Nobody wants to be a statistic, but on reading the following, many kossacks might feel like mere guinea pigs in an experiment proving the accuracy of this analysis by Henry A. Giroux, originally published on truthout.com.
Here's hoping bobswern republishes this piece in its entirety, as he often does with Giroux' incisive, pertinent work. Meanwhile, I'll excerpt a few slices, beginning with the final paragraph:
The new illiteracy is about more than not knowing how to read the book or the word; it is about not knowing how to read the world. The challenge it poses in a democracy is one of both learning how to reclaim literacy so as to be able to narrate oneself and the world from a position of agency. But it is also about unlearning those modes of learning that internalize modes of ignorance based on the concerted refusal to know, be self-reflective and act with principled dignity. It is a problem as serious as any we have ever faced in the United States. At the core of any viable democratic politics is the ability to question the assumptions central to an imagined democracy. This is not merely a political issue but an educational issue, one that points to the need for modes of civic education that provide the knowledge and competencies for young and old alike to raise important questions about what education and literacy itself should accomplish in a democracy. This is not an issue we can ignore too much longer.
Addressing this same theme, Harold Pinter made the notion of knowledge, dignity, and agency the central theme of his Nobel Lecture. Pinter outlines decades of brutal, dehumanizing, anti-democratic, anti-people actions by agents of the US government, expressing awe that such cruelty could exist so long while the typical American lives blithely in ignorance of the uses made made of our tax dollars. What has been most striking to me in the self-indulgent hate-fest of previous days, weeks, and yes, years, on this website, has been the contrast between the self-involved, self-important indulgencies in manufactured controversy with the steady rain of US violence around the world. Pinter's closing echoes that of Giroux:
When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror - for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.
I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.
If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - the dignity of man.
Giroux mentions "self-reflection", Pinter talks about looking ourselves in the mirror. In 2005, Pinter fells the dignity of humankind is "so nearly lost to us". This week, Giroux warns that we cannot ignore this issue much longer.
Has dkos seemed a dignified place these last several days? Have we seen much self-reflection? Is it really all the fault of some other person, not ourselves? Have we maintained a focus on the institutional and societal structures that are the proper province of politics, or have we reduced complex social questions to a self-absorbed and hopeless quest for answers within individuals?
I offer as a mirror, selected quotes from Giroux' article:
C. Wright Mills argued 50 years ago that one important measure of the demise of vibrant democracy and the corresponding impoverishment of political life can be found in the increasing inability of a society to translate private troubles to broader public issues. This is an issue that both characterizes and threatens any viable notion of democracy in the United States in the current historical moment. In an alleged post-racist democracy, the image of the public sphere with its appeal to dialogue and shared responsibility has given way to the spectacle of unbridled intolerance, ignorance, seething private fears, unchecked anger and the decoupling of reason from freedom. Increasingly, as witnessed in the utter disrespect and not-so-latent racism expressed by Joe Wilson, the Republican congressman from South Carolina, who shouted “you lie!” during President Obama’s address on health care, the obligation to listen, respect the views of others and engage in a literate exchange is increasingly reduced to the highly spectacular embrace of an infantile emotionalism.. . .
. . . What this decline in civility, the emergence of mob behavior and the utter blurring in the media between a truth and a lie suggest is that we have become one of the most illiterate nations on the planet. I don’t mean illiterate in the sense of not being able to read,... I am talking about a different species of ignorance and anti-intellectualism. Illiterate in this instance refers to the inability on the part of much of the American public to grasp private troubles and the meaning of the self in relation to larger public problems and social relations. . . . As this widespread illiteracy has come to dominate American culture, we have moved from a culture of questioning to a culture of shouting and in doing so have restaged politics and power in both unproductive and anti-democratic ways.
Along these lines, I wrote the following recently, when pressed to submit to the cartoon litmus test of racist/not racist:
What concerns me is the orientation toward identifying individuals as racist rather than fighting structural and cultural racism as a force. To me, this personalizing of the issue of racism is an example of the larger neoliberal move to personalize everything, so that individuals can no longer connect their own personal suffering with institutional forces that contribute to their situation.
Back to Giroux
All of these forces, whose educational influence should never be underestimated, constitute a new type of illiteracy, a kind of civic illiteracy in which it becomes increasingly impossible to connect the everyday problems that people face with larger social forces — thus depoliticizing their own sense of agency and making politics itself an empty gesture. Is it any wonder that politics is now mediated through a spectacle of anger, violence, humiliation and rage that mimics the likes of The Jerry Springer Show? . . . This is a prescription for a kind of rage that looks for easy answers, demands a heightened emotional release and resents any attempts to think through the connection between our individual woes and any number of larger social forces. . . .
. . . Emptied of any substantial content, democracy appears imperiled as individuals are unable to translate their privately suffered misery into genuine public debate, social concerns and collective action. This is a form of illiteracy that is no longer marginal to American society but is increasingly becoming one of its defining and more frightening features.
. . . When millions of people are unemployed, tossed out of their homes, homeless or living in poverty, the language of character, pop psychology, consumerism and celebrity culture are more than a diversion: they are fundamental to the misdirected anger, mob rule and illiteracy that frames the screaming, racism, lack of civility and often sheer and legitimate desperation.
snip
. . . The new illiteracy is not the cause of our problems, which are deeply rooted in larger social, economic and political forces that have marked the emergence of the corporate state, a deadly form of racism parading as color blindness and a ruthless market fundamentalism since the 1970s, but it is a precondition for locking individuals into a system in which they are complicitous in their own exploitation, disposability and potential death.
Pinter tells us that defining the real truth of our lives and our societies is a mandatory obligation devolving on us all. Essential to awareness of this real truth is self-reflection in combination with respectful discourse focused on something larger than any of our personal emotional traumas and private suffering. Politics is not therapy.