[Marxism] Chris Hedges on the military-industrial-academic complex

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

America Is in Need of a Moral Bailout
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090323_america_is_in_need_of_a_moral_bailout/
Posted on Mar 23, 2009

By Chris Hedges

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.”

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