>I worry. Do we place too much faith in the salutary, not to say
>panaceac, effects of 'civil talk', i.e. of just sitting down and
>talking with our adversaries? It seems such a middle-class
>parenting strategy, perhaps too deeply built into our habitus for
>us to be adequately critical of its limitations? Deeper still,
>our rejection of violence or force as an element in personal and
>social transformation. Do our moral ideals neutralize us as
>effective political agents? is that their social-historical
>function?
For his dissertation study in education psychology (Harvard),
Sali Abrahams compared the discourse of South African Black
and U.S. Black and White/ rich and poor adolescents on a series of
values-related questions; he rated answers on a scale of
moral reasoning that he developed himself, using Kohlberg,
Gilligan, and sociocultural theories of development.
I didn't actually read the study, and can't evaluate
it here, but the results Sali claims sound plausible to me.
The South African Black adolescents outscored all the others on awareness
of themselves vis a vis others and vis a vis a larger world. Their
"heros" were political figures, in contrast to the sports and popular
culture heros of adolescents in this country. Their representations of
the heroic, their own ambitions, their sense of moral purpose, were
based on sociocultural analyses, issues of social justice,
rather than the aggrandized/fetishized individual.
It's interesting that violence and force have been a factor in the
everyday lives of poor black adolescents in both this country and
S. Africa; but, acc. to this study, they figured as factors in
positive personal and social transformation only in S. Africa,
where the youth saw themselves as contributing alongside adults
to an urgent & collective project. The project of social justice
has been defined, in the South African context, by deeply moral
reasoning. Does deeply moral reasoning need senseless
violence as a ground?
And in the absence of deeply moral reasoning, we have the bourgeois
notion of civil discourse.
- Judy
Judy Diamondstone
Graduate School of Education
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
10 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08903
diamonju who-is-at rci.rutgers.edu
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