My principal concern was not with whether or not we should try to help
students become more empowered in the world as it is ... that doesn't seem
such an immoral agenda ... and I was not imagining that doing so wouldn't
entail enculturating them into some forms of practice I'd still like to see
changed ... that's the price _they_ have to pay for power in an unjust
world (and which many seem willing to pay) ... my concern was rather our
willingness to accept the consequences for US.
Just what kinds of and how much fundamental change in our own cultural
values and practices are we prepared to accept as OUR price for both
helping them, and ultimately helping ourselves, toward a more just world?
We can't change their paths without changing ours; hybridity only works as
a two-way, reciprocal process of vulnerability to being changed. Since I
tend to a dialectical model of such things, I also believe that it is NOT
simply a matter of their adopting some of our practices and us adopting
some of theirs ... instead we both come to new forms of practices, _ones
that will be in basic conflict in some unpredictable respects with our
present values and practices_ (and theirs).
The price we have to pay is not just in our time and treasure, nor even in
our own measure of power, control, and relative invulnerability ... it is
in our most basic values and most valued practices. I don't think this is
widely thought through.
Strangely, the people who may understand these risks and dilemmas best
(intuitively if not theoretically) are conservatives. They are quite sure
that any substantial change in the structural balances of power between
dominant groups and Others is likely to lead to the demise of traditional
key values and the practices legitimated by them. They see us
'progressives' as fools playing with fire, more likely to burn the house
down than to warm a few cold guests down in the basement. We and the
conservatives SHARE most of these traditional key values (up to a point)
... how could we not, we proceed more or less from the same cultural
traditions.
Ask yourself: Do I really believe that progressive social change will lead
to a world that will not accept some of my own currently most deeply
regarded values and ideals? or to a world in which I will be profoundly
uncomfortable and from which I will feel basically alienated in many respects?
What is the alternative belief? that we already have the final answers to
basic human values issues? that what we really want is to make Them just
like us (or slightly better by the same criteria)? that it is possible and
necessary for them to change but not for us to do so?
I often hear a pragmatic argument which goes like this:
"Ideally I'd like to co-create with Others a new and exciting,
unpredictably different, hybrid poly-culture, but the realities of power
are such that first and foremost we have to get those Others to operate the
existing dominant cultural practices ..."
and I think ... how convenient for us that the evil dominant powers-that-be
let us off the hook and enable us in practice to just go on comfortably
postponing any confrontation with the dimensions of that unpredictable
hybrid future that might really disturb us ...
I also know that any rhetoric of Us and Them is likely to miss the
liberating confusion of identities and practices that defeats such
dichotomies everywhere except in the safe worlds of our theoretical fancies
... but I don't think that helps us escape this particular moral dilemma
... JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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