I don't know what genuinely pluralist conditions and elements are, Jay. I
would think one thing is a willingness to acknowledge that we have a problem
to deal with. Some Canadians, who are proud of its history of embracing
multiculturalism, say to me, when I mention racism, that we don't the
problem of overt racism in the US. To me, a petty crime or white collar
crime still is a problem to acknowledge as a first step.
I think of Zhuangzi as a Chinese exemplar of critical thinking (he was said
to flourish 350-300 BC). *http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zhuangzi/* That
is, if you believe that the encyclopedia is generally trustworthy, that the
translation is good enough to allow evaluation of Zhuangzi's words, and so
on.
How do we speak to politicans so they understand the seriousness of the
matter at hand, testing babies? In general I favor the idea of silliness.
American politicians enjoy or at least get football, right? Did skilled
football players, when they were 2, 5, or 15 years old, practice isolated,
decontextualized skills, catching a ball in midair and staying there or, as
a ball is thrown, players running away from each other to show who is
fastest? (I know, I am being silly) Even professional football players work
on developing critical thinking; a neighbor, a CFL player, told me that his
team spent more time indoors, watching videotaped games, than out in the
field. But politicians understanding is one thing, acting on that
understanding is another.
Yuan
On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 11:46 AM, Jay Lemke <jaylemke@umich.edu> wrote:
Nancy and all,
Dialogue is both the most natural form of communication and also an
improvable art. It does easily degenerate into binary, partisan
polarization, and I think we know that historically this tends to lead to
violence and to long-lasting, even multi-generational conflicts. It is also
a favorite tool of politicians, especially those who wish to move from being
the representatives of a small minority to building their one-issue, or
one-enemy coalitions of the uncritical.
But it can, on the other hand, become the art of reciprocal perspectives
and dialectic advance of ways of seeing the world and acting in it, if we
can find ways to re-enunciate the words of Others, to re-adjust the scope of
common ground, to do what majority politicians usually aim for, "bringing us
all together". Of course that is a somewhat unrealistic ideal, and it too
degenerates into pushing majority views onto everybody, so learning nothing.
Pluralist societies seem to require a certain kind of general cultural
ethos, and I am not sure that the US really has it. Interestingly, a
frequently cited example of a genuinely successful pluralist culture/society
is Hawai'i, Obama's home. I don't know what specifically the elements of a
genuinely pluralist culture are. What cultural values or habits predispose
people to tolerance? to curiosity about the viewpoints of Others? to a
desire to learn across differences? to a disinclination towards simplistic
analyses and polarizations?
Most historical societies seem to contain both tendencies, towards
pluralism and toward monologism. Times of prosperity seem to favor
tolerance, times of scarcity feed intolerance.
What else do we know about the conditions for productive pluralism?
JAY.
Jay Lemke
Professor (Adjunct, 2009-2010)
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke <http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejaylemke>
Visiting Scholar
Laboratory for Comparative Human Communication
University of California -- San Diego
La Jolla, CA
USA 92093
On Dec 29, 2009, at 5:39 AM, Nancy Mack wrote:
Jay,
I like your emphasis on the Bakhtinian cross-difference discourse.
I am alarmed by the over emphasis on argument in first year composition
courses and the new language arts core standards.
The emphasis on argument:
Eliminates narratives of individuals.
Promotes binary thinking.
Asks us not to reflect on our life experiences.
Sets us up to be one issue voters.
Makes the world a safe, uncomplex world of simple decisions.
Creates enemies from difference.
Makes peace into oppression.
Prefers logic rather than ethics.
Polarizes emotion as the opposite to logic.
Prefers discourse that badgers rather than communicates.
Disrespects different world views and philosophies.
Divides us into winners and losers.
Privileges dogma over openness.
And so on.
Nancy
----- Original Message -----
From: Jay Lemke <jaylemke@umich.edu>
Date: Monday, December 28, 2009 10:14 pm
Subject: [xmca] critique of pure tolerance
To: XMCA Forum <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
On the ethics of engaging respectfully with positions you really
strongly disagree with.
Recap: some of us are trying to figure out effective ways to
challenge conservative/oppressive discourses about education and
other matters in ways that are not as likely to be marginalized
as many left rhetorical strategies have become in many places
and for many audiences.
One strategy might be to see what the core values and discourses
of those to whom our opponents appeal might say that is more to
our way of thinking. For example, what Christian discourse may
say that is in favor of critical thinking, or against the
priority of decontextualized learning, or just against the
"gospel of prosperity" (which, if you haven't seen recent news
interest in this is an explicit movement in fundamentalist US
christianity that says God wants you to get rich).
In doing so, however, we tread the slippery slope. Historically
the Anglo-Saxon left has been rather purist, and its internal
squabbles have mainly been over who is more perfectly
marxist/democratic/etc. Leaving not much room to develop
discourses that overlap or penetrate those of the non-left
majority (who in the US are also mostly non-right). Something
different happened in Latin America, where a fusion of Catholic
populism and left communitarianism did a much better job of
appealing to both rural populations and university intellectuals
(Freire as a case in point, but he is part of a much larger
discourse tradition). As I recall a few popes have actually
condemned Latin American bishops for being too leftist. So they
must have been getting something right. :-)
Nonetheless, the fear is that we might lend credibility to
oppressive discourses by speaking partly within their discursive
worlds. That is probably a justifiable concern, given Bakhtin's
close linkage in the notion of heteroglossia (diversity of
discursive worlds, or "social voices") of ways of describing the
world and ways of valuing it. But to my mind communication is
not about conversion, nor indeed even about being right. It is
about establishing new cross-difference discourses that produce
surprising ideas and values. I have always thought that there
was rather too much missionary spirit in leftist discourse, that
it remained uncomfortably close to christian messianic and
evangelical models. The problem with this being that it assumes
an end to history, that answers are known, and so there is no
real incentive for a dialogue in which one is open to learn with
one's interlocutors.
So, yes, there is risk, but there is also much to gain.
BTW, is there a good history of "critical thinking"? someone
must believe it was invented in the Englightenment, or in the
Renaissance, or by the 400 BC Greeks, by the Jews (when?), by
the Chinese (when?). If we are going to claim that Jesus or
Buddha exemplified critical thinking, are we also going to
believe it's true?
JAY.
Jay Lemke
Professor (Adjunct, 2009-2010)
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke <http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejaylemke>
Visiting Scholar
Laboratory for Comparative Human Communication
University of California -- San Diego
La Jolla, CA
USA 92093
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca