Sep 30, 2015

The Cost of Whiteness: Why Talk of White Privilege Is Incomplete Without Mentioning Its Penalty by Thandeka

   

Most white Americans believe they were born white. Yet their own stories of early racial experiences describe persons who were bred white. Which is it-nature or nurture? Neither. The social process that creates whites produces persons who must think of their whiteness as a biological fact.
The process begins with a rebuke. A parent or authority figure reprimands the child because it's not yet white. The language used by the adult is racial, but the content of the message pertains to the child's own feelings and what the child must do with feelings the adult doesn't like. Stifle them. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum, in her book Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, tells how she learned to do this as a child being taught to be white.
Nussbaum's reflections begin with a description of the incident that provoked her father's racial rebuke: "In Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, in the early 1960s, I encountered black people only as domestic servants. There was a black girl my age named Hattie, daughter of the live-in help of an especially wealthy neighbor. One day, when I was about ten, we had been playing in the street and I asked her to come in for some lemonade. My father, who grew up in Georgia, exploded, telling me that I must never invite a black person into the house again." Nussbaum's first lessons ended at school where the only African Americans present were "kitchen help." Here, she and her classmates learned how to "efface them from our minds when we studied." The target of Nussbaum's first lessons in whiteness was her own sentient awareness of the surrounding environment. She had to learn how to disengage her own feelings, how to dissociate herself from them.

Sep 27, 2015

When We Label a Person, We Kill the Human Being Inside of Them by Tim Hjersted




No person or group of people is ever one thing. Inside each of us are a thousand diverse aspects - evolving dimensions.
So when we judge a person, cut off our hearts from them with a label or dismissal, we are killing the human being inside of them. We are interacting with a 2D image, a distortion which hides their full humanity.
For instance, if we label someone as bad, then anything he does that is good we will rationalize and dismiss, thinking there must be some ulterior motive behind it. Everything he says and does from that point becomes filtered through this stale judgment from the past. This person could act entirely different, say something new, but we aren't listening. We're just interacting with the image.
In truth, most of our life revolves around images like these. We create an opinion about a person, an idea, a place - and when we have new experiences of these things we don't process them with a fresh and open mind. We process them through our existing images. But have we ever tried to look at our life without these images?
As J Krishnamurti asks in Freedom From the Known,
"Have you ever experimented with looking at an objective thing like a tree without any of the associations, any of the knowledge you have acquired about it, without any prejudice, any judgment, any words forming a screen between you and the tree and preventing you from seeing it as it actually is? Try it and see what actually takes place when you observe the tree with all your being, with the totality of your energy. In that intensity you will find that there is no observer at all; there is only attention. It is when there is inattention that there is the observer and the observed. When you are looking at something with complete attention there is no space for a conception, a formula or memory."
In the same way, with each person in your life, I hope you will see them with complete attention. See all of who she is, all of who he is. See the beauties, see the shortcomings, see the kindness, see the loving gestures, see the mistakes, see the suffering, see the playful laughing, see the sweet and caring, see it all. See their whole being. Stay connected to the whole of each person.
I realize this is more difficult than it sounds. Our whole society is built upon judging and labeling. When we buy food from the cashier at the deli, we don't see this person like we see ourselves - with her own dreams, desires, fears, and problems. Most of the time we interact with the labels: the cashier, the boss, the stranger, the ex-partner, the new crush, the liberal, the conservative. In grade school the effect is even more polarized: the preps, the hippies, the cheerleaders, the popular kids, the losers, the geeks, the goths, the punks. We categorize and see people further by their particular nationality, race, and sexual orientation, their politics or religion, their social class and physical appearance. But all of these distinctions are only static images, only a flat card-board cut out masking the thousand roles we all have. These labels do not encompass the totality of humanity that is in each one of us, and thus, they are illusions that prevent us from experiencing people as they actually are.
When we throw away our old judgments, our old images, and see a person just as they are in each moment, you and that person become alive! You feel, not just intellectually, but in the core of your being, the fundamental realization that "that which is in me is that which is in you."
Behind the labels, behind the words, behind the thin surface of differences, real or imagined, we share the same basic humanity, the same basic needs, aspirations, and dreams.
This insight seems to directly trigger the empathy centers of the brain. It opens the heart.
Labeling others seems to have the effect of closing off the heart.
This isn't always the case, of course. As biological organisms in this complex and chaotic world, we have no choice but to make judgments in life. We have to make decisions. From birth the mind is trained to sort and to organize life into categories and names. Culture comes in and gives those labels value, assigning distinctions of good and bad. The problem comes in when we rely too heavily on these labels to filter reality. We mistake the filter or label for reality itself.
An obvious example is how the advertising and music and beauty and fashion industries - pretty much all corporate media in our society - reinforces stereotypical images of women as sex objects and little more. The basic de-humanizing effect of seeing women in this one-dimensional context is what opens the door to violence and sexual abuse towards women, and other elements of social inequality.
In the eyes of so many damaged and conditioned men a filter or screen is formed between themselves and women, where they see "tits and ass," an object they feel entitled to, but do not see the human being with all of her multi-dimensional qualities. Somehow a fundamental connection in the brain became severed, and they understand that "I" have needs, that "I" matter, that "my" happiness is important, but the faculty that allows them to see that this truth exists for the other becomes obscured. This blockage is created by judgment. She is just a "slut," they might say.
Making judgments creates a convenient distance for us, an abstract separation created in the mind that blocks off potential feelings of empathy. Without these judgments to insulate us, our aggressive, brutal, subtle acts of disregard for others would horrify us. We could not live with ourselves.
For instance, it would not be easy for a boss to see the humanity behind his "employees," because that would reveal the logic of holding power over others for the mad system that it is. A soldier cannot step into the soul of his enemy, because he would be horrified to realize that he is killing himself. A working-class Republican can not see the humanity in the immigrants he despises, because that would reveal that they are both being oppressed by the same corporate economic forces. A police officer cannot see the humanity and struggle behind a group of protesters, because then he would see that these other human beings are actually fighting for his liberation as well, and that they are, in truth, allies.
We are all caught in these images together. We are all prisoners of these roles, because society has framed our relationship to others in these terms. The boss, the soldier, the police officer - they cannot break free because their paycheck, and hence, their ability to live, depends on upholding these roles.
But beyond simple financial reasons, they are locked into these roles by cultural inertia. Generation after generation, these images are passed to each new generation. Images of colonialism, images of power and social class, images of racism and sexism, images of religious righteousness, of divine entitlement, of patriotism and economic prestige. Whole generations of people have been taught their entire life to identity heavily with these images, to believe they are real. Far more powerful than economic pressures, these cultural images bind the people most damaged in our society into a prison of the mind. They are locked in the same institutionalized madness with the rest of us.
I want to break free.
And not just from these socially polarizing images, but from all images, every image. Is this even possible? I want to find out. Because these images do not just create an immense degree of suffering on a societal level, but in our relationships with our friends and neighbors and intimate partners as well.
If we want to end the suffering that is caused by these images, then we need to come to a deep understanding of how these judgments arise in ourselves.
Holding Up a Mirror...
When I looked inside myself, I found that the act of judging others, forming images of people that put myself above them, is primarily an act to recuse myself of responsibility. It is not easy to accept responsibility for when we may have hurt someone, or when we may have acted unkind or unloving, so we try to ignore it. We judge the person, put them below us, create our own side to the story - then we do not feel so guilty for closing off our heart. We have a good justification in our mind, and we will hold on to it, because to let go of our comforting judgments about others we would have to confront ourselves. We would have to point the harsh judgments we afford to others suddenly back in the direction of ourselves, and this can be a very disturbing experience.
We may prefer not to look, not to learn, not to grow, because learning requires difficulty, and it is much easier to go about our lives without questing our own narratives. It is certainly not easy to face the possibility that our harsh judgments may have caused another person or group of people suffering, directly or in directly, and there was never a good reason for it.
Now, I know very few people are honest enough to admit that, when it comes down to it, they are mostly concerned about themselves. It is always amazing to me when I do meet people that can unapologetically state that if they're not "getting anything" from someone they have no problem not loving them. When someone says, "I don't have to care about them, so I won't." It is gut-wrenching to read blogs of conservatives that would cut social services to properly motivate people to work hard, and that if people starve or find themselves homeless because society no longer has any social-safety nets, well, "tough luck."
Most of us, however, have more flattering narratives. We say we are loving people. We say we care about others. And this is true up to a point, of course, but there is a very clear limit to how good we are prepared to be, isn't there? We will be compassionate only up to a point, and it is interesting to see how this acceptable limit to one's compassion has been shaped and defined by our culture as a whole. It goes unspoken, an invisible set of assumptions that define the line between what is considered "acceptable" consideration and compassion, and "acceptable" disregard for others.
Reading J Krishnamurti's Freedom From the Known made me question this line, revealed the absurdity of it. In its place, his work instilled in me a great desire to love, but not just in the small, limited way we have been taught to love our family and lovers. He challenged me to love everyone, without discrimination.
With this ideal in mind, I find myself coming back to all of these images we can have about people. A judgment might be triggered by any number of images which we have a bias against. Try out these words on yourself: Progressive, conservative, anarchist, capitalist, socialist, American, Syrian, white, black, male, female, transgender, Muslim, Christian, athiest, terrorist, rebel, immigrant, illegal alien, human being.
What images do you see when you visualize each word in your mind? When someone speaks, how often do you sieze upon certain words in their speech to draw the "true" meaning of their statements using the images you've accumulated of those words? How often, when you interact with someone, do you filter what they are saying and doing through the multiple images you have acquired about them?
Or do you ignore the images that come to your mind and quiet the reaction in your head so you can give your most sincere effort to listening and understanding what they are *trying* to say, despite any particular words or images about them that may rub you the wrong way? What would it be like to let go of all the images we have formed of them and look into their eyes with deep attention, until we can see the full humanity, the full complexity of their being?
A Double Standard?
You might ask yourself at some point, am I myself judging the people that judge others harshly? No. I love them. It is why I write at all. It is why I want to stay connected to people, to continue loving, even when it is difficult.
Would I learn anything from cutting my heart off from someone - an ex-partner, an old friend, a family member, a community member, or someone I disagree with politically? Someone of another nation or religion? Would they learn anything? Would we get any closer to ending the mad and violent nature of our relationships? This may sound like an exaggeration, but violence is not just the violence we see on TV. If we ever hope to end violent wars we must first come to understand the nature of violence in ourselves.
When I looked into violence deeply in myself, I discovered that separating myself at all from another human being is a subtle form of violence. We judge people. We cut them off. This is violence. In this chaotic world, we have become so desensitized by the noise and static of gross physical violence, we have lost the sensitivity in our being to perceive the subtle forms, our hearts have become so wounded.
What I have found, when I allow my heart to become very sensitive, is that anything less than love hurts. Even subtle forms of separation between people in my life hurts, and I want to bridge the gap until we can embrace each other again as the family that we truly are. This is what letting go of illusions feels like for me. It is to realize that beneath our differences, we are all family. It is to let go of all separating emotions and bring the other into my heart - to realize myself in her, to realize myself in him or them.
When I have done this, thinking about people who have judged me harshly or who judge others harshly, I saw that they have likely been deeply wounded by our society, and their harsh judgments are a survival strategy to protect themselves from pain. They cut off their hearts from others so they do not have to feel the other's pain. They may have accumulated many walls around their heart, so actions that may appear callous to the outsider may be an expression of a deeper tragedy - all those years that we did not see that resulted in their heart becoming so walled off. We suffer now because their suffering is spilling over.
In Practical Terms.
Now, I realize that there is a certain physical limitation to how compassionate and thoughtful we can be in the 24 hours of each day. We can't be personally responsible for the well-fare of everyone. Physically this is impossible. The question comes down to how we define our "sphere of responsibility."
Through my actions with the people I interact with, and the conversations I have with them, and the time we spend together - I am in relationship with this person, and I have an effect on their life. Have you ever made a personal choice that permanently affected the life of another? Taught them a lesson, negative or positive, that shaped the course of their future events? If you have, then hopefully you understand the gravity of what I mean by our "sphere of responsibility." Suddenly you may feel like Spider-man, realizing that "with great power comes great responsibility."
In your epiphany you realize that we are not disconnected islands unto ourselves, able to do whatever we want without repercussion. Everything is connected. We are all strings on the web together. And our actions send pulses on the web that vibrate deep.
I have not fleshed out fully any answers to this question of responsibility. I can feel an answer intuitively, a kind of gut reaction that makes my heart ache when I think about the lack of compassion that so many people feel justified in maintaining. But I am looking into it myself. I am exploring with you. What does it mean to be a mature, compassionate, wise human being? How would a person like this think, not in abstract flowery language, but in concrete terms? How have they re-wired the physical circuitry of their brains to think and feel and love on a deep and expansive level? Let's discover together.
I am interested in your thoughts on this. Tentatively, I will say that we are responsible to give people our time and our thoughtfulness to the degree that our lives are tied to theirs, as friends, as partners, as ex-partners, or whatever relationship we have to them in society. If you imagine your circle of friends and partners over the course of your life as darts on a dart-board, with you in the center, your degree of responsibility is greater proportional to how close they are to you at the center. Your level of sacrifice and commitment increases the longer you know them, the more your immediate relationship affects them.
At the heart of being responsible is what Thich Nhat Hanh lovingly calls "mindfulness" - being mindful of people's needs and feelings, of honestly and openly sharing your own needs, and asking what a person needs when they find it difficult to say.
Mindfulness means looking at the people in our life with complete attention. We temporarily suspend the desires of our own self so that we can see things from another's point of view. Usually, in our daily life, our perceptions are driven by what we desire. When we're hungry, all we can see is food. When we're aroused, all we can see are the sexual bodies we're attracted to. When we're pissed off, all we can see is the person and event that pissed us off. In each case, our perceptions are narrowed down to the tiny spectrum of our own desires. This is a kind of one-pointed perception. In contrast, when we practice mindful looking, we temporarily suspend our one-pointed view and attempt to see all views, as many views as possible. We take in our whole 360 degree environment as if our consciousness resides in each person, with all their multi-dimensional complexity.
Mindfulness means being aware of who we really are, beyond the clothes, beyond the artificial labels and categories of language. We see this very essential, very universal quality in ourselves and every single person on planet earth.
If we are talking about the end of a romantic relationship, mindfulness means that we will still treat the other person with consideration; we will treat them like family.
Of course, this whole paradigm of how we love others applies not just to our partners, but everyone we come in contact with in our life - for the 30 seconds we interact with the cashier at the grocery store, to the five minutes we give to a lost stranger looking for directions, to a friend that had a rough day and wants to grab something to eat, to the person we've been dating for a few weeks that we're no longer interested in dating anymore, to the person we've been with for two years, to an old-ex partner that has now become one of our best friends.
We can be mindful of them for the time and duration that our fate is entwined with theirs, whether it is for 30 seconds or several decades. We love people as much as is possible in the time that our life floats into the sphere of theirs before it inevitably continues on, in the continuous stream of interactions that we experience with countless other beings in the world.
                                                                             *************

OneLove

ʻĀINA: That Which Feeds Us

  ʻĀINA (pronounced "eye-nah") means “That Which Feeds Us” in the Hawaiian language. The film highlights a way to address some of the most pressing environmental and health crises facing the island of Kauai - and of island Earth. That may sound like an outstanding claim, but as ʻĀINA vividly illustrates, such is the power of agriculture and food for people and the planet. They will distract us with their entertainment and political spectacles. Their lies and distortions are accepted truths in these times. Step beyond the sludge and understand the world for what it is. This documentary is an excellent starting point towards your liberation. 

  The earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future.
  ~Marya Mannes, More in Anger, 1958

  OneLove        

Sep 26, 2015

Poet's Nook: "On a White Horse" by Mike Galsworthy





The hooves, they drummed a devil's tattoo 
Upon the woodland path.
The mechanical horse, it was angel white 
And never had had a sin in its mind.
The rider, he was the admired man 
And he saw no end to his sight --
A captain of industry with bags of golden leaves 
That he ripped from the trees
As he kicked his horse to ride on ride on 

To the rhythm, the rhythm, the rhythm of hooves;
The gathering of leaves and the rhythm of hooves.
"I built this horse for riding," said he. 
"This horse, I built for riding."


But the weather-clerk stepped across his path:
"Stop!" he said, "look around. 
Your riding whips the winds and strips the trees
It shifts the rains and lifts the seas! 
Slow down," he said "or change course"

"No! I cannot risk that I'll be overtaken",
The rider he said to the clerk
"There are other riders chasing me 
And I built this horse for riding," said he
"So move out of my way, I ride on."

To the rhythm, the rhythm, the rhythm of hooves.
To the gathering of leaves and the rhythm of hooves.
"I built this horse for riding," said he. 
"I built this horse for riding."

But one mile on, people cluttered his path 
Crying "We've seen the darkening skies! 
Please hook back some leaves onto our trees 
To catch the winds that bring disease 
And rot the fish in our waters!"

"But it's not just me," the rider said. 
"There are too many people on this earth
And when they crawl and breed in the mud, 
they bring the winds and the rains and the floods.
I earned these leaves, now move out of my way"
And the rider just rode on.
The rider just rode on.

To the rhythm, the rhythm, the rhythm of hooves.
To the gathering of leaves and the rhythm of hooves. 
"I built this horse for riding," said he
"I built this horse for riding"

But then the air turned dark and the rain it poured down; 
And the horse it broke and stumbled and fell
Deep into the mud it stumbled and fell
With the rider, it stumbled and fell. 

The rider then saw his daughter 
And called out to her in the panicking crowd --
"My daughter, come see, I have the leaves
To buy an ark to sail the seas when the waters rise.
Though others perish, we will survive."

But as he put his hand into the bag, 
Those leaves crumbled to dust and blew away. 
Up to the dark storm they blew away.
So strangely from his hand they blew away.

"Oh father," said the daughter 
"Your leaves, they have no magic now 
Because nobody will trade them. 
The farmer gives his food to men-at-arms
To keep off the jackals of jagged towns 
That come running through the ragged woods

Since the rats overran the granaries 
From the flagstones to the rafters,
When the miller's children all fell sick in the squalid dereliction.
And where's the doctor? He's fled to higher grounds 
To drink the untouched rains --
Because poisoned rivers run overland 
Through eye sockets and open mouths
Of people fallen in burning famine upon the putrid earth.

And this is not how it was meant to be;
That our once green earth should rot to black like this
And our children walk the rain, drenched in war, fear and pain.

It is a dark time
It's a dark time for humankind.
And you, father - you led in the other horsemen
To the rhythm, the rhythm, the rhythm of hooves,
Riding, riding, on your white horse."

                                                       **********

OneLove

Sep 24, 2015

Noam Chomsky: U.S. Is Greatest Threat to World Peace

  In a speech titled “On Power and Ideology” delivered at The New School for Social Research in Manhattan on Saturday, world-renowned political dissident Noam Chomsky discussed the persistent notion of U.S. exceptionalism, Republican efforts to torpedo the Iran nuclear deal, and the normalization of U.S.-Cuba relations. Chomsky explained why he believes the U.S. poses the greatest threat to world peace.

  “[The United States] is a rogue state, indifferent to international law and conventions, entitled to resort to violence at will. … Take, for example, the Clinton Doctrine—namely, the United States is free to resort to unilateral use of military power, even for such purposes as to ensure uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources—let alone security or alleged humanitarian concerns. And adherence to this doctrine is very well confirmed and practiced, as need hardly be discussed among people willing to look at the facts of current history.”

  Chomsky also explained why he believes the U.S. and its closest allies, namely Saudi Arabia and Israel, are undermining the possibility for peace in the Middle East.

  “When we say the international community opposes Iran’s policies or the international community does some other thing, that means the United States and anybody else who happens to be going along with it.”

OneLove

John McAfee :‘American government is dysfunctional'


Very interesting.....

 OneLove

Sep 23, 2015

None But Ourselves (Can Free Our Minds)





"It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere."
-Voltaire
“Your perspective on life comes from the cage you were held captive in.” 
― Shannon L. Alder
“Needs are imposed by nature. Wants are sold by society.” 
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“A handful of us determine what will be on the evening news broadcasts, or, for that matter, in the New York Times or Washington Post or Wall Street Journal…. Indeed it is a handful of us with this awesome power….And those [news stories] available to us already have been culled and re-culled by persons far outside our control.”
– Walter Cronkite
“Who controls the past controls the future and who controls the present controls the past.”
– George Orwell
“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”
– Malcolm X
Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing.
-Germaine Greer
"We've got a form of brainwashing going on in our country…. Do you know how they brainwash people? They repeat something over and over. And that's what we do in this country. Owning things is good. More money is good. More property is good. More commercialism is good. MORE IS GOOD. MORE IS GOOD. We repeat it--and have it repeated to us--over and over until nobody bothers to even think otherwise. The average person is so fogged up by all this, he has no perspective on what's really important anymore."
-Morrie Schwartz
"Human society as a whole is a vast brainwashing machine whose semantic rules and sex roles create a social robot."
- Robert Anton Wilson
"The line between education and brainwashing is paper thin"
-Yana Toboso
For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of 'brainwashing under freedom' to which we are subjected and which all too often we serve as willing or unwitting instruments.
-Noam Chomsky
We have been brainwashed into craving a diet that is killing us. What we believe tastes good is generally what we have been socially conditioned to enjoy.
-Jane Velez-Mitchell
"Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness — and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we're being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling — their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability."
-Arundhati Roy
"We need to make some dramatic, concrete moves to escape the materialism that seeps into our minds via diabolically clever and incessant advertising. We have been brainwashed to believe that bigger houses, more prosperous businesses, and more sophisticated gadgets are the way to joy and fulfillment. As a result, we are caught in an absurd, materialistic spiral. The more we make, the more we think we need in order to live decently and respectably. Somehow we have to break this cycle because it makes us sin against our needy brothers and sisters and, therefore, against our Lord. And it also destroys us. Sharing with others is the way to real joy."
- Ronald J. Sider

Sep 21, 2015

Donald Trump and the Ghost of Totalitarianism by Henry A. Giroux




In the current historical moment in the United States, the emptying out of language is nourished by the assault on the civic imagination. One example of this can be found in the rise of Donald Trump on the political scene. Donald Trump’s popular appeal speaks to not just the boldness of what he says and the shock it provokes, but the inability to respond to shock with informed judgement rather than titillation. Marie Luise Knott is right in noting that “We live our lives with the help of the concepts we form of the world. They enable an author to make the transition from shock to observation to finally creating space for action—for writing and speaking. Just as laws guarantee a public space for political action, conceptual thought ensures the existence of the four walls within which judgment operates.”[i] The concepts that now guide our understanding of American society are dominated by a corporate induced linguistic and authoritarian model that brings ruin to language, politics and democracy itself.

Missing from the commentaries by most of the mainstream media regarding the current rise of Trumpism is any historical context that would offer a critical account of the ideological and political disorder plaguing American society—personified by Trump’s popularity. A resurrection of historical memory in this moment could provide important lessons regarding the present crisis, particularly the long tradition of racism, white supremacy, exceptionalism, war mongering, and the extended wars on youth, women, and immigrants. Calling Trump a fascist is not enough. What is necessary are analyses in which the seeds of totalitarianism are made visible in Trump’s discourse and policy measures. One example can be found in Steve Weissman’s commentary on Trump in which he draws a relationship between Trump’s casual racism and the rapidly growing neo-fascist movements across Europe that “are growing strong by hating others for their skin color, religious origin, or immigrant status.”[ii] Few journalists have acknowledged the presence of white militia and white supremacists groups at his rallies and almost none have acknowledged the chanting of “white power” at some of his political gatherings, which would surely signal not only Trump’s connections to a racist past but also to the formative Nazi culture that gave rise to the endgame of genocide.[iii]

Another example can be found in Glenn Greenwald’s analysis of the mainstream media’s treatment of Trump’s attack on Jorge Ramos, an influential anchor of Univision.[iv] When Ramos stood up to question Trump’s views on immigration, Trump refused not only to call on him, but insulted him by telling him to go back to Univision. Instead of focusing on this particular lack of civility, Greenwald takes up the way many journalists scolded Ramos because he had a point of view and was committed to a political narrative. Greenwald saw this not just as a disingenuous act on the part of establishment journalists but as a weakness that furthers the march of an authoritarian regime that does not have to be accountable to the press. Trump may be bold in his willingness to flaunt his racism and make clear that money drives politics, but this is not new and should surprise no one who is historically and civically literate.

What is clear in this case is that a widespread avoidance of the past has become not only a sign of the appalling lack of historical consciousness in contemporary American culture, but a deliberate political weapon used by the powerful to keep people passive and blind to the truth, if not reduced to a discourse drawn from the empty realm of celebrity culture. This is a discourse in which totalitarian images of the hero, fearless leader, and bold politicians get lost in the affective and ideological registers of what Hannah Arendt once called “the ruin of our categories of thought and standards of judgment.”[v] Of course, there are many factors currently contributing to this production of ignorance and the lobotomizing of individual and collective agency. The forces promoting a deep seated culture of authoritarianism run deep in American society.

Such factors extend from the idiocy of celebrity and popular culture and the dumbing down of American schools to the transformation of the mainstream media into a deadly mix of propaganda and entertainment. The latter is particularly crucial as the collapse of journalistic standards that could inform the onslaught of information finds its counterpart in a government wedded to state secrecy and the aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers,[vi] the expanding use of state secrecy, the corruption of political language,[vii] the disregard for truth, all of which have contributed to growing culture of political and civic illiteracy.[viii] The knowledge and value deficits that produce such detrimental forms of ignorance not only crush the critical and ethical imagination, critical modes of social interaction, and political dissent, but also destroy those public spheres and spaces that promote thoughtfulness, thinking, critical dialogue, and serve as “guardians of truths as facts,” as Arendt once put it.[ix]

Under the reign of neoliberalism, space, time, and even language have been subject to the forces of privatization and commodification. Public space has been replaced by malls and a host of commercial institutions. Commodified and privatized, public space is now regulated through exchange values rather than public values just as communal values are replaced by atomizing and survival-of-the fittest market values. Time is no longer connected to long term investments, the development of social capital, and goals that benefit young people and the public good. On the contrary, time is now connected to short-term investments and quick financial gains. More broadly, time is now defined by “the non-stop operation of global exchange and circulation”[x] and the frenetic reproduction and perpetuation of an impoverished celebrity and consumer culture that both depoliticizes people and narrows their potential for critical thought, agency, and social relations to an investment in shopping, and other market-related activities. Under neoliberalism, time presents itself as a form tyranny, an unquestioned necessity, and in speeding up the flows of work, leisure, knowledge, and everyday life it spawns a new kind of violence in which the flow of capital replaces the flow of thoughtfulness, atomization replaces a notion of shared solidarity, the spectacle undermines historical memory, privatization seeks to erase all notions of the public good, and manufactured precarity replaces any sense of security and long-term planning.

In the age of casino capitalism, time itself has become a burden more than a condition for contemplation, self-reflection, and the cultivation of thoughtful and compassionate social relations. The extended arc of temporal relations in which one could imagine long-term investments in the common good has given way to a notion of time in which the horizon of time is contained within the fluctuating short-term investments of the financial elite and their militant drive for profits at any price. What is lost in this merging of time and the dictates of neoliberal capital are the most basic elements of being human along with the formative culture and institutions necessary to develop a real, substantive democracy. As Christian Marazzi observes:

Taking time means giving each other the means of inventing one’s future, freeing it from the anxiety of immediate profit. It means caring for oneself and the environment in which one lives, it means growing up in a socially responsible way. [Taking time means] questioning the meaning of consumption, production, and investment [so as to not] reproduce the preconditions of financial capitalism, the violence of its ups and downs, the philosophy according to which ‘time is everything, man is nothing.’ For man (sic) to be everything, we need to reclaim the time of his existence. [xi]

Civic death and disposability are the new signposts of a society in which historical memory is diminished and ethical evaluations become derided as figments of liberal past. Dispossession and depoliticization are central to the discourse of neoliberalism in which language is central to moulding identities, desires, values, and social relationships. As Doreen Massey observes, under neoliberalism the public is urged to become consumers, customers, and highly competitive while taught that the only interest that matters are individual interests, almost always measured by monetary considerations.[xii] Under such circumstances, social and communal bonds have been shredded, important modes of solidarity attacked, and a war has been waged against any institution that embraces the values, practices, and social relations endemic to a democracy.

This retreat into private silos has resulted in the inability of individuals to connect their personal suffering with larger public issues. Thus detached from any concept of the common good or viable vestige of the public realm, they are left to face alone a world of increasing precarity and uncertainty in which it becomes difficult to imagine anything other than how to survive. Under such circumstances, there is little room for thinking critically and acting collectively in ways that are imaginative and courageous.

Surely, the celebration and widespread prevalence of ignorance in American culture does more than merely testify “to human backwardness or stupidity”; it also “indicates human weakness and the fear that it is unbearably difficult to live beset by continuous doubts.”[xiii] Yet, what is often missed in analysis of political and civic illiteracy as the new normal is the degree to which these new forms of illiteracy not only result in an unconscious flight from politics, but also produce a moral coma that supports modern systems of terror and authoritarianism. Civic illiteracy is about more than the glorification and manufacture of ignorance on an individual scale: it is producing a nation-wide crisis of agency, memory, and thinking itself.

How else to explain, for instance, the mainstream media’s willingness to provide a platform for Donald Trump whose views express an unchecked hatred of immigrants, women, the welfare state, and any viable notion of the public good. As Richard Hofstadter, Noam Chomsky, and Susan Jacoby have made clear ignorance is not simply about the absence of knowledge, it is a kind of ideological sandstorm in which reason gives way to emotion, and a willful stupidity spreads through the culture as part of a political project that both infantilizes and depoliticizes the general public.[xiv] Trump is simply the most visible embodiment of a society that is not merely suspicious of critical thought but disdains it. Trump is the quintessential symbol of the merging of a war-like arrogance, a militant certainty, and as self-absorbed unworldliness in which he is removed from problems of the real world. The clueless Trump is far from a kind of clownish fiction some writers have described him to be. And while liberals such as Michal Tomasky have pointed to his appeal to racial resentment, a gladiatorial style, and his ability to combine a war like discourse and elements of conservative fundamentalism with a flair for entertainment,[xv] this type of analysis regrettably shies away from talking about Trump’s presence on the political landscape as an indication and warning of the specter of totalitarianism confronting Americans in new forms.[xvi]

Trump is the embodiment of a political party and casino driven social order in which informed judgments, moral responsibility, and collective action disappear from the world of politics. Trump’s often insulting, humiliating, misogynist, and racist remarks signify more than the rantings of an antediluvian, privileged white man who is both savvy in the world of public relations and delusional in the world of politics. Trump represents the new face of what Hannah Arendt once called the “banality of evil.”[xvii] Unapologetic about the racist nature of his remarks, unreflective about a savage economic system that is destroying the planet and the lives of most of its inhabitants, and unaware of his own “criminal” participation in furthering a culture of fear and cruelty, he is typical of an expanding mass of pundits, anti-public intellectuals, and right-wing fundamentalists who live in a historical void and for whom emotion overtakes reason.

Clearly, the attack on reason, evidence, science, and critical thought has reached perilous proportions in the United States. A number of political, economic, social, and technological forces now work to distort reality and keep people passive, unthinking, and unable to act in a critically engaged manner. Politicians, right-wing pundits, and large swaths of the American public embrace positions that support Creationism, capital punishment, torture, and the denial of human-engineered climate change, any one of which not only defies human reason but stands in stark opposition to evidence-based scientific arguments. Reason now collapses into opinion, as thinking itself appears to be both dangerous and antithetical to understanding ourselves, our relations to others, and the larger state of world affairs. Under such circumstances, literacy disappears not just as the practice of learning skills, but also as the foundation for taking informed action. Divorced from any sense of critical understanding and agency, the meaning of literacy is narrowed to completing basic reading, writing, and numeracy tasks assigned in schools. Literacy education is similarly reduced to strictly methodological considerations and standardized assessment, rooted in test taking and deadening forms of memorization, and becomes far removed from forms of literacy that would impart an ability to raise questions about historical and social contexts.

For Arendt the inability to think, to be thoughtful, and assume responsibility for one’s actions spoke not just to a regrettable type of civic and political illiteracy, but was crucial for creating the formative cultures that produced totalitarian regimes. Absent any residue of moral responsibility, political indignation, and collective resistance, crimes committed in a systemic way now emerge, in part, from a society in which thinking had become dangerous and non-thinking normalized. Of course, thinking critically is largely produced in public spheres that instill convictions rather than destroy them, encourage critical capacities rather than shut them down, invest in public spheres rather than eliminate them by turning them over to private interests. What Donald Trump represents is rarely talked about in the media. He is the most current egregious highly visible symbol of a terrifying stage in American society haunted by the protean elements of a new totalitarianism. Totalitarian forms are still with us but they no longer find expression in the rounding up and killing of Jews, gays, and intellectuals or in the spectacles of militarism with the heightened show of armies of thugs dressed in military uniforms and black boots. The new totalitarianism is echoed in the resurgence of religious bigotry that runs through the current society like an electric current and personified in the media celebration of bigots such as Kentucky clerk Kim Davis who believes that her religion gives her the right to both deny marriage license to gays and the disavow the separation of church and state. Unfortunately, Davis is more than an embarrassment politically and ethically, she reflects a sizable number of religious fundamentalists who have the backing of Republican Party and presidential candidates such as Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee.

Totalitarianism throws together authoritarian and anti-democratic forms that represent a new historical moment in American history. Economic fundamentalism now governs all of society rather than just the market and in doing so drives politics and sets policies that promote massive inequalities in wealth and power, produce huge amounts of suffering, and appear to delight in a culture of cruelty. Military fundamentalism points to a society that now militarizes everything from knowledge to schools. In this scenario, an increasing number of behaviors are criminalized, militarism feeds the punishing and incarceration state, and a kind of hyper masculinity now parades as the new model for legitimating aggression and violence in multiple spheres and against an increasing range of populations extending from women and black youth to Mexican immigrants. One of the most deadly fundamentalisms is education. We now live in a world in which illiteracy has replaced literacy and civic values have gone the way of the typewriter. As the orbits of privatization increase furthering what has been called by Mark Fisher the “empire of the self,” knowledge is transformed into the flow of non-stop information just as education collapses into training. Students are now defined as test-takers and celebrity culture has overtaken any viable notion of a critical, questioning, and informed culture. Trump’s rise in the polls is tantamount to the collapse of civic literacy and the public spheres that support it.

Totalitarianism’s curse finds public and political support for a mode of non-thinking in which rails against any attempt to ask what it might mean to use knowledge and theory as a resource to address social problems and events in ways that are meaningful and expand democratic relations. This is a form of illiteracy marked by the inability to see outside of the realm of the privatized self, an illiteracy in which the act of translation withers, reduced to a relic of another age. The United States has become a country in which a chron­ic and deadly form of civic illiteracy finds its most visible expression into a disimagination machine that celebrates the Donald Trumps of the world. The world of politics is far from clownish and in fact points to a poisonous future at a time in which the educational force of the culture is being used to promote a poisonous form of civic illiteracy. Donald Trump is not the singular clown who has injected the color and idiocy into American politics, he is the canary in the mineshaft warning us that totalitarianism relies on mass support and feeds on hate, moral panics, and “the frenzied lawlessness or ideological certitude.”[xviii] As American society moves from a culture of questioning to a culture of shouting, it has restaged politics and power in ways that are truly unproductive, frightening, and anti-democratic. Jerome Kohn writing about Arendt’s notion of totalitarianism provides a commentary that contains a message for the present age, one that points the possibility of hope triumphing over despair—a lesson that needs to be embraced at the present moment. He writes that for Arendt “what matters is not to give oneself over to the despair of the past or the utopian hope of the future, but ‘to remain wholly in the present.’ Totalitarianism is the crisis of our times insofar as its demise becomes a turning point for the present world, presenting us with an entirely new opportunity to realize a common world, a world that Arendt called a ‘human artifice,’ a place fit for habitation by all human beings.”[xix] And if Trump represents a symbol of a threatening totalitarianism, the legacy of individual and collective struggle now on the horizon in the struggles emerging among the Black Lives Matter Movement, fast food workers, environmentalists, and a range of other groups point to a different future in which the ideological stupidity and the unbridled braggadocio of the loud mouth authoritarians will be challenged and overcome by the urgency of hope in the face of despair. Rather than view Trump as an eccentric clown maybe it is time to portray him symbolic of the legacy of a totalitarian past whose story needs to be told again. And in making such connections, there is not only the power of resistance but a call to civic action to prevent such horrible narrative from appearing once again.

I want to conclude by arguing that inherent in Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil is the view of education as central to politics. That is, for her the educative nature of politics is dialectical in that it is central to both creating the formative cultures of thoughtlessness and Nazi pedagogy and in creating those modes of politics in which matters of critique, desire, and agency are central to constructing critical and socially responsible citizens alive to the demands of economic, racial, and political justice. For those of us who believe that education is more than an extension of the business world, it is crucial to address a number of issues that stress the educative nature of politics as part of a broader effort to create a critical culture, democratic public spheres, and a collective movement that supports the connection between critique and action and redefines agency in the service of the practice of freedom and justice. Let me mention just a few.

First, educators, artists and others can address and make clear the relationship between the attack on the social state and the transformation of a range of democratic public spheres into adjuncts of corporate power. The neoliberal attacks on the welfare state, social provisions, public servants, and the public good must be understood and addressed as not simply an agenda to solidify class power but as an attack on democracy itself. . Nor can it be understood outside of the production of the atomized neoliberal subject who is taught to believe in a form of possessive individualism that disdains matters of compassion, solidarity, and the type of sociality crucial to a democratic society. In a society in which the “social self’ has been transformed into the “disembedded individual,” any viable notion of the public good is now repudiated by the privatizing and atomistic values at the heart of a hyper-market driven society. [xx]

As I have mentioned earlier in this essay, militarism has a deadly grip on American society as both an ideology with its celebration of the ideals of war, violence, and military heroism and as a policy that fuels the arms race, invests billions in military weapons, and spends more on the tools of surveillance, war, and state violence than on schools, health care, and the welfare state. Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies has done extensive research on military spending and the costs of war and states that as a result of the Iraqi War alone “American taxpayers will ultimately spend roughly $2.2 trillion on the war, but because the U.S. government borrowed to finance the conflict, interest payments through the year 2053 means that the total bill could reach nearly $4 trillion.”[xxi] At the very least, any viable form of resistance against the onslaught of totalitarianism will have to develop as Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun has pointed out a Marshall Plan in which funding is sufficient to make all levels of education free, while also providing enough social support to eliminate poverty, hunger, inadequate health care, and the destruction of the environment.[xxii] There is nothing utopian about the demand to redirect money away from the military, powerful corporations, and the upper 1 percent.

Second, progressives need to develop a new radical democratic imaginary that challenges the notion that a market economy is synonymous with democracy. Capitalism and democracy are antithetical and the ways in which democracy is undermined by casino capitalism needs to be endlessly addressed as part of the pedagogical and political task of rupturing what might be called neoliberal commonsense, especially regarding the assumption that the market should govern all of social life. The greatest threat posed by authoritarian politics is that it makes power invisible and hence defines itself in universal and commonsense terms, as if it is beyond critique and dissent. Moreover, disposability has become the new measure of a savage form of casino capitalism in which the only value that matters is exchange value. Coupled with making the machinery of neoliberal power visible is the need to overcome the fragmentation of the left while not denying the various modes of oppression at work in the United States. Put differently, there is a need young people, workers, educators, artists, and others to become part of a broader social movement aimed at dismantling the repressive institutions that are moving the United States into a new authoritarian age. This is especially true with regards to addressing the mass incarceration state, which drains billions of dollars in funds to put people in jail when such resources could be used to fund health care, free higher education, much needed infrastructure, a social wage, free day care, and so it goes. .

What I am suggesting is that progressives need to develop a more comprehensive view of society and a keener recognition of the mutually informing registers of politics, oppression, and political struggle. There is a noble and informing example of this type of analysis in the work of theorists such as Michael Lerner, Stanley Aronowitz, Angela Davis, and the late Martin Luther King, Jr., who drew connections between militarism, racism and capitalism as part of is call not for reform but for a radical restructuring of American society.

Third, against the new thoughtlessness that drapes the American public in the abyss of ignorance, infantilism, consumerism, militarism, and environmental stupidity, there is a need to create those pedagogical spaces in which shared faith in justice replaces the shared fears of precarity, hatred of the other, and a fear of the demands of justice. Against the savage brutalism of the new totalitarianism, there is a need to develop new discourses, vocabularies, values, desires, and a sense of spirituality that brings people together around a need for critique, passion for justice, and a desire for new modes of collective resistance and struggle. We may be in the midst of “dark times” but the light of hope is never far off and while it offers no guarantees, it posits the possibility of a future that will not mimic the horrors of the past and present.

  Notes

  [1] Marie Luise Knott, Unlearning With Hannah Arendt, trans. by David Dollenmayer, (Other Press: New York, NY. 2011, 2013), p. 47. [2] Steve Weissman, “Bashing Blacks, Latinos, Jews, and Muslims: Never Again!,” Reader Supported News, (September 2011). Online at:http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/32150-focus-bashing-blacks-latinos-jews-and-muslims-never-again
  [3] See, for example, Randy Blazak, “Donald Trump is the New Face of White Supremacy,” Counter Punch, (August 28, 2015). Online at:http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/28/donald-trump-is-the-new-face-of-white-supremacy/ [4] Glenn Greenwald, “Jorge Ramos Commits Journalism, Gets Immediately Attacked by Journalists,” The Intercept, (August 27, 2015). Online at: https://theintercept.com/2015/08/26/jorge-ramos-commits-journalism-gets-immediately-attacked-journalists/
  [5] Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt: The Last Interview and Other Conversations, (Brooklyn, NY. : Melville House Publishing, 2013)
  [6] Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide (New York: Metropolitan, 2014).
  [7] Charles Lewis, 935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America’s Moral Integrity (New York: Public Affairs, 2014). [8] Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason (New York: Pantheon, 2008); Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, eds.Agnotology: the Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). The classic text here is Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in America Life (New York: Knopf, 1963). [9] Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2013), p. 31. [10] Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, (Verso, 2013) (Brooklyn, NY: Verso Press, 2013), p. 5.
[11] Christian Marazzi, The Violence of Financial Capitalism (New York: Semiotext(e) 2011), p. 96. [12] Doreen Massey, “Vocabularies of the economy,” Soundings, (2013) http://lwbooks.co.uk/journals/soundings/pdfs/Vocabularies%20of%20the%20economy.pdf [13] Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis, Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013), p. 7.
  [14] Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 2002); Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason (New York: Pantheon, 2008) and Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in America Life (New York: Knopf, 1963). [15] Michael Tomasky, “Trump,” New York Review of Books(September 24, 2015). Online:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/sep/24/trump/
  [16] See, for instance, Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Destinies of Totalitarianism,” Salmagundi, No. 60, (Spring -Summer, 1983),http://www.jstor.org/stable/40547754 [17] Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 2006).
[18] Bill Dixon, “Totalitarianism and the Sand Storm,” Hannah Arendt Center (February 3, 2014). Online:http://www.hannaharendtcenter.org/?p=12466
[19] Jerome Kohn, “Totalitarianism: The Inversion of Politics,” The Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress Essays and lectures—“On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understanding” (Series: Speeches and Writings File, 1923-1975, n.d.) Online at: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/arendthtml/essayb1.html
  [20] These two terms are taken from Stefan Collini, “Response to Book Review Symposium: Stefan Collini, What are Universities For,” Sociology 1-2 (February 5, 2014), Online:http://soc.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/02/14/0038038513518852
  [21] Ben Armbruster,”Study: Iraq War Cost U.S. $2.2 Trillion, Claimed Nearly 200,000 Lives,” ThinkProgress (March 14, 2013). Online: http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/03/14/1721961/study-iraq-war-cost-2-triillion/ The publication by the Watson Institute of the March 14, 2013 ‘Costs of War’ Project, “Iraq War: 190,000 lives, $2.2 trillion,” can be found online athttp://news.brown.edu/articles/2013/03/warcosts [22] For Tikkun’s Marshall Plan, seehttp://spiritualprogressives.org/newsite/?page_id=114

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