as counter to the wishes of the majority.
Rather, ethics looks at lesbianism thus: if the will of the majority is to treat lesbians as second-class, in order to accrue rights or privileges that it denies to us, or merely in order to spare their feeling “uncomfortable” at our difference. The weight of the “benefits” (merely perceived, or actual) that members of the majority may derive (as clearly, not all members do, or want to) has to be weighed against the actual cost to the minority. Which in this case can be onerous. Thus the actual benefits to the majority is minor or specious, while the cost to the minority is burdensome. Benefiting one group at the expense of another not only unethical, it’s false logic.
Because we are all interdependent, ethics argues that a slight to one is ultimately damaging to everyone.
Quick example: that Checker at the supermarket who you just tromped all over because your higher status as costumer allowed you to, takes that slight home and yells at her son, who works part time in your gate-guarded community mowing lawns, and takes out his frustration by keying a few SUV’s – that’s the ethical argument in a nutshell. What lessens one, lessens us all, what empowers one, empowers us all, or you can’t profit from the misery of another.
Sure, in the short-run, it can seem that way. And in our increasingly stratified and globalized world, those who benefit may be so far away from those they harm that it may take generations to close the circle – but it will close.
It is from that knowledge, aside from any notion of “goodness” or “shouldness,” that we should all act.
Leave moralizing to the moralists, and/or insist that they address the ethical implications of their beliefs.
pax, keres