No democracy can survive without a formative culture that offers the public the opportunity to broaden their knowledge, skills, and values in ways that enhance and expand their capacities to think critically, imagine otherwise, create the conditions for shared responsibilities, and hold power accountable. A vibrant formative culture expands the critical educative nature of all cultural apparatuses - from schools to the old and new media - as part of a wider project of enabling people to be able to assume the role of critical agents, thinking subjects, and critically engaged citizens willing to learn how to govern rather than merely govern and to able to care for the other. Education becomes central to any viable notion of politics because it provides the tools to enable people, as C. Wright Mills reminded us, to translate private troubles into public concerns. Neoliberalism has created the conditions in which civic literacy and moral responsibility disappear. This Jeffersonian ideal of education providing the conditions to produce an informed citizenry is now under siege at every level of society in which knowledge is produced and circulated. Moral indifference now replaces social responsibility just as civic literacy is now replaced by the idiocy of celebrity culture, the anti-intellectualism embraced by a commodity based-culture, and the current utterly instrumental and repressive view of education. When civic literacy declines and the attacks on civic values intensify, the commanding institutions of society are divorced from matters of ethics, social responsibility and civic engagement. One consequence is the emergence of a kind of anti-politics in which the discourses of privatization, possessive individualism and crass materialism inundate every aspect of social life, making it easy for people to lose their faith in the critical function of civic education and the culture of an open and substantive democracy. As public spaces are transformed into spaces of consumption, the formative cultures that provide the preconditions for critical thought and agency crucial to any viable notion of democracy are eviscerated. Under such circumstances, civil society, along with critical thought, if not politics itself, cannot be sustained and become short-lived, fickle and ephemeral. At the same time, it becomes more difficult for individuals to comprehend what they have in common with others and what it means to be held together by shared responsibilities rather than by shared fears and competitive struggles.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Jun 2013 19:34:21 +0000
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