We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions
to participate in the process of change.
Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people,
can transform the world.
- Howard Zinn
This is the fifth in a series of dialogues with philosophers and
critical theorists on violence. This conversation is with Henry A. Giroux, a
professor in the department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. His latest book is “America at War With
Itself” (City Lights).
Brad Evans: Throughout your work you have dealt with the dangers of
ignorance and what you have called the violence of “organized forgetting.” Can
you explain what you mean by this and why we need to be attentive to
intellectual forms of violence?
Henry Giroux: Unfortunately, we live at a
moment in which ignorance appears to be one of the defining features of
American political and cultural life. Ignorance has become a form of weaponized
refusal to acknowledge the violence of the past, and revels in a culture of
media spectacles in which public concerns are translated into private
obsessions, consumerism and fatuous entertainment. As James Baldwin rightly
warned, “Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can
have.”
The warning signs from history are all too clear. Failure to
learn from the past has disastrous political consequences. Such ignorance is
not simply about the absence of information. It has its own political and
pedagogical categories whose formative cultures threaten both critical agency
and
What I have called the violence of organized forgetting signals
how contemporary politics are those in which emotion triumphs over reason, and
spectacle over truth, thereby erasing history by producing an endless flow of
fragmented and disingenuous knowledge. At a time in which figures like Donald
Trump are able to gain a platform by promoting values of “greatness” that serve
to cleanse the memory of social and political progress achieved in the name of
equality and basic human decency, history and thought itself are under attack.
Once ignorance is weaponized, violence seems to be a tragic
inevitability. The mass shooting in Orlando is yet another example of an
emerging global political and cultural climate of violence fed by hate and mass
hysteria. Such violence legitimates not only a kind of inflammatory rhetoric
and ideological fundamentalism that views violence as the only solution to
addressing social issues, it also provokes further irrational acts of violence
against others. Spurrned on by a complete disrespect for those who affirm
different ways of living, this massacre points to a growing climate of hate and
bigotry that is unapologetic in its political nihilism.
It
would be easy to dismiss such an act as another senseless example of radical
Islamic terrorism. That is too easy. Another set of questions needs to be
asked. What are the deeper political, educational, and social conditions that
allow a climate of hate, racism, and bigotry to become the dominant discourse
of a society or worldview? What role do politicians with their racist and
aggressive discourses play in the emerging landscapes violence? How can we use
education, among other resources, to prevent politics from being transformed
into a pathology? And how might we counter these tragic and terrifying
conditions without retreating into security or military mindsets?
B.E.: You insist that education is
crucial to any viable critique of oppression and violence. Why?
H.G.: I begin with the assumption
that education is fundamental to democracy. No democratic society can survive
without a formative culture, which includes but is not limited to schools
capable of producing citizens who are critical, self-reflective, knowledgeable
and willing to make moral judgments and act in a socially inclusive and
responsible way. This is contrary to forms of education that reduce learning to
an instrumental logic that too often and too easily can be perverted to violent
ends.
So
we need to remember that education can be both a basis for critical thought and
a site for repression, which destroys thinking and leads to violence. Michel
Foucault wrote that knowledge and truth not only “belong to the register of
order and peace,” but can also be found on the “side of violence, disorder, and
war.” What matters is the type of education a person is encouraged to pursue.
It’s
not just schools that are a site of this struggle. “Education” in this regard
not only includes public and higher education, but also a range of cultural
apparatuses and media that produce, distribute and legitimate specific forms of
knowledge, ideas, values and social relations. Just think of the ways in which
politics and violence now inform each other and dominate media culture.
First-person shooter video games top the video-game market while Hollywood
films ratchet up representations of extreme violence and reinforce a culture of
fear, aggression and militarization. Similar spectacles now drive powerful
media conglomerates like 21st Century Fox, which includes both news and
entertainment subsidiaries.
As
public values wither along with the public spheres that produce them, repressive
modes of education gain popularity and it becomes easier to incarcerate people
than to educate them, to model schools after prisons, to reduce the obligations
of citizenship to mere consumption and to remove any notion of social
responsibility from society’s moral registers and ethical commitments.
Please continue this
interview here: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/20/opinion/the-violence-of-forgetting.html?_r=3
