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Javier E

A Note on Sentimentality « Kenyon Review Blog - 0 views

www.kenyonreview.org/...a-note-on-sentimentality

sentimentality censorship cultural bias taste arts language

shared by Javier E on 10 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • One of the underdiscussed aspects of literary taste is the principle of exclusion: Not what is welcomed in a work, but what is disallowed.
  • In the world of contemporary fiction, one of the biggest no-no’s is what goes by the name “sentimentality.” It’s hard to perceive it for what it is, when you’re on the inside, but this is actually an arbitrary allergy on our part; it’s analogous to the Victorian one against “immorality” in literature.
  • You can’t assert on a factual basis that sentimentality is wrong or false, that it somehow misrepresents the human experience—because mushy-gushy moments are an actual part of real lived life
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  • “Good” artists instinctively exclude elements of what they know to be part of real life if they feel it may be “bad,” artistically speaking. The prudish Victorians regarded sexual language in fiction that way. Charles Dickens, obviously, knew that people have sex, but he would never spell such a thing out in a novel, even though he knew dirty language was part of real life (especially among the lowlifes he sometimes wrote about, like Fagin and company). It was “bad.” It may have been “bad” in a different sense—as in indecent, improper—but it was “bad” artistically as well, in that his sense of his audience kept him from being too graphic or explicit, either in scenes or dialogue. Meanwhile, Dickens was at liberty to engineer a scene in which, say, a tuberculosis-stricken orphan switches places at the guillotine with a virginal seamstress. Today, you can put all sorts of explicit sexual references in fiction, and the average critic won’t chide you for immorality or indecency; sentimentality will get you panned every time.
  • The critical temperament of an age shapes an age’s creativity not just in the supply-demand way, motivating writers to produce what is praised and valued by critics and readers. The critical temperament actually blocks off areas of life to create a portrayal of the world that fits its idea of the world. So a prudish era like the Victorian will target immorality—and a cynical or ironic era like ours will target sentimentality.
Javier E

Are the New 'Golden Age' TV Shows the New Novels? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-tv-shows-the-new-novels.html

novel tv shows dickens art literature

shared by Javier E on 03 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • it’s become common to hear variations on the idea that quality cable TV shows are the new novels.
  • Thomas Doherty, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, called the new genre “Arc TV” — because its stories follow long, complex arcs of development — and insisted that “at its best, the world of Arc TV is as exquisitely calibrated as the social matrix of a Henry James novel.”
  • Mixed feelings about literature — the desire to annex its virtues while simultaneously belittling them — are typical of our culture today, which doesn’t know quite how to deal with an art form, like the novel, that is both democratic and demanding.
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  • comparing even the best TV shows with Dickens, or Henry James, also suggests how much the novel can achieve that TV doesn’t even attempt.
  • Television gives us something that looks like a small world, made by a group of people who are themselves a small world. The novel gives us sounds pinned down by hieroglyphs, refracted flickerings inside an individual.
  • Spectacle and melodrama remain at the heart of TV, as they do with all arts that must reach a large audience in order to be economically viable. But it is voice, tone, the sense of the author’s mind at work, that are the essence of literature, and they exist in language, not in images.
  • At this point in our technological evolution, to read a novel is to engage in probably the second-largest single act of pleasure-based data transfer that can take place between two human beings, exceeded only by sex. Novels are characterized by their intimacy, which is extreme, by their scale, which is vast, and by their form, which is linguistic and synesthetic. The novel is a kinky beast.
  • Televised evil, for instance, almost always takes melodramatic form: Our anti-heroes are mobsters, meth dealers or terrorists. But this has nothing to do with the way we encounter evil in real life, which is why a character like Gilbert Osmond, in “The Portrait of a Lady,” is more chilling in his bullying egotism than Tony Soprano
  • television and the novel travel in opposite directions.
maddieireland334

Celebrity Scandals: Why do we crave sleaze? - 0 views

diigo.com/07h3br

psychology social media

shared by maddieireland334 on 29 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • maddieireland334 on 29 Mar 15
     
    Chaucer, Daniel Defoe and Charles Dickens have all played their part in the story. 'A cynical, mercenary, demagogic, corrupt press will produce in its time a people as base as itself.' Joseph Pulitzer. The UK boasts, if that's the right word, a very competitive newspaper market, probably the most competitive in the world.
Javier E

There Is No Theory of Everything - The New York Times - 3 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...ere-is-no-theory-of-everything

philosophy meaning of life scientism explanation elucidation

shared by Javier E on 15 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • fered by science and the kinds of humanistic description we find, say, in the novels of Dickens or Dostoevsky, or in the sociological writings of Erving Goffman and David Riesman. His quest was to try and clarify the occasions when a scientific explanation was appropriate and when it was not, and we need instead a humanistic remark.
  • His conviction was that our confusions about science and the humanities had wide-ranging and malign societal consequences.
  • However efficacious the blue pill might be, in this instance the doctor’s causal diagnosis is the wrong one. What is required is for you to be able to talk, to feel that someone understands your problems and perhaps can offer some insight or even suggestions on how you might move forward in your life. This, one imagines, is why people go into therapy.
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  • On a ferry you want a blue pill that is going to alleviate the symptoms of seasickness and make you feel better.
  • Frank’s point is that our society is deeply confused by the occasions when a blue pill is required and not required, or when we need a causal explanation and when we need a further description, clarification or elucidation. We tend to get muddled and imagine that one kind of explanation (usually the causal one) is appropriate in all occasions when it is not.
  • What is in play here is the classical distinction made by Max Weber between explanation and clarification, between causal or causal-sounding hypotheses and interpretation. Weber’s idea is that natural phenomena require causal explanation, of the kind given by physics, say, whereas social phenomena require elucidation — richer, more expressive descriptions.
  • In Frank’s view, one major task of philosophy is help us get clear on this distinction and to provide the right response at the right time. This, of course, requires judgment, which is no easy thing to teach.
  • Frank’s point, which is still hugely important, is that there is no theory of everything, nor should there be. There is a gap between nature and society. The mistake, for which scientism is the name, is the belief that this gap can or should be filled.
  • One huge problem with scientism is that it invites, as an almost allergic reaction, the total rejection of science. As we know to our cost, we witness this every day with climate change deniers, flat-earthers and religious fundamentalists
  • in order to confront the challenge of obscurantism, we do not simply need to run into the arms of scientism. What is needed is a clearer overview of the occasions when a scientific remark is appropriate and when we need something else, the kind of elucidation we find in stories, poetry or indeed when we watch a movie
  • People often wonder why there appears to be no progress in philosophy, unlike in natural science, and why it is that after some three millenniums of philosophical activity no dramatic changes seem to have been made to the questions philosophers ask. The reason is because people keep asking the same questions and perplexed by the same difficulties
  • Wittgenstein puts the point rather directly: “Philosophy hasn’t made any progress? If somebody scratches the spot where he has an itch, do we have to see some progress?”
  • Philosophy scratches at the various itches we have, not in order that we might find some cure for what ails us, but in order to scratch in the right place and begin to understand why we engage in such apparently irritating activity.
  • This is one way of approaching the question of life’s meaning. Human beings have been asking the same kinds of questions for millenniums and this is not an error. It testifies to the fact that human being are rightly perplexed by their lives. The mistake is to believe that there is an answer to the question of life’s meaning
  • The point, then, is not to seek an answer to the meaning of life, but to continue to ask the question.
  • We don’t need an answer to the question of life’s meaning, just as we don’t need a theory of everything. What we need are multifarious descriptions of many things, further descriptions of phenomena that change the aspect under which they are seen, that light them up and let us see them anew
Javier E

Harold Bloom Is Dead. But His 'Rage for Reading' Is Undiminished. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...book-of-life-harold-bloom.html

books classics reading critic language knowledge education literature

shared by Javier E on 23 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • It’s a series of meditations on what Bloom believes to be the most important novels we have, and it takes for granted that its readers already know the books under consideration; in other words, that they have already absorbed “the canon,” and are eager to reconsider it later in their lives.
  • A not atypical, almost throwaway passage for you to test the waters on: “Tolstoy, as befits the writer since Shakespeare who most has the art of the actual, combines in his representational praxis the incompatible powers of Homer and the Yahwist.” This is not Bloom showing off; it’s the way Bloom thinks and proceeds.
  • Apart from his novelists, his frame of reference rests on Shakespeare above all others, Homer, Chaucer, Dante, Montaigne, Emerson, Dr. Johnson (the “shrewdest of all literary critics”), Blake, Wordsworth, Whitman (for him, the central American writer of the 19th century), Wallace Stevens, Freud
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  • Among the novelists, Cervantes, Tolstoy (supreme), Melville, Austen, Proust, Joyce.
  • He is inevitably at his strongest when dealing with those writers he cares most about. With Jane Austen, for one. And, above all, with Tolstoy:
  • As for Dickens, whose “David Copperfield” was a direct influence on Tolstoy, to Bloom his greatest achievement is “Bleak House”
  • He pairs it with Dickens’s final complete novel, “Our Mutual Friend,” a book I care for so extravagantly that I’ve read it three times
  • The two works in which Bloom is most fully invested are “Moby-Dick” (40 pages) and “Ulysses” (54)
  • He chooses to give room to not one but two of Le Guin’s novels, “The Left Hand of Darkness” and “The Dispossessed,”
Javier E

Technopoly-Chs. 9,10--Scientism, the great symbol drain - 0 views

scientism science social science narrative objectivity advertising morality authority coherence Postman book notes

shared by Javier E on 02 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • By Scientism, I mean three interrelated ideas that, taken together, stand as one of the pillars of Technopoly.
  • The first and indispensable idea is, as noted, that the methods of the natural sciences can be applied to the study of human behavior. This idea is the backbone of much of psychology and sociology as practiced at least in America, and largely accounts for the fact that social science, to quote F. A. Hayek, "has cont~ibuted scarcely anything to our understanding of social phenomena." 2
  • The second idea is, as also noted, that social science generates specific principles which can be used to organize society on a rational and humane basis. This implies that technical meansmostly "invisible technologies" supervised by experts-can be designed to control human behavior and set it on the proper course.
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  • The third idea is that faith in science can serve as a comprehensive belief system that gives meaning to life, as well. as a sense of well-being, morality, and even immortality.
  • the spirit behind this scientific ideal inspired several men to believe that the reliable and predictable knowledge that could be obtained about stars and atoms could also be obtained about human behavior.
  • Among the best known of these early "social scientists" were Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, Prosper Enfantin, and, of course, Auguste Comte.
  • They held in common two beliefs to which T echnopoly is deeply indebted: that the natural sciences provide a method to unlock the secrets of both the human heart and the direction of social life; that society can be rationally and humanely reorganized according to principles that social science will uncover. It is with these men that the idea of "social engineering" begins and the seeds of Scientism are planted.
  • Information produced by counting may sometimes be valuable in helping a person get an idea, or, even more so, in providing support for an idea. But the mere activity of counting does not make science.
  • Nor does observing th_ings, though it is sometimes said that if one is empirical, one is scientific. To be empirical means to look at things before drawing conclusions. Everyone, therefore, is an empiricist, with the possible exception of paranoid schizophrenics.
  • What we may call science, then, is the quest to find the immutable and universal laws that govern processes, presuming that there are cause-and-effect relations among these processes. It follows that the quest to understand human behavior and feeling can in no sense except the most trivial be called science.
  • Scientists do strive to be empirical and where possible precise, but it is also basic to their enterprise that they maintain a high degree of objectivity, which means that they study things independently of what people think or do about them.
  • I do not say, incidentally, that the Oedipus complex and God do not exist. Nor do I say that to believe in them is harmful-far from it. I say only that, there being no tests that could, in principle, show them to be false, they fall outside the purview Scientism 151 of science, as do almost all theories that make up the content of "social science."
  • in the nineteenth centu~, novelists provided us with most of the powerful metaphors and images of our culture.
  • This fact relieves the scientist of inquiring into their values and motivations and for this reason alone separates science from what is called social science, consigning the methodology of the latter (to quote Gunnar Myrdal) to the status of the "metaphysical and pseudo-objective." 3
  • The status of social-science methods is further reduced by the fact that there are almost no experiments that will reveal a social-science theory to be false.
  • et us further suppose that Milgram had found that 100 percent of his 1 subjecl:s did what they were told, with or without Hannah Arendt. And now let us suppose that I tell you a story of a Scientism 153 group of people who in some real situation refused to comply with the orders of a legitimate authority-let us say, the Danes who in the face of Nazi occupation helped nine thousand Jews escape to Sweden. Would you say to me that this cannot be so because Milgram' s study proves otherwise? Or would you say that this overturns Milgram's work? Perhaps you would say that the Danish response is not relevant, since the Danes did not regard the Nazi occupation as constituting legitimate autho!ity. But then, how would we explain the cooperative response to Nazi authority of the French, the Poles, and the Lithuanians? I think you would say none of these things, because Milgram' s experiment qoes not confirm or falsify any theory that might be said to postulate a law of human nature. His study-which, incidentally, I find both fascinating and terrifying-is not science. It is something else entirely.
  • Freud, could not imagine how the book could be judged exemplary: it was science or it was nothing. Well, of course, Freud was wrong. His work is exemplary-indeed, monumental-but scarcely anyone believes today that Freud was doing science, any more than educated people believe that Marx was doing science, or Max Weber or Lewis Mumford or Bruno Bettelheim or Carl Jung or Margaret Mead or Arnold Toynbee. What these people were doing-and Stanley Milgram was doing-is documenting the behavior and feelings of people as they confront problems posed by their culture.
  • the stories of social r~searchers are much closer in structure and purpose to what is called imaginative literature; that is to say, both a social researcher and a novelist give unique interpretations to a set of human events and support their interpretations with examples in various forms. Their interpretations cannot be proved or disproved but will draw their appeal from the power of their language, the depth of their explanations, the relevance of their examples, and the credibility of their themes.
  • And all of this has, in both cases, an identifiable moral purpose.
  • The words "true" and "false" do not apply here in the sense that they are used in mathematics or science. For there is nothing universally and irrevocably true or false about these interpretations. There are no critical tests to confirm or falsify them. There are no natural laws from which they are derived. They are bound by time, by situation, and above all by the cultural prejudices of the researcher or writer.
  • Both the novelist and the social researcher construct their stories by the use of archetypes and metaphors.
  • Cervantes, for example, gave us the enduring archetype of the incurable dreamer and idealist in Don Quixote. The social historian Marx gave us the archetype of the ruthless and conspiring, though nameless, capitalist. Flaubert gave us the repressed b~urgeois romantic in Emma Bovary. And Margaret Mead gave us the carefree, guiltless Samoan adolescent. Kafka gave us the alienated urbanite driven to self-loathing. And Max Weber gave us hardworking men driven by a mythology he called the Protestant Ethic. Dostoevsky gave us the egomaniac redeemed by love and religious fervor. And B. F. Skinner gave us the automaton redeemed by a benign technology.
  • Why do such social researchers tell their stories? Essentially for didactic and moralistic purposes. These men and women tell their stories for the same reason the Buddha, Confucius, Hillel, and Jesus told their stories (and for the same reason D. H. Lawrence told his).
  • Moreover, in their quest for objectivity, scientists proceed on the assumption that the objects they study are indifferent to the fact that they are being studied.
  • If, indeed, the price of civilization is repressed sexuality, it was not Sigmund Freud who discovered it. If the consciousness of people is formed by their material circumstances, it was not Marx who discovered it. If the medium is the message, it was not McLuhan who discovered it. They have merely retold ancient stories in a modem style.
  • Unlike science, social research never discovers anything. It only rediscovers what people once were told and need to be told again.
  • Only in knowing ~omething of the reasons why they advocated education can we make sense of the means they suggest. But to understand their reas.ons we must also understand the narratives that governed their view of the world. By narrative, I mean a story of human history that gives meaning to the past, explains the present, and provides guidance for the future.
  • In Technopoly, it is not Scientism 159 enough to say, it is immoral and degrading to allow people to be homeless. You cannot get anywhere by asking a judge, a politician, or a bureaucrat to r~ad Les Miserables or Nana or, indeed, the New Testament. Y 01.i must show that statistics have produced data revealing the homeless to be unhappy and to be a drain on the economy. Neither Dostoevsky nor Freud, Dickens nor Weber, Twain nor Marx, is now a dispenser of legitimate knowledge. They are interesting; they are ''.worth reading"; they are artifacts of our past. But as for "truth," we must tum to "science."
  • In Technopoly, it is not enough for social research to rediscover ancient truths or to comment on and criticize the moral behavior of people. In T echnopoly, it is an insult to call someone a "moralizer." Nor is it sufficient for social research to put forward metaphors, images, and ideas that can help people live with some measure of understanding and dignity.
  • Such a program lacks the aura of certain knowledge that only science can provide. It becomes necessary, then, to transform psychology, sociology, and anthropology into "sciences," in which humanity itself becomes an object, much like plants, planets, or ice cubes.
  • That is why the commonplaces that people fear death and that children who come from stable families valuing scholarship will do well in school must be announced as "discoveries" of scientific enterprise. In this way, social resear~hers can see themselves, and can be seen, as scientists, researchers without bias or values, unburdened by mere opinion. In this way, social policies can be claimed to rest on objectively determined facts.
  • given the psychological, social, and material benefits that attach to the label "scientist," it is not hard to see why social researchers should find it hard to give it up.
  • Our social "s'cientists" have from the beginning been less tender of conscience, or less rigorous in their views of science, or perhaps just more confused about the questions their procedures can answer and those they cannot. In any case, they have not been squeamish about imputing to their "discoveries" and the rigor of their procedures the power to direct us in how we ought rightly to behave.
  • It is less easy to see why the rest of us have so willingly, even eagerly, cooperated in perpetuating the same illusion.
  • When the new technologies and techniques and spirit of men like Galileo, Newton, and Bacon laid the foundations of natural science, they also discredited the authority of earlier accounts of the physical world, as found, for example, in the great tale of Genesis. By calling into question the truth of such accounts in one realm, science undermined the whole edifice of belief in sacred stories and ultimately swept away with it the source to which most humans had looked for moral authority. It is not too much to say, I think, that the desacralized world has been searching for an alternative source of moral authority ever since.
  • We welcome them gladly, and the claim explicitly made or implied, because we need so desperately to find some source outside the frail and shaky judgments of mortals like ourselves to authorize our moral decisions and behavior. And outside of the authority of brute force, which can scarcely be called moral, we seem to have little left but the authority of procedures.
  • It is not merely the misapplication of techniques such as quantification to questions where numbers have nothing to say; not merely the confusion of the material and social realms of human experience; not merely the claim of social researchers to be applying the aims and procedures of natural scien\:e to the human world.
  • This, then, is what I mean by Scientism.
  • It is the desperate hope, and wish, and ultimately the illusory belief that some standardized set of procedures called "science" can provide us with an unimpeachable source of moral authority, a suprahuman basis for answers to questions like "What is life, and when, and why?" "Why is death, and suffering?" 'What is right and wrong to do?" "What are good and evil ends?" "How ought we to think and feel and behave?
  • Science can tell us when a heart begins to beat, or movement begins, or what are the statistics on the survival of neonates of different gestational ages outside the womb. But science has no more authority than you do or I do to establish such criteria as the "true" definition of "life" or of human state or of personhood.
  • Social research can tell us how some people behave in the presence of what they believe to be legitimate authority. But it cannot tell us when authority is "legitimate" and when not, or how we must decide, or when it may be right or wrong to obey.
  • To ask of science, or expect of science, or accept unchallenged from science the answers to such questions is Scientism. And it is Technopoly's grand illusion.
  • In the institutional form it has taken in the United States, advertising is a symptom of a world-view 'that sees tradition as an obstacle to its claims. There can, of course, be no functioning sense of tradition without a measure of respect for symbols. Tradition is, in fact, nothing but the acknowledgment of the authority of symbols and the relevance of the narratives that gave birth to them. With the erosion of symbols there follows a loss of narrative, which is one of the most debilitating consequences of Technopoly' s power.
  • What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer. And so the balance of business expenditures shifts from product research to market research, which meahs orienting business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable. The business of business becomes pseudo-therapy; the consumer, a patient reassl.,lred by psychodramas.
  • At the moment, 1t 1s considered necessary to introduce computers to the classroom, as it once was thought necessary to bring closed-circuit television and film to the classroom. To the question "Why should we do this?" the answer is: "To make learning more efficient and more interesting." Such an answer is considered entirely adequate, since in T ~chnopoly efficiency and interest need no justification. It is, therefore, usually not noticed that this answer does not address the question "What is learning for?"
  • What this means is that somewhere near the core of Technopoly is a vast industry with license to use all available symbols to further the interests of commerce, by devouring the psyches of consumers.
  • In the twentieth century, such metaphors and images have come largely from the pens of social historians and researchers. ·Think of John Dewey, William James, Erik Erikson, Alfred Kinsey, Thorstein Veblen, Margaret Mead, Lewis Mumford, B. F. Skinner, Carl Rogers, Marshall McLuhan, Barbara Tuchman, Noam Chomsky, Robert Coles, even Stanley Milgram, and you must acknowledge that our ideas of what we are like and what kind of country we live in come from their stories to a far greater extent than from the stories of our most renowned novelists.
  • social idea that must be advanced through education.
  • Confucius advocated teaching "the Way" because in tradition he saw the best hope for social order. As our first systematic fascist, Plato wished education to produce philosopher kings. Cicero argued that education must free the student from the tyranny of the present. Jefferson thought the purpose of education is to teach the young how to protect their liberties. Rousseau wished education to free the young from the unnatural constraints of a wicked and arbitrary social order. And among John Dewey's aims was to help the student function without certainty in a world of constant change and puzzling· ambiguities.
  • The point is that cultures must have narratives and will find them where they will, even if they lead to catastrophe. The alternative is to live without meaning, the ultimate negation of life itself.
  • It is also to the point to say that each narrative is given its form and its emotional texture through a cluster of symbols that call for respect and allegiance, even devotion.
  • by definition, there can be no education philosophy that does not address what learning is for. Confucius, Plato, Quintilian, Cicero, Comenius, Erasmus, Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, Russell, Montessori, Whitehead, and Dewey--each believed that there was some transcendent political, spiritual, or
  • The importance of the American Constitution is largely in its function as a symbol of the story of our origins. It is our political equivalent of Genesis. To mock it, to• ignore it, to circwnvent it is to declare the irrelevance of the story of the United States as a moral light unto the world. In like fashion, the Statue of Liberty is the key symbol of the story of America as the natural home of the teeming masses, from anywhere, yearning to be free.
  • There are those who believe--as did the great historian Arnold Toynbee-that without a comprehensive religious narrative at its center a culture must decline. Perhaps. There are, after all, other sources-mythology, politics, philosophy, and science; for example--but it is certain that no culture can flourish without narratives of transcendent orjgin and power.
  • This does not mean that the mere existence of such a narrative ensures a culture's stability and strength. There are destructive narratives. A narrative provides meaning, not necessarily survival-as, for example, the story provided by Adolf Hitler to the German nation in t:he 1930s.
  • What story does American education wish to tell now? In a growing Technopoly, what do we believe education is for?
  • The answers are discouraging, and one of. them can be inferred from any television commercial urging the young to stay in school. The commercial will either imply or state explicitly that education will help the persevering student to get a ·good job. And that's it. Well, not quite. There is also the idea that we educate ourselves to compete with the Japanese or the Germans in an economic struggle to be number one.
  • Young men, for example, will learn how to make lay-up shots when they play basketball. To be able to make them is part of the The Great Symbol Drain 177 definition of what good players are. But they do not play basketball for that purpose. There is usually a broader, deeper, and more meaningful reason for wanting to play-to assert their manhood, to please their fathers, to be acceptable to their peers, even for the sheer aesthetic pleasure of the game itself. What you have to do to be a success must be addressed only after you have found a reason to be successful.
  • Bloom's solution is that we go back to the basics of Western thought.
  • He wants us to teach our students what Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Saint Augustine, and other luminaries have had to say on the great ethical and epistemological questions. He believes that by acquainting themselves with great books our students will acquire a moral and intellectual foundation that will give meaning and texture to their lives.
  • Hirsch's encyclopedic list is not a solution but a description of the problem of information glut. It is therefore essentially incoherent. But it also confuses a consequence of education with a purpose. Hirsch attempted to answer the question "What is an educated person?" He left unanswered the question "What is an education for?"
  • Those who reject Bloom's idea have offered several arguments against it. The first is that such a purpose for education is elitist: the mass of students would not find the great story of
  • Western civilization inspiring, are too deeply alienated from the past to find it so, and would therefore have difficulty connecting the "best that has been thought and said" to their own struggles to find q1eaning in their lives.
  • A second argument, coming from what is called a "leftist" perspective, is even more discouraging. In a sense, it offers a definition of what is meant by elitism. It asserts that the "story of Western civilization" is a partial, biased, and even oppressive one. It is not the story of blacks, American Indians, Hispanics, women, homosexuals-of any people who are not white heterosexual males of Judea-Christian heritage. This claim denies that there is or can be a national culture, a narrative of organizing power and inspiring symbols which all citizens can identify with and draw sustenance from. If this is true, it means nothing less than that our national symbols have been drained of their power to unite, and that education must become a tribal affair; that is, each subculture must find its own story and symbols, and use them as the moral basis of education.
  • nto this void comes the Technopoly story, with its emphasis on progress without limits, rights without responsibilities, and technology without cost. The T echnopoly story is without a moral center. It puts in its place efficiency, interest, and economic advance. It promises heaven on earth through the conveniences of technological progress. It casts aside all traditional narratives and symbols that· suggest stability and orderliness, and tells, instead, of a life of skills, technical expertise, and the ecstasy of consumption. Its purpose is to produce functionaries for an ongoing Technopoly.
  • It answers Bloom by saying that the story of Western civilization is irrelevant; it answers the political left by saying there is indeed a common culture whose name is T echnopoly and whose key symbol is now the computer, toward which there must be neither irreverence nor blasphemy. It even answers Hirsch by saying that there are items on his list that, if thought about too deeply and taken too seriously, will interfere with the progress of technology.
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