THE SCOURGE OF ILLITERACY IN AUTHORITARIAN TIMES

Abstract

The dark times that haunt current age are exemplified in monsters that have come to rule United States and who now dominate major political parties and other commanding political and economic institutions in United States. Their nightmarish reign of misery, violence, and disposability is also evident in their dominance of a formative culture and its at- tendant cultural apparatuses that produce a vast machinery of manufactured consent. This is a social formation that extends from mainstream broadcast media and Internet to a print culture, all of which embrace spectacle of violence, legitimate opinions over facts, and revel in a celebrity and consumer culture of ignorance and theatrics. Under reign of this normalized ideological architecture of alleged commonsense, literacy is now regarded with disdain, words are reduced to data, and science is confused with pseudo-science.Thinking is now regarded as an act of stupidity, and ignorance a virtue. All traces of critical thought appear only at margins of culture as ignorance becomes primary organizing principle of American society. For instance, two thirds of American public believe that creationism should be taught in schools and a majority of Republicans in Congress do not believe that climate change is caused by human activity, making U.S. laughing stock of world.1 Politicians endlessly lie knowing that public is addicted to exhortation, emotional outbursts, and sensationalism, all of which mimics celebrity culture. Image selling now entails lying on principle making it all easier for politics to dissolve into entertainment, pathology, and a unique brand of criminality. The corruption of both truth and politics is made all easer since American public have become habituated to overstimulation and live in an ever-accelerating overflow of information and images. Experience no longer has time to crystallize into mature and informed thought. Opinion now trumps reasoned and evidence based arguments. News has become entertainment and echoes reality rather than interrogating it. Popular culture revels in spectacles of shock and violence.2 Universities have become McDonalized and knowledge is now subject to practice of a fast education resulting curricula that resemble a fast-food menu.3 Unsurprisingly, education in larger culture has become a disimagination machine, a tool for legitimating ignorance, and it is central to formation of an authoritarian politics that has gutted any vestige of democracy from ideology, policies, and institutions that now control American society.I am not talking simply about kind of anti-intellectualism that theorists such a Richard Hofstadter, Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky, and more recently Susan Jacoby, have documented, however insightful their analyses might be. I am pointing to a more lethal form of illiteracy that is often ignored. Illiteracy is now a scourge and a political tool designed primarily to make war on language, meaning, thinking, and capacity for critical thought. Chris Hedges is right in stating that the emptiness of language is a gift to demagogues and corporations that saturate landscape with manipulated images and idiom of mass culture.4 Words such as love, trust, freedom, responsibility, and choice have been deformed by a market logic that narrows their meaning to either a relationship to a commodity or a reductive notion of self-interest. We don't love each other, we love our new car. We don't love each other, we love our new car. Instead of loving with courage, compassion, and desiring a more just society, we love a society in saturated in commodities. Freedom now means removing one's self from any sense of social responsibility so one can retreat into privatized orbits of self-indulgence. George Monbiot points to way in which freedom has been transformed under neoliberalism. He writes:The freedom that neoliberalism offers, which sounds so beguiling when expressed in general terms, turns out to mean freedom for pike, not for minnows. …