The teaching machines of the current era are not limited to simply schools but are found in multiple sites in society. Hence, addressing the ideological and structural forces that celebrate the inability to think, readily eliminate institutions and public spheres that make thinking possible, intensify the connection between non-thinking, thoughtlessness and the routinization of misery, human suffering, along with the destruction of the eco-system should be at the heart of any viable movement for political and economic change. At stake here is the creation of a politics willing to address the distinctive challenges posed by the emergence of a digital age in which culture, power, and politics become more integrated and serve to reconstitute the ways in which people relate to themselves, others, and the larger world.
What Arendt and Hofstadter teach us is that the task of politics in the age of an overabundance of information and knowledge is not to make politics a discourse limited to structural forms of domination but to broaden its meaning as part of a wider project of which pedagogy is central to how it understands, addresses, and shapes the world, particularly how it shapes memory, consciousness, and individual and social agency.
The emergence of Donald Trump, and the deeply corrupt Republican and Democratic political parties on the current American political scene exemplify how ignorance breeds corruption and endears a large number of people to falsehoods, venality, and carnival barking. The corruption of both the truth and politics is made all the easier since the American public have become habituated to overstimulation and live in an ever-accelerating overflow of information and images. Experience no longer has the time to crystalize into mature and informed thought. Leon Wieseltier is right in stating that "words cannot wait for thoughts and patience [becomes] a liability."[11]
Opinion outdoes reasoned and evidence based arguments and the power of expression degenerates into a spectacle. News has become entertainment and echoes reality rather than interrogating it. Popular culture revels in the spectacles of shock and violence. [12] Universities now labor under the burden of a neoliberal regime that celebrate the corporate model made famous by McDonalds. Knowledge is now instrumentalized, standardized, and collapses the distinction between education and training. Knowledge is packaged for easy consumption resulting in curricula that resemble a fast-food menu [13].
Many of the commanding institutions that produce and distribute ideas -- from the media to higher education -- have become disimagination machines, tools for legitimating ignorance, stoking paranoid fantasies, legitimating conspiracy theories, and are central to the formation of an authoritarian politics that is gutting any vestige of democracy from the ideology, policies, and institutions that now shape American society. Education has lost its moral, political, and spiritual bearings just as teachers, union members, and other public servants across the country are being belittled and attacked by economic and religious fundamentalists. One consequence is that an increasing number of public spheres have become corporatized, employ a top-down authoritarian styles of power, mimic a business culture, and infantilizes the larger polity by removing the public from all forms of governance. Clearly all of these defining relations produced in a neoliberal social order have to be challenged and changed.
The rise of thoughtlessness and the inability to think along with the demonization of vulnerable others constitute a political epidemic and do not augur well for democracy. Americans live in a historical moment that annihilates thought. A culture of cruelty and a survival-of-the-fittest ethos in the United States is the new norm and one consequence is that democracy is on the verge of disappearing or has already disappeared!
Where are the agents of democracy and the public spaces that offer hope in such dark times? What role will progressives play at a time when the very ability of the public's ability to translate private troubles into broader systemic issues is disappearing? How might politics itself be rethought in order to address the pedagogical and structural conditions that contribute to the growing intensification of violence in all spheres of American society? What role should intellectuals, cultural workers, artists, writers, journalists, and others play as part of a broader struggle to reclaim a democratic imaginary and exercise a collective sense of civic courage? What is now clear is that not only is pedagogy linked to social change but also to the production of modes of agency and the institutions that make radical change possible. Education as a political force makes us both the subjects of and subject to relations of power. The key is to expand that insight so as to make education central to politics itself. That is a lesson we can learn from both Arendt and Hofstadter.
Notes.
[1] Surprisingly, a good take on this issue can be found in Thomas L. Friedman, "Trump's Wink Wink to 'Second Amendment People'," The New York Times, [August 9, 2016] Online:http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/10/opinion/trumps-ambiguous-wink-wink-to-second-amendment-people.html?_r=0; see also, David S. Cohen, "Trump's Assassination Dog Whistle Was Even Scarier Than You Think," Rolling Stone Magazine, [August 9, 2016]
Online: click here
[2] Hannah Arendt's notion of the banality of evil was first used in her 1963 book , Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Hofstadter phrase the paranoid style of politics gained prominence in his book of the same title.
[3] Richard J. Bernstein, The Abuse of Evil: The Corruption of politics and Religion since 9/11, (Polity Press, 2005).
[4] Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt: The Last Interview and Other Conversations, (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2013), p. 50.
[5] Yoni Applebaum, "I Alone Can Fix it," The Atlantic (July 21, 2016). Online;http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/trump-rnc-speech-alone-fix-it/492557/
[6] Ibid., Applebaum.
[7] Richard Hofstadter, "The paranoid style in American politics."Harper's (November 1964). Online http://www.harpers.org/archive/1964/11/0014706. As mentioned above, his more extensive treatment of this idea appears in Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Vintage, Reprint Edition, June 10, 2008).
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