AUTHORITARIAN POLITICS IN THE AGE OF
CIVIC ILLITERACY
by
HENRY A. GIROUX
__________________________________________
Henry
A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair
Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural
Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship
at Ryerson University. He is the author of more than 50 books
including The Educational Deficit and the War on Youth
and Zombie
Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism.
Many of his essays, including The Spectacle of Illiteracy, appear
on his website at www.henryagiroux.com.
His interview with Bill
Moyers is must viewing.
Print
this page
YOUR
COMMENTSThe
dark times that haunt the current age are epitomized by the
monsters that have come to rule the United States and who now
dominate the major political parties and other commanding political
and economic institutions. Their nightmarish reign of misery,
violence and disposability is also evident in their dominance
of a formative culture and its attendant cultural apparatuses
that produce a vast machinery of manufactured consent. This
is a social formation that extends from the mainstream broadcast
media and Internet to a print culture, all of which embrace
the spectacle of violence, legitimate opinions over facts, and
revel in a celebrity and consumer culture of ignorance and theatrics.
Under the reign of this normalized ideological architecture
of alleged commonsense, literacy is now regarded with disdain,
words are reduced to data, and science is confused with pseudo-science.
Thinking
is now regarded as an act of stupidity, and ignorance a virtue.
All traces of critical thought appear only at the margins of
the culture as ignorance becomes the primary organizing principle
of American society. For instance, two thirds of the American
public believe that creationism should be taught in schools
and most of the Republic Party in Congress do not believe that
climate change is caused by human activity, making the U.S.
the laughing stock of the world. Politicians endlessly lie knowing
that the public is addicted to shocks, which allows them to
drown in overstimulation and live in an ever-accelerating overflow
of information and images. News has become entertainment and
echoes reality rather than interrogating it. Unsurprisingly,
education in the larger culture has become a disimagination
machine, a tool for legitimating ignorance, and it is central
to the formation of an authoritarian politics that has gutted
any vestige of democracy from the ideology, policies and institutions
that now control American society.
I am
not talking simply about the kind of anti-intellectualism that
theorists such a Richard Hofstadter, Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky,
and more recently Susan Jacoby have documented, however insightful
their analyses might be. I am pointing to a more lethal form
of illiteracy that is often ignored. Illiteracy is now a scourge
and a political tool designed primarily to make war on language,
meaning, thinking, and the capacity for critical thought. Chris
Hedges is right in stating that “the emptiness of language
is a gift to demagogues and the corporations that saturate the
landscape with manipulated images and the idiom of mass culture.”
The new form of illiteracy does not simply constitute an absence
of learning, ideas, or knowledge. Nor can it be solely attributed
to what has been called the “smartphone society.”
On the contrary, it is a willful practice and goal used to actively
depoliticize people and make them complicit with the forces
that impose misery and suffering upon their lives.
Gore
Vidal once called America the United States of Amnesia. The
title should be extended to the United States of Amnesia and
Willful Illiteracy. Illiteracy no longer simply marks populations
immersed in poverty with little access to quality education;
nor does it only suggest the lack of proficient skills enabling
people to read and write with a degree of understanding and
fluency. More profoundly, illiteracy is also about what it means
not to be able to act from a position of thoughtfulness, informed
judgment and critical agency. Illiteracy has become a form of
political repression that discourages a culture of questioning,
renders agency as an act of intervention inoperable, and restages
power as a mode of domination. It is precisely this mode of
illiteracy that now constitutes the modus operandi of a society
that both privatizes and kills the imagination by poisoning
it with falsehoods, consumer fantasies, data loops, and the
need for instant gratification. This is a mode of manufactured
illiteracy and education that has no language for relating the
self to public life, social responsibility or the demands of
citizenship. It is important to recognize that the rise of this
new mode of illiteracy is not simply about the failure of public
and higher education to create critical and active citizens;
it is about a society that eliminates those public spheres that
make thinking possible while imposing a culture of fear in which
there is the looming threat that anyone who holds power accountable
will be punished. At stake here is not only the crisis of a
democratic society, but a crisis of memory, ethics and agency.
Evidence
of such a repressive policy is visible in the growth of the
surveillance state, the suppression of dissent, especially among
Black youth, the elimination of tenure in states such as Wisconsin,
the rise of the punishing state, and the militarization of the
police. It is also evident in the demonization, punishing, and
war waged by the Obama administration on whistleblowers such
as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Jeffrey Sterling, among
others. Any viable attempt at developing a radical politics
must begin to address the role of education and civic literacy
and what I have termed public pedagogy as central not only to
politics itself but also to the creation of subjects capable
of becoming individual and social agents willing to struggle
against injustices and fight to reclaim and develop those institutions
crucial to the functioning and promises of a substantive democracy.
One place to begin to think through such a project is by addressing
the meaning and role of pedagogy as part of the broader struggle
for and practice of freedom.
The
reach of pedagogy extends from schools to diverse cultural apparatuses
such as the mainstream media, alternative screen cultures and
the expanding digital screen culture. Far more than a teaching
method, pedagogy is a moral and political practice actively
involved not only in the production of knowledge, skills, and
values but also in the construction of identities, modes of
identification, and forms of individual and social agency. Accordingly,
pedagogy is at the heart of any understanding of politics and
the ideological scaffolding of those framing mechanisms that
mediate our everyday lives. Across the globe, the forces of
free-market fundamentalism are using the educational force of
the wider culture and the takeover of public and higher education
both to reproduce the culture of business and to wage an assault
on the historically guaranteed social provisions and civil rights
provided by the welfare state, public schools, unions, women’s
reproductive rights and civil liberties, all the while undercutting
public faith in the defining institutions of democracy.
As
market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all
aspects of society, democratic institutions and public spheres
are being downsized, if not altogether disappearing. As these
institutions vanish—from public schools and alternative
media to health care centers– there is also a serious
erosion of the discourses of community, justice, equality, public
values and the common good. This grim reality has been called
by Alex Honneth a “failed sociality”– a failure
in the power of the civic imagination, political will and open
democracy. It is also part of a politics that strips the social
of any democratic ideals and undermines any understanding of
education as a public good and pedagogy as an empowering practice,
a practice which acts directly upon the conditions which bear
down on our lives in order to change them when necessary.
One
of the challenges facing the current generation of educators,
students, progressives and other cultural workers is the need
to address the role they might play in educating students to
be critically engaged agents, attentive to addressing important
social issues and being alert to the responsibility of deepening
and expanding the meaning and practices of a vibrant democracy.
At the heart of such a challenge is the question of what education
should accomplish not simply in a democracy but at a historical
moment when the United States is about to slip into the dark
night of authoritarianism. What work do educators have to do
to create the economic, political and ethical conditions necessary
to endow young people and the general public with the capacities
to think, question, doubt, imagine the unimaginable, and defend
education as essential for inspiring and energizing the citizens
necessary for the existence of a robust democracy? In a world
in which there is an increasing abandonment of egalitarian and
democratic impulses, what will it take to educate young people
and the broader polity to challenge authority and hold power
accountable?
What
role might education and critical pedagogy have in a society
in which the social has been individualized, emotional life
collapses into the therapeutic, and education is reduced to
either a private affair or a kind of algorithmic mode of regulation
in which everything is reduced to a desired outcome. What role
can education play to challenge the deadly neoliberal claim
that all problems are individual, regardless of whether the
roots of such problems like in larger systemic forces. In a
culture drowning in a new love affair with instrumental rationality,
it is not surprising that values that are not measurable–
compassion, vision, the imagination, trust, solidarity, care
for the other, and a passion for justice—withers.
Given
the crisis of education, agency, and memory that haunts the
current historical conjuncture, the left and other progressives
need a new language for addressing the changing contexts and
issues facing a world in which there is an unprecedented convergence
of resources--financial, cultural, political, economic, scientific,
military, and technological--increasingly used to exercise powerful
and diverse forms of control and domination. Such a language
needs to be political without being dogmatic and needs to recognize
that pedagogy is always political because it is connected to
the acquisition of agency. In this instance, making the pedagogical
political means being vigilant about “that very moment
in which identities are being produced and groups are being
constituted, or objects are being created.” At the same
time it means progressives need to be attentive to those practice
in which critical modes of agency and particular identities
are being denied. It also means developing a comprehensive understanding
of politics, one that should begin with the call to reroute
single issue politics into a mass social movement under the
banner of a defense of the public good, the commons and a global
democracy.
In
part, this suggests developing pedagogical practices that not
only inspire and energize people but are also capable of challenging
the growing number of anti-democratic practices and policies
under the global tyranny of casino capitalism. Such a vision
suggests resurrecting a radical democratic project that provides
the basis for imagining a life beyond a social order immersed
in massive inequality, endless assaults on the environment,
and elevates war and militarization to the highest and most
sanctified national ideals. Under such circumstances, education
becomes more than an obsession with accountability schemes,
an audit culture, market values, and an unreflective immersion
in the crude empiricism of a data-obsessed market-driven society.
In addition, it rejects the notion that all levels of schooling
can be reduced to sites for training students for the workforce
and that the culture of public and higher education is synonymous
with the culture of business.
At
issue here is the need for progressives to recognize the power
of education in creating the formative cultures necessary to
both challenge the various threats being mobilized against the
ideas of justice and democracy while also fighting for those
public spheres, ideals, values, and policies that offer alternative
modes of identity, thinking, social relations, and politics.
But embracing the dictates of a making education meaningful
in order to make it critical and transformative also means recognizing
that cultural apparatuses such as the mainstream media and Hollywood
films are teaching machines and not simply sources of information
and entertainment. Such sites should be spheres of struggle
removed from the control of the financial elite and corporations
who use them as propaganda and disimagination machines.
Central
to any viable notion of what makes pedagogy critical is, in
part, the recognition that it is a moral and political practice
that is always implicated in power relations because it narrates
particular versions and visions of civic life, community, the
future, and how we might construct representations of ourselves,
others, and our physical and social environment. It is in this
respect that any discussion of pedagogy must be attentive to
how pedagogical practices work in a variety of sites to produce
particular ways in which identity, place, worth, and above all
value are organized and contribute to producing a formative
culture capable of sustaining a vibrant democracy.
In
this instance, pedagogy as the practice of freedom emphasizes
critical reflection, bridging the gap between learning and everyday
life, understanding the connection between power and difficult
knowledge, and extending democratic rights and identities by
using the resources of history and theory. However, among many
educators, progressives and social theorists, there is a widespread
refusal to recognize that this form of education that not only
takes place in schools, but is also part of what can be called
the educative nature of the culture. At the core of analyzing
and engaging culture as a pedagogical practice are fundamental
questions about the educative nature of the culture, what it
means to engage common sense as a way to shape and influence
popular opinion, and how diverse educational practices in multiple
sites can be used to challenge the vocabularies, practices and
values of the oppressive forces that at work under neoliberal
regimes of power.
There
is an urgent political need for the American public to understand
what it means for an authoritarian society to both weaponize
and trivialize the discourse, vocabularies, images and aural
means of communication in a society. How is language used to
relegate citizenship to the singular pursuit of cravenly self-interests,
legitimate shopping as the ultimate expression of one’s
identity, portray essential public services as reinforcing and
weakening any viable sense of individual responsibility, and,
among other instances, using the language of war and militarization
to describe a vast array of problems we face as a nation.
Such
falsehoods are now part of the reigning neoliberal ideology
proving once again that pedagogy is central to politics itself
because it is about changing the way people see things, recognizing
that politics is educative and that domination resides not simply
in repressive economic structures but also in the realm of ideas,
beliefs and modes of persuasion. Just as I would argue that
pedagogy has to be made meaningful in order to be made critical
and transformative, I think it is fair to argue that there is
no politics without a pedagogy of identification; that is, people
have to invest something of themselves in how they are addressed
or recognize that any mode of education, argument, idea, or
pedagogy has to speak to their condition and provide a moment
of recognition.
Lacking
this understanding, pedagogy all too easily becomes a form of
symbolic and intellectual violence, one that assaults rather
than educates. Another example of such violence can be seen
in the forms of high stakes testing and empirically driven teaching
that dominate public schooling in the United States, which amounts
to pedagogies of repression which serve primarily to numb the
mind and produce what might be called dead zones of the imagination.
These are pedagogies that are largely disciplinary and have
little regard for contexts, history, making knowledge meaningful,
or expanding what it means for students to be critically engaged
agents.
The
fundamental challenge facing educators within the current age
of neoliberalism, militarism and religious fundamentalism is
to provide the conditions for students to address how knowledge
is related to the power of both self-definition and social agency.
In part, this suggests providing students with the skills, ideas,
values and authority necessary for them to nourish a substantive
democracy, recognize anti-democratic forms of power, and to
fight deeply rooted injustices in a society and world founded
on systemic economic, racial and gendered inequalities. A as
Hannah Arendt, once argued in “The Crisis of Education,”
the centrality of education to politics is also manifest in
the responsibility for the world that cultural workers have
to assume when they engage in pedagogical practices that lie
on the side of belief and persuasion, especially when they challenge
forms of domination.
Such
a project suggests developing a transformative pedagogy–rooted
in what might be called a project of resurgent and insurrectional
democracy --that relentlessly questions the kinds of labour,
practices, and forms of production that are enacted in schools
and other sites of education. The project in this sense speaks
to the recognition that any pedagogical practice presupposes
some notion of the future, prioritizes some forms of identification
over others, upholds selective modes of social relations, and
values some modes of knowing over others (think about how business
schools are held in high esteem while schools of education are
disdained and even the object in some cases of contempt). Moreover,
such a pedagogy does not offer guarantees as much as it recognizes
that its own position is grounded in particular modes of authority,
values and ethical principles that must be constantly debated
for the ways in which they both open up and close down democratic
relations, values and identities. These are precisely the questions
being asked by the Chicago Teachers’ Union in their brave
fight to regain some control over both the conditions of their
work and their efforts to redefine the meaning of schooling
as a democratic public sphere and learning in the interest of
economic justice and progressive social change.
The
notion of a neutral, objective education is an oxymoron. Education
and pedagogy do not exist outside of relations of power, values
and politics. Ethics on the pedagogical front demands an openness
to the other, a willingness to engage a “politics of possibility”
through a continual critical engagement with texts, images,
events, and other registers of meaning as they are transformed
into pedagogical practices both within and outside of the classroom.
Pedagogy is never innocent and if it is to be understood and
problematized as a form of academic labour, cultural workers
have the opportunity not only to critically question and register
their own subjective involvement in how and what they teach
in and out of schools, but also to resist all calls to depoliticize
pedagogy through appeals to either scientific objectivity or
ideological dogmatism. This suggests the need for educators
to rethink the cultural and ideological baggage they bring to
each educational encounter; it also highlights the necessity
of making educators ethically and politically accountable and
self-reflective for the stories they produce, the claims they
make upon public memory, and the images of the future they deem
legitimate. Understood as a form of militant hope, pedagogy
in this sense is not an antidote to politics, a nostalgic yearning
for a better time, or for some “inconceivably alternative
future.” Instead, it is an “attempt to find a bridge
between the present and future in those forces within the present
which are potentially able to transform it.”
At
the dawn of the 21st century, the notion of the social and the
public are not being erased as much as they are being reconstructed
under circumstances in which public forums for serious debate,
including public education, are being eroded. Reduced either
to a crude instrumentalism, business culture, or defined as
a purely private right rather than a public good, our major
educational apparatuses are removed from the discourse of democracy
and civic culture. Under the influence of powerful financial
interests, we have witnessed the takeover of public and increasingly
higher education and diverse media sites by a corporate logic
that both numbs the mind and the soul, emphasizing repressive
modes of ideology that promote winning at all costs, learning
how not to question authority, and undermining the hard work
of learning how to be thoughtful, critical and attentive to
the power relations that shape everyday life and the larger
world. As learning is privatized, depoliticized, and reduced
to teaching students how to be good consumers, any viable notions
of the social, public values, citizenship, and democracy wither
and die.
One
of the most serious challenges facing teachers, artists, journalists,
writers and other cultural workers is the task of developing
a discourse of both critique and possibility. This means developing
discourses and pedagogical practices that connect reading the
word with reading the world, and doing so in ways that enhance
the capacities of young people as critical agents and engaged
citizens. In taking up this project, educators and others should
attempt to create the conditions that give students the opportunity
to become critical and engaged citizens who have the knowledge
and courage to struggle in order to make desolation and cynicism
unconvincing and hope practical. But raising consciousness is
not enough. Students need to be inspired and energized to address
important social issues, learning to narrate their private troubles
as public issues, and to engage in forms of resistance that
are both local and collective, while connecting such struggles
to more global issues.
Democracy
begins to fail and political life becomes impoverished in the
absence of those vital public spheres such as public and higher
education in which civic values, public scholarship, and social
engagement allow for a more imaginative grasp of a future that
takes seriously the demands of justice, equity, and civic courage.
Democracy should be a way of thinking about education, one that
thrives on connecting equity to excellence, learning to ethics,
and agency to the imperatives of social responsibility and the
public good. The question regarding what role education should
play in democracy becomes all the more urgent at a time when
the dark forces of authoritarianism are on the march in the
United States. As public values, trust, solidarities and modes
of education are under siege, the discourses of hate, racism,
rabid self-interest and greed are exercising a poisonous influence
in American society, most evident in the discourse of the right-wing
extremists such as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. Civic illiteracy
collapses opinion and informed arguments, erases collective
memory, and becomes complicit with the militarization of both
individual, public spaces, and society itself. Under such circumstances,
politicians such as Hilary Clinton are labeled as liberals when
in reality they are firm advocates for both a toxic militarism
and the interests of the financial elites.
All
across the country, there are signs of hope. Young people are
protesting against student debt; environmentalists are aggressively
fighting corporate interests; the Chicago Teachers Union is
waging a brave fight against oppressive neoliberal modes of
governance; black youth are bravely resisting and exposing state
violence in all of its forms; prison abolitionists are making
their voices heard, and once again the threat of a nuclear winter
is being widely discussed. In the age of financial and political
monsters, neoliberalism has lost its ability to legitimate itself
in a warped discourse of freedom and choice. Its poisonous tentacles
have put millions out of work, turned many black communities
into war zones, destroyed public education, flagrantly pursued
war as the greatest of national ideals, turned the prison system
into a default institution for punishing minorities of race
and class, pillaged the environment, and blatantly imposed a
new mode of racism under the silly notion of a post-racial society.
The
extreme violence perpetuated in the daily spectacles of the
cultural apparatuses are now becoming more visible in the relations
of everyday life making it more difficult for many American
to live the lie that they are real and active participants in
a democracy. As the lies are exposed, the economic and political
crises ushering in authoritarianism are now being matched by
a crisis of ideas. If this momentum of growing critique and
collective resistance continues, the support we see for Bernie
Sanders among young people will be matched by an increase in
the growth of other oppositional groups. Groups organized around
single issues such as insurgent labour movements, those groups
trying to reclaim public education as a public good, and other
emerging movements will come together hopefully, refusing to
operate within the parameters of established power while working
to create a broad-based social movement. In the merging of the
power, culture, new public spheres, new technologies, and old
and new social movements, there is a hint of a new collective
political sensibility emerging, one that offers a new mode of
collective resistance and the possibility of taking democracy
off life-support. This is not a struggle over who will be elected
the next president or ruling party of the United States, but
a struggle over those who are willing to fight for a radical
democracy and those who are not. The strong winds of resistance
are in the air, rattling established interests, forcing liberals
to recognize their complicity with established power, and giving
new life the meaning of what it means to fight for a democratic
social order in which equity and justice prevail for everyone.
