America Is in Need of a Moral Bailout

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."