What I love about Phil Agre's writings is that they are passionate and
finely reasoned at the same time, that he cares about the right things,
and that he has a state-of-the-art bullshit detector. I emailed Phil
begging him to turn this into an op-ed piece for a big newspaper but he
said he quailed at the thought of dealing with the hassles an editor would
put him through. He has a good audience with RRE, but I'd still like to
see this piece end up on a lot of refrigerators and community bulletin
boards where it will be read by people who don't subscribe to esoteric
email lists. Especially young people need to see cynical manipulative crap
identified for what it is so that they don't get confused and lose hope.
I think Phil's policy is that you may forward RRE posts without permission
for non-commercial purposes ONLY, but INCLUDE EMAIL HEADER as below. All
rights rest with the author, Phil Agre. If you want to publish it in any
other way please negotiate with him, his email address is in the header.
Also this is part of a longer piece, I am just posting the first half of
it. The full text can be found in the Red Rock Eater archives on
http://communication.ucsd.edu/pagre/rre.html
Judith Weiss
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Date: Fri, 8 Nov 1996 20:50:15 -0800 (PST)
>From: Phil Agre <pagre@weber.ucsd.edu>
>To: rre@weber.ucsd.edu
>Subject: notes
>X-URL: http://communication.ucsd.edu/pagre/rre.html
>A while back, I came across an op-ed column addressed to teen-agers which
>purported to explain certain points about life. The first of these points
>was, and I quote,
>
> Life's not fair. Get used to it.
>
>All of the points were like this: each of them presupposed that their
>reader held a putatively naive or self-serving opinion about life,
>and they proposed to set the reader straight in a remarkably nasty and
>disrespectful way.
>
>I view this article as part of a larger and very depressing trend: the
>return of authoritarian culture. The purpose of authoritarian culture
>is to instill a mindless obedience to authority. It employs two basic
>methods. The first of these methods is stereotype: one's normal human
>tendencies to think critically and resist oppression are caricatured
>and ridiculed; endless stories are adduced to portray people who employ
>these innate faculties in a bad light; and labels such as "whining" and
>"complaining" and "victim" are liberally applied.
>
>The second method of authoritarian culture is the attempt to naturalize
>authority by hiding it behind large abstractions. In this case, the
>abstraction in question is "life". Having established that "life" is
>unfair, it becomes possible to label any protest against unfairness as
>a demand that the whole world conform to one's own immature whims. These
>teenagers are counseled to "get used to it" and to reconcile themselves to
>a life of being treated unfairly. No liberal nostrums about self-esteem
>here: this columnist's message was that nobody deserves to be treated with
>respect, and that it's arrogant to think otherwise.
>
>Another example of authoritarian culture is the contemporary American
>use of the word "accountability". Accountability, we are told, means
>"accepting the consequences of your actions". Everyone is supposed
>to "be accountable", and to embrace this condition as a concomitant of
>responsible adulthood. Authority here is hidden through a grammatical
>device. In normal usage, the word "accountable" takes a complement,
>as in "accountable to ...". When the complement is omitted, the human
>authority is displaced into the woodwork, and obedience to that authority
>is conflated with a variety of quite different conditions: responsibility,
>honesty, etc. No reasonable person has a problem with the idea of being
>responsible for one's actions. But nobody who believes in a democratic
>society can accept the idea that any person has absolute authority to
>judge any other person's actions, and hand down "consequences", without
>likewise being constrained by norms of responsibility, which in the old
>days were called "justice" and -- yes, that's right -- "fairness".
>
>It is not surprising when people in authority employ such language. But
>authoritarian culture requires more: it requires that people internalize
>this language, applying it to themselves and dissociating all desire for
>justice and fair treatment. We all have our failings, but we we cannot
>have a decent society unless everyone is treated with respect and judged
>with a reasonable regard for proportionality and due process. Healthy
>people don't just "get used to" injustice. Quite the contrary, genuine
>maturity begins with the skill and discipline of helping people organize
>to identify and overcome injustice. Shame and ridicule are the least
>violent of the tools that have historically been employed to condemn
>people to passivity. But they are also the most basic and, in the end,
>the most destructive.
>
>The basic method for promoting an extreme position is to harp on the evils
>of the opposite extreme. Authoritarian culture thus lives in a symbiotic
>union with its evil twin, libertarian culture, whose sole value is freedom
>from constraint. The symbiosis between authoritarian and libertarian
>culture has many facets:
>
> * Authoritarian culture holds that people are essentially bad and that
>nothing can be done about this; libertarian culture holds that people
>are essentially good and that nothing needs to be done to encourage this.
>
> * Authoritarian culture imposes constraint without respect for individual
>dignity; libertarian culture holds that individual dignity consists in the
>absence of constraint.
>
> * Authoritarian culture holds that people are innately irresponsible;
>libertarian culture denounces responsibility as an authoritarian myth.
>
> * Authoritarian culture and libertarian culture both conflate feelings
>with action, authoritarian culture to repress them both and libertarian
>culture to license them both.
>
> * Authoritarian culture crushes the spirit and eventually gives rise to
>an immature impulse toward libertarian culture; libertarian culture stands
>indifferent as great industries arise to support an epidemic of addiction,
>which then gives rise to a fearful impulse toward authoritarian culture.
>
>What authoritarian and libertarian have in common is their claim to follow
>a simple, objective rule that lies beyond human interpretation: the rule
>of order or the rule of freedom. The terra incognita that lies beyond
>the dysfunctionality of both authoritarian and libertarian culture is
>democratic culture: the form of culture within which everyone takes
>responsibility for living together constructively. Democratic culture
>is not just a matter of voting. It is a set of values, and it is a
>set of skills. Some of these skills are organizational: you can't have
>democratic culture unless people know, deep down in their bones, how to
>hold a productive consensus-based meeting. Other skills are emotional:
>you can't have democratic culture unless people can tell the difference
>between resisting oppression and acting out resentment, between organizing
>and polarizing, between freedom and irresponsibility, between pleasure and
>addiction, between discipline and shame, between personal boundaries and
>passive aggression.
>
>The sixties have left an ambiguous legacy because they blurred together
>two very distinct impulses: countercultural libertarianism, for which I
>don't have an awful lot of respect, and democratic experimentation, for
>which I have a great deal of respect. Recreational drug use, for example,
>is stupid and boring. But the democratic organizing traditions that arose
>and flourished in the sixties were an important cultural contribution, and
>it's sad to see them forgotten. The rise of authoritarian culture depends
>on this forgetting, and on crushing at an early age the hopes for human
>dignity with which all of us are born.
>
>Why isn't this obvious? One reason is that the American conservative
>movement originated as a marriage of convenience between authoritarians
>and libertarians, both of whom portrayed themselves as opponents of
>something called "government". But opposition to government tout court
>is opposition to democracy. We have been inundated in recent years by
>rhetoric that seeks to make democracy literally unthinkable by conflating
>all types of government, whether democratic or totalitarian, into a
>single stereotype of oppression. This stereotype requires its proponents
>to construct themselves as powerless victims, and it licenses all sorts
>of whining and complaint by the very people who make a big point of
>censuring whining and complaint by others. By treating the institutions
>of a democratic society as inherently beyond control, it also licenses
>an abdication of personal responsibility -- the responsibility to learn,
>practice, and teach the values and skills of a democratic society.
.... He then goes on to particularize this set of issues to the growth of
the Internet.
--jsweiss@mail.utexas.edu (Judith Weiss)
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>