thinking dangerously
IN DARK TIMES
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.
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YOUR
COMMENTSThe conditions that produce the terrifying
curse of totalitarianism seem to be upon us and are increasingly
visible in President Trump’s denial of civil liberties,
the stoking of fear in the general population, and a reckless
hostility to the rule of law and a free and critical press.
Totalitarian elements of the past are also evident in Trump’s
contempt for the truth, and a willingness to create a new political
formation through an alignment of religious fundamentalists,
racists, xenophobes, Islamophobes, the ultra-rich, and unhinged
militarists. Hannah Arendt once argued that all thinking is
dangerous. This appears particularly true in an age when radical
extremists who trade in hate-filled discourses, white nationalism,
and racist policies move from the margins of society to the
center of American politics.
Against
the current assault on critical thinking and the institutions
that nurture it, it is crucial for Americans to reclaim the
call to think dangerously again and employ language in the service
of compassion, justice, and civic responsibility. In part, this
suggests learning how to hold authority accountable, search
for the truth, make authoritarian power visible, and recognize
that no society can escape self-reflection, deny the injuries
of state induced injustice, or dispense with truth itself. Dangerous
thinking should cause trouble, exercise its right to both understand
and interrogate critically the major problems people face while
being able to connect such issues to larger structural considerations.
Thinking dangerously means refusing a culture of immediacy and
sensationalism. Such thinking requires using historical memory
as a resource and connecting private troubles to broader political,
structural, and economic issues. Such thinking nurtures the
social imagination and envisions a future in which the impossible
becomes possible once again.
What
happens to democracy when the President of the United States
labels critical media outlets as “enemies of the people”
and derides the search for truth by disparaging such efforts
with the blanket term “fake news”? What happens
to democracy when individuals and groups are demonized on the
basis of their religion? What happens to a society when critical
thinking becomes an object of contempt and is disdained in favor
of raw emotion or disparaged as fake news? What happens to a
social order ruled by an “economics of contempt”
that blames the poor for their condition and subjects them to
a culture of shaming? What happens to a polity when it retreats
into private silos and becomes indifferent to the use of language
in the service of a panicked rage that stokes anger but not
about issues that matter? What happens to a social order when
it treats millions of illegal immigrants as disposable, potential
terrorists, and criminals? What happens to a country when the
presiding principles of a society are violence and ignorance?
What happens is that democracy withers and dies, both as an
ideal and as a reality.
How
else to explain the present historical moment with its collapse
of civic culture and the future it cancels out? What is to be
made of the undermining of civic literacy and the conditions
that produce an active citizenry at a time when massive self-enrichment
and a gangster morality at the highest reaches of government
undermine the public realm as a space of freedom, liberty, dialogue,
and deliberative consensus? Americans are in the midst of a
crisis of history, politics, and agency, made all the more obvious
by a government populated by right-wing extremists attempting
to implement death-dealing policies regarding health care, the
environment, the economy, foreign policy, immigration, and civil
liberties.
Democracy
fails in an age when its leadership is stripped of credibility.
As a habitual liar, Trump has attempted to obliterate the distinction
between the facts and fiction, evidence-based arguments and
lying, and in doing so has dangerously enlarged the landscape
of distortion, misrepresentation, and falsification. Not only
has he reinforced the legitimacy of what I call “right-wing
disimagination machines” such as Breitbart News, he has
also created among large segments of the public a distrust for
both the truth and the institutions that promote critical literacy
and informed judgment. Consequently, he has managed to organize
millions of people who believe that loyalty is more important
than the truth and in doing so has emptied the language and
the horizon of politics of any substantive meaning, thus contributing
to an authoritarian and depoliticized culture of sensationalism,
immediacy, fear, and anxiety. Trump has put in motion all the
anti-democratic forces that have haunted American society for
the last forty years. The broader consequence of his campaign
of distortion, lies, and falsification has been captured in
an interview Hannah Arendt gave to the New York Review of
Books in 1978 in the aftermath of the horrors of fascism.
She writes:
In
the present moment, it becomes particularly important for progressives
and others to protect and enlarge the formative cultures and
public spheres that make democracy possible. Under a relentless
attack on the truth, honesty, and the ethical imagination, the
need for the American public to think dangerously is crucial,
especially in a society that appears increasingly amnesiac—a
country where forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting
are not only willfully practiced but celebrated. Rather than
draining the swamp, the Trump administration has pushed cronyism
and the rule of the elite to a new level of political corruption.
All of which becomes all the more threatening at a time when
the United States has tipped over into a social order that is
awash in public stupidity and views critical thought as both
a liability and a threat. Not only is this obvious in the presence
of a celebrity culture that embraces the banal and the idiotic,
but it is also visible in the proliferation of anti-intellectual
discourses and policies among a range of politicians and anti-public
intellectuals who are waging a war on science, reason, and the
legacy of the Enlightenment.
At
the core of thinking dangerously is the recognition that education
is central to politics and that a democracy cannot survive without
informed citizens. Critical and dangerous thinking is the precondition
for nurturing both the ethical imagination and formative culture
that enable engaged citizens to learn how to govern rather than
be governed. Thinking with courage is fundamental to a notion
of civic literacy that views knowledge as central to the pursuit
of economic and political justice. Such thinking incorporates
a critical framework and set of values that enables a polity
to deal critically with the use and effects of power, particularly
through a developed sense of compassion for others and the planet.
Thinking dangerously is the basis for a formative and educational
culture of questioning that takes seriously how imagination
is key to the practice of freedom. Thinking dangerously is,
thus, not only the cornerstone of critical agency and engaged
citizenship, but also the foundation for a democracy that matters.
