Oh my sad home place
Torrey
OrtonOct. 21, 2013
Oh my sad home place in me…how you
look from here…
…is what I wrote to
myself some nights ago as I finished reading the sudden capitulation of the
temperamentally optimistic Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof of the NY Times,
among others, who bewail (no longer just
bemoan) the decline of their exceptional country in the face of the rising
tides of its fundamentalist progeny (the backward and truthless Tea Party and
its religious (e.g. evangelicals) and
greedy (e.g. Kochs at al) facilitators) of the late capitalist days of
the West (and maybe the East, too, long before they got to have more than a
taste of it). I felt sad - just that for a while - and it came back a week
later. I’ve often been outraged and despairing of my country of origin’s
systemic faults, but sad was new. As if something is passing, maybe passed, as
they now say of the dying. And so something in me which has long felt an
endangered remnant I feel is sinking into the dark night of spirit.
This something I think
is a gift of my upbringing – an education – no longer available even from the
bastions of educational quality which I worked through 50 years ago and more.
At the time I despised the boarding school and subsequently loved the undergraduate
and post-graduate institutions I traversed between my 13th and 27th years (with a four year timeout
as a teacher).
I see all this from far
away, not just in space but also in preoccupation. I have been busy learning
other things about cultures and peoples and occupations that living around the
world make necessary - most especially my times in China at various junctures
between 1978 and 2008.
I guess this loss was
predicted by Allan Bloom’s 1987 The Closing of the American Mind How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy
and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (US $6.36 at the Harvard
Coop remainders table a year after publication announces the purchase receipt
still occupying the Foreword by Saul Bellow) which I bought when it came out
years ago and never read until I was recalled to Bloom again by a retread of his
argument in the NYRB a couple years ago.
In the last chapter of the book was a section titled “The decomposition
of the university” in a chapter called The
student and the university foreshadowing a string of book length theses
confirming Bloom’s fears in the early Noughties, including one by an
undergraduate philosophy colleague now Yale Prof. Anthony Kronman (Education’s End Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given UP on the Meaning of Life
– Yale, 2007). Harry Lewis at Harvard published Excellence WITHOUT A SOUL How
a Great University Forgot Education
-Public Affairs, 2006.
That a 30+ year old Williams
College grad at Heritage
Action is
a leading manipulator of Republican reps and senators with Koch bros’ $$ and the
mindless certitudes of the under-educated masses they manipulate without
remorse for the sake of power is confirming of my loss. He remains nameless
though nameable because he could have been of Yale or MIT or choose your
establishment’s provenance The American inhabitants of the international Top 50
universities ratings have for decades been churning their precursors out of
their undergrad societies. Skull and Bones for dinner?
And this was not
predictable from the Sixties. Who could have thought that the standards which
ruled my days in the learning yoke of the best would have corroded so
thoroughly and so unnoticed by their very core supporters – my teachers and we
who learned from them, our generation of leaders of thought. Almost without a
joint whimper anywhere but the books mentioned above they succumbed to the
Circes of late capitalism and its strange facilitator relativism, polished by
positivist science. There were counter tremors in various fields but few moral
outbursts to be found as the language and practice of learning was suborned by
that of “productivity” and customer service.
There’s a tremor of the
same here in Whackademia (NewSouth,
2012), Richard Hil’s indictment of the greater and less great Australian universities
in similar arguments to Kronman and Lewis, with a down-under flavour. Recently the
staff of Sydney University went on strike against the administration’s latest
efforts to “reform” the place. Among the issues were:
“ … commodification
is just one facet of the disastrous hijacking of universities by corporate
interests and ideology. It might have been hoped that senior academics would
show some critical distance from the corporate shibboleths of our age. Far from
it: vice-chancellors and their deputies now enthusiastically enact the values
of competition, league-tables, performance indicators and similar managerial
fetishes with all the fervor of recent converts.
Students,
correspondingly, are increasingly encouraged to view their education as a
commercial transaction, and themselves as clients. Except that they’re getting
an increasingly shoddy deal, with cost-cutting
bringing reductions in the number of course offerings and
increases in casually employed teaching staff – a trend the union’s current
campaign has successfully opposed, in the face of strenuous management
resistance.”
But it’s a bit late. The entire discourse
is corrupted, it seems. Sad countries.
Paul Krugman, a somewhat less positive
scribe says a few days ago in his closing remarks on the resolution of the U.S. default discussions:
“Things could have been even
worse. This week, we managed to avoid driving off a cliff. But we’re still on
the road to nowhere.”
Mad country?
For a counter argument of sorts see Ely
Ratner deputy director of the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a
New American Security and Thomas Wright a fellow with the Managing Global Order
project at the Brookings Institution here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/americas-not-in-decline--its-on-the-rise/2013/10/18/4dde76be-35b1-11e3-80c6-7e6dd8d22d8f_story.html
There’s the judgment problem of incommensurable measures between them and
the others…but what’s new? Same country, different worlds. One the world of
economies and the other of influences.
No comments:
Post a Comment