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You Can't Become Rich In Your Pocket Until You Become Rich In Your Mind | ||||
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Unfortunately, something has got in the wayEDUCATION AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF DEMOCRACY The most serious shortcoming of our education system may be its failure to develop a foundation for democratic values. It does not address the attitudes, understandings or skills that are essential to democracy, especially in the contemporary world. We live in a consumer society. The purpose of the advertising industry is to arouse a desire for the advertised products and manipulate potential consumers into purchasing particular brand names. The sophistication, subtlety and success of this industry are impressive. (We spend more on advertising than we do on education.) Politics has adopted the mindset and techniques of this industry, cunningly manipulating voters to support particular candidates and platforms. Without the skills and habits of critical thinking, which can be developed in the course of education, we are vulnerable to subtle indoctrination. In societies of previous centuries, the opposition of competing interests, church versus state, monarch versus noble versus commoner, resulted in a balance of powers. It was often possible to find an interest both inclined and able to provide refuge for advocates of unpopular views. The elimination of these independent power centers has not been entirely positive. For where there is only one power, even if it is democratic, there is little protection for advocates of the politically incorrect. As Tocqueville warned, democracy threatens to impose a tyranny of public opinion. While tyranny of public opinion occasionally drove the Athenian democracy to violent excess and was responsible for the death of Socrates, both the nature and the problems of modern democracy are more complex. On the positive side, modern societies are heterogeneous. At least in theory, this offers refuge to advocates of unpopular views, provided some segment of the population finds those views attractive. But on the negative side, contemporary society provides the opportunity for subliminal indoctrination. We may fail to notice that we have been manipulated into our views, surreptitiously conscripted to fight the battle against the politically incorrect. Our preoccupation with private affairs and our lack of interest in society, which increase our vulnerability to such manipulation, would have been surprising to the classical Athenians. They assumed that citizens are naturally concerned with the health of their city-state and that they regard the vitality of their community as essential to their own well-being. There is reason to take this classical view seriously as a foundation for modern democracy. Yet our present understanding of democracy differs sharply from the classical view. In contrast to the ancient Greeks, modern democracy does not assume that citizens will, should, or need be interested in the common good. The British Empiricist foundation of democracy regards the matter from a different perspective. Locke started from a utilitarian view, assuming that people naturally seek to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. But a pre-government state of nature, free from constraints except for the moral obligation to preserve the peace and refrain from injuring others, is ill suited to a utilitarian enterprise. That is because some individuals may seek personal gain by violating the natural rights of others. A social contract in which people in the state of nature voluntarily transfer their natural rights to a government, able to prevent violations of rights, provides an environment more conducive to maximizing utility. This social contract does not require any commitment of citizens to the whole. Rather, these individuals seek only to increase their own utility. Still, according to Locke, this social contract is the basis of government. Because this social contract is among equally free people, ultimate sovereignty must lie with the people. Even though we regard this philosophy as the foundation for our own democracy, it is a fragile foundation, equally compatible with monarchy. Locke himself regarded a constitutional monarchy as the ideal form of government, with the executive and judicial powers in the hands of the monarch and the legislative power in the hands of an elected assembly. In general, justifying any form of government in terms of a state of nature and intrinsic human nature is suspect. How would Locke respond to Hobbes, who sees the state of nature as the universal war of every person against every other person? How would Hobbes or Locke respond to Rousseau? Rousseau paints a more benign picture of the state of nature and a more complex portrait of human nature. He maintains that our suffering and our artifice are caused by our alienation from the state of nature, supposedly the very state of nature from which Hobbes and Locke are trying to escape. How would Hobbes, Locke or Rousseau respond to Freud? Freud’s vision of a libidinous id rebelling against a repressive superego is equally incompatible with all their views. From a different culture, the Chinese ideograph for “person” shows two persons leaning on and supporting each other. This calls attention to yet a different aspect of ourselves, one more akin to the Greek perception of human nature than to those of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau or Freud. Such radically different portraits of human nature suggest it may depend on our environment. A laissez faire environment in which resources are scarce might fit a Hobbesian view of the state of nature as universal war. Any government, no matter how tyrannical, would be an improvement. But in an environment in which the economic survival of the individual is not constantly challenged, Aristotle’s view that man is essentially a political animal might provide a more viable foundation for political systems. Because modern industrial democracies provide social safety nets, our obsession with economic survival has diminished; so the Greek understanding of democracy may be more appropriate to modern society than either Hobbes’s view that any alternative is preferable to chaos or Locke’s more calculating social contract. Unfortunately, something has got in the way. Our obsession with survival has been replaced, not by an Aristotelian interest in the good of the community, but by the frenetic pursuit of small pleasures. This self-indulgence is the product of a culture that values — and teaches the value of — consumption over anything else. Is this an advance over classical Greece? The Greeks would not have thought so. They characterized a slave as a person concerned only with filling his belly. Our values have reduced us to the status of slaves — rich slaves, perhaps, but slaves nonetheless. It is not just food that is the item of concern, but our material possessions that increasingly define our lives. (They may define our lives, but they do not make us happier. Studies have shown that beyond a minimum threshold, wealth is irrelevant to happiness. Perversely, the pursuit of wealth often detracts from enterprises that would add more value and happiness to our lives.) In contrast to modern democracy, classical Athens was characterized by a culture that valued community and instilled a sense of responsibility to others. Citizens understood that public service creates value, even if it does not pay well. It is both an obligation and an honor. They also understood, to paraphrase Pericles, that a person unconcerned with the state of society around him is useless — no matter how much wealth he may amass. Such a culture reflected a view of community as extended family. It was easy to identify your own interest — and fate — with the community, and not just your family, clan or faction. That is why the early democracies were found in relatively small homogeneous communities. This sentiment may be necessary for the long-term survival of democracy, even — and especially — in the contemporary world. In its absence a democracy can too easily degenerate into a plutocracy or a corporatist state. But this sentiment is hardly to be found today. In modern industrial democracies there is a failure to value even immediate community. This failure that may be symptomatic of a deeper insularity, a spiritual malaise wrought, ironically, by the benefits of modern society. “The civilized being of the immense cities returns to the wild state — that is, to a state of isolation — because the social mechanism allows him to forget the need for community and to lose his feelings of connection to other people, which were once kept alive by his wants. Every improvement in the social mechanism renders useless certain acts, certain ways of feeling, certain attitudes toward communal life.” (Max Stirner, quoted in Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch, p. 263.) When our ties to family, friends and community had survival value, they were stronger. They also had spiritual value. Now that their survival value has disappeared, the ties themselves have weakened. While we have mastered techniques of socialization, these are superficial. We have become spiritually solitary beings. This isolation has impoverished us, even if our poverty is not reflected in monetary measures. While these issues have been addressed by religion, they are too often addressed within a narrow context. Religious communities are comprised solely of co-religionists and encourage the view that those outside the community are less deserving. This creates competing sub-communities and weakens the whole. The resulting factionalism can destroy democracies. That is why diversity, in religion or in other areas, presents such a challenge to democracy. It is why Rousseau advocated a single unifying civil religion to which all citizens must belong. How can we teach the value of heterogeneous community? How can we teach this without creating an opposition between those inside and those outside the community? How can we create a culture that prizes democratic values but is sensitive to the potential shortcomings of democracy? How can we create it without the indoctrination recommended by Plato (The Laws) and without the imposition of artificial homogeneities? This is not to belittle the warmth of the nuclear or extended family. It is rather to encourage extending these sentiments more widely, as Einstein had recommended. The notion that we are all mutually interrelated suggests an attitude that takes a step beyond Kant’s categorical imperative. At a societal level this attitude embodies the concept underlying Gandhi’s satyagraha, Reinhold Niebuhr’s nonviolent coercion, Martin Luther King’s militant nonviolence, and Daisaku Ikeda’s soft power. This attitude can generate a reasonable foundation for the resolution of intra- and international conflict, as well as a basis for peaceful, but concerted, opposition to real or perceived injustice. It can also deepen our commitment, presently a shallow one, to democracy. Because we are the oldest modern democracy and because we are a powerful country, it is easy to flatter ourselves. We pretend to have a vibrant democracy in which our citizens both understand and are committed to democratic values. It may be pretty to think so. But we do not merit such flattery. Studies show that most of our citizens, while they may pay lip service to democratic ideals, have little tolerance for the politically incorrect. It is here that education can play a vital role. Even though our present curriculum gives minimal attention to democratic values, work by social scientists (Lipset’s Political Man, among others) have identified a person’s level of education as the variable having the greatest positive impact on his commitment to democratic values. Imagine what could be accomplished with a betterfocused higher-quality education. This underlines the importance of education in the classical sense, and not mere training. We need more than mere lip service to democracy and democratic ideals. We need, in addition to a citizenry that truly values democratic government, an overriding morality that values all people, including future generations, as ends in themselves. We also need the skills and attitudes necessary to independent thought, the acceptance of diversity, the appreciation of community, and the autonomous commitment to value. These skills and attitudes are best taught within public education. Privatization driven by free market considerations would not satisfactorily address issues related to democracy, for these have no immediate economic impact. According to our economic paradigm, those values necessary to democracy are not values at all. If we aspire to bring up individuals concerned with more than feeding their bellies, we will have to transcend the laissez faire paradigm. If we are to transcend this paradigm, the quality and priorities of our education will be critical issues. It is not training that speaks to these issues, for training may be conducive to a slave mentality. Rather, it is those aspects that go beyond training, that teach critical reasoning, the value inherent in all people, the ability to make a difference. It is unfortunate, perilous, that we have given these matters so little attention. |
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