Thinking Dangerously in an Age of Political Betrayal
Thinking has become dangerous in the United States. The indications are everywhere. 1 2 3 4
One important function of dangerous thinking is that it foregrounds the responsibility of artists, intellectuals, academics and others who use it. Mapping the full range of how power is used and how it can be made accountable represents a productive pedagogical and political use of theory. Theorizing the political, economic, and cultural landscapes is central to any form of political activism and suggests that theory is like oxygen. That is, a valuable resource, which one has to become conscious of in order to realize how necessary it is to have it. Where we should take pause is when academic culture uses critical thought in the service of ideological purity and in doing so transforms pedagogy in to forms of poisonous indoctrination for students. Critical thought in this case ossifies from a practice to a form of political dogmatism. The cheerleads for casino capitalism hate critical theory and thought because they contain the possibility of politicizing everyday life and exposing those savage market driven ideologies, practices, and social relations that hide behind an appeal to commonsense. Both the fetishism of thinking and its dismissal are part of the same coin, the overall refusal to link conception and practice, agency and intervention, all aggravated by neoliberalism’s hatred of all things social and public.
While there is more than enough evidence to distrust the appeal to democracy, especially in light of how the term is utterly debased at all levels of mainstream politics and in the culture in general, I think it is a term with a long legacy of struggle and needs to be reclaimed and fought over rather than abandoned. Derrida is particularly instructive in his insistence on distinguishing between the reality and promise of democracy—a distinction that points to democracy as a signpost that anticipates something better and in doing so offers a political and moral referent to think and act otherwise. I also think that the left and liberals have lost sight of the power of democracy as a term that can bring together a variety of diverse struggles, thus providing a referent for moving beyond particularized struggles while not abandoning them.
As part of an appeal to radical democracy, I think it is crucial for educators and other cultural workers to find ways to talk about the social contract as a means of both invoking matters of the social and justice, or what John Rawls once called “the infrastructure of justice, and also affirming freedom as a constitutive part of the social, rather than in opposition to the social. Young people have put have raised serious questions about what a democracy looks like and who it might serve. Critically interrogating the meaning, reality, misappropriation and promise of democracy along with the necessary agents to have it come into fruition is an important political task.
The right-wing in its various guises have so devalued any democratic notion of the social and critical thought that it has become difficult to think in terms outside of the survival-of the-fittest ethic and culture of cruelty that now dominates reality TV, the bullies who set policy in Washington, and the sycophants who are media cheerleaders for Obama, the bankers, and corporate America. Fortunately, we have a number of brave souls in and out of the academy who refuse to give up the language of democracy–from Harvey Kay and Chris Hedges to the indomitable and courageous Bill Moyers.
Needless to say ideas without institutions in which they can be nurtured tend to fall to the margins of society. This is all the more reason to defend public and higher education and all of those public spheres where democratic ideas, values, and practices are taken seriously, and intellectual rigor becomes the norm rather than a side show. Think of the informed critical writing and interviews one can find in Truthout, Salon, Truthdig, Monthly Review Zine, “Democracy Now!”, ThomDispatch.com and a range of other online sites that refuse prescriptions and barking commands. These are the new cultural apparatuses of freedom for the 21st century and they need to be defended in the name of dangerous forms of thinking that are self-reflective, infused with democratic values, and expand the public good.
Critical thought and thinking dangerously are not just about reading texts and screen culture closely or for that matter using abstract models of language to explain the arc of history, politics, and human behavior. They are also about the frameworks we develop in terms of how we deal with power, treat one another, and develop a sense of compassion for others and the planet. I was so taken a few years ago by a similar sentiment reflected in a story that Jürgen Habermas told about being at Herbert Marcuse’s side as he was dying and being moved by Marcuse’s last few words “I know wherein our most basic value judgment are rooted–in compassion, in our sense of the suffering of others.” While it makes little sense to be trapped in a kind of ossified intellectual rigor, there is no excuse to believe that action uninformed by theory is anything but an expression of thoughtlessness.
We live in an era when conservatives and the financial elite collapse public concerns into private interests, define people largely as consumers, and consider everyone potential terrorists. Moreover, the apostles of neoliberal capitalism militarize and commodify the entire society, consider youth as nothing more than a source of profit, define education as training, undermine the welfare state in favor of a warfare state, and define democracy as synonymous with the language of capital. We live in a period that the late Gil Scott-Herron once called “winter in America.” As the forces of authoritarianism sweep over every major institution in America, the time for wide-spread resistance and radical democratic change has never been so urgent. Such change will not come unless the call for political and economic change is matched by a change in subjectivity, consciousness, and the desire for a better world. This is, in part, a theoretical challenge and supports individual and collective efforts to reconfiguring those public spheres where theory can emerge and be refined into modes of critique, understanding, and collective action. As a mode of resistance, dangerous thinking is the basis for a formative and pedagogical culture of questioning and politics that takes seriously how knowledge can become central to the practice of freedom, justice, and democratic change. At a time of lowered expectations, thinking dangerously raises the bar and points to making the impossible, once again, all the more possible.
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