LOSS OF OUR MORAL COMPASS

Is Chris Hedges, this time, right or wrong or neither?

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http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/20090323_america_is_in_need_of_a_moral_bailout/

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America Is in Need of a Moral Bailout

By CHRIS HEDGES • Truthdig • 03.23.09

[Chris Hedges, who writes a weekly column for Truthdig that is

published every Monday, is currently a senior fellow at The Nation

Institute and a Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and the

Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University. He spent nearly

two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle

East, Africa and the Balkans. Hedges, who has reported from more than

50 countries, worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National

Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, where he

spent fifteen years.]

In decaying societies, politics become theater. The elite, who have

hollowed out the democratic system to serve the corporate state, rule

through image and presentation. They express indignation at AIG

bonuses and empathy with a working class they have spent the last few

decades disenfranchising, and make promises to desperate families that

they know will never be fulfilled. Once the spotlights go on they read

their lines with appropriate emotion. Once the lights go off, they

make sure Goldman Sachs and a host of other large corporations have

the hundreds of billions of dollars in losses they incurred playing

casino capitalism repaid with taxpayer money.

We live in an age of moral nihilism. We have trashed our universities,

turning them into vocational factories that produce corporate drones

and chase after defense-related grants and funding. The humanities,

the discipline that forces us to stand back and ask the broad moral

questions of meaning and purpose, that challenges the validity of

structures, that trains us to be self-reflective and critical of all

cultural assumptions, have withered. Our press, which should promote

such intellectual and moral questioning, confuses bread and circus

with news and refuses to give a voice to critics who challenge not

this bonus payment or that bailout but the pernicious superstructure

of the corporate state itself. We kneel before a cult of the self,

elaborately constructed by the architects of our consumer society,

which dismisses compassion, sacrifice for the less fortunate, and

honesty. The methods used to attain what we want, we are told by

reality television programs, business schools and self-help gurus, are

irrelevant. Success, always defined in terms of money and power, is

its own justification. The capacity for manipulation is what is most

highly prized. And our moral collapse is as terrifying, and as

dangerous, as our economic collapse.

Theodor Adorno in 1967 wrote an essay called “Education After

Auschwitz.” He argued that the moral corruption that made the

Holocaust possible remained “largely unchanged.” He wrote that “the

mechanisms that render people capable of such deeds” must be made

visible. Schools had to teach more than skills. They had to teach

values. If they did not, another Auschwitz was always possible.

“All political instruction finally should be centered upon the idea

that Auschwitz should never happen again,” he wrote. “This would be

possible only when it devotes itself openly, without fear of offending

any authorities, to this most important of problems. To do this,

education must transform itself into sociology, that is, it must teach

about the societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of

political forms.”

Our elites are imploding. Their fraud and corruption are slowly being

exposed as the disparity between their words and our reality becomes

wider and more apparent. The rage that is bubbling up across the

country will have to be countered by the elite with less subtle forms

of control. But unless we grasp the “societal play of forces that

operates beneath the surface of political forms” we will be cursed

with a more ruthless form of corporate power, one that does away with

artifice and the seduction of a consumer society and instead wields

power through naked repression.

I had lunch a few days ago in Toronto with Henry Giroux, professor of

English and cultural studies at McMaster University in Canada and who

for many years was the Waterbury Chair Professor at Penn State.

Giroux, who has been one of the most prescient and vocal critics of

the corporate state and the systematic destruction of American

education, was driven to the margins of academia because he kept

asking the uncomfortable questions Adorno knew should be asked by

university professors. He left the United States in 2004 for Canada.

“The emergence of what Eisenhower had called the

military-industrial-academic complex had secured a grip on higher

education that may have exceeded even what he had anticipated and most

feared,”

Giroux, who wrote “The University in Chains: Confronting the

Military-Industrial-Academic Complex,” told me. “Universities, in

general, especially following the events of 9/11, were under assault

by Christian nationalists, reactionary neoconservatives and market

fundamentalists for allegedly representing the weak link in the war on

terrorism. Right-wing students were encouraged to spy on the classes

of progressive professors, the corporate grip on the university was

tightening as made clear not only in the emergence of business models

of governance, but also in the money being pumped into research and

programs that blatantly favored corporate interests. And at Penn

State, where I was located at the time, the university had joined

itself at the hip with corporate and military power.

Put differently,

corporate and Pentagon money was now funding research projects and

increasingly knowledge was being militarized in the service of

developing weapons of destruction, surveillance and death. Couple this

assault with the fact that faculty were becoming irrelevant as an

oppositional force. Many disappeared into discourses that threatened

no one, some simply were too scared to raise critical issues in their

classrooms for fear of being fired, and many simply no longer had the

conviction to uphold the university as a democratic public sphere.”

Frank Donoghue, the author of “The Last Professors: The Corporate

University and the Fate of the Humanities,” details how liberal arts

education has been dismantled. Any form of learning that is not

strictly vocational has at best been marginalized and in many schools

has been abolished. Students are steered away from asking the broad,

disturbing questions that challenge the assumptions of the power elite

or an economic system that serves the corporate state. This has led

many bright graduates into the arms of corporate entities they do not

examine morally or ethically. They accept the assumptions of corporate

culture because they have never been taught to think.

Only 8 percent of U.S. college graduates now receive degrees in the

humanities, about 110,000 students. Between 1970 and 2001, bachelor’s

degrees in English declined from 7.6 percent to 4 percent, as did

degrees in foreign languages (2.4 percent to 1 percent), mathematics

(3 percent to 1 percent), social science and history (18.4 percent to

10 percent). Bachelor’s degrees in business, which promise the

accumulation of wealth, have skyrocketed. Business majors since

1970-1971 have risen from 13.6 percent of the graduation population to

21.7 percent. Business has now replaced education, which has fallen

from 21 percent to 8.2 percent, as the most popular major.

The values that sustain an open society have been crushed. A

university, as John Ralston Saul writes, now “actively seeks students

who suffer from the appropriate imbalance and then sets out to

exaggerate it. Imagination, creativity, moral balance, knowledge,

common sense, a social view—all these things wither. Competitiveness,

having an ever-ready answer, a talent for manipulating situations—all

these things are encouraged to grow. As a result amorality also grows;

as does extreme aggressivity when they are questioned by outsiders; as

does a confusion between the nature of good versus having a ready

answer to all questions. Above all, what is encouraged is the growth

of an undisciplined form of self-interest, in which winning is what

counts.”

This moral nihilism would have terrified Adorno. He knew that radical

evil was possible only with the collaboration of a timid, cowed and

confused population, a system of propaganda and a press that offered

little more than spectacle and entertainment and an educational system

that did not transmit transcendent values or nurture the capacity for

individual conscience. He feared a culture that banished the anxieties

and complexities of moral choice and embraced a childish

hyper-masculinity, one championed by ruthless capitalists (think of

the brutal backstabbing and deception cheered by TV shows like

“Survivor”) and Hollywood action heroes like the governor of

California.

“This educational ideal of hardness, in which many may believe without

reflecting about it, is utterly wrong,” Adorno wrote. “The idea that

virility consists in the maximum degree of endurance long ago became a

screen-image for masochism that, as psychology has demonstrated,

aligns itself all too easily with sadism.”

Sadism is as much a part of popular culture as it is of corporate

culture. It dominates pornography, runs like an electric current

through reality television and trash-talk programs and is at the core

of the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing

the capacity for moral choice. And it has its logical fruition in Abu

Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and our lack of compassion

for the homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed and the

sick.

“The political and economic forces fuelling such crimes against

humanity—whether they are unlawful wars, systemic torture, practiced

indifference to chronic starvation and disease or genocidal acts—are

always mediated by educational forces,” Giroux said. “Resistance to

such acts cannot take place without a degree of knowledge and

self-reflection. We have to name these acts and transform moral

outrage into concrete attempts to prevent such human violations from

taking place in the first place.”

The single most important quality needed to resist evil is moral

autonomy. Moral autonomy, as Immanuel Kant wrote, is possible only

through reflection, self-determination and the courage not to

cooperate.

Moral autonomy is what the corporate state, with all its attacks on

liberal institutions and “leftist” professors, has really set out to

destroy. The corporate state holds up as our ideal what Adorno called

“the manipulative character.” The manipulative character has superb

organizational skills and the inability to have authentic human

experiences. He or she is an emotional cripple and driven by an

overvalued realism. The manipulative character is a systems manager.

He or she exclusively trained to sustain the corporate structure,

which is why our elites are wasting mind-blowing amounts of our money

on corporations like Goldman Sachs and AIG. “He makes a cult of

action, activity, of so-called efficiency as such which reappears in

the advertising image of the active person,” Adorno wrote of this

personality type. These manipulative characters, people like Lawrence

Summers, Henry Paulson, Robert Rubin, Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner,

AIG’s Edward Liddy and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, along with

most of our ruling class, have used corporate money and power to

determine the narrow parameters of the debate in our classrooms, on

the airwaves and in the halls of Congress while they looted the

country.

“It is especially difficult to fight against it,” warned Adorno,

“because those manipulative people, who actually are incapable of true

experience, for that very reason manifest an unresponsiveness that

associates them with certain mentally ill or psychotic characters,

namely schizoids.” END

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LOSS OF OUR MORAL COMPASS

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