Whether the remaining fragments of our moral capacity are to be obliterated by the compulsion to build driverless cars and colonize Mars or to be drowned in the fanaticism of Franklin Graham's Christian Nationalism the effect is the same, the destruction of language, the power of the word to tell about the distinction between the human and inhumane.
The Trump era--insipid, vulgar, full of lies--is enabled by the dominant motif of our civilization, its bleak logic of political necessity, that generates wars the world around and concentrates wealth that destroys this city and creates that one. A Trumpian world brings into sharper focus what is at stake. Language as the baseline for human expression is at-risk, words as the baseline for the honesty of our experience and the power of our imagination is under threat.
The Chronicle of Higher Education delves into the Silicon Valley necrosis in a Special Report citing the flagship campus of the University of Illinois and Assumption College in Worcester, Mass., where Illinois is pairing majors in the liberal arts-for example anthropology and linguistics-with computer science; and Assumption is eliminating traditional majors in favor of ones geared to practical skills. "Goodbye art history, geography and, yes, the classics. Hello, data analytics, actuarial science and concentrations in physical therapy," writes Frank Bruni,
"The University of Wisconsin at Superior announced that it was suspending nine majors; Wisconsin at Stevens Point recently proposed dropping 13 majors, including philosophy and English, to make room for programs with "clear career pathways." [Frank Bruni writing in "Aristotle's Wrongful Death," NY Times, May 26, 2018]
As the tech giants take-over our vocabulary, substituting data and technocratic ingenuity for words, the capacity for moral reasoning thickens and fogs over as in the global immigration crisis.
Take the "Windrush" scandal in Britain: Immigrants from the Caribbean were brought on a ship by that name to England legally after WW II to fill its labor shortage. They are now betrayed by PM Theresa May's strategy to make it harder for illegal immigrants to work and live in the UK. Because the Home Office destroyed their landing papers, after forty years the Caribbean legal immigrants have found themselves to have become illegal. Lost in a maze of bureaucratic paperwork.... "some of the rules are so complicated, and the financial cost of navigating them so high, that people are unable to discover or prove their status conclusively, no matter how hard they try." Harrowing stories have emerged of individuals being made homeless, jobless and stateless...., after they failed to produce proof they were never given in the first place....Not only has the politics become delusional....our entire way of understanding and talking about migration has gone awry, writes William Davies in the London Rview of Books of May 10th.
When home secretaries speak of 'illegal immigrants', they mostly mean people who entered the country legally. When they speak of 'borders', they often mean hospitals, homes, workplaces and register offices. As the experience of the 20th century warned, when language stops working, all manner of things are possible.
Just so, our own U. S. government's immigration ploys, implicitly supported by The Rev. Franklin Graham's Christian Nationalism and his Project Blitz perfectly reflect this emerging world of language as manipulation and chicanery.
Project Blitz is deliberately designed to throw the legislative process in local states into chaos by clogging their agendas. Americans United for Separation of Church and State have found that more than 70 bills before state legislatures appear to be based on Project Blitz templates or have similar objectives. Some of the bills are progressing rapidly.
An Oklahoma measure...awaiting the governor's signature, allows adoption and foster care agencies to discriminate on the basis of their own religious beliefs. Others, such as a Minnesota bill that would allow public schools to post "In God We Trust" signs on their walls, have provoked hostile debates in local and national media, which is in many cases the point of the exercise. [Katherine Stewart, NY Times, May 26, 2018]
These machinations are no side show to be ignored by those who still hold to an antique faith about God as inseperable from moral imperative. The battle to save words and the meaning of the Word is entering the late rounds. Examples abound:
The accelerating strangulation of individual rights in the workplace with the recent Supreme Court ruling blocking class actions by employees for the relief of their grievances now forces them to seek arbitration one by one. You can find the same requirement in the small print in most contracts we sign in daily life. You'll have to have a large pocket book to afford a legal action seeking relief from Macys because not only are no class actions permitted, you even agreed to this small print when you signed-on. Apparently meaningless words become demonic as they are turned against human rights and dignity.
It is not to be doubted that STEM-based education and a turn to the worship of totalitarian religion has great political utility. Only the kids who know what it's like to be shot at and the communal oriented religious and labor movements remain to resist. That's a large number, of course, but only if we animate it with words that say what we mean about truth and justice.
No comments:
Post a Comment