Teaching as the Practice of Wisdom 9781623568436, 9781623564933, 9781472553256, 9781623562526

Citation preview

TEACHING AS THE PRACTICE OF WISDOM

Available from Bloomsbury: Series Editors: Shirley R. Steinberg and Ana Maria Araujo Freire On Critical Pedagogy, Henry A. Giroux Echoes from Freire for a Critically Engaged Pedagogy, Peter Mayo Critical Pedagogy for Social Justice, John Smyth Narrative Learning and Critical Pedagogy, Ivor Goodson and Scherto Gill

TEACHING AS THE PRACTICE OF WISDOM DAVID GEOFFREY SMITH

CRITICAL PEDAGOGY TODAY

N E W YOR K • LON DON • N E W DE L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 © David Geoffrey Smith, 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smith, David Geoffrey, 1946Teaching as a practice of wisdom / David Geoffrey Smith. pages cm ISBN 978-1-62356-843-6 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-62356-493-3 (paperback) 1. Educational sociology. 2. Education–Philosophy. 3. Freire, Paulo, 1921-1997. I. Title. LC189.S55 2014 370.11’5 – dc23 2013045217 ISBN: HB: 978-1-6235-6843-6 PB: 978-1-6235-6493-3 e-PDF: 978-1-6235-6252-6 e-Pub: 978-1-6235-6338-7 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

For Ted Aoki In Memoriam

Contents Acknowledgements/Permissions............................................................ viii Introduction: In the Spirit of Freire......................................................... 1 Chapter 1 Wisdom Responses to Globalization: The Pedagogic Context...................................................... 15 Chapter 2 Can Wisdom Trump the Market as a Basis for Education?..................................................................... 57 Chapter 3 Meditation on an Answer from Ku-Shan........................... 89 Chapter 4 The Deep Politics of War and the Curriculum of Disillusion.................................................. 95 Chapter 5 From Leo Strauss to Collapse Theory: Considering the Neoconservative Attack on Modernity and the Work of Education.............................119 Chapter 6 Engaging Peter McLaren and the New Marxism in Education: An Essay Review of McLaren’s Rage+Hope......................................................145 Chapter 7 Hermeneutic Inquiry........................................................ 177 Chapter 8 Spiritual Cardiology and the Heart of Wisdom: A Meditation on Life Writing........................... 187 Chapter 9 The Prophetic Voice in Curriculum: Reflections on the Legacy of Dwayne Huebner...............195 Bibliography......................................................................................... 203 Index..................................................................................................... 217

vii

Acknowledgements/Permissions Chapter 1: Wisdom Responses to Globalization: The Pedagogic Context. Smith, David. 2014. ‘Wisdom Responses to Globalization: The Pedagogic Context.’ In The International Handbook of Curriculum Research, edited by William Pinar, 45–59. NY: Routledge. Chapter 2: Can Wisdom Trump the Market as a Basis for Education? Smith, David. 2011. ‘Can Wisdom Trump the Market as a Basis for Education?’ In Contemporary Studies in Canadian Curriculum: Principles, Portraits and Practices, edited by D. Stanley and K. Young, 153–185. Calgary, AB: Detselig. Chapter 3: A Meditation on an Answer from Ku-Shan. Originally delivered as a talk to faculty and graduate students at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada. 8 April, 2008. Chapter 4: The Deep Politics of War and the Curriculum of Disillusion. Smith, David, 2012. The Deep Politics of War and the Curriculum of Disillusion. Policy Futures in Education, 10, no. 3, 340–351. Chapter 5: From Leo Strauss to Collapse Theory: Considering the Neoconservative Attack on Modernity and the Work of Education. Smith, David. 2008. ‘From Leo Strauss to Collapse Theory: Considering the Neoconservative Attack on Modernity and the

viii

A cknowledgements / P ermissions

Work of Education.’ Critical Studies in Education, 49 no. 1, 33–48. Chapter 6: Engaging Peter McLaren and the New Marxism in Education. Smith, David. 2009. ‘An Essay Review of Peter McLaren’s “Rage+Hope: Interviews with Peter McLaren on War, Imperialism+Critical Pedagogy.” ’ Interchange, 40, no. 1, 93–117. Chapter 7: Hermeneutic Inquiry. Smith, David. 2010. ‘Hermeneutic Inquiry.’ In Encyclopedia of Curriculum Studies, Vol. 1, edited by Craig Kridel, 432–436. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Chapter 8: Spiritual Cardiology and the Heart of Wisdom. Chambers, Cynthia M., Erika Hasebe-Ludt, Carl Leggo and Anita Sinner, eds. 2011. A Heart of Wisdom: Life Writing as Empathetic Inquiry. New York: Peter Lang, xi–xvi. Chapter 9: The Prophetic Voice in Curriculum. Lewis, Patrick, and Jennifer Tupper, eds. 2009. Challenges Bequeathed: Taking Up the Challenges of Dwayne Huebner. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, xi–xiv.

ix

Introduction: In the Spirit of Freire This is not a book on how to grow a beard or develop wrinkles as marks of sagacity in the practice of teaching. Instead, the essays collected here attempt something much more difficult, and probably impossible. They seek to address the pedagogical implications of a two-sided problem. On the one side is the apparent hollowing-out, and maybe impeding collapse, of the liberal democratic tradition in the West since the days of neoconservative ideological hardening in America in the 1980s and the ascendance of neoliberal economic theory. On the other side is the problem of dealing with the social and cultural fallout from these developments, with neoliberal and neoconservative policies now fully entrenched, yet somehow exhausted and certainly delegitimized by the global financial crisis of 2008. There is a need to reimagine new, wiser, human possibilities given the deep damage suffered at local domestic levels, both at home and abroad. If education and teaching basically concern the stories we tell the young about life, what are the stories that need to be told today? Most of the essays in this book are an attempt to respond to that question, and in doing so they insist on holding in tension a full-face addressing of the contemporary politico-economic environment in which the stories are embedded, alongside an examination of global wisdom traditions as having something important to say about what it means to live well in a complicated, conflicted world. A rejuvenated critical pedagogy in the spirit of Paulo Freire may be more relevant today than ever. Primarily, this is because the 1

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

triumph of propaganda in the military-corporate state has reduced the intellectual left to almost complete silence, a silence signifying either agreement with surface media messages or, worse, fear, producing compliance. There are good reasons for fear in the age of surveillance coupled with the public smearing of anyone who dares to question the dominant interpretation of things. Actually, my personal hope is that, indeed, fear is the cause, since in the long run fear can be overcome by truth, an insight dear to Freire. The starting point for truth seeking and truth telling in our current context is learning to see and acknowledge how one’s own experience, for good or ill, is implicated in, and constructed by, macronarratives lying hidden beyond the purview of immediate consciousness. To say this is not to invoke conspiracy theory; it is simply to acknowledge that unless we participate in a certain kind of awakening to our surroundings and day-to-day routines and investigate our auspices, we live in what Freire called the natural attitude, which requires a rising to consciousness, or conscientização, the condition of both our freedom and our dignity as human beings. A caveat: Anyone inspired by Freire needs to remember that he spent much of his career in exile and was imprisoned twice for his social and political views. He also failed at his own final doctoral exam for much the same reason, at a time when his native Brazil was controlled by powerfully conservative forces. (For an excellent overview of Freire’s life and influences, see Gerhardt 1993.) There is another reason that Freire is relevant, at least certainly to me as I have tried to follow various trails in the search for truth regarding what is going on in the world and to articulate a distinctly pedagogical response to the resulting revelations based on wisdom teachings. This has to do with Freire’s eclecticism. Far from being a dogged methodologist, a pedantic pedagogue, Freire was always experimenting, always observing, always revising his understanding and sense of what needed to be done. This was a feature of his relentless curiosity about human nature, a curiosity 2

I ntroduction : I n the S pirit of F reire

brought to maturity through his own intellectual journeying. Phenomenology, existentialism, Catholic communitarianism, Christian personalism, humanist Marxism, Hegelianism – all these were deeply formative to Freire’s hermeneutic imagination and his care for human beings suffering in their ‘situation’, as he liked to call it. Of course, one can discern here a certain lack, with all of these influences being locked into a particular kind of imaginal space; namely, the tropes and traditions of Western philosophy. So it is, then, in the name of eclecticism that I dare extend Freirean compassion to include sources beyond the usual philosophical traditions of Europe as part of a new hermeneutic of human well-being, one that attempts to draw readers and practitioners into a more global conversation of what might be required as we face an uncertain future together. What can the East, for example, contribute, existentially, politically, materially, to a new global conversation about human futures? I can see two possibilities: (a) a more expanded ontology of human suffering than one finds in Western philosophy, even in Freire; and (b) a more thorough investigation of Mind and its role in human suffering and human healing at both the personal and politico-cultural levels. Eventually, as in my own experience, a journey into Eastern thought can inspire an appreciation of wisdom in human life, which, in turn, ironically, can inspire a return to one’s own Western tradition with new sensibilities and a capacity for discerning ancient wisdom sources that have been lost or occluded by the hyper-rationality of the Enlightenment, the rise of science and the technocratic corporate state. I believe the deep commonalities inhering in these various Wisdom traditions, from vastly different civilizations, hold great promise for a new global conversation regarding life together. Let me provide one example, as follows. In Plato’s final Socratic dialogue, the Phaedo, which leads to Socrates’ taking the deadly hemlock as punishment for corrupting the youth of Athens and refusing the authority of local gods, Socrates declares, ‘Those who rightly love wisdom are practicing 3

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

dying, and death to them is the least terrible thing in the world’ (Warmington and Rouse 1956, 470 [hereafter WR]). In this scenario, it is good to remember that, at his impending death, Socrates was in a good mood, happy even while his surrounding supportive interlocutors were thoroughly miserable at the thought of losing their beloved friend and mentor. From a Socratic point of view, practising dying as the right way to live and love wisdom is not a morbid activity. Rather, the practice of dying is the practice of a particular kind of refinement, an overcoming of obsession with the physical body, which is the typical plight of non-reflective being; and here, the physical doesn’t just mean my literal body, but the entire material realm of nature (Gk. physis). Often in popular philosophy, the Platonic world is characterized as antibody, privileging instead the soul (Gk. psyche, L. anima), with the body as that which is trapped in temporality and decay, while the soul is eternal. Indeed, in his own taxonomy of the professions, Plato placed philosophers at the top, because they were concerned with the eternal spirit of life, while at the bottom were physicians, preoccupied only with the bodily world. So also was the merchant class not highly praised in classical Greece. It is not the place here to engage the intricate debates in the Western tradition over body and soul and their interrelationship except to note Socrates’ basic point: We need to be careful about the body and its demands, because they can get in the way of something very fundamental; namely, the human desire to engage and become one with the eternal spirit of life; indeed, its deeper truth. Socrates puts it graphically: [Through obsession with the body] we shall never attain sufficiently what we desire, that is, the truth. For the body provides thousands of busy distractions because of its necessary food; besides, if diseases fall upon us, they hinder us from the pursuit of the real … and truly make us … unable to think one little bit about anything at any time. (WR 469) 4

I ntroduction : I n the S pirit of F reire

Then, a point that is highly relevant to themes in this book: Indeed, wars and factions and battles all come from the body and its desires, and from nothing else. For the desire of getting wealth causes all wars, and we are compelled to desire wealth by the body, being slaves to its culture … [I]n fact, if we are to know anything purely, we are to examine the real things by the soul alone. (WR 469)

So, ‘if you see a person fretting because he is about to die, he was not really a wisdom-lover (philosopher), but a body-lover (philosoma). And no doubt the same person is a money-lover and honours-lover, one or both’ (WR 471). One can witness here a clear indictment of the monotonous materialism that neoliberal philosophy has inflicted upon much of the world, to say nothing of the pretensions of neoconservatism. More important though is the hopeful insight it offers – that, indeed, there is a real world, a world deeper and truer than any consumerist phantasm, or fantasy of world domination, as in the theory of ‘Full-Spectrum Dominance’ of the neoconservative agenda (see Engdahl 2009). The wisdom lover, through the practice of thinking, of mindfulness, of reasoning (Gk. logos), is able to pierce such illusions to reveal that which we cannot live without, which is nothing less than the spirit of life itself, the life prevenient to but also immanent in any particular life, and which will and does go on beyond the death of individuals, cultures, lobbies, states, and nations. The invitation of wisdom is to enter into this Life beyond life through, paradoxically, the practice of dying. The particularities of my body are secondary to the fact of its very existence, of its liveliness, such that if I fall in love with the former, with a contrived sense of who I think I am, and forget the latter, in the name of living I shall actually be dying; whereas if I give up any pretensions about myself, practising a form of dying, of letting go, paradoxically, I enter the living 5

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

stream of all things, the source of true joy. In dying, Socrates was happy because he had discovered this secret, a secret shared by all the great sages of the Axial Age, as the philosopher Karl Jaspers named the historical period of two-and-a-half millennia ago, when wisdom seemed to break forth throughout the world (see Jaspers 1966, 1974). The Taoists emphasized that balance in life is important, accepting death as part of living, and that the Tao, or Way of Heaven, is the same as the Tao of Earth; the Buddha taught the importance of not clinging to life in the name of desire, as the paradoxical secret of living well; the Confucians translated all of this into forms of political and educational theory with leaders educated to understand how learning (studying the Way) must never reduce to a form of vulgar accumulation to serve predetermined ends, but rather be an induction into ethical being, grounded in genuine humility, a relinquishing of selfinterest. The biblical figure of Job declared in his bodily misery, ‘Though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God’ (Job 19:26), a reminder that the transcendent is in the immanent, the spirit is in the flesh. Later in the Christian tradition, Jesus taught the importance of losing oneself to find oneself, and the medieval mystical philosophers taught the principle of coincidentia oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites – that this and notthis, both life and death, participate in an organic unity that can never be disentangled. The love of wisdom, as Socrates taught, relies on the gift of thinking, which in the Greek sense is dialogical, a concept much misunderstood today even in the dialogical pedagogy favoured by critical pedagogues. Too often it means a logic of question and answer, with the questioner leading the way to an answer that he/she has predetermined to be the correct one. Instead, the Greek roots, dia, meaning ‘through’, and logos, meaning not just logic, but reasoning, thinking, considering, searching, ‘wording’, and so on, all point to how dialogue really means thinking through together so that together we might discover the answer to 6

I ntroduction : I n the S pirit of F reire

the conundrum in front of us both. In a sense, any conundrum facing us lies in a kind of open space that is indeterminate until together we consider it through dialogue and come to a conclusion on which we can all agree. This process is very similar to that found in North American Indigenous circles: When an important decision is to be made, elders gather, not so much to argue as to sit together, speak quietly as so inspired, and wait until a full consideration of the problem has unfolded in their mutual presence and a decision can be made. Dialogue in this sense is foundational to the effective practice of democracy, but it has suffered profound degradation in recent years by reducing speaking together to blatant forms of confrontation, competition, and embattlement rather than honest mutual consideration of problems held in common. What makes the times of contemporary Western civilization so precipitous is nothing less than the death of thinking in this ancient sense, a sense still so relevant and necessary to the practice of democratic life. The block to thinking has been established, for example, by attempts to conform educational institutions to the rule of money, whereby schools and universities are coerced into a predetermined law of economic determinism. Furthermore, as many of the essays in this book try to clarify, the assumptions regarding Market Logic and economic well-being currently at work not only are time bound in their construction, but also refuse any reconsideration or refinement of their basic auspices, even though those auspices are increasingly exposed as inadequate, indeed inappropriate, to today’s geopolitical requirements. This is how the death of thinking operates: by a refusal to consider anything outside of its own logistical paradigm. When thinking cannot begin with an open future, it actually ceases to be thinking, surviving only as a form of calculative rationality to serve predetermined ends. The social and cultural implications of this condition are dire, because if the future is not open, why should I go on? It should come as no surprise that mental illness, 7

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

especially depression, is now the leading medical condition in North America (see Whitaker 2010). The difficulty of addressing these issues is tied to their insinuation in a further logic, the logic of empire, with all of the ancillary emotional links to patriotism, nationalism and fundamentalisms of one kind or another. All of these latter features, which are necessary for the sustenance of empire, require a massive machinery of public persuasion, through heavily controlled public media and curriculum narratives that underwrite the military corporate state. The power of this machinery lies not so much in its overtness, which is not difficult to read in the pronouncements of advertising and vapidly ideological politics; rather, the power resides in its subtleties of inversion. The following point made by Michael Budde about advertising is worth quoting at length as an analogue for political suasion as well: Marketing/advertising power does not operate in a (simple) ‘hyperdermic’ fashion, implanting ideas and desires into the minds of countless passive individuals. Nor does it assume that people are stupid, easily duped, or incapable of choice. Its dynamic is more closely akin to a seduction than assault. It involves actor A knowing things about B that B doesn’t realize A knows. It is like playing poker against someone who has already seen your hand, unbeknownst to you … In such a context, the actor under surveillance chooses, she is acting freely, but she does so in a context constructed to advance the priority of others. So long as asymmetry in information persists, and so long as the player under surveillance is unaware of the degree of contextual manipulation and structuring, the one-sided interaction can continue indefinitely. (Erlendson 2003, 42)

Believing that one is choosing freely what in fact has already been chosen for one? Interested readers can explore further this dynamic through the work of Edward Bernays, the nephew of 8

I ntroduction : I n the S pirit of F reire

Sigmund Freud, who drew on Freud’s theories of instinctual drives and the unconscious to formulate the theories of propaganda and marketing behind many of the operations of daily life in the world today (see Bernays 1928/2005, 1923/1951), including the fictional conventions of 9/11 (see Griffin 2011, McMurtry 2013), the so-called Color Revolutions in Eastern Europe (see Engdahl 2011), and, more lately, the Arab Spring phenomenon and spreading disruptions in North Africa (see multiple links at www.globalresearch.ca). Actually, the problems that Western democracy faces might be even deeper than this. The architects of neoliberal polity drew most heavily on the work of Fredrick Hayek (1944/2007), who in turn drew on the work of Joseph Schumpeter (2008). Philosophically, there is an ironic linkage going back to Friedrich Nietzsche (see Nietzsche 2000) in the nineteenth century. Their basic point is that democracy, traditionally based on dialogue and education in the humanities as core curriculum, along with common participation in political decision making (basically the Deweyan ideal), is a crock of nonsense. Realistically, you can’t run a country that way. Dialogue has its severe limitations, as anyone who has spent fruitless hours of discussion in committee meetings can attest. When it comes to issues of great political and economic importance, what is required is a small cadre of elites who, through long exercise of power and influence and their superior intelligence, best know what is to be done. Democracy is a nice sop for the masses; having a sense of participation in the big picture is comforting. But when it comes to the heavy lifting in policy and action, leave it to the Big Men, gifted and creative as they are, so proven by their success, particularly in wealth accumulation. Let schools and universities have their humanities departments – it’s a good way to pacify intellectuals who love nothing better than to chatter endlessly about this and that over carafes of wine. What we really need today are persons of iron will, exceptional brain and awe-inspiring courage who can stay the course of bringing 9

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

progress to the world while keeping the hordes at bay (all qualities self-defined, of course). There is much towards which one can be sympathetic in the foregoing scenario, but a key aspect is lacking; namely, a consideration of ethics, or what Plato called the virtues, and here we are returned to the questions of mind and mindfulness so essential to the practice of wisdom. In this context it is helpful to distinguish two Greek terms for intellectual activity. The discursive action of the logos we have so far considered. The formal term for this is dianoia, or reason, which depends on ‘formulating abstract concepts and then arguing on this basis to a conclusion reached through deductive reasoning’ (Palmer, Sherrard and Ware 1990, 360 [PSW]). There is a higher form of activity, however, based on the highest human faculty, simply called ‘the intellect’ (Gk. nous). The Greek concept of intellect shares much with the Asian concept of mind, in particular appreciation for the unity of mind and body, especially in the heart. For Greek sages the intellect ‘constitutes the innermost aspect of the heart’ and is variously referred to as ‘the organ of contemplation’ and ‘the eye of the heart’ (see PSW, 360). Chinese does not have two words for mind and heart, but only hsin; literally, heart-mind. Through this highest human faculty, the intellect or heart-mind, a person is capable of knowing the truth of life and the inner essences or principles of created things, what Plato and Buddhist philosophy call the Real. This can be achieved by ‘direct apprehension or spiritual perception’, but it requires one key quality, purification. Purification from what? What is it that corrupts the intellect or heart/mind and its operation more than anything else? Distraction. ‘Distraction is the cause of the intellect’s obscuration’, said Peter of Damaskos in the eleventh century (PSW, 182). What are the causes of distraction? For Plato, as we saw, it was the endless call to satisfy bodily desires, which can come in many forms, such as the desire for certainty, the desire for wealth, the desire for power, not just the usual 10

I ntroduction : I n the S pirit of F reire

suspects of lust, gluttony and so on. Aristotle called it the desire for ‘bad infinity’ (Gk. pleonexia), a total investment in or commitment to something of finite value. For Taoists it can be an excessive desire for one thing over another, which creates an imbalance in personal and cultural energies. For the Buddha it is the condition of constant craving that can never be satisfied. The operation and vitality of the intellect requires great discipline, a kind of perpetual vigilance against all those warring factions that would enslave attention to nonessentials and prevent one from seeing the world as it actually is, personally, politically, pedagogically. The point here is that under the rhetorical sirens of freedom and democracy, neoliberal and neoconservative polity and practice survive on the basis of the infinite distractibility of persons, either through repetitive narratives of civilizational superiority supported by faked heroic deeds of antiterrorism (see Aaronson 2013) or through the more direct seductions of consumer culture with its promises of a fulfilment that can in truth never be realized. By these very means a consequence is achieved that serves the ruling order: nothing less than the corruption of the intellect/ heart-mind and the incapacity of persons to see their actual condition. To lose one’s mind is a terrifying prospect precisely because, without mind and mindfulness, we cannot be human. Such, then, is the commitment of this book: in a stumbling way to issue a call for a return to sanity, both personal and collective, and for courage to turn away from enslaving distraction to see our ‘situation’ in the Freirean sense for what it is, that a renewed freedom might be gained and human dignity prevail through a healed body, a body politic, a cultural body; revivified, ironically, through a recovery of spirit, of the eternal within the body of the real. To know the real is a mark of wisdom, but the journey to it is long and difficult. Paulo Freire once said that the key thing in any pedagogical endeavour is ‘to grasp the aspiration of people’ and there are signs everywhere that hope is rising for true reform along 11

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

the lines noted here. For example, a Center for Contemplative Mind in Society (www.contemplativemind.org) has been established, as well as a Wisdom University (www.wisdomuniversity. org). My one worry about all this good work is that it seems to hold so little engagement with the temporal powers of the present, and that unless there is vigilance over and challenge of the prevailing epistemologies of power, wisdom tries to exist as a severed psychotic space without specific address in the real world. A good education today must not just be for the body or for the soul, but for the soul-in-the-body, which means an education of both body and soul together. Hence all of the essays in this book try to maintain a critical view of education as always political, with the political as the site of dreaming for a world of lesser suffering and greater hope. A few words about the content of each of the chapters: Chapter 1, ‘Wisdom Responses to Globalization: The Pedagogic Context’, gives an account of a graduate seminar I have developed and offered for the past five years at the University of Alberta. In the seminar we hold in tension the political and the ontological by examining the publicly unspoken underside of contemporary neoliberal economic theory along with an exploration of the wider parameters of the term Wisdom. Chapter 2, ‘Can Wisdom Trump the Market as a Basis for Education?’ looks at the historical evolution of Market Logic, from the first stock exchange in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1460 to the collapse of global markets in 2008. This is followed by some brief examples from various Wisdom traditions that address questions the market cannot answer with respect to the requirements of mindful pedagogy. Chapter 3 ‘Meditation on an Answer from Ku Shan’, involves consideration of Ku Shan’s response to the question ‘What is the basic object of investigation?’ His reply: ‘How has one gotten into such a state?’ Ku Shan was a fourth-century CE neo-Taoist scholar. Chapter 4, ‘The Deep Politics of War and the Curriculum of Disillusion’, draws on Indigenous knowledge traditions for 12

I ntroduction : I n the S pirit of F reire

examples of how best to understand the phenomenon of disillusionment that often arises when one begins to see one’s situation for what it is. Chapter 5, ‘From Leo Strauss to Collapse Theory: Considering the Neoconservative Attack on Modernity and the Work of Education’, examines the philosophical work of Leo Strauss. Strauss is important for his strong influence over the neoconservative movement in the United States that has led to the current state of almost perpetual war in the Middle East. The pedagogical implications of Strauss’s views receive special emphasis. Chapter 6, ‘Engaging Peter McLaren and the New Marxism in Education’, provides a kind of interlocution between McLaren and myself. McLaren remains one of the most important voices today for a neo-Marxist approach to education, and we ignore Marx at our peril. Chapter 7, ‘Hermeneutic Inquiry’, might seem odd for inclusion in this collection. However, hermeneutics remains important for clarifying the multiple meanings and operations of tradition in human life, especially in the context of pedagogical interpretation. Historically, hermeneutics has always served as an interpretive buffer between philosophical idealism and revolutionary politics and contains its own form of wisdom. Chapter 8, ‘Spiritual Cardiology and the Heart of Wisdom’, engages an emerging form of educational research – namely, Life Writing. I try to bring wisdom insights to an appreciation of this movement. Chapter 9, ‘The Prophetic Voice in Curriculum’, opens a discussion that might have been dear to the heart of Paulo Freire: the role of the prophetic in educational and cultural analysis. The influence of Dwayne Huebner in the field of curriculum studies is taken as exemplary. Finally, this introduction would not be complete without some words of appreciation. Very special heart-felt thanks go to Shirley Steinberg and Ana Maria Araujo Freire for their invitation to contribute to this book series Critical Pedagogy Today. I praise their courage and stamina in keeping the fire of critical praxis alive. A deep thank you also to my copy editor, Linda Pasmore. Her eye 13

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

for detail is so much better than mine. Last but first, my partner Julia, who has taught me more about life than she will ever know: I am profoundly grateful. Grace and peace to all readers.

14

CHAPTER 1

Wisdom Responses to Globalization: The Pedagogic Context To seek enlightenment by separating from this world is as absurd as to search for a rabbit’s horn. Hui Neng Founder of Ch’an [Zen] Buddhism, Seventh century C.E. We are drowning in propaganda … It’s threatening our lives, cutting off our air. Mark Crispin Miller Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, NYU (2011) Distraction is the cause of the intellect’s obscuration. Peter of Damaskos Eleventh-century Greek Orthodox theologian The wise are mightier than the strong … (and) the tongue of the wise brings healing. Proverbs 24:5 and 12:18 Wisdom is proven right by all her children. Jesus of Nazareth

15

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

INTRODUCTION This chapter is essentially a report on a graduate seminar I have developed at the University of Alberta over the past five years. The title of the chapter is the title of the current seminar course. Actually, the course began as two separate but consecutive courses, Globalization and Education and Teaching as the Practice of Wisdom. In the first, we studied the burgeoning literature on globalization that was seemingly omnipresent from the mid-1990s to the collapse of global markets in 2008. The second course was a kind of experiment to see if a collective reading and reflection on global ancient wisdom traditions (Buddhism, Taoism, Indigenous knowledge, Sufism, sapiential Biblical literature, etc.) could be made to speak directly to the practices of education in today’s secular, materialist, and technocratic environment. Two years ago I collapsed the two courses into one to make a conversation between the two topics more direct, even urgent. The financial crisis of 2008 exposed the fallacies of the dominant version of globalization, namely neoliberalism, a socalled philosophy whose genealogical godfather was, ironically, Friedrich Nietzsche, but whose more contemporary theorists in the realm of economics and social policy were Fredrich Hayek and his American expositor, Milton Friedman. The ideas of both men anchored the economic and social reforms implemented in Britain and the United States by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, respectively, beginning in the late 1980s. Under the logics of market deregulation, withdrawal of government support for a plethora of social services in the name of privatization, celebration of the autonomous self-interested individual, unfettered domestic and international competitiveness, and the reduction of education to the training of ‘human capital’ for the global market, neoliberalism has now found itself facing the inherent venality and unsustainability of its basic presuppositions, linked to its contemporaneous sibling, neoconservatism. 16

W isdom R esponses to G lobalization

Neoconservatism was/is another so-called philosophy that saw the end of the Cold War and bipolar world as an opportunity for the world’s last remaining superpower (so self-defined at the time) to assume unilateral control over the rest of the world, quite literally. This vision was articulated through such documents as The Project for a New American Century and a theory of ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ (Engdahl 2009). The essential hubris of both neoliberalism and neoconservatism led the United States and its ally Great Britain into two disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, creating not just their mutual economic bankruptcy (a $14 trillion debt in the United States), but, perhaps more important, leading to the exposure of their moral and philosophical bankruptcy. The social and cultural implications of the failures of neoliberalism and neoconservatism have yet to be worked out, and currently a global vacuum in both philosophy and politics is emerging from the exhaustion, even death, of this former ‘order’, with no comprehensive global planning or strategizing possible under a condition now characterizable as civilizationally pluralistic, with Asian, African and Latin American countries seeing new opportunities for global leadership, or at least more autonomy within a reconfigured world order. The contemporary global space may in fact be in the midst of World War IV (the Cold War being WWIII), waged on four fronts: a paranoid Western civilizational campaign against Islam characterized as ‘Islamofascism’ (Podhoretz 2008); a U.S. war against Russia and China based on a struggle for global domination (Bzrezinski 2012); a global struggle for control of not only essential natural resources, especially petroleum, but also minerals such as coltan required for cell phone manufacture (Engdahl 2009); and a global war over currency, that is, over which currency (dollar, euro, yuan, etc.) will control the global market (Rickards 2011). The ‘neo’ debacle, then, is symptomatic of a much larger problem, which is the erosion of the possibility of a unipolar world 17

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

dominated by only one ‘civilization’. The question is, pedagogically speaking, how can the shape and character of education be reimagined not just in the aftermath of the ‘neo’ debacle, but, more specifically, in the face of the dissipation of its basic operating assumptions? This is no small matter, since neoliberal reforms in education have now become entrenched in most societies of the Western world, to say nothing of their cultural intertwining among ideological acolytes in countries such as South Korea, Zimbabwe (neoliberalism co-opted by a fundamentalist African nationalism, Mugabeism [see Hwame 2012]), and even the new China. Privatization, site-based management, funding tied to performance on standardized tests, teaching reduced to ‘facilitating’, economistic assessment of all human values, children viewed as an ‘investment’ in the future, education reduced to an ‘industry’ for global export (United States and British satellite campuses springing up everywhere), research and development geared largely for a chimerical ‘new knowledge economy’, the ascendant subordination of traditional understandings of pedagogy to new instructional technologies – all of these features of the contemporary educational landscape find their basic scaffolding in the economic philosophy of neoliberalism and the political charge of neoconservatism. Part of the problem is that all of these developments have ridden on the rhetorical coattails of long-accepted philosophical tropes: democracy, freedom, human rights, and the rule of law. The fact is that these rhetorical flourishes have now been revealed as consistently operating as a mask to cover both global and domestic imperial venturing, most often today in the name of an Anglo-American constructed ‘War on Terror’, that what has been inspired is not just an epistemological crisis, but also a moral and indeed mental one. The epistemological crisis is a symptom of the War on Terror through the saturation of the public domain with false information (propaganda) to support it (see Harvey 2010; also multiple links on globalresearch.ca). Under such a condition, 18

W isdom R esponses to G lobalization

how can I any longer trust what I think I know? The moral and mental crises are inspired, at least in part, by the emergence of surveillance culture (Google Earth, the Patriot Act, tracking technology in vehicles, ‘backdoor’ monitoring chips in computers, etc.), itself a feature of the War on Terror, producing what is now understood as a ‘Culture of Fear’ (Fisher 2011), a symptom fully reflected in popular video games such as World of Warcraft, Hollywood movies such as Enemy at the Gates and Independence Day, and the preponderance of crime-show television programming. The moral crisis is reflected also in political cynicism and a sense of helplessness produced by the split between the rhetorics of possibility and the crushing realities of everyday life. Mental illness is now the fastest growing medical condition in North America (Whitaker 2010). The point is, a schizoid situation has now been created for teachers, parents, and all people of goodwill, since the values of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, as dominant economic, social, and political ideologies, are largely unworkable and unsustainable in the context of localized communities, for which schools, classrooms, and families are the foremost expression. Insofar as both neos are also incipiently recipes for war, local communities increasingly find themselves faced with new forms of aggression in behaviourally defiant students, in self-interested client–service provider relationships, in the monetarization of human values, in the hyper-competitiveness of a dualistic axiology (I have to ‘get’ you before you ‘get’ me), and so on. What happens to practices of forgiveness, compassion, forbearance, generosity, and goodwill when these are defined in the new dispensation as human weaknesses, not worthy of serious support or consideration? Or is the situation today such that in public I need to be tough, self-interested, competitive, and paranoid, while in my family, school, or classroom I must shed all this and become sweet, gentle, accommodating, forgiving, generous, and supportive of others? Who can survive such a dichotomous understanding of the world? 19

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

Why should anyone be expected to accept this as ‘normal’? What form of pedagogical insight can address this situation in a way that is genuinely helpful both for teachers and students? Is there not a way of seeing the world more comprehensively, more wholly (lit. healthily < OE health, ‘whole’), indeed as holy, in a way of caring that is not naïve but wiser and more attuned to a deeper truth of things? A recent joint study by the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and the University of California, Berkeley, has revealed a direct relationship between excessive wealth accumulation and moral indecency: The rich are more prone to lying than the poor (Mittelstaedt 2012). For those of us living within the Anglo-American nexus, a basic difficulty is that we are ignorant of the inherent rules of operation that define the conduct of daily life, with economics, since the nineteenth century, regarded as providing a transcendental logic deemed superior to all others for solving human problems (Polanyi 1944/2001). This ignorance does not mean that most people cannot parrot ‘the Law of Supply and Demand’, discuss the meaning of ‘Market Share’, or confidently declaim ‘Let the Market decide!’ What it does mean though is that when cognitive saturation by such clichéd understanding is taken as the real or true condition of our lives, an attendant disability also arises; namely, the failure or unwillingness to perceive or appreciate the deep human liabilities that accrue when economic determinism is deferred to as god. Most poignantly, the liabilities include (a) the inability to imagine life differently, (b) a contiguous difficulty in seeing the connection between philosophical pathology (as it might be termed) and pathologies in the social and cultural realm, and (c) an acceptance of human victimization as an ‘unfortunate but inevitable’ by-product of an operating paradigm that tolerates no criticism of itself. Political philosopher John McMurtry (2002) has summed all this up very well: Contemporary economic theory is embedded in ‘an acculturated metaphysic that has lost touch with the real world outside of its value programme’ (136). 20

W isdom R esponses to G lobalization

Hence it is, then, that in the graduate seminar I collapsed the two themes of globalization and wisdom. I saw the necessity for careful deconstruction of the philosophical principles guiding the neoliberal and neoconservative globalization agenda along with an opening of ancient global wisdom traditions for their insight on what it means to live ‘well’ together on the earth as our planetary home. If globalization theory, and its base in market economics, is constructed as a form of philosophy, then, as educational philosophers, we must live up to our philosophical calling as ‘lovers of wisdom’ (Gk. phileo, ‘to love’ + sophos, ‘wisdom’) and not just live as passive enablers of a decaying worldview.

UNDERSTANDING THE CHARACTER AND LIABILITIES OF A TRANSCENDENT MARKET LOGIC It is not the place here to review all of the material that we read in the course to better understand how human values have come to be monetarized to the extent they have, a condition in which ‘everything is for sale’ (Kuttner 1999), even our emotions, which in the realms of both pedagogy and retail are prized only if we can show that we are relentlessly happy and upbeat (see Hochschild 2003). I will, however, draw attention to some particularly helpful material that we have read. Jerry Z. Muller’s (2003) The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought is a brilliant, beautifully lucid, and accessible genealogical study of the evolution of Market Logic in the Western tradition. The journey moves from the classical republican visions of Greece and Rome that stigmatize merchants as being involved in ‘material’ practices rather than the more elevated work that involves mind and spirit; through the age of Christendom under the Roman Catholic church when usury – lending money at interest – was regarded as a mortal sin; eventually to the radical (neo)liberalism of Hayek (1944/2007), the guiding mentor whose ideas led to the collapse of global financial 21

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

markets in 2008, a collapse from which there will likely never be a recovery to prior conditions, according to Mark Carney, former Governor of the Bank of Canada. I have summarized much of this evolution in a previous paper titled ‘Can Wisdom Trump the Market as a Basis for Education?’ (Smith 2011; this book). One particular theme from Hayek is worth noting given the current exposure of the compensation levels of financial elites during the market meltdown. Like Nietzsche before him, Hayek believed in leadership by elites and that the gifted few should be entitled to the special privileges that their creative work has accomplished. Democracy is a problem for those Hayek called the ‘Originals’, the rare breed of truly creative thinkers whose ideas should be given free reign for the genuine advancement of society. Indeed, it is the dynamic and resourceful few who must force the less resourceful to adapt through what Hayek called ‘impersonal compulsion’. This in turn creates what Nietzsche termed (Ger.) ressentiment, or resentment, among those ‘who must be content with a smaller reward’ (in Muller 2003, 358); hence today the Occupy Movement, articulating a revolt of 99 per cent of the population against the top 1 per cent. Canadian philosopher John McMurtry has written a series of books that deconstruct Market Logic as a form of ‘Moral Syntax’. In Value Wars: The Global Economy Versus the Life Economy (McMurtry 2002), he illuminates how the global market mindset is ‘self-referential’ to the point that ‘facts do not deter its certitude’ (12). The ‘inconceivable is now normalized’, contained in the paradox that we are ‘destroying life to save it’ (28) through, among other things, environmental plunder in the name of progress. The following is worth quoting at length: Humans are value-bearing beings and their ultimate ground of value is life itself; but because the ruling economic order has no life-coordinates in its regulating paradigm, it is structured always to mis-represent its life-blind imperatives as life-serving 22

W isdom R esponses to G lobalization

… Thus, the freedom of unfreedom, the terror of anti-terrorism, the peace-seeking of war are, like the life-endowing properties of dead commodities, contradictions which are generated by the global market system’s syntax of meaning itself. (55)

In pedagogical terms, the problem with this ‘fanatic value-set’ is that it ‘has no feedback loop whereby its life-destructive effects can register on its bearers’ (51). Clearly insinuated in McMurtry’s work is the way that a transcendent Market Logic operates hypocritically, with a deliberate but hidden nonlinkage between its promises and its deliveries. This hypocrisy is well worked out by writers such as David Macarov (2003) in What the Market Does to People: Privatization, Globalization, and Poverty, which shows the Social Darwinism that is necessarily at work for the market to survive in its current form. Society must be constructed on a bifurcation between winners and losers. Losers in turn can never be allowed to win. Hence, the unrelenting continuance of poverty in African countries; the residual White Supremacist character of the International Banking system (now under challenge by organizations such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China [BRIC]) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization [SCO] of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan); Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi’s attempt to establish a Pan-African currency against the dollar and euro based on the Gold Dinar (Wile 2011) – which resulted in the NATO-led revolt against Gaddafi in 2011); and the ongoing use of Anglo-American models of education in so-called ‘developing countries’ with development a euphemism for the ‘colonization of the mind’ (Wa Thiongo 2011) etc. John Perkins (2006) addressed this hypocrisy directly. In his bestseller, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins tells of his life as a career operative of a shell company tied to the highest levels of the American government, in turn linked to the 23

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

world’s largest corporations and financial institutions. In his own words: Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign ‘aid’ organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization. (xi)

The basic purpose and strategy of EHMs is to seduce world leaders into borrowing billions of US dollars to construct massive infrastructure projects in their home countries in the name of ‘development’. This borrowed money is then paid back to US contracting companies such as Bechtel, Enron, and Halliburton, all of them linked to the deep sinews of Washington power. Debt becomes the key instrument of political control over the countries concerned. The new infrastructure then allows ease of access to and exploitation of desired natural resources. Korean economic historian Ha-Joon Chang (2012) has written a whimsical yet serious book titled 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. He examined the splits between promise and reality within the economic globalization paradigm. For example, in common discourse about economics, even in university courses, we are not told that there is no such thing as a free market, that free market policies rarely make poor countries rich, that more education in itself is not going to make a country richer, and that good economic policy does not require good economists. The last point is relevant here to the extent that within a fuller 24

W isdom R esponses to G lobalization

context of what is ‘required’, humanly speaking, economic matters might indeed be a very subordinate concern. In the most recent offering of the course, we have used David Harvey’s (2010) The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism as a basic text for gaining understanding of some of the fundamental contradictions of capital’s operation, including the creation of credit society to fund imperial wars, the politics of criminalization and incarceration of the poor as a way of dealing with unemployment, and an undermining of the meaning of work through the fetishization of technological and organizational innovation. Given the rhetorical urgency for teachers and professors to technologize their teaching practices, Harvey’s words seem sagacious: The ‘fetishism’ (of technologization and innovation) is fed upon to the degree that innovation itself becomes a business that seeks to form its own market by persuading each and every one of us that we cannot survive without having the latest gadget and gismo at our command … Opposition arises because the more workers are positioned as appendages of the machines they operate, the less freedom of maneuver they have, the less their skills count and the more vulnerable they become to technologically induced unemployment. (91–96)

As a 67-year-old academic myself, whose research, writing, and teaching have most typically involved working with written texts and face-to-face engagements with students, the pressure to technologize most of these traditional aspects of professorial life into online learning, Moodle course management systems, and so on has inspired a certain crisis of identity, since having something to ‘profess’ (a quality of scholarly being that takes years to develop) has given way to skills of simple facilitation. Indeed, it can be argued that if learning means only the acquisition and accumulation of information, teaching in the traditional sense 25

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

becomes superfluous. Today, access to information is ubiquitous, and in many ways, if not most, this is a positive development, although the multiple ways the new technologies of information both frame and monitor what can be known is a feature yet to be investigated and theorized adequately. No, teaching and the teacher only matter if education is about something much more profound, which is the cultivation and embodiment of sagacity and discernment which in turn produce genuine humility (hence ‘humanness’ < L. humus), counterpointing our species-specific love of ignorance in the name of knowing. Paradoxically, it takes years of study to learn an essential and abiding truth: As human beings we don’t really know very much. When knowledge and its production are reduced to economic interests alone, qua The New Knowledge Economy, the very concept of knowledge metastasizes into a commodity form that necessarily stands apart from any necessary embodiment in a knower. It need not make any difference to the ‘I’ that knows. ‘I’ can simply pick and choose anything I think I need to know to achieve predetermined ‘ends’ or goals that ‘I’ have predetermined to be necessary for the preservation and continued success of ‘my’ predetermined self-identity. Needless to say, this is all true of self-defined cultures, societies, tribes, and groups just as much as it is of individuals, and it speaks of how, in the name of progress, the new knowledge economy, often referred to as a ‘knowledge revolution’, is actually a very conservative development. Hence it is that in most wisdom traditions, problematization of the concept of the ego, or identity, is the highest priority, along with suspicion of the ego’s use of knowledge as power. As Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu put it two and a half millennia ago, ‘Whoever wishes to rule the country with knowledge alone will destroy the country’ (in Henricks 1989, 32). To conclude this discussion of Market Logic and its vulnerabilities, a few final points need to be made.

26

W isdom R esponses to G lobalization

1. As writers such as John Gray (1998) and David Harvey (2010) have argued, today it is no longer appropriate to think of ‘capitalism’ as a purely Western phenomenon, since countries around the world have taken up Market Logic but are reimagining or redeveloping it out of the context of their own historical and political experience. So Chinese capitalism, for example, still retains the residues of its earlier socialist revolution tied to the interests of ‘the people’ commanded by a strong centralized government. The political infrastructure of Japanese capitalism is still controlled by ancient warlord families such as Toyota, Honda, and Mitsubishi. More important though, lingering within these newer capitalisms are, on the one hand, remembrances of historical suffering under the foot of Western imperialism and, on the other, ongoing respect for ancient sources of traditional wisdom rooted, in the Asian case, in Confucian philosophy, itself a product of both Taoist and Buddhist insight. In the African context, the so-called ‘African Renaissance’ relies not just on commitments to economic development, but also on forms of traditional wisdom now generically termed ‘Unhu Ubuntu’ (see Battle 2009, Connell 2007, Swanson 2007). These Asian and African examples signal a point that I will develop later; namely, the importance of understanding wisdom as an immanent, indwelling reality rather than as just one more concept in competition with a global plethora of other concepts. 2. A second point is related to the first. David Harvey (2010) has astutely recognized that attempts at radical social reform usually founder because leaders fail to recognize the complexity of situations with which they are dealing. Certainly this is true in most attempts at curriculum reform. Specifically, Harvey (123 ff) suggested that seven clear ‘activity spheres’ that are

27

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

always in play need to be addressed comprehensively. These spheres are technologies and organizational forms, social relations, institutional and administrative relations, production and labour processes, relations to nature, reproduction of daily life and species, and, finally, mental conceptions of the world. What I and the graduate seminar attempt to do is place ‘mental conceptions of the world’ at the forefront of consideration, since how we imagine the world, the nature of reality, and the meaning of good living all lie at the heart of our intentions and actions on a daily, minute-by-minute basis, and they both inflect and infuse all other aspects of human activity. Hence, our ‘mental conceptions’ must be the first to gain our attention if we are to imagine the world differently. It is precisely here that wisdom traditions have the most to say, and their voice is virtually univocal: To heal the world I must engage in the work of healing myself. To the degree that I heal myself, so will my action in the world be of a healing nature. Presuppositions are at work here, of course, the most significant being of an essential dialogical co-creating unity between self and other. The concept of a pure, independent, autonomous ego (individual or collective) that lies at the heart of the Western tradition’s selfdefinition is nothing but a grand illusion, to be held responsible for so much of the violence perpetrated in its name. The point here is that the Western conception of Reason, as Logos, is better understood to imply dia-logos, a process whereby no one person or group can ever claim possession of truth in its fullness. Something unknown and at work is in every knowledge claim. Hence it is then that, no matter where one finds oneself within the seven ‘activity spheres’, one lives and acts within a consciousness of one’s essential openness and incompletion. This, in turn, is the ground of human hope; namely, a recognition that the constraints of certainty are delusional, there being 28

W isdom R esponses to G lobalization

always a Way that is fuller, deeper, truer, a condition that only ‘we’ can create, but a ‘we’ possible only to the degree each of us has relinquished our ‘I’. How is this ‘Great Relinquishment’, as Chan master Hui Neng (1969) once called it, possible? I will explore this question later. Again, one implication of this is how authentic social change rests most effectively on the operation of immanent action rather that action ‘upon’ the world taken from a conception of the world as ‘other’ to myself. Authentic social reform is like leaven, intimately intermixed in the bread of life rising as a source of human nourishment. 3. One of the biggest challenges in taking on a transcendentalized Market Logic is to denaturalize it; it is not to be accepted as the natural basic condition of human life. Any reading of economic history quickly reveals this, although to raise a challenge today is often to invite ridicule. Part of the difficulty is that the preferred option of modern economic theory is to pose as a science, with science itself posing as the basis of secular certitude. In the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill (1874/2010), like others of his time, looked for a ‘scientific’ basis for conceptions of human life. He argued ‘in the abstract’ that Political Economy must presuppose an arbitrary definition of man, as a being who invariably does that by which he may obtain the greatest amount of necessaries, conveniences, and luxuries, with the smallest quantity of labour and physical self denial with which they can be obtained in the existing state of knowledge. (144) Mill’s point was later interpreted by economist Gary Becker (1992 Nobel Prize winner in Economics and recipient from George W. Bush of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007), as a celebration of the human being as ‘self-maximizing’ animal. This became part of the justifying rationale of radical free market economics (see Becker 1976). Social theorist Raj Patel (2009) has recently provided evidence for the inadequacy 29

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

of Becker’s view, in particular on the matter of human generosity and altruism. He cited, for example, Martin Broken Leg’s 1999 study of generosity amongst young people in Native American cultures compared to youth under the spell of consumer capitalism. Patel also noted preliminary neuroscience experiments that suggest that in fact humans have evolved ‘complex behaviors that include in-built desires for altruism and fairness’ and not just for selfishness and avarice (32). The point is that it is possible to imagine communities and cultures built on values other than self-maximizing individualism and that the time may be ripe for such imagining. 4. A fourth and final point marks a transition from our discussion of globalization, Market Logic, economic theory, and so on to a serious consideration of wisdom traditions. It arises from a recognition that Market Logic has its roots in the resolution of specifically religious concerns, thus it is very appropriate to resuscitate religious sensibilities, in the name of wisdom, to address our contemporary global concerns. Capitalism in its many forms (finance capitalism, merchant capitalism, asset trading, state capitalism, etc.) is intimately linked historically to the two great monotheistic traditions of the West, Judaism (see Muller 2010) and Protestant Christianity (see Weber 1920/1980, Tawney 1926/1960). What needs to be deconstructed, wisdomly, is how these traditions are plurivalent rather than monolithic, so that conceptual archaeological work can tease out the moral and ethical dimensions of both traditions that are still alive and well, serving in counterbalance to the hard-line greed and avarice that have come to be celebrated as indeed sacred virtues in contemporary times.

It needs to be recognized also that imperial conquest is written into dominant narratives of both traditions, from the military 30

W isdom R esponses to G lobalization

conquest of the ‘Promised Land’ possibly ca. 1300 BCE (‘Do not leave alive anything that breathes’ [Deuteronomy 20:16]) to the Christian exhortation to ‘make disciples of all nations’ (Matthew 28:19), but so too do those same traditions preserve a deeper contemplative voice that actually indicts the narratives of domination (‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples’ [Isaiah 56:7]). The West can save itself and work to construct a more peaceful polyvalent world to the degree that its deeper heart of wisdom can be brought forward. I have tried to address this issue somewhat in my 2011 paper. Max Weber (1920/1980) in his classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism argued that the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century overturned the spirituality of the Middle Ages by converting orare est labore to labore est orare. By this manoeuvre, the beginnings of entrepreneurialism were given spiritual meaning. Instead of prayer (orare) being a meaningful form of work (labore), work itself became celebrated as a form of prayer. Indeed, today ‘work’ is fetishized to the point that questions of its meaning and place in the development of human dignity have been supplanted and charged into an abstract concept of ‘labour’, identified as human capital within the paradigm of economic globalization. Can the practice of prayer, better understood as meditative or contemplative practice, be revivified as being of legitimate assistance in the building of a more just, humane world? If so, how?

THE TURN TO WISDOM According to a Pew Research Center poll in December 2011, only 50 per cent of Americans now believe in capitalism, with 40 per cent reacting to the term in strongly negative ways. Only 25 per cent trust banks to do the right thing to solve the current financial crisis (Kristof 2012). Rick Groen (2011), film critic for Canada’s national newspaper The Globe and Mail, noted the pervasive atmosphere of the films of 2011 to exude ‘a pervasive sense of loss’. 31

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

Again, it is as if an old order is dying; but what can or will unfold from its expiration? Is it possible to turn to the sages of the past and present for a voice of wisdom to guide the way forward, if indeed forward, with its links to ideological understandings of progress, is something to be desired? One option must not be chosen, even though it seems to be the preferred option of so many today who are calling for a return to wisdom: We cannot begin by trying to escape our circumstances; we must find new life in the middle of our circumstances, in medias res, as hermeneutical philosophers like to say. As British social theorist Glenn Rikowski (in McLaren 2006) has insisted, ‘We are capitalism’ (78), capitalism-is-us. It has taken up residence in our bones, our brains, our muscular tissues, and in the structures of everyday life, from commuting, to eating, to playing, to how and why we ‘educate’. It cannot be run away from, only better understood so that new dreams may emerge from the fetters of the taken-for-granted. It is not easy to speak about wisdom without insinuating that one knows what it is. Any such insinuation is itself simply foolish if not highly dangerous. ‘If you meet the Buddha, kill him’ is an adage well known in Buddhist circles. In other words, if you think you have finally found what you have been looking for, let it go; otherwise it could quickly turn into another illusion to cling to in the name of enlightenment. In the Western tradition, from the pre-Socratics to Plato, wisdom was understood as a unified understanding of ‘the highest principles of things that function as a guide for living a truly exemplary human life’ (Delaney, in Audi 1999, 976). Later, Aristotle split this into a distinction between theoretical wisdom (Gk. sophia) and practical wisdom (Gk. phronesis), the former an ability to see into the true nature of things, and the latter an ability to use the mind (Gk. phren) to discern appropriate modes of action in specific situations. All of these understandings have certain parallels as well as divergences in other global traditions. In the Hindu and Buddhist ‘Ways’, wisdom is equated through the term prajna (Sk.) with ‘consciousness’. In Hinduism, 32

W isdom R esponses to G lobalization

prajna denotes the condition, whereby Self-Consciousness (Sk. atman) unites with Ultimate Consciousness (Sk. brahman), producing the deepest composure in all experience, since the basic alienation inhering in a conceived separation between Self and Other is transmuted into a singular unified field of unselfconsciousness or self-forgetfulness. Through such experience one is genuinely free to act without guile or self-interest. In Mahayana Buddhism, prajna, as wisdom, is one of the six ‘perfections’ (Sk. paramita, lit. ‘reaching the other shore’) indicative of full enlightenment, marked by insight into the true nature of things; namely, their nonreducibility, or emptiness (Sk. sunyata), with no human concept able to contain things in their essence. Hence, here, emptiness does not mean void or vacuum, but indeed full potentiality, since, the certainties of Western science notwithstanding, life exists nonconditionally; it simply is. The earlier remark about composure is important across a wide range of global wisdom traditions, because it points to how stillness/peace is both the mark of wisdom and the ontological state out of which appropriate (wise) action arises most effectively. In early Gnostic Christianity (second–fourth centuries C.E.), salvation (Gk. soteria) was interpreted as ‘being at rest’. Indeed, Jesus, as a messianic wisdom teacher (Borg 2008), explicitly declared ‘Come to me … and you will find rest’ (Matthew 11:28–29). In Taoism, human effort is directed to finding the ‘still point’ from which all of life radiates and attuning oneself with it. In Islam the Arabic word waqf conveys much the same meaning. The various Orthodox traditions (Greek, Russian, etc.) emphasize hesychastic experience, the experience of stillness that implies not quiescence or passivity but, rather, openness and deep, active listening (Gk. hesychia). In the Hebrew tradition we are exhorted to ‘be still’ to ‘know’ life more comprehensively (Ps. 46:10). What is implicit in these various calls to stillness or composure is an appreciation of how distraction lies at the root of our deepest human ills. Within the operation of capital, cultivating 33

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

distraction is foundational to all marketing psychology, and the maintenance of distraction is an absolute requirement for product innovation and production. If people could learn to be happy with the car, the clothes, the house, the spouse, the school, the neighbourhood, and so forth that are currently part of their lives and not find them somehow unsatisfactory or disposable in very short order, even though still perfectly functional and of ongoing value, well, the whole economic system would fall apart without much delay. Manufacturing would decline, retail services would shrink beyond current comprehension, engineering sciences, most of the trades – indeed, every single product or activity that relies on demand turning into the cultivation of supply would fall into much more limited use. Economic historian J. K. Galbraith once remarked, perhaps tongue in cheek, that the entire field of contemporary psychology rose to prominence when it became more difficult to sell an automobile than to make one. The point is, learning how the human mind operates, its suggestibility and capacity for fantasy, and indeed its delusion lies at the epistemological heart of capitalism – in other words, knowing how to keep people constantly dissatisfied with their lives and in search of fulfilment through an endless chain of inherently unsatisfying yet full-of-promise material, aesthetic, and even ‘spiritual’ objects. Hence, the call to wisdom is also a call to mindfulness, to the end of distractedness, a form of ‘recollection’, as Benedictine spirituality names it, a recovery of oneself in deeper unity with the essential nature of the world. This recovery or finding of one’s deepest self is at the same time a form of losing oneself in the fullness of Being, or what in Buddhism is called the ‘Ocean of Dharma’. Dharma (Sk.) can be translated as ‘the Law of Life’, but also ‘that which carries and sustains us’. To become mindful is to learn to be sustained by Life in its truest sense, the sense that lies beyond language, culture, and tradition. In effect, becoming mindful is the ultimate condition of our freedom as human beings. It also identifies the way in which a turn to wisdom is a deeply political 34

W isdom R esponses to G lobalization

act, an act of cultural insurrection, because it refuses to take seriously the seductions of secondary gods. One key aspect of cultural life certain to diminish under a condition of less distraction is an obsession with formal health care. This is because mindfulness is intractably linked to the welfare of the body’s central organ, the heart. In Chinese, heart and mind share the same word, h’sin. In the Greek tradition too this link is well understood. Noted at the beginning of this essay is a quotation from eleventh-century Greek orthodox sage Peter of Damaskos. Peter’s work can be found in Volume Three of the Philokalia, a compendium of Orthodox spirituality from the fourth to fifteenth centuries (see Palmer, Sherrard and Ware 1990). Philokalia literally means ‘love of the beautiful, the true’. Peter declared, ‘Distraction is the cause of the intellect’s obscuration’, ‘forgetfulness is the greatest of evils’, and ‘stillness (marks) the beginning of the soul’s purification (and is) the first form of bodily discipline’ (182). When Peter referred to the ‘intellect’s obscuration’, he used the Greek word nous for intellect rather than dianoia, which refers to the functioning of the intellect to formulate abstract concepts and then arguing on the basis of this to conclusions reached through deductive reasoning. The intellect, as nous, on the other hand, is the highest human faculty through which a person begins to ‘know God’; that is, the reality that transcends all concepts, hence enabling perception of the inner essences or principles of created things, and our participation in them. Even more important, nous also constitutes the innermost aspect of the heart and is sometimes called the ‘organ of contemplation’, the ‘eye of the heart’ (for further discussion see Palmer, Sherrard and Ware 1990, 360). ‘Distraction is the cause of the intellect’s obscuration.’ Is it possible to grasp the utter importance and relevance of this elusive saying? Obscuration literally means ‘darkening’ (L. obscurus, dark). So, when our minds have become darkened through ‘distraction’, we are in deep trouble. When our highest human 35

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

faculty has become subjugated and dominated by nonsensical phantasms perpetrated by intense and powerful media, when education reigns as a project of human engineering to serve only the material prospects of the market, when we invite violence into our minds and imaginations as a form of entertainment – in short, when distraction rules – we become ‘forgetful of Being’, as Heidegger put it, and there is only one possible consequence as a long-term phenomenological reality: We start losing our minds. And when we have lost our minds, ‘darkness covers the earth, and gross darkness the people’ (Isaiah 60:2), as the Hebrew prophet Isaiah declared sapiently some two and a half millennia ago. In North America, antipsychotic drugs now outsell all other medications, including those for heart disease and stroke. There is a now a psychosis at the heart of Western ‘civilization’, induced by the lies and duplicities the corporate and financial elites use to protect their interests, even in universities. In my own university, Prozac, an antipsychotic drug used to treat depression, and Viagra, a cure for sexual dysfunction, are the top prescribed drugs in the university health system. No, a new epistemology is needed that begins with an understanding of the essential unity of the world, an understanding to be gained through piercing the superficial veils of difference into a comprehension of our lived interdependence within a unified field always lying anterior to anything you or I might say about it. This is the mystical vision that underwrites virtually all wisdom traditions of the world, articulated in the coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of opposites) of medieval philosophy and the Taoist intuition of yin/yang. How is this comprehension to be cultivated? If composure is the mark of wisdom, meditation or meditative sensibility is its modus. Unfortunately, the common stereotypes of people engaged in meditation include monks sitting for hours in a meditation hall, or a practitioner perched on a mountaintop in a yogic position, or someone in a trance disengaged from the realities of everyday 36

W isdom R esponses to G lobalization

life. These stereotypes are unfortunate because they hide the deeper meaning and purpose of meditation behind a misunderstanding of meditation as a form of detachment. In The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation, Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh (1999) illuminated the ways that meditative practice needs to be cultivated as a practice of ordinary daily living, a form of mindful attention to the objects and conditions of life that are always ready at hand, from dishes in the sink, to peeling an orange, to sitting in a traffic jam. The basic truths of life are revealed in the simplest, most common details of living, not (just) in cataclysmic events that in any case are themselves simply culminating agglomerations of seemingly incidental events over time. Hence, Hui Neng, the seventhcentury C.E. founder of Chinese Ch’an Buddhist, could declare, ‘To seek enlightenment by separating from this world is as absurd as to search for a rabbit’s horn’ (34). Rabbits don’t have horns: Searching by disengagement from the world is not just a futile exercise, but also misguided. In English the word meditation has an interesting Proto-IndoEuropean etymological root, -med-, which is linked to many other Latin words lying in the heart of English, such as medicus, a physician; mederi, to heal; and it links also to meter and measurement (see etymologyonline.com). In the practice of meditation, there is, therefore, a triple linkage: mindfulness as an act of healing gained through a taking stock of oneself, one’s culture; an act of ‘measurement’ that begins by a kind of ritual ‘stopping’ (Trungpa 1988, 78) of the ordinary flow of consciousness to attend to the things of the world as they arrive in consciousness Now. In a way, meditation is the practice of facing oneself and one’s culture precisely in the things and events of the world that lie at hand. There is a parallel insight to this in the Hebrew tradition of prayer, with the Hebrew word l’hitpalel translatable not just as ‘to pray’ but also ‘to judge oneself’. As Rabbi Hayim Halevy Donin (1980) has expressed it, ‘All prayer is intended to help make 37

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

us into better human beings’ (5). Even more profoundly, in the Hebrew Mishnah of the Talmudic interpretation of Jewish law, the term mav’eh is used as a synonym for a human being, which is derived from the same linguistic root as ‘to pray’. In other words, as Nosson Scherman (2011) has said, in the Talmud the human being is ‘the creature that prays’ (xii). Attention to the material body as the site of one’s salvation (composure, healing, self-facing, etc.) is well understood in the Hebrew tradition as a preliminary requirement of prayer, of being human. The garment that the praying person puts on, the tallit, is composed of stringed fringes, with each string representing ‘my two hundred and forty eight organs and my three hundred and fifty-five sinews’ (Scherman 2011, 4–5), each organ representing a positive commandment, each sinew a negative one. To wrap oneself in the tallit is therefore to signal a recognition that whatever salvation might mean, it takes place through my body, my embodied being. Certainly, salvific events might take place ‘outside’ of me, in other places and persons, but for salvation to mean anything to me, somehow it must register in my body, my materiality. Hence it is, then, that in the graduate seminar one of the assignments is to engage in encounter studies. Students are encouraged to consciously stop and take notice of daily encounters that register on the body and then mindfully unpack what is personally ‘at work’ in the encounter, and also to explore how the encounter fans out into broader cultural implications. Ordinary daily encounters are emphasized rather than grand or earthshaking ones, although those can be important as well, constructed as all grand events are from the minutiae of daily, largely unnoticed phenomena. Examples of encounter studies include losing one’s keys, being approached by a homeless person, standing at the cashier line in the grocery store, sitting in one’s car in a traffic jam, a teacher’s experience of being ‘talked back to’ by a defiant student, etc. etc. In each of these cases, through class dia-logos (lit. submitting our individual reasoning to a collective attunement to a more 38

W isdom R esponses to G lobalization

transcendent Logos [or Word, or Tao, or Way] – that is, the very manner of the world that makes individual reasoning possible) we are able to consider them not defensively, ideologically, or from the point of view of self-interest, but phenomenologically, how they simply register in experience. But equally important, as the phenomenological experience arises, so too arise questions of experiential origin and queries as to why we live in this specific way, materially speaking, and considerations about living differently. Being stuck in a traffic jam on the way to school invites one to consider the many political, economic, and cultural interpenetrations that are involved in such an experience – the domination of public space by the automobile and its links to global wars over petroleum resources, to name obvious examples. One student happened to be stuck behind a school bus on the way to school, and the question arose, ‘What do students learn from being bussed to school?’ ‘They learn how to commute’ was one response. If the actualities of the encounters put us in touch with the material arrangements (political, economic, cultural) of our personal and collective situation, equally important from a wisdom perspective is how we respond to them affectively, mindfully, and hence, in a way, pedagogically. What is to be learned about our human nature from such experiences – and it is on this matter that the wisdom of millennia can come into play – and not just leave us abandoned to personal subjectivity? Buddhist theory identifies three ‘poisons’ to which we most commonly fall victim: greed, anger, and delusion (see Loy 2003 for further elaboration). Greed is about always wanting ‘more’, but always within the same psychic grammar as one’s current conditions, so that instead of satisfying desire, it only intensifies it. In Seoul, South Korea, traffic jams are a perpetual problem. One proposed solution has been to build a second level of highway on top of existing ones. Similarly, if one form of punishment fails to change a defiant student’s behaviour in desired directions, another form of punishment may be 39

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

tried, perhaps in the name of ‘behaviour management’. In both examples, for any true healing to take place, it is the fundamental assumptions that need to be examined, the very desire for ‘more’. Anger is the most typical response of ego frustration and can be caused by other people or circumstances that get in the way of the ego’s desire. This is the foundation of war perpetrated by those who believe in the possibility of their own pure identity. ‘The world would be a wonderful place if I could just get rid of you!’ Stuck in a traffic jam on one’s way to school is likely to produce anger that arises from the frustration of not being able to fulfil one’s sense of parental or professional responsibility. ‘The whole class is waiting for me!’ ‘I don’t want Jason to miss his math test!’ Wisdomly, by putting the ego to rest, one can see more clearly that the situation isn’t actually about oneself at all and, out of the ensuing sense of relief, one can also see more clearly the absurdity of what is occurring. Laughter might even be the result. Wisdom teachers are known for their sense of humour. Delusion refers to the condition that pervades all unmindful experience and is sometimes called simply ‘ignorance’ (Sk. avidya). Primarily, ignorance is the result of being trapped in cultural and parochial understandings and accepting them as universal truth. Aristotle defined this as ‘bad infinity’ (Gk. pleonexia), a seduction into infinite desire incapable of restraint. Today I received in the mail a glossy magazine celebrating the ‘good life’. Pictures of beautiful young women and men draped in the finest clothes, images of expensive cars, exotic vacation locales, and so on – all of these put forward as something to be desired by anyone wishing to call themselves successful in life. What is important is not to simply dismiss this as delusional per se (recall the long, deep, philosophical respect for the link between truth and beauty), but to underscore its onesidedness, or better, its incompleteness. In the same mail arrived letters soliciting financial support for an Alzheimer’s disease care facility, for assistance for War Amputees, and for the Big Brothers/Big Sisters organization, which assists 40

W isdom R esponses to G lobalization

children in difficulty. These letters serve to remind us that the truth of life, indeed its beauty, has to be found somehow in acknowledging and embracing such human suffering as well if life is to be appreciated in its fullness. In fact, by acknowledging such suffering, one can turn it back on the images of success in the glossy magazine. Who in fact are these ‘beautiful people’, and what are their lives really like? Perhaps they may best be viewed as modelling the duplicity of the image. The Buddha began his life as a young prince, having everything of a material nature that he might desire, yet he knew intuitively this could not possibly encompass the full range of human possibility, so he felt compelled to leave his environs and embark on a long search for the deeper truth of things. The purported failures of public schooling might have something to do with this understanding of delusion. If educational theory and practice cannot articulate this multidimensional nature of reality, celebrating only successes of a culturally parochial kind, schools become places of suffocating oppression, both for successful students and for those less so. For the latter, the oppression is obvious. Less obviously, successful students may be oppressed by their ignorance of, or ignoring of, the ‘other’ side, which ignorance they may have to face later as they encounter life’s inevitable paradoxes and difficulties. What is meant by the term wisdom traditions when it is used in the context of appealing to wisdom as a source for pedagogical, indeed social and cultural, insight? The question pulls us into some very murky water, as issues arise regarding the commensurability of meaning across massive differences of historical and geographical experience. Is it possible, or even realistic in any sense of that word, to talk about Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Sufism, sapiential Biblical literature, Indigenous knowledge, the African unhu ubuntu renaissance, to say nothing of the Western traditions of wisdom from ancient Greece through writers such as de la Rochefoucauld (1681; see Willis-Bund and Friswell 1871), 41

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

Schopenhauer (1851/1973), and Nietzsche (1878/1996), all in the same breath, as if they each speak with the same essential voice? In a way, the question invites a further one, whether the commonalities in human experience in the world outweigh the differences, and it might be true to say that the contemporary period is unique in providing access to wisdom traditions from around the world through textual translations and enhanced mobility of persons, so that articulating the commonalities may become increasingly possible. Even though persons, groups, and cultures find themselves at different times and places on the planet and hence have different material bases out of which experience of the world arises, it is still the same planet for everyone, an insight only recently reinforced through images of earth from outer space. Likewise, while living in a desert is a very different experience from living in a tropical environment and an urban life is quite different from a rural one, human struggles reveal a remarkable commonality across the entire range. How can I be happy? What do I do about feelings of jealousy and ill will? How to deal with relationships among both friends and ‘enemies’? What is a moral life, and how might I live it? What is my responsibility to the common good in the midst of immense political corruption? How might future civic leaders be ‘educated’ to serve well? These are all questions that global wisdom traditions try to address, each in its own way. The point is, there is indeed great commonality across wisdom traditions, and, historically, there has been widespread intermingling of the same, as the desire for practical guidance bears its witness across time and space. As biblical scholars have noted, for example (see Herbert 1963), most of the sapiential literature of the Hebrew bible can also be found in the wisdom literature of ancient Sumeria, Babylonia, Egypt, and Ugarit from as early as the third millennium BCE, thus forming a commonality of tradition not claimable by any one tradition alone. Again, this speaks to the fact that wisdom, as basic human prudentiality and the power of discernment into the 42

W isdom R esponses to G lobalization

true nature of things, is actually no unique respecter of any one particular tradition, even though different traditions make their own interpretations out of their own circumstances. As Jesus of Nazareth expressed it, ‘Wisdom is proven right by all her children’ (Lk. 7:35). The remark was a response to a query as to why, in his personal lifestyle, he was not more ascetic, a common stereotype assigned to people pursuing wisdom. Jesus’ point is that wisdom practice is not about asceticism or nonasceticism, but truth seeking and one’s collective life with others. The Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa (2001) spoke of honouring ‘crazy wisdom’ – that sometimes the face of wisdom seems crazy, absurd, wild, even conspiratorial. Today, many of our best wisdom teachers may in fact be ‘conspiracy theorists’ who have seen through the charade of propaganda surrounding 9/11 and the War on Terror, scholars such as David Ray Griffin (2011) and Peter Dale Scott (2010). In the biblical tradition of the West, wisdom is sometimes regarded as ‘God’s Consort’, with the Greek translation of wisdom as the feminine ‘Sophia’ naming the Wisdom of God. Philo, the Hellenized Jewish philosopher of the first century C.E., equated Wisdom with the Logos – in a sense, the mind of divinity active in the world and present in human beings as they ‘think through’ the Logos to solve their problems (lit. dia-logos, ‘dialogue’). In one of the creation stories of Genesis (there are actually two), an oftneglected aspect of a famous verse implies quite directly the masculine–feminine unity of both divinity and humanity. Genesis 1:26–27 reads, ‘Let us make humankind in our own image, … so God created male and female.’ I like to think, therefore, that the call of wisdom in the biblical tradition is, in fact, a call for the feminization of that tradition against hyper-patriarchy and masculocentrism. The call of wisdom is the call for balance in human affairs, as the Taoists have always insisted, and this is most poignantly revealed in the profoundly intimate interdependence between men and women as co-creators of human experience. It 43

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

is an unfortunate historical turn that gave precedence to the other creation story of woman, with Woman taken from Man’s (lit. Heb. Adam) rib, to become a perpetual ‘side issue’ of the masculine agenda (see Genesis 2:18–23). When we look at the various modalities of wisdom literature, it is possible to see that the way the questions are taken up is quite different from the usual analytic and hyper-rationalistic formality one usually finds in the social science and humanities disciplines of the Western academy, for example. Whether it be the ancient morality tales of Aesop’s Fables, using the character traits of different animals to illustrate the virtues and foibles of human beings, or the stories and ceremonial practices of Indigenous people that reveal the continuity between material and spiritual realms, or the aphoristic guiding of Hebrew Proverbs, the paradoxical puzzles of Zen koans, or Taoist principles of harmony and balance – all of these speak in a way unique to wisdom; namely, as a call to consider the auspices of our living. If the existential questions of capitalism are, ‘How can I/we become rich?’ ‘How can I/we gain a competitive advantage over others, and maintain the same?’ ‘How can I/we secure the material resources of the world before anyone else?’ and so on, the responsibility of wisdom is to emphasize the narrowness and existential poverty of such preoccupations and point to something deeper, something more nurturing and mutually sustaining. In the graduate seminar no attempt is made to harmonize all of the different traditions into a single voice, but simply to allow each tradition to speak to us as directly as possible. I like to use the analogy of a person lost in the desert and dying of thirst. Imagine yourself in such a condition. As you are about to die, a stranger appears who offers you a drink. What are you going to do? Of course, you are going to accept the drink! If someone offers me a drink when I am dying of thirst, I do not ask, ‘Are you a Jew, a Christian (Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant?), a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Taoist?’ No. First I accept the drink. Questions of 44

W isdom R esponses to G lobalization

origin, politics, interpretive contestation, and so on can all come later, but only after the fact of my resuscitation. When I began teaching of wisdom traditions in my own faculty of education, I described the inaugural course as ‘Teaching as the Practice of Wisdom’, emphasizing the matter of practice in the sense of both practical action and trial and error experiment. Wisdom is both a product of teaching (one learns over time how to teach well), just as wisdom is a prevenient guide for the teacher based on years of experience. Teachers are always practising, with perfection an ever-elusive goal that teaches true humility. In the Greek Orthodox tradition, humility is the true mark of wisdom. Indeed, no one is exempt from the true difficulties of trying to live a more ethical, disciplined, and mindful life. One can study and practise for a lifetime but still ‘fall’ into habits of thought and action that diminish human life rather than dignify it. As the Philokalia’s Peter of Damaskos noted of the biblical tradition, most of the exemplary figures, from Moses through king David to Peter, the first Christian Pope (< Gk. pappas, ‘father’), displayed serious weaknesses of character at certain points in their lives. More important, though, is that they struggled to the end of their lives to overcome their weaknesses to be able more faithfully to fulfil their respective human callings. To ‘fall’ is not the issue; to rest complacently in one’s fallen condition out of pride, stubbornness, self-justification, or even inordinate guilt is a greater missing of the point of life, which is the literal meaning of ‘sin’ (< Gk. hamartia). In the sixth century C.E. when Benedict of Nursia (later ‘St. Benedict’) was developing his first monastic communities in Italy, as one way of dealing with a rotting-out Roman empire, curious passers-by would often ask, ‘What do you and members of your community do all day?’ Benedict would reply, ‘We fall down, then we get up. We fall down again, then again we get up, fall again, get up, fall, get up, fall, and still try to get up’ (see deWaal 1989). According to contemporary Buddhist teacher Sayadaw Pandita (1992), the mark of maturity on the spiritual path is not 45

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

whether one falls or makes mistakes; maturity is marked instead by increased speed of recovery time. In other words, it is important not to nurse grudges, hold anger internally for long periods, or engage in unconstructive behaviour as a matter of habit. Learn to read one’s responses quickly, for what they are; learn from them and, by so doing, redeem them through more positive action. Contemporary Chinese scholar Zongjie Wu of Zhejian University has recently published a stunningly brilliant piece on the problems of teaching Confucianism in today’s Chinese schools (see Wu 2011). A neo-Confucian renaissance is taking place all over China as part of an effort to recover a deeper sense of authentic Chinese identity in a globalizing world. As Wu pointed out, however, educational theory in China today has fallen victim to the precepts of Western modernity, based primarily on linguistic theories of ‘representation’ whereby language is taken to represent the ‘real’ world and students are required to learn what is real. Hence, in Chinese classrooms today, students are required to memorize and recite Confucian sayings, but in a way that completely violates the spirit and truth at the heart of Confucianism itself. There is a reason that Confucian literature, like most wisdom literature in the world, is mainly in the form of aphorisms, brief conversations, axioms, verses, and stories rather than complicated and convoluted arguments: because the aim is to be suggestive, hinting, and open, rather than pedantic and heavy handed. The point is to open a space where students can begin to consider the auspices of their lives, and this is best done through a simple remark or point that offers itself for reflection in the context of the students’ life situation. Wisdom language points to the much larger and fuller ‘remainder’ of everything that is ‘said’; it opens out into the authentic silence beyond formal language, to where the actual possibility of finding one’s self might be found, paradoxically in the very way that one can be liberated from it. It is appropriate to quote Wu at length here, given the importance of the point: 46

W isdom R esponses to G lobalization

For Confucius, learning is a constant modification of self by day-to-day engagement towards a Junzi (good person), a process of gradually becoming shining but silent. However, a discourse that constitutes today’s pedagogic practice is dominated by the concept of learning as accumulation of representational language, which makes learning a process of collecting facts and propositions – as many as possible. For the Chinese ancients, the purpose of memorizing the classics is to catch spiritual enlightenment by removing the shadow of language. Memorization is to make language ready for decoding meaning in everyday life. What is memorized is not the ideas, facts, theses, or truths, but the nets, the traps which have to be foretaken, fore-grasped so that the fish and rabbits could be caught. Once a rabbit is caught, the trap is forgotten. Forgetfulness is the only reason that students have to memorize … [Today] the memorization of language is no longer for its ancient use of uncovering the ineffable, the secrets of life, but to grasp the illusion, the false consciousness residing entirely in the signification of signs [i.e., things only seemingly made ‘real’ through processes of representation]. (566)

I indicated earlier that there is no attempt in the seminar course to harmonize all traditions into a single unity. We read primary sources such as the Tao te Ching, the Confucian Analects, Indigenous knowledge such as that found in the work of Dooling and Jordan-Smith (1989), and feminist Buddhist scholarship such as that of Charlotte Joko Beck (2007) and Pema Chodron (2004). However, today we can increasingly find sources that helpfully attempt to pull together multiple traditions in a way that can speak of Wisdom’s commonalities. Jack Kornfield’s (2001) After the Ecstasy the Laundry: How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path is a text I have used to great benefit over the past several years, and to which students have responded very favourably. In a concluding statement of my own, I simply identify here 47

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

seven characteristics of Wisdom traditions as I have come to learn them after years of study, and then I will attempt to relate them to the practice of pedagogical wisdom. I have worked out some of these themes more fully in Smith (2011); unfortunately, there is not enough space to elaborate them here in detail, so in brief: 1. Wisdom acknowledges the inherent unity of birth and death. While Vietnamese master Thich Nhat Hanh (1988) once remarked that ‘birth and death are fictions, and not very deep’ (10), our mortality is encoded in the very fact of our birth, so that if we choose to live as if we will never die, our living will be somehow dishonest, just as a preoccupation with death will also produce just a half-life. Living in the inherent unity of birth and death means always accepting one’s situation in the ‘now’ as the site in which the fullness of human experience is always already present. There is an ancient Buddhist saying, ‘Life cannot be made more perfect’, which means not that life is without difficulties and problems, but that the full range of its possibilities is always present, immanent in every present moment. A culture obsessed with ‘progress’ such as that of the West, easily pathologizes death and dying as a problem, when actually acceptance of one’s mortality is the key to wholesome living. Ironically, the two defining features of human experience, birth and death, both reveal the limits of human choice and hence render the ‘Choice Theory’ favoured by the Western liberal tradition of education somewhat illusory. Pedagogically, inducting children into a belief that life is a matter of will, and willpower, under the guise of clichés such as ‘You can do anything in life that you want to do if you work hard and put your mind to it’ can be a recipe for despair in the face of failed dreams. Similarly, preoccupations with goal-setting, curriculum-by-objectives and so on are not ill-advised in themselves 48

W isdom R esponses to G lobalization

but quickly become so if they evolve into blinkered constraints against the fullness of life’s beckoning. 2. Wisdom contradicts values of power by revealing the paradoxical nature of experience. This theme reveals itself in many different forms and ways. Here is one example: In classical Christian theology is a term, ‘The Happy Fault’, that respects the relationship between the breaking of a taboo, or law, and the foundation of love in mercy and forgiveness. The primary example begins with the Genesis myth of Adam and Eve (Gen. chs. 2 and 3). The Creator God tells them they are free to do anything except eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, lest they die. Of course, they succumb to temptation, ironically because, among other things, the tree was ‘to be desired to make one wise’ – an important caveat against seeing wisdom as an object of desire; also to be noted is the link between death and the assumption of power in moral reasoning. Instead, somehow, the story implies, the free life of the genuinely human resides not in the power of judgement, but in faith in a prevenient order never fully transparent to human ‘knowing’. The Genesis story attempts to account for the origin of the human experience of alienation from perfect existence, from paradise (hence, for example, the ordinary but universal experience of frustration and anger), and the embarkation on the long journey to return ‘home’, the myth of eternal return, as philosopher of religion Mircea Eliade (1954/2005) called it. This hope for a return to perfect life provided, and still provides, the messianic vision of Judaism, eventually taken up in the Christian tradition of Jesus being the messiah, literally, ‘the anointed’ (Heb. masiah), with the act of anointing denoting kingship within a new dispensation marked by mercy, forgiveness, generosity, and so on. Jesus’ words such as ‘Judge not…’

49

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

and ‘The rain falls on both the just and the unjust’ (Mt. 7:01 and 5:45, respectively) is a form of call back to what is formally termed the prelapsarian (before the lapse) human condition, life before the breaking of the taboo. ‘The Happy Fault’, therefore, names the paradox that breaking a taboo provides the necessary condition for the revelation of mercy, forgiveness, generosity, and so on. Without breakage there can be no reconciliation; a mistake is the requirement for rectification. This paradox is widely understood by teachers who can stand the test of time. Rules, regulations, expectations, standards even – all of these are an inevitable part of any human community made up of diverse personalities, histories, and ethnic and cultural origins. However, any rule, law, or taboo will eventually be broken. But such breakage also provides the necessary condition for reconciliation under a broadening of understanding, a bearing of witness to authentic compassion, and a sharing of mutual forbearance. Under neoliberal/neoconservative policies the rising calls for ‘zero tolerance’ regarding aberrant student behaviour is deeply regrettable as a sign that the adult world is losing a sense of its own complicity in the construction of youthful difficulties and the subsequent collapse of compassion as an essential element of human dignity. Ironically, paradoxically, tolerance itself easily slips into dogma when taken as a literal code, thereby losing its character as a ‘field’ through which the complexities, ambiguities, and uncertainties of life can reveal themselves for mutual edification between teachers and students of life’s deeper meanings. 3. Wisdom fractures the temporal enframing of conventional interpretation. The Western tradition has two basic concepts of time, chronometric and kairotic. The former is derived from the Greek god Chronos, famous for eating his own children lest

50

W isdom R esponses to G lobalization

they grow up to usurp his power. Chronometric time is the measured time necessary for scheduling, planning, and anticipating and is most commonly experienced through an instrument called, tellingly, a ‘watch’. Chronometric time is the principle form of time for the operation of capital and efficient labour/productivity ratios. Under capital, ‘Time is money’, so time is not to be ‘wasted’ on tasks not related to production. In educational circles, even today, one hears of students’ ‘time on task’, as if overt behaviour ‘on task’ were the most important measure of pedagogical efficiency, rather than dreaming or wondering. What is occluded under the reign of chronometric time is kairotic time (< Gk. kairos), which can roughly be translated as cosmological time, which is always everywhere in operation behind the scenes of ordinary human action. Think of the million-year frames of geologic time, for example, or the light-years of space. More experientially, kairotic time registers when we speculate that something happened when ‘the timing was right’, a moment not measurable to a single source by any instrument, but intuitively understood as arriving when various elements converge to give cause. Under the reign of kairotic time, many things might seem to be dead, inert, or inconsequential, when all of a sudden there may be a bursting forth to reveal dimensions of their nature heretofore ignored. I used to teach in Southern Alberta, Canada, a semi-desert area where a certain flower blooms only every 60 years. For 59 years the plant lies dormant, almost invisible, and seemingly dead. Kairotic time provides a reminder that much of life is like this; it lies hidden, dormant, awaiting its appropriate moment. Teaching mindful of kairotic time appreciates how many gifts of young people are sensitive

51

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

to conditions of revelation; the gifts will not reveal themselves if the conditions of the time are not right. This is one reason that wise teachers constantly discipline themselves to a kind of ‘karmic attunement’, attending to the young not according to a ‘watch’, but according to a sensitive attunement to life’s broader rhythms, paradoxes, and indeed mysteries. 4. Wisdom understands the natural world as pedagogical. To be natural means to ‘be born’ (< L. nasci nat), so in a sense every human being is part of nature. It is a conceit of Western selfconsciousness to conceive of a human-nature separation, a situation that turns nature, under the exigencies of capital, into either a romantic love-object (e.g., eco-tourism or exotic travel) or a brute object that requires domestication, exploitation, or both. The cultural loss is the pedagogical wisdom only a mindful attending to human nature in its unified sense can produce. The recovery of this wisdom has a number of requirements, one of which is related to my suggestion above about kairotic time. Learning to let nature speak to us means silencing any predisposition to speak before plants, animals, mountains, and rivers have spoken to us. This may sound absurd, but it is best understood through the practice of silence in non-human settings. One may go into the woods to commune with nature only to find it silent, without realizing that such a perception is only a symptom of the noise already existing in one’s own head or a feature of the way the noise of one’s simple presence forces everything else into silent hiding. Instead, sit down, be silent, be still, be patient, and learn to be amazed. To learn from nature means to be present to it, both within oneself and in relation to everything else. Under conditions of illness, attending to the body mindfully can produce forms of insight into those same conditions not available to conventional

52

W isdom R esponses to G lobalization

interpretation. Observe how a tree bends to accommodate a neighbour, and learn something about generosity. Listen to birdsong, and hear how every song is a response to someone else’s song, and learn the inadequacies of the concept of personal autonomy. Sit around a campfire on a romantic evening, and suddenly observe the eyes of a mountain lion gleaming in the summer moonlight, focused directly on your beloved, and from your terror learn respect for the territory of others. The death of multiple species, to say nothing of the demise of languages and cultures under the juggernaut of Western theories of ‘development’, is a form of speaking back to those same theories. If the speech is not heard, beware of the consequences. When the Western powers first invaded Iraq in 2003, I asked one of my Chinese doctoral students what he thought of such action. He was also a Taoist Tai Chi Master, quite famous in his homeland. His response? ‘The West is digging its own tomb.’ Of course, given the inherent unity of life and death, this prognosis can be taken as another example of paradox: The more one tries to secure one’s interests, the more insecure they become, and the so-called war on terror becomes itself a form of terrorism. 5. Wisdom honours the intermingling of implicate and explicate orders. In a way, this is implied in everything that I have discussed so far. More deliberately, the continuity of implicate and explicate orders has been articulated by Bede Griffiths (1989), a Benedictine monk who went to India in 1955 to search for the common ground of spirituality between East and West. The explicate order is easily understood as the world that lies at hand, available for empirical investigation and comment. The implicate order is everything else that is ‘implied’ in the explicate order. Needless to say, the implicate order is vast, infinite,

53

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

incapable of human measurement; yet still, it is ‘here’, in this thing or that, explicitly. Even more important though is how the relationship between the orders is deeply political, insofar as the explicate is always subordinate to the implicate. In Hinduism this lies at the heart of the Sanskrit understanding of language: The Word (Sk. vac) lies subordinate to Silence, the uttered to the yet-to-be-uttered (see Padoux 1990).

By honouring the continuity between these orders, wisdom finds its voice in the politics between the said and the unsaid, the visible and the invisible. It does not rest in an easy acceptance of conventional interpretations, in the awareness that no matter what is said, there is still more to be said, waiting in the wings, so to speak. Hence vigilance and wakefulness are common hortatory terms in wisdom literature. A true teacher is one who honours not just the child who is ‘present’, but also the human being who is yet-to-come. This theme has another connection, which is to the importance of Place in the unfolding of Wisdom’s call. Earlier here I noted distraction as a cause of human emotional and intellectual darkening. Phenomenologically, in terms of experience, constant motion and moving are deeply contributive to such distraction. This can be called the condition of placelessness and explains why operations of displacement and destabilization are common military strategies in contemporary warfare. In the Benedictine tradition, on entering the order, every monk makes a ‘Vow of Stability’, a commitment to this place as the place where the journey into truth will occur. The understanding is that indeed any place can suffice for the work of such a journey when it is appropriately understood as containing, paradoxically, in its singularity everything that is necessary for truth’s fuller unfolding; that is, for the revelation of the implicate in the explicate. It is interesting to note in the contemporary resurgence of Indigenous knowledge the

54

W isdom R esponses to G lobalization

importance attached to Place, not simply as political possession of land, but as the necessary condition for sacred understanding. As Indigenous scholar Keith Basso (1996) expressed it, ‘Wisdom sits in places’. How might schools be such places? In closing, the following remarks may be appropriate. According to Thai teacher Ajahn Chah (2002), the primary vision of wisdom is for us to become ‘fearless’, which involves the long and difficult work of learning to know ‘phenomena as they are’ (93). As noted earlier, Michael Fisher (2011) has characterized the pervasive atmosphere, particularly in Western societies, as a ‘Culture of Fear’. It may be, therefore, that the first responsibility of wisdom work is, as Chah suggested, to examine the phenomenon of fear itself, and specifically what it is that is feared, the specific sources of fear. In the context of this chapter, fear of the consequences of the collapse of Market Logic as a recipe for human well-being is understandable, since the failure of Market Logic (see Kevin Mellyn’s [2012] Broken Markets) inspires a fear of loss of everything promised through utopian market rhetoric, from more efficient schools, better health care, more individual wealth, more celebration of personal autonomy, firmer, more secure global dominance in the name of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law, and so forth. Following Chah, I suspect the way forward lies in two unified paths. One is the urgent need to rethink economic theory around, not profit taking and wealth accumulation, but what economic historian Robert Heilbroner (1999) described as ‘the art of human provisioning’, a work that under positive interpretations of globalization will necessarily involve what Pasha and Samatar (1996) have called ‘intercivilizational dialogue’. A starting point for this, I believe, will involve a recognition of the respective poverties of every civilizational tradition, rather than starting from triumphalist national and ideological affirmations, which only put others on the defensive. To begin by affirming our mutual poverty inspires an openness to the relative contributions of others, as well, importantly, openness to mutual criticism. 55

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

A second path may be the one that confronts fear itself, and its existential auspices. This is the work of wisdom that I have tried to articulate, stumblingly, here. The primary human fear, said Freud, is the fear of insignificance, or self-annihilation. Ironically, this very condition of human insignificance relative to the vastness of cosmic realities, and the loss of self within the interpenetration of all phenomena – it is recognition of this very conditionedness that is the necessary starting point of sagacious living. ‘Reverence for the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’, says the Hebrew writer of Proverbs (1:7). This language can be de-theologized to name the phenomenological experience of an immanent transcendence in life that inspires both wonder and genuine humility in the face of all-that-is. Japanese Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki (1994) decried the ‘homocentric fallacy’ (65) lying at the heart of the West’s self-narrative. Learning to live together on the planet, in peace, may require a relinquishment of this fallacy in the name of a more comprehensive view. Maybe there are signs of progress. Nietzsche’s ‘Death of God’ in the nineteenth century could only result in Foucault’s “End of Man” in the twentieth, since the death of an anthropomorphic god merely announces the death of an anthropogenic self-fantasy. Constructively, this may mark ‘the end of the world as we know it’ in the twenty-first century, as the REM song says. The best sentiment may lie in the remainder of the song’s line, ‘and I feel fine’. That the end of the world as we’ve known it is at hand may be true, arguably, depending on who the ‘we’ is. It is the world yet-to-be-known, however, that is the source of our hope, insofar as the sages say, ‘that which you seek, you already are’ (Loy 2000, 228).

56

CHAPTER 2

Can Wisdom Trump the Market as a Basis for Education? The wise are mightier than the strong. (Proverbs 24:5) The tongue of the wise brings healing. (Proverbs 12:18)

INTRODUCTION On the morning of 17 February 2009, a distinguished professor of business at one of Canada’s leading research universities made a remarkable suggestion. Market regulators, he said, would do well to practise Buddhist philosophies. His comment came after his keynote speech, ‘Why Markets Fail’, during a symposium sponsored by the university and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The symposium was designed to help people better understand the contemporary collapse of global markets and perhaps to allay their fears for the future (see Morck 2009). As a professor of education who has been studying global wisdom traditions, including Buddhism, for over 20 years, my ears suddenly pricked up. Buddhist philosophies might be helpful, the professor surmised, because the Buddha spoke of the impermanence of life, of the dialectical relation of pleasure to suffering, and because markets might be analogous to the Buddhist concept 57

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

of illusion. So far so good. Then: The temptation to regulate markets, which always follows a collapse, might in fact impede the ‘natural ability of the market to recover’ (a presumption, surely), and indeed make matters worse in the long run. So the argument went, and just as suddenly my ears resumed their flopped position. Why? Because the professor’s logic appropriated the Buddha’s wisdom for a predetermined purpose, namely the survival of the market, rather than letting that wisdom interrogate Market Logic itself and perhaps thereby transform it into a better practice of social and cultural healing, if in fact that might be possible. That last point about healing is relevant insofar as the earliest formulations of Market Logic in the eighteenth century were indeed designed to encourage personal and social healing, especially healing of the wounds of ethnic, religious, and political strife. Repudiating existing religious and monarchical traditions for their propensity to produce enmity, Voltaire (1734/1980), a leading French philosophe of the European Enlightenment, pointed to the London Stock Exchange as ‘a place more respectable than many a court’ where ‘you will see assembled representatives of every nation for the benefit of mankind. Here, the Jew, the Mohametan and the Christian deal with one another as if they were of the same religion, and reserve the name “infidel” for those who go bankrupt’ (Letter Six). It’s a fairly long journey from the establishment of the first stock exchange in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1460 to the collapse of the global market in 2008, a time of an immense inversion of human values, when, for example, the Seven Deadly Sins (SDS) of medieval Christendom (anger, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony) gradually morphed into the easier virtues of contemporary capitalism (self-righteous rage against another in the name of personal rights, consumerism, leisure, self-esteem, recreational sex, a desire for what the other has, and insatiability. (NB: Brainstorming with a class the binary opposites of the SDSs is an interesting pedagogical activity – DS.) 58

W isdom as a B asis for E ducation

Responsibility for this inversion of values might rest with traditional religious institutions themselves, if sin actually means ‘missing the point’ of life (Gk. hamartia), and there has been a persistent failure to translate consciousness of sin into the one quality celebrated above all others by the new Enlightenment rationality, namely, human happiness. The enshrinement of the right to pursue happiness in the new American constitution of 1789 marked a determination that had been evolving for almost 200 years that worldly happiness was a good thing, with status in life beyond death something undecidable in human terms and hence of less immediate concern. By the mid-eighteenth century the word civilization had taken on a new and very specific meaning, identified as ‘refinement’, a kind of moral rehabilitation of luxury (Febvre, quoted in Burke 1973, 229). The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1751/1983), in his 1742 essay ‘On Luxury’, denounced what he called ‘the monkish virtues’ of asceticism and self-denial; and Voltaire (1734/2009), in his poem ‘The Worldling’, assailed the ‘poor Doctors of the Church’ for their hypocrisy in failing to appreciate their dependence on the material welfare supplied by the new wealth of urban luxury. In all of this, the market was seen to play a pivotal role in producing what the godfather of modern economics, Adam Smith (1776/1976), anticipated as ‘universal opulence’, but also a new form of social control based on the self-control necessary to succeed in a world based on commercial relations. Indeed, the word proprietor entered the English language to describe the ‘propriety’ of the new business man (Muller 2003, 72). Smith (1780/1982) was sanguine enough about human nature to recognize that ‘the wise and virtuous’ were inevitably ‘a small party’ (62), with the new logic of self-interest capable of leading to what a century later the philosopher Hegel called ‘bad infinity’, from Aristotle’s pleonexia, a seduction into infinite desire incapable of restraint (quoted in Muller 2003, 159). It is worth noting too, as an aside, that Smith foresaw how the division of labour, or 59

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

specialization that he recommended as part of production efficiency for market success, would lead to new forms of isolation and alienation for workers. His antidote was education, so that people could engage with understandings of the world broader than the one that their working conditions had inflicted on them. Smith was thus a forebear of mass public education in capitalist societies. Today, the market has assumed the status of what Buddhist social theorist David Loy (2000) has termed ‘the world’s first transcendental logic’ (16). To question it is to invite derision, especially from those who most profit from it, which includes not just those involved in production, trade, and finance, but also so-called academics who make their reputations in faculties and schools of business even while refusing to critically examine their underlying presuppositions. It is important to remember, however, that in the classical republican traditions of Greece and Rome, merchants were stigmatized as being involved in practices that, although necessary for material provisioning, for that very reason were somehow lesser on the scale of human dignity. Mind and spirit were always more important in the classical world, to such a degree that being a merchant actually disqualified one from citizenship in the republic (Muller 2003, 61). In the Christian tradition too, at least until the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, self-interest, the very basis of Market Logic, was regarded as a passion, thus part of a person’s bodily animal nature rather than true human nature (61). All of these foregoing contextualizing remarks reinforce what in recent days social theorist Samir Amin (2004) has stressed; specifically, the importance of understanding capitalism as a ‘parenthesis’ in the human story, not its final end, a remark intuitively understood perhaps by a group of MBA students at Canada’s University of Western Ontario subsequent to the current market crash. ‘The paradigm has broken’, said one student (see Grant 2008). More on this point later. 60

W isdom as a B asis for E ducation

What I wish to attempt, then, in this chapter, is both genealogical and pedagogical. As recent scholarship has well established, since the middle of the 1990s public education policy and indeed practice have fallen under the formidable influence of what is usually termed neoliberalism. Basically, the era beginning in the late 1970s/early 1980s with Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States was a time when Western economies were floundering under pressures of economic stagnation, and the Thatcher/Reagan solution was to invoke the economic ideas of Friedrich von Hayek (and his American disciple, Milton Friedman) by way of solution. These ideas included ending the welfare state that had been constructed since World War II, privatizing whenever possible public institutions such as schools and hospitals, holding all public institutions accountable to severe standards of economic efficiency, and ending state interference in the operation of the free market. New terms in education were born, such as the new knowledge economy, in an attempt to reduce all knowledge to commodity form for international trade in a conceived new borderless world of globalization. Knowledge production itself became an industry subject to the efficiency requirements of industrial production, with universities held to new management rules of accountability and stricture. Because Market Logic is structured on a foundation of human competitiveness, education became articulated as the task of preparing students, defined as human capital, for global competitiveness. Schools and universities became subject to global ranking measures, with those falling behind subject to the threat of state de-funding. The language of excellence appeared as a coverall term used by institutions to legitimize themselves as both worthy and desirable within an increasingly stringent fight for resources, customers, clients, and recruits. Cornell University even devised an Excellence in Parking award for its parking services department (Peters 2007). In the United States, those who drafted the No Child Left Behind policy seemed unaware of the 61

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

apocalyptic nature of the policy’s title. To this day all of these reforms have had an enormous effect on life in educational institutions, and in pedagogical terms most of it has been negative. Teachers are being asked to teach more and more students with fewer and fewer resources. Education faculty members are pressed to publish more and more, because in the new performance measures it is the number of publications that counts rather than their quality, with one result being most of the new scholarship is unenlightening since the increases in institutional responsibility and teaching have reduced the time for deep study. Students at both school and tertiary levels have come to see educational institutions as service providers and they themselves as clients or customers with the highest priority right to personal satisfaction. As a consequence, teachers and professors have lost much of their former professional authority over both curriculum and pedagogy. The list could go on. What is relevant here – and it is a development that has received scant attention in virtually all educational research literature to date – is that the contemporary collapse of the global market signifies the end of neoliberalism as a legitimate basis for educational practice (if ever such legitimacy ever existed). The principles of deregulation, the aggressive economic imperialism masked by the euphemism of globalization, the myth of education as the conduit to personal wealth creation – all of these assumptions now lie in shambles. Because mainstream media (newspapers, television, Hollywood cinema, etc.) are controlled by those now desperately trying to manage the collapse, information about the collapse and its impending intensification is hidden behind the veiled language of economic recovery. The facts of the matter, however, are such that a recovery to some pre-recessionary levels of economic health is a delusional idea. Basically, this is because the global economy has been constructed on a foundation of US public and state indebtedness, designed to finance the failed imperial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, wars that, undertaken in the heady, swaggering 62

W isdom as a B asis for E ducation

years of post-communism, in turn were undertaken to ameliorate the already perilous condition of Western economies. (For more detailed discussion of these claims, see various articles at Globalresearch.ca, and particularly the work of the GlobalEurope Anticipation Bulletin, available online.) That perilousness today calls for a new kind of social and political vigilance by all those concerned for public welfare, especially perhaps educators, whose unique vocational responsibility is to stand for an open future so that the young, the special charge of educators at all levels, might indeed have a future. Vigilance is one thing, but relevant vigilance requires a particular kind of attention. In this case, education can no longer be left to the economists; neither can economists alone be trusted to guide the public sphere as they have done basically since the eighteenth century, but in a uniquely heightened and ideologically driven way since the 1970s. If, however, educators are to creatively resist the oppressive obsessions of the economists, they have no alternative but to engage the operating assumptions of economists themselves. Educators have to study economics, but actually in a unique way, a hermeneutic way. By this I mean they/we have to study economics, not as a set of inert ideas that require only effective implementation but, rather, as a historically derived field that constituted itself in response to particular questions and issues arising in the public domain. Robert Heilbroner (1999), an economic historian, once described economics as the work of ‘human provisioning’. The origin of the word in the Greek oikos, which means ‘household’, points to how economics must be concerned with the overall welfare of the human household and not tied, as it has become today, to ideological posturing and divisive politics. What makes the current situation particularly elusive yet decisive is the fact that most, if not all, economists simply do not know what to do. Because the global economy is now, well, global, that is, integrated in an unprecedented way, conventional economic theory, based on forms of rationality rooted in the eighteenth-century 63

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

European Enlightenment, is largely inadequate for interpreting the intricacies and requirements of truly global times. In this essay my point is that, today, economics needs to be put in its place, basically to where it belonged before the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century. As economic historian Karl Polanyi (2001) argued in his classic book The Great Transformation, before the nineteenth century the economy served society; since then, society has served the economy. This latter condition needs to be revisited, but, as noted, responsible social theorists of all stripes need to educate themselves on the assumptions of the field that they wish to revise. It is in that spirit that this current chapter proceeds. What is Market Logic, and what have been the debates about it, historically? How can Market Logic today be engaged creatively, not just critically? With regard to the latter aspect, I turn to global wisdom traditions for assumptions about how priorities in human living might be established beyond the currently dogmatic formulations of global monetarism. In what follows I undertake a kind of genealogy of capitalism, a term that only entered the English language in the nineteenth century, before which Adam Smith simply referred to ‘commercial society’ and G. F. Hegel later embellished as ‘civil society’ (quoted in Muller 2003, 166). For much of what follows in the next section, I am clearly indebted to Muller’s brilliant historical work.

MARKET LOGIC: HISTORICAL OPINIONS In the modern period, concerns about commercial society go back to writers such as Justus Moser (see Knudsen 1986) of the late eighteenth century, who saw the market as a ‘destroyer of culture’, the concomitant need being to protect indigenous traditions of social wellness. In the nineteenth century, philosopher G. F. Hegel (see Hardimon 1994) saw the arbitrariness of free choice in a culture of consumption as a sign of ‘unfreedom’, leading to entrapment in subjectivity. Karl Marx in the last century saw capitalism as 64

W isdom as a B asis for E ducation

resulting in human alienation from self, others, and the natural world and inevitably leading to war and the polarization of rich and poor. Hungarian Georg Lukacs (see Kadarkay 1991) regarded modern capitalism as ‘an age of absolute evil’ and a ‘system of illusion’ that creates passivity, mental torpor, and ‘thingification’, with reification as the failure to see the relations that capital produces as historically constructed. Indeed, according to Lukacs, so enmeshed can we become within the operations of the market that to become conscious of this would be ‘to commit suicide’, with the result that most people prefer ‘false consciousness’. In the 1960s and 1970s Herbert Marcuse (1964; see Katz 1982) became famous for his suggestion that capitalism creates totalitarianism without terror by producing a form of ‘one dimensional thought’ that reduces everything to a single logic. He coined such terms as stupefaction and moronization and contended that true economic freedom means ‘freedom from the economy’. Even supporters of the market have recognized its downsides, though they sometimes interpret the negatives as positives. In his classic work The Philosophy of Money, Georg Simmel (see Wolff 1965) explored the effect on the mind of living in a capitalist society. The calculating consciousness that develops in a marketdominated culture leads to the tendency towards abstraction and the removal of personal emotional investment from the affairs of daily life, along with indifference to others, which, ironically, Simmel regarded as a good thing in that people are left alone to go about their own business. Today’s epithet ‘Mind your own business’ echoes what Simmel was suggesting. Simmel also referred to ‘the tragedy of culture’ within capitalist societies when people are frustrated by dreams of what they could do in life, but simply can’t do by force of circumstances. Although the competition fostered by market relations ‘achieves what usually only love can do: the divination of the wishes of the other, even before he himself becomes aware of them’, inevitably, this produces ‘a fight of all, for all’ (quoted in Wolff 1965, 62). 65

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

Simmel’s contemporary, Max Weber, was interested in a similar question: ‘What human type is promoted by modern capitalism?’ In Economy and Society (Weber 1978), he argued that the modern huge corporation has produced an entirely new class of persons, namely managers, who operate at all levels throughout a large company, and now indeed society. As bureaucratic functionaries, their necessary preoccupation is with an instrumental rationality to match means with predetermined ends, which results in a ‘disenchantment of the world’ because the need to keep the current order of things running smoothly subverts the capacity to imagine a different world. This in turn leads to an experience of living within the ‘iron cage’ of one’s own subjectivity (see Scaff 1989), an interpretation that Hegel perhaps inspired. In a way, the title of this chapter is misleading if it is taken as a rhetorical invitation to condemn Market Logic as a completely negative phenomenon, perhaps especially with respect to providing a basis for education. As von Hayek argued, all of life’s requirements today are mediated through the market, so in fact to criticize the market is anti-life (Muller 2003, 367). Even going to a spiritual retreat that considers alternatives to Market Logic requires all the benefits that a market society has produced: a mode of transportation to get there, books and reading materials from commercial publishing houses, electricity for illumination at night, blankets from textile companies, clothing from garment industries, etc., etc. It is impossible to live outside of market relations today, and indeed one of the main points of pro-market theorists right from the beginning (Voltaire through von Hayek) has been that the market leads to creative possibilities in human relations that have eluded every other historically constituted institution to date. Nation, state, church, mosque, synagogue, tribe, race – all of these eventually invert into a phenomenology of regression built on assumptions of exclusion and/or selfsuperiority. The market has been the great leveller of the human condition, hence the reason that it must be continually promoted 66

W isdom as a B asis for E ducation

as a path to world peace based on equality and a common rule of law. Of course, this is a rhetorical argument in itself, completely based on a selective interpretation of facts that hides the true cost of market relations taken as an ultimate truth form (see Macarov 2003). That is where the question of wisdom enters the picture, which I will consider later. In the meantime, I wish to outline the key ideas of two of the most important economic thinkers to have shaped our current circumstances both in the West and more globally, namely, Joseph Schumpeter and von Hayek, whom I have already mentioned. If there is going to be any meaningful engagement over the question of human futures in a more cosmopolitan and internationally equitable sense, then it is essential in my view that Schumpeter and von Hayek be better understood than they currently are because their ideas have largely shaped contemporary market assumptions. Schumpeter (1942/2008) published his landmark book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy when he was a professor of economics at Harvard, after he had emigrated from Germany in the 1930s. The title of the book itself signals one of Schumpeter’s foremost interests – to delegitimize Marxist socialism as, ironically, a ‘substitute religion’ that inevitably ends up repressing the very working classes it proclaims to emancipate, because success of the socialist system is built on a closed totalitarian model that cannot abide its own critics. What is important here for our own purposes is to identify how the argument between capitalism and socialism, which has defined economic theory first in the Western tradition and now also globally since the early twentieth century, sets up a logic of choice that might indeed be a false choice. Today my argument is that this choice is an anachronism that wisdom traditions might help to rectify. The requirements of human survival demand a more catholic (L. < universal) deliberation on questions of human provisioning, including education. Again, more later. 67

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

In a sense Schumpeter was an heir to the iconoclasm of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900; see Kaufmann 2000), who repudiated the ‘God-hypothesis’ of conventional religion in favour of a more naturalistic interpretation of human life and necessities. This world, he argued, perpetually organizes and reorganizes itself within a fundamental disposition he called ‘will to power’ that gives rise to successive iterations of power relationships. ‘This world’, he proposed, ‘is the will to power and nothing besides, and you yourselves are also this will to power – and nothing besides!’ (quoted in Kaufmann 2000, 70). Often characterized as nihilist, Nietzsche’s vision was actually one of human possibility and especially creativity, which he described as the unique possession of gifted individuals who should be given privileged responsibility for human leadership, a task that cannot – indeed, must not – be left to ‘the herd’, hence Nietzsche’s theory of the superman (Ger. Ubermensch), the leader who leads but who also in that role inevitably inspires resentment (Ger. Ressentiment) from lesser mortals. All of these themes found a place in Schumpeter’s economic theory and later that of von Hayek. Schumpeter emphasized the importance of entrepreneurship as the engine of economic innovation, which required a class of elites who shared ‘the joy of creating’. According to Schumpeter, people with ‘supernormal brains’ move towards business not just because of the lure of great profits, but also because of the ability of business to engage their creative powers through research, marketing, and organization theory. Schumpeter was a defender of big corporations because they supported and provided opportunity to the creatively superior. Inevitably though, such elitism inspires resentment from those ‘below’: ‘that feeling of being thwarted and ill-treated which is the auto-therapeutic attitude of the unsuccessful many’. Although Schumpeter agreed that capitalism ‘effectively chains the bourgeois stratum to its tasks’, nevertheless, the habits of mind within capitalism, especially rationalistic individualism, have produced significant social advances such as the emancipation of women 68

W isdom as a B asis for E ducation

and a more generalized pacifism. Schumpeter was also famous for his description of capitalism as a ‘veritable whirlwind of creativity and destruction’. Market Logic perpetually creates new products and services, but in that process destroys old ones, and creates new cultures while traditional ones fall before it. Needless to say, this is not a happy picture for the fallen, who have historically risen in resistance, as evidenced in much of the world today. What makes Schumpeter important to educators is the way his ideas serve as a prelude to those of Friedrich von Hayek, who in turn is the intellectual godfather of the most important influence on public policy in the West since the late 1970s and 1980s, namely neoliberalism. Through von Hayek’s ideas, we can trace the transformation of educational policy from a more balanced, humanistically oriented practice to the distorted, less mindful market-oriented activity that it has become today. Actually, as I noted earlier, the collapse of global markets in 2008 marks, in my view, the end of legitimacy for neoliberalism, and that is one reason that the times are auspicious for re-theorizing public policy, including that of education. Economic historian Jerry Z. Muller identified von Hayek’s philosophizing as ‘the crystal-clear vision of the one-eyed man’ (386), and for that reason alone a strenuous deconstruction of von Hayek’s ideas is necessary for the defence of a world free from the kind of economic determinism for which he is responsible. Like Schumpeter, von Hayek in his seminal book The Road to Serfdom (1944/2007) defined his work against socialism and celebrated individual achievement over collectivism. Furthermore, he saw democracy as a threat to the liberal order that functioning free markets require, and during the rise of neoliberalism in the 1990s, there were many calls for the scaling back of democracy, for example, by Prof. Ian Angell of the London School of Economics (see Gwyn 1996). For one thing, democracy holds functioning governments for ransom through the operation of what von Hayek called ‘special interests’, people who use democratic politics to 69

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

push their own limited agendas. He was especially critical of groups who operated in the name of social justice, a concept he termed ‘a quasi-religious superstition’ that makes sense only in small self-contained communities, but is too vague and amorphous to be of value in global times. The only legitimate meaning of justice is protection against those who would thwart individual self-effort and the efforts of individual companies and corporations. Ironically, said von Hayek, democracy could destroy liberalism, to the point that means need to be put into place to limit the range of questions to be decided by political process. Similarly, although market relations make cultural pluralism possible, this requires vigilance against those who in the name of their own self-interest would impose their own specific agenda on everyone else. Of course, there is a certain hypocrisy in this view, because Market Logic itself serves a very specific agenda and very specific groups of persons. Like Schumpeter, von Hayek also believed in leadership by elites and contended that the gifted few should be entitled to the special privileges that their creative hard work has accomplished: ‘Whoever leaves to others the task of finding some useful means of employing his capacities must be content with a smaller reward’ (quoted in Muller 2003, 358). Indeed, it is the dynamic and resourceful few who must force the less resourceful to adapt, a kind of impersonal compulsion created by the laws of competition. This is related to his theory of the state, which he regarded as a-moral, as simply a ‘piece of utilitarian machinery’ with no ethical duties or responsibilities or any educative function. The responsibility of the politician is only to ensure that market relations can operate without fetter. Because politicians don’t have time for truly creative thinking, they must rely on intellectuals, of whom there are two kinds: (a) ‘Originals’, a very rare breed who can think out and through genuinely new paradigms; and (b) ‘second hand dealers in ideas’, who can operationalize the work of Originals into new forms of social functioning. 70

W isdom as a B asis for E ducation

It is easy to discern how the basics of von Hayek’s ideas translated into the realm of education. The system of rewards and punishments implicit in his paradigm is revealed in new kinds of bullying (impersonal compulsion) by school and university administrators to goad teachers and professors into forms of performance the implicit value of which is believed to be beyond their right to debate because institutional officials themselves predetermine the registers of value. Those who succeed in satisfying the registered requirements are thereby rewarded for excellence, the implicit meaning of which is actually indeterminable, a fact that is taken as irrelevant except to the degree that excellent performance can fold into a comparative institutional accounting of the same irrelevances. If the state has no educative function, what becomes of the function of education within the state? Insofar as Market Logic determines the value of all social practices, only forms of education that serve the market have value. Hence the recommendation of Hon. Mike Harris, Premier of Ontario, at the beginning of Hayekian reforms in that province in 1989: ‘The humanities should be removed from the university, since they serve no economic benefit.’ More recently, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2009) has passed policies that give priority funding to proposals that directly serve the interests of the business community. For a teacher, the most important consequences of von Hayek’s vision might be more intangible, but perhaps all the more powerful for being so. This has to do with the kind of person that the vision produces, reflected in the personalities of students who enter classrooms and study halls; in people driving cars, riding buses, performing on playgrounds and in stadia; and otherwise behaving in public spaces. In fine, the Hayekian vision produces individuals who are self-serving and self-justifyingly violent against others in the name of seeking competitive advantage, and whose pursuit of happiness comes at the price of others’ happiness. In 71

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

broader terms, the Hayekian vision has produced heightened conflict in the international sphere because Anglo-American powers since the 1990s have seized the moment of the fall of communism to assert new forms of global ‘full spectrum dominance’ (See Mahajan 2003) through constructing the War on Terror as a device to serve their predetermined agenda (see Chossudovsky 2005, McMurtry 2002, Petras and Veltmeyer 2001, etc.). As I mentioned though, this agenda has been implemented at enormous cost to the ordinary public, a cost that has in fact bankrupted the economy of the world’s heretofore most dominant economy, that of the United States of America. The social, cultural, and political implications of this bankruptcy around the world have only just begun to be felt, but the effects will be irreversible, long term, and of enormous global consequence. Real unemployment in America stands today at about 30 per cent (Global Research 2010). The rise of surveillance culture (hidden cameras, bar coding, security chips in automobiles, Google street and community videoing, etc.) operating under the cover of the new Department of Homeland Security is not a feature of the war on terrorism, as if terrorism means a strike from the outside; no, the Department of Homeland Security is designed as a defence against impending civil violence as more people lose their jobs, their homes, their sense of a possible future (see various links at Globalresearch.ca). Insofar as Canada not only borders the United States but is also its most significant trading partner, all Canadian citizens should be cognizant of the forces that will inevitably shape their own future. So if the times are auspicious for a paradigm change in the manner in which economics is appreciated and assessed within the broader social realm, including education, how might this be characterized? It is here that a turn to global wisdom traditions might be relevant, and in the remainder of this chapter I hope to work out some possible ways of how this might be so. As a beginning it might be helpful to remember that there was in fact a fully operational social, cultural, and political world before the market 72

W isdom as a B asis for E ducation

became its definer beginning somewhere around the sixteenth century. To say this is not to advocate for a nostalgic return to the days of feudalism, medieval theology, and pre-science, although indeed it was the fracturing of the medieval taboo against lending money at interest (condemned as usury) that became the cornerstone of contemporary Market Logic, yet which is also now the root cause of the market’s collapse because the lending of money and the creation of a ‘credit society’ have led to the current unsustainable rate of public and state indebtedness (see Harvey 2010). A related point is also relevant: Credit and debt are a form of social control by the holders of debt, a condition of significant human un-freedom and hence profoundly resisted by the religion of Islam, for example. The point is, though, it is possible to imagine a world of healthy, creative human relations that is not dependent on nor indeed tolerant of the kinds of human abuses that rule the world today in the name of market inevitabilities. This could be a world in which culture and the arts are celebrated as nurturing human character instead of producing products that are humanly demeaning and foolish; a world where marketing experts are forbidden to use the insights of child psychology to ‘brand’ children in the name of consumer loyalty; a world no longer stuck in automobile traffic jams in the name of civilization and hence perpetually trapped in wars over petroleum, conducted in the name of a civilization. To imagine all this is to understand that the form of the world that is sold to the average person as a normal world is in fact a constructed world based on assumptions about how life should be lived and evaluated. It is precisely those assumptions that demand an urgent, open, and sustained debate today. The old dialectical reasoning of nineteenth-century Europe, a legacy that presents the false choice between capitalism and collectivism as the only choice available to social theorists and policy makers today, is simply silly, yet dangerous because the political divisiveness it sponsors is taken to be resolvable only through war over one side or the other of the argument. 73

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

In the history of economic theory, two themes relevant to the current discussion recur significantly. One is an admission that Market Logic produces an ossification of concern for means rather than ends. In philosophical terms the result is the collapse of teleology, or the study of ends. What is the market for, apart from concern for its own survival as the world’s first transcendental logic? As I noted at the beginning of this chapter, originally the market was an icon of hope for human happiness against the failures of the traditional guardians of human conduct to produce that happiness. What would the record show today regarding the market’s ability to produce human happiness? In North America, mental illness, especially depression, is the fastest growing medical condition (Whitaker 2010). The market is indeed spectacularly successful in producing an endless variety of material goods, but many of these are actually unnecessary for human welfare in any deep sense; then too, what should the purpose of life be when all material requirements are met? Furthermore, the global inequity in the production and distribution of these goods is constructed on a template of world order rooted in nineteenth-century European and later American imperialism, a situation at the heart of much global conflict today (Bello 2001). Indeed, it is the very devolution of that imperial order now that implicitly announces new possibilities for human futures, deliberation over which writings such as this are attempting to contribute. A second recurrent theme in economic history is a recognition that the kinds of human behaviour argued as essential for success in a market-driven world are actually unworkable in the day-to-day functioning of a healthy society. In essence, to be successful in the market requires of entrepreneurs, financiers, marketers, salespersons, and so on actions that are exploitative in basic essence, because personal or corporate profit is the guiding motive. Human relations matter only to the degree that money can be made from them, or some other form of capital. A most striking example of this is in the powerful documentary film Merchants 74

W isdom as a B asis for E ducation

of Cool (2005) (downloadable through Google), a detailed revelation of how advertising agencies undertake marketing research to get inside the minds of young people to discover their primary interests, drives, and determinations, which are then ‘sold’ back to them in the form of packaged products directly connected to those interests, drives, and determinations. Michael Budde (quoted in Erlendson 2003) described the sophistication of this very well: Marketing/advertising power does not operate in a (simple) ‘hyperdermic’ fashion, implanting ideas and desires into the minds of countless passive individuals. Nor does it assume that people are stupid, easily duped, or incapable of choice. Its dynamic is more closely akin to a seduction than assault. It involves actor A knowing things about B that B doesn’t realize A knows. It is like playing poker against someone who has already seen your hand, unbeknownst to you … In such a context, the actor under surveillance chooses, thinking she is acting freely, but she does so in a context constructed to advance the priority of others. So long as asymmetry in information persists, and so long as the player under surveillance is unaware of the degree of contextual manipulation and structuring, the one-sided interaction can continue indefinitely. (42)

In other words, behind the shadows of ‘normal’ human interaction lie persons manipulating that interaction for their own predetermined purposes. After watching the film Merchants of Cool, it is difficult for parents and teachers to restrain their desire to criminalize the manipulators of the adolescent subconscious as corruptors of public morals; at least, such is the common response when I have shown the film in university classes. The question is, Could a school or university class or a family survive if the values purveyed by such requirements of market success were taken as the norm? The most likely result would be to turn families and classrooms into places of deep paranoia, distrust, and, 75

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

ultimately, forms of aggression that would destroy each entity. Market-dominated society, then, survives only through the creation of a secret schizophrenia whereby the public rhetorics of freedom, democracy, and personal agency operate in front of a mask that hides the agents of human control and manipulation. When it comes to the question, then, of whether the market can produce human happiness, the answer can only be that the happiness produced by the market is grounded in dissociation; that is, the ‘happy’ person is psychically dissociated from the agency that is actively constructing the conditions of that happiness, such that the happiness is essentially without power or agency itself. It cannot ‘go’ anywhere without permission of the market agents, who would always deny it as a threat to their own survival or subvert it into yet another more sophisticated manipulative turn. The only place that normal human agency can go, psychically and, indeed, physically, under market domination is inward, into narcissism and ever-increasing self-enclosure (psychic privatization), the long-range consequences being various forms of self-destruction, then later anarchy, as inarticulate disorientation explodes in public violence. On this point alone a global discussion might begin about wisdom and the requirements of healthy living and human wellbeing, because it is a mark of all wisdom traditions that the world inheres in a fundamental unity that cannot be broken except artificially as an act of human will. Human well-being depends on a unity between word and act, between self and other, between the human and natural worlds, and between life and death. It is a call for a recovery of that sense of unity that inspires the remarks that follow.

WISDOM: A FEW BEGINNINGS To speak of wisdom is difficult, because the term seems so amorphous and ambiguous. Instead, one might speak of wisdom 76

W isdom as a B asis for E ducation

traditions, which might be more easily identifiable and then accessible for their specific recommendations, which must be taken up not uncritically, but at least openly. Every civilization has its sages and wisdom figures, and there is an emerging interest in the field globally (see, e.g., Ferrari and Potworoswski 2009, Kornfield 2001, and Miller 2006). The Hebrew tradition has its sapiential literature in Proverbs, Ecclesiates, Job, and the Book of Wisdom, and so on. Classical Greece had the concept of phronesis, as practical philosophy, with philosophy meaning ‘love of wisdom’ (Gk. philo+sophia). Asia holds the inheritances of Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and the yogic traditions of Hinduism. Islam has its Sufi traditions. Today, Africa is in the process of recovering its wisdom in the form of Unhu/ubuntu, a theory of being based on the primacy of community and togetherness over individualism (Connel 2007). Aboriginal and Indigenous wisdom is also finding new respect in Western academies (Battiste 2000). Open the ‘BOOKS’ link on Amazon.com, enter the words ‘education and wisdom’, and a burgeoning domain literature will be revealed. The most striking feature of this literature, however, is the way that it treats wisdom as a kind of prosthetic device to help teachers and students survive the travails of contemporary education. Practise meditation and mindfulness so that as a teacher you might more calmly orchestrate the pedagogical and curricular necessities of daily life. (See, e.g., MacDonald and Shirley’s 2009, The Mindful Teacher.) This approach is exactly wrong, because it merely sponsors and nurtures the kind of happy dissociation or cultural schizophrenia that is at the heart of the problems outlined in this chapter. No, what is required is something much more difficult and challenging. Wisdom must critically and forcefully address the conditions of our time, revealing their nonsustainability, deconstructing their underlying mythos, and thereby offering a ‘Way’ to human happiness that is fully integrated, psychically speaking, with an understanding of the ways of the world. Wisdom can never be an enclave against the world, but an invitation to live 77

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

fully in the world in a healthy, life-giving way. The reason that the distinguished professor of business that I noted at the beginning of this chapter is in error regarding Buddhism is that he proposed the use of Buddhism to predeterminatively preserve the market, whereas a correct understanding of the Buddha’s teaching would be to challenge the human propensity to cling to and reify any construct of the human imagination. Hence, neither can wisdom be against the market, because that too would be predeterminative. No, the virtue of wisdom is its ability to see the market for what it is: capable of doing much good in the provisioning of human need, but also, in its current form, addled with assumptions that are humanly destructive. It would be impossible to survey all of the wisdom traditions noted above, but I will attempt to identify a few common themes, with their relevance to educational theory and practice. What is the source of Wisdom? The Hebrew tradition puts it this way: ‘Reverence [or awe] for the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ (Proverbs 9:10). This language can be de-theologized phenomenologically to express the human experience of the world as being charged with a creative energy that is not subject to human will or rationality alone. Life is always greater than any interpretation that human beings give it, including this one, so that although indeed sometimes human interpretations can penetrate, at least superficially, aspects of the worldly condition, any attempt to make permanent those interpretations ends in disaster. This is the case, for example, with the discoveries of science; experience has shown that when such discoveries become absolutized in human confidence, they usually turn into monstrous deformities of one kind or another. The same with all political theories. Wisdom thus teaches that the appropriate response to the world is one of reverence and awe, because, no matter how confident we might become in our knowledge of the world, such knowledge is miniscule compared to the vastness of our ignorance relative to the entirety of what is. Hence, the Hebrew writer asserts that to 78

W isdom as a B asis for E ducation

eschew this insight is a mark of foolishness: ‘Fools despise wisdom’ (Proverbs 1:7). The marks of wisdom are modesty, genuine humility (hence L. humus, ‘earth’, as the derivation of ‘human’), and openness to the unfolding of larger pictures of human experience in the world rather than a quick dismissal of them in the name of foregone opinion. Putting the matter thus aligns the Hebrew tradition with most other wisdom traditions of the world, where meditative sensibility, as it might be best described, is the foundation of this kind of deep understanding of the human condition. Meditative sensibility is cultivated through the practice of stillness, directed to finding what in Taoism is called the ‘stillpoint’; in Islam, ‘the eternal now’ (Arabic waqt); in Buddhism, ‘equipoise’ (Gyatso 1985). Meditation operates as the silent awareness of the immensity of the cosmos in which we find ourselves and the foolishness of all false confidence and braggadocio. The silence too marks a finding of oneself in the world, and not alienated from it; alienation is what arises when time-bound interpretations supplant any sense of timelessness or eternity. The great Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa (1990) described meditation as ‘the art of making friends’ (75), which points to a recovery of the essential unity of the world that has been lost under the hyper-individualist rubrics of Western rationality. Again, the Hebrew writer declaims, ‘To gain wisdom is to love oneself’ (Proverbs 19:19), a love very different from the kind of narcissism described earlier as symptomatic of the dissociative personality, instead pointing to a recovery of the alienated self into a new unity of being. Indeed, this very unity of being is the authority that undergirds and permeates all Life, as evidenced in the Mosaic experience of divinity as ‘pure being’ (Lit. ‘I am’, Exodus 3:14). Instead of meditation, the great Trappist monk Thomas Merton (1975) sometimes used to speak of ‘wordless prayer’, which creates a space ‘open to others’ and is ‘rooted in a sense of common 79

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

illusion and criticism of it’ (90). This acknowledgement of criticism as a function of meditative sensibility, a concern for our common illusions, is linked in Catholic tradition to an understanding of evil, taken to mean ‘the privation of a good that should be present. It is the lack of a good that essentially belongs to nature: the absence of a good that is natural and good to a being. Evil is therefore the absence of what ought to be there’ (Hardon 1985, 136). Putting the matter as strongly as possible, what signifies the triumph of commercial values to a transcendent logic as evil is precisely the way such a triumph causes a privation of any other manner of being human. Within such logic there is no ‘other’; or as Margaret Thatcher ignorantly declaimed following von Hayek: ‘There is no alternative.’ In the domain of curriculum and pedagogy, therefore, what forms of practice would be inspired by the wisdom perspective that I have so far outlined? In general terms, wisdom-guided curriculum and pedagogy must begin by pushing away any interpretation that exclusively sees education as preparation for the competitive global market. Instead, such education should be guided by helping students to recover the unity of their being, a unity that has been shattered by virtue of their formation within capitalist culture. Distractedness, the inability to focus and concentrate, aggressiveness in human relations, self-interested conflict as virtue – increasingly, these qualities have come to define the lives of young people, which the wisdom curriculum might serve to heal. A primary requirement for such healing is that young people learn to be still, which arises naturally not from some enforced artificial discipline, but from forms of curriculum and pedagogy that are a genuine invitation to see the immensity of the world as an open place with an open future; indeed, an ‘awesome’ place, to use current vernacular. It is precisely the fact that so many students experience school as a place that sponsors a future that is so predictable that drives so many into narcissism and despair. 80

W isdom as a B asis for E ducation

The invitation to see the world as an open place has its own requirements. One is to understand how the received human world is a constructed world, which means learning to see it as readable or interpretable, and hence not fixed and static. Such a world can be engaged creatively and moved forward by forms of insight disciplined by a comprehensive understanding of the past. Human stillness – indeed, peacefulness – arises through a balance of relations between acts of withdrawal (in Catholic tradition the practice of recollection) and acts of genuine engagement, as experienced, for example, in the art studio, the music room, or the shop class. In Confucian traditional curriculum, the Chinese word wen denotes ‘the arts of peace’ (Waley 1992, 39), which include music, calligraphy, archery, and so on, all designed to assist in the overall formation of human character. One of the first reforms inaugurated by the neoliberal assault on public education was to consistently abolish arts programmes in schools, and in wisdom terms, this is best understood as an evil act; that is the privation of an inherent good. A second characteristic of global wisdom traditions concerns their understanding of time, or what might more formally be described as the temporal enframements of human action. This is related to the first point above, in that time in a cosmological sense is very different from how time is experienced under the rule of capital. In the Western tradition, there are two basic concepts of time, with one privileged to the unfortunate loss of the other. Chronological time (< Gk. chronos) is the measured time of industry, efficiency, and day-to-day routine. In Greek mythology, Chronos was the god who ate his own children for fear that they might usurp him, so one might wonder how the rule of chronological time in schools and classrooms serves to deliver the young to the platter of adult intention rather than providing a place where the young can learn to be, then be better able to serve the broader community from the creative reservoir of their free maturity. East Indian social theorist Ashis Nandy (1988) has 81

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

suggested that in technical rational cultures such as that of the West, childhood has been rationally idealized and taken over by various forms of social engineering, the consequence being the disappearance of the ‘real’ child. The concept of time silenced by Market Logic is translatable from the Greek word kairos, denoting the sense that things have their time beyond the capacities of specific measurement. The English expression ‘in the fullness of time, such and such occurred’ means that the event could not have been specifically forecast in advance, but when the time was right, it happened. This relates to the earlier understanding of awe and wonder. What genuinely impresses us, humanly speaking, usually takes us by surprise, because it breaks through routine contingencies to reveal something about life that we could never have imagined based on previous logics and understandings. As part of wisdomly understanding, the kairotic sense of time is of enormous relevance in teaching but, again, is unrecognized in almost all educational theory today. It involves a recognition that things have their time in a way that cannot be delivered chronometrically. Some students simply take longer to appreciate some things than others. The son of a personal friend was repeatedly diagnosed in elementary school as having a reading disability and suffered the inevitable humiliation of such a diagnosis. Eventually, my friend firmly told school authorities, ‘Just leave him alone!’ Today the son is completing his PhD. Furthermore, some things reveal themselves on their own terms, when they are ready, not simply under the duress of a formal curriculum requirement at 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday. This is now well understood in the realm of ecology, for example, and the study of (so-called) wildlife. The best way to see animals in their natural habitat is simply to sit still; then the animals will come out of hiding and show themselves. How often do the young hide themselves because they intuit that conditions are not safe for their self-revelation? How much cultural rejuvenation is lost because 82

W isdom as a B asis for E ducation

being ‘juvenile’ has taken on a pejorative meaning? Attention to juvenile behaviour might indeed teach us a lot about ourselves if we could better understand it rather than predeterminatively condemn it. Mahatma Gandhi used to speak of the young as ‘the barometers’ of culture who express its pressures and tensions in ways that supersede conventional interpretation. In many wisdom traditions, the hiddenness of things is well appreciated. The Hebrew prophet Isaiah (45:15) declared of the God of Israel, ‘Truly, you are a God who hides himself.’ Again, this language can be de-theologized phenomenologically to express the human experience of cosmological uncertainty, even anxiety in the face of realizing that what once had inspired confidence seems to have disappeared. It also expresses the way in which so often we experience life as a mystery, that something inscrutable draws us deeper into an examination of our own ignorance and limitations. In the Buddhist tradition, philosophers have suggested that there are times and places where the Buddha will not reveal himself. Usually this is because of the Buddha’s perception that the time is not right, that any revelation would be rejected, not seen, or even ridiculed. In curriculum and pedagogy, these understandings of hiddenness can teach us not only that things reveal themselves on their own terms, in their own good time, but also that certain things are impossible under certain conditions. Deep truth cannot be seen when it is overlaid with the obsessions of ideology, politics, or dogmatic agendas of self-survival. More concretely, one might ask, ‘Why does so much educational ‘research’ today seem so unenlightening, repetitive, and incapable of moving beyond itself?’ Wisdomly, the answer must be ‘Because it is paradigmatically stuck’ and cannot see beyond the parameters of its current imaginal space. Historically, this problem goes back to the 18th century and the death of metaphysics inspired by Immanuel Kant’s (1781/2008) The Critique of Pure Reason. Kant argued that philosophy was incapable of describing life as it actually exists in its 83

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

wholeness or universality because the philosopher is subject to his own perceptions, which are bound in time and place. Philosophy says more about the philosopher than the world he philosophizes about. All we can do is point to the operation of Reason itself and make assessments based on what later became known as the ‘historico-critical method’, whereby everything from Kant onwards, in the Western tradition at least, can be understood only in its historical and spatial context. This was a pivotal moment in the Western tradition because the final by-product of the Kantian argument was the self-enclosure of human subjectivity and the loss of the world as something that addresses me from beyond myself. The world as a Whole lost any form of pedagogical function, with description of things in their time and space boundedness the only recourse left to scholarship. Historically, the solution to solving problems of global development has been controlled by the subjectivity of Western powers to turn the rest of the world into an image of themselves. Today, the global education agenda seems almost universally directed to recreating Western self-understanding everywhere. A recent Canadian Globe and Mail newspaper report (see Church 2010) contends that Canadian universities need to see India as a land of opportunity for developing satellite campuses there. The Schulich School of Business of York University is celebrated as a prototype (A1). A recent $12 million grant from the Canadian International Development Agency was designed to help China turn its entire educational system from a (so-called) Confucian model of authoritarian teaching and rote-based learning into one of Western-styled, child-centred pedagogy. Sitting in on one of the earliest planning meetings for the project, I was simply stunned by the presumptions of my well-meaning Canadian colleagues. Where is ‘the world’ in the context of contemporary educational scholarship, in the sense of how a new appreciation for Others might penetrate the enclosed subjectivity of the Western tradition to open a genuine dialogue regarding human futures? What might the necessary conditions 84

W isdom as a B asis for E ducation

be for a truly global discussion about this, beyond Western selfreplication? One might hope that teacher education institutions see the implications of contemporary global requirements. In the Canadian context of curriculum and pedagogy, three young scholars are engaged in work worthy of note, Jackie Seidel (2006), Sandra Wilde (2007), and Dwayne Donald (2008). In Buddhism, the concept of ‘Dharma Cycles’ describes the manner in which geopolitical and cosmological forces converge in the creation and devolution of mass formations of one kind or another. In Sanskrit, dharma means ‘that which sustains us’ and refers generally to a sense of the Law of Life, or the rule of life that lies beyond our human desire or intent, even though such desire and intent might indeed play a role in the unfolding of that rule, a paradox of freedom and fate well understood in Greek tragedy. A dharma cycle is a historical period of approximately 500 years, from the early inception of a new idea or development through its maturation and eventual decline. Reading the Western tradition backwards from the present identifies the European conquest of the Americas as the inception of Euro-American modernity (Dussel 1995, 1996). As Enrique Dussel argued the matter, it was the new wealth that flowed into Europe from that conquest that gave rise to the Renaissance (recovery of the human body from its Greek neglect theologized by the Christian Church), to the new individualism of the Protestant Reformation inspired by the boldness of the new mercantile class, to the subjectivist rationalism of the Enlightenment and the consequent rise of ‘rational’ science, to industrialism, democracy, and eventually America, which British philosopher John Gray (1998) has named ‘the world’s last Enlightenment regime’ (64). Inevitably, concepts such as the Dharma Cycle can only be speculative, but their value is to serve in reminder that nothing lasts forever, that things are always in motion, and that the phenomenon of death is built into the phenomenon of birth. Ironically, Joseph Schumpeter argued that the very success 85

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

of (European) capitalism might result in its own destruction, because, by ‘rationalizing the human mind’, it creates ‘a mentality and style of life incompatible with its own fundamental conditions’ (quoted in Muller 2003, 299). In his classic work Denial of Death, Ernest Becker (1973) argued that the Western tradition, based on Christian languages of hope and eternal life, has been unable to face mortality as fundamental to the human condition, and yet it is a universal insight of wisdom that one cannot truly live until life and death are appreciated in their essential unity. Thai master Achaan Chah (2002) presented a powerful description of training in this understanding in the Theravada tradition. Learning to sleep in the charnal grounds (burial grounds) is part of the curriculum for novices. At first there is nothing but terror over unusual sounds, echoes, fear of spirits, ghosts, and so on. Eventually, with perseverance comes peace because acceptance of death results in freedom from clinging to understandings of life that are self-preservational in a very limited sense. The basic achievement of wisdom is therefore not cleverness or knowledge or even strength in the usual manner. No, the basic achievement of wisdom is freedom – freedom from fear, freedom from delusion, freedom from the limitations of parochial culture. In the Mosaic tradition, the call of pure being is to freedom from enslavement, so in the context of this chapter, the main pedagogical challenge is to invite consideration of the ways that teachers, students, parents, and professors have become enslaved to understandings that prohibit dreaming of a better world and to lay them down in an act of great relinquishment so that freedom might prevail and we might be born again. In conclusion, I make the following point. The ascendance of Market Logic to a place of transcendence relies on a conceit unique to the Western tradition itself; namely, an assumption of the very possibility of universal logic. It is that very conceit that is dying today. As Adam Smith recognized back in the eighteenth century, the world has always been a multicultural place, and his 86

W isdom as a B asis for E ducation

projected vision of ‘universal opulence’ would therefore depend on good communicative relations between cultures, especially between East and West, as well as firm regulation by moral and self-disciplined states. As Giovanni Arrighi (2009) has suggested, the fact that China is now rearticulating how Market Logic might function to serve a more just distribution of goods and services rather than only individual wealth creation is symptomatic of how market relations are being rethought in global times. So … can Wisdom trump the market as a basis for education? Because ignorance of wisdom prevails so widely, response to the question might be pessimistic. Fortunately, life is not a poker game, and wisdom actually has no interest in winning or losing, but only in living well. Considering what that might mean in an increasingly complex and conflicted world might now be a special charge to educators.

87

CHAPTER 3

Meditation on an Answer from Ku-Shan On receiving an email from Heesoon Bai, Director of Graduate Programs in Education at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, one can note under her sign-off name a question–answer exchange from the work of Ku-Shan, a fourth-century neo-Taoist scholar. Ku-Shan is credited with editing the authoritative, still currently used edition of the Chuang Tzu, and writing the oldest extant commentary on it. The neo-Taoists criticized the literalism of orthodox Confucianism by distinguishing words and meaning. The meaning of any word is fuller and broader than any literal representation of it can render, an understanding that predates the Wittgenstein ‘linguistic turn’ in Western language theory by almost 2,000 years. Ku-Shan was famous for looking to naturalness, or spontaneity, as a basis for renewal and was instrumental in forming an interest in ‘Pure Conversation’, or ch’ing-t’an, learning to talk straightforwardly, without duplicity and guile. Anyway, here is the quotation Heesoon took from Ku-Shan: Ku-Shan was asked, ‘What is the basic object of investigation?’ He replied, ‘How has one gotten to such a state?’

This is more enigmatic than it might seem at first. It could mean ‘How is it that we are even asking such a question about the object of our investigations? Have we so lost sight of our purposes that we no longer know what we are studying, what we are doing?’ This 89

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

would make sense for Ku-Shan’s time, because it was a period of political upheaval after the Wei dynasty replaced the Han dynasty in 220 C.E. Or it could mean that the object or purpose of inquiry is precisely to investigate how we got into such a condition, and here we are challenged by a central claim not just from Taoism, but also from all of the Asian traditions; namely, that whatever happens now depends on what happened before now. In the language of contemporary educational psychology, kids need to learn that all actions have consequences. In Wisdom traditions generally – and here I refer not just to Asian traditions, but also to the contemplative traditions of the West, particularly monastic traditions – this issue of consequentiality is understood very deeply and is recognized as one of the most difficult challenges of human life. It’s not just that we should love our neighbour and not kill people, but that the consequences of not loving and of killing are wide and deep. The absence of love, withholding of love, produces coldness and hardness in human relations, as well as disputatiousness and self-protectionism. And as Goethe said, ‘You can only understand what you love’, so love is a precondition of understanding, not the result of it. Similarly with killing. The consequences go far beyond the one killed or the killer. The killing inspires vengeance in survivors, and unspeakable grief. Children lose parents; parents lose children. The psychological trauma never really goes away; it just moves to the shadows of consciousness, later to reappear in unexpected, usually unfortunate ways. Over one million innocent civilians (almost the entire population of the city of Vancouver) have died in Iraq since the first US bombings in 1991. One can only wonder in what name, what idea such killings are justified, and what will be the long-range consequences. What is even more important though is how actions and consequences arise not just out of grand gestures or even things manifest on the surface. They also arise out of the minutiae of experience, often unexpectedly, and that is why it is so important 90

M E D I T A T I O N O N A N A N S W E R F R O M K U-SH A N

to attend to the details of life, because it is small things that lead to big consequences. My father used to be a radio operator on British merchant navy vessels that plied the East India trade through the Suez Canal. One simple error in tapping out the Morse code of dots and dashes could have meant the difference between a successful voyage and a disastrous one. In Wisdom traditions, it is accepted that everything begins and ends with the mind, or in Chinese, hsin, the heart-mind, which expresses the essential unity between thought and emotion. This is not Hegelianism whereby mind creates the world or theory precedes practice. Instead, it honours the way that mind and world are already one. So, taking care of your mind is a way of taking care of the world, and vice versa. According to recent statistics, mental illness is the fastest growing medical condition in North America. Wisdomly, we must interpret this as a symptom of the sickness of the human world we have created, rather than simply a reflection of individual malady. Anyone who has seriously undertaken the labour of mind-care understands how incredibly difficult it is. Not only is the mind a ‘monkey’, as the Buddhists say, that jumps all over the place. Even more important is its capacity for delusion and deviousness: ‘The human heart is devious above all else; … who can understand it?’ wondered the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah (16:10). In Buddhism, the consequences of delusion are phenomenological realities such as greed, malice, and envy. The Seven Deadly Sins of the medieval Christian church were named to protect believers from the dangers that accrue from the lack of mindful vigilance. Ironically, today the list has been inverted into virtues: Pride means selfesteem; Sloth means leisure; Gluttony means self-pleasure; Anger means righteous indignation; Lust, the valorization of desire, and so on. Interestingly, the Vatican has updated the list to include genetic modification, experiments carried out on humans, pollution of the environment, the causing of poverty, and obscene wealth. 91

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

Actually, when I first read Ku-Shan’s name in Heesoon’s email, I confused it with another Taoist figure, Ku-Shen, a deity mentioned in the Tao-te-ching, the foundational text of Taoism from about the third century B.C.E. Now, we all know that Tao means ‘Way’, but maybe just as important is te, which means both ‘power’ (or ‘energy’) and ‘virtue’. The energy of the Way produces virtue. Following the Way is at once energizing and empowering, and virtuous living follows naturally from that. Ku-Shen means ‘Spirit of the Valley’, and she was identified as the Primordial Mother, the gateway to Heaven and Earth. In Taoism, the spirit of the valley never dies, because all waters flow into it. So the valley is also a symbol of Tao, the Way that goes on eternally, in spite of what we humans might think or do. This reference to the ‘Way’ is important because, really, it is the defining term of all Wisdom traditions, and it is found everywhere. The point is, life has a Way to it, a Way to live that is compatible or co-extensive with the very manner of Life’s unfolding. In the Hebrew tradition, King David wrote a poem, Psalm 15, to describe his experience: ‘You have made known to me the way of life’. The insight of this poem is repeated by the first Christian community to describe the life of Jesus as the Way, and in one account Jesus even says, ‘I am the Way.’ What is significant about Way language is that it shifts attention away from concepts and forms of rationality about which we might argue and debate, and it invites us to consider the very manner of our living. The issue is not whether your concepts are correct, but whether your life is. Are you living according to the Way of life? All traditions recognize how difficult this is. The way of the Way is never transparent, and indeed one should be suspicious of people who too easily claim to know it. As the Tao-te-ching says in its opening lines, ‘That which can be named is not the constant or eternal name.’ But this does not mean that the Way is unknowable. Instead, we know it ‘by its fruits’, which have to do 92

M E D I T A T I O N O N A N A N S W E R F R O M K U-SH A N

with generosity, kindness, power of discernment, humour, and the ability to speak recognizable truth in particular situations. Indeed, the fruit of living the Way is wisdom. To sum up a few points thus far: There is indeed a Way of Life that leads to Wisdom. It is very difficult to discern and requires great discipline of heart and mind, or heart-mind. The main way of discernment is mindfulness or contemplation, or, as the great Cistercian monk Thomas Merton called it, ‘wordless prayer’. In Taoism it involves finding ‘the stillpoint’; in Buddhism, returning to your ‘original face’. In the Greek orthodox tradition, the achievement of hesychasm (Gk. stillness) is the necessary condition for insight. The practice of the Way – and here the key word is practice, because one never quite reaches the goal completely, finally – leads to an awareness of how the smallest details of life play into the largest consequences or effects and that it is therefore highly important to maintain vigilance over the details of one’s conduct, because how we got to here, today, depends on what happened yesterday, or indeed in the moment just passed. Back to Ku-Shan. Ku-Shan was asked, ‘What is the basic object of investigation?’ He replied, ‘How has one gotten to such a state?’ So … how have we gotten to such a state? What is our state, as teachers today, as people living here in this beautiful city, on this mountain top? Well, it’s Vancouver, named after Capt. George Vancouver, the nineteenth-century explorer of the British Empire. This is Simon Fraser University, named after the Scottish explorer of the great river flowing down the mountain passes of British Columbia. Of course, we know the legacies of this, of European colonialism, and somehow we have to face this, and it’s difficult, because the alternatives are not transparent. One thing though: In a way, the west coast of North America represents the end of the line of westward expansion from Europe. Looking out over the Pacific Ocean, eventually we would see Asia. So it is very appropriate that we study Asian philosophy today as a counterpoint to our Western tradition, because in a way that tradition 93

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

has reached its exhaustion point. It can’t solve the very problems that have been created by its own assumptions – about identity, about power, about the capacity to call things into being through words, concepts, and ideas. British social philosopher John Gray (1998) called America (and basically that’s us as Canadians too) ‘the world’s last Enlightenment regime’ (54). The irony is that such an interpretation is largely unacceptable to the powers that be. Hence the world is currently engaged in a clash of civilizations. In education, the conservatives, or better, neoconservatives, have taken the hard line in an attempt to stem the recognized decline. Performance standards, hard-line assessment, accountability – we know all about it. The worst part is that this is now all linked to the other neo, neoliberalism, which is another term for Darwinian economic determinism, or Market Logic. Buddhist philosopher David Loy (2000) called the market ‘the world’s first transcendental signifier’ (16). What this means is that every single thing on the planet has to be renderable as a commodity for exchange, accumulation, and profit-taking. It is at once a macabre, futile, and completely unsustainable vision. It is a recipe for endless war, and the question is what are we going to do about it? What can we do about it? Ku-Shan might be a good place to start? ‘How have we gotten to such a state?’ Fortunately, there is a Way to go.

94

CHAPTER 4

The Deep Politics of War and the Curriculum of Disillusion INTRODUCTION This is the Information Age, or so we are told repeatedly through all forms of media. Yet in spite of this, or perhaps, paradoxically, very often because of it, so much of what occurs does so with very few people knowing about it, or at least knowing the reasons why what has happened, has happened. This seems especially true of events of monumental historical significance, war being the preeminent example. Today, people in the West have been called into support of a so-called War on Terror, a chain of events precipitated by an attack reported to be not just on America, but also on Western civilization itself and its values of democratic politics, human rights, and the rule of law. A new genre of inquiry called Deep Politics has emerged from the shadows of the luminous surface of things. Deep Politics attempts to challenge dominant interpretations by revealing their largely unreported underside. Because of its threat to standing orders of power, Deep Politics is sometimes labelled as Conspiracy Theory, but this charge might more often operate as a form of denial, based on a deep fear of the truth of things. In this chapter, I call it a fear of disillusionment, a fear that what so many have held dear for so long might be coming to an end in the midst of changing configurations of global power. 95

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

I wish to propose that disillusionment is actually not a problem but, in fact, an absolutely essential experience on the journey to human maturity, both personal and cultural. Pedagogically speaking, appreciating the positive importance of disillusionment and its phenomenological dynamics might hold promise for a new kind of education beyond the naïve realism that currently holds sway. As the fields of cultural anthropology and religious studies help to reveal, naïve realism is the stubborn precursor of any breakthrough to new insight. In turn, a breakthrough is inevitably frightening before the consoling arrival of wisdom. As we will see later, rituals of disillusionment in traditional societies have as their primary purpose an induction of the young into the realization that life is always more than it seems, which is another way of pointing to its inherent wholeness, indeed sacredness (< L. sacer, ‘holy’), that it is not reducible to our concepts of it, and that if we do fall in love with our concepts in any absolute way, we will suffer as victims of our ignorance and never grow up. Only children believe in Santa Claus, or so we say. Under the technical rationality of a secular age, the myth of Santa Claus might be the only ritual of disenchantment left. This might help to explain why, in the midst of monstrous contemporary deceptions, most people prefer their illusions. To summarize: In this chapter I explore, as parts of an interconnected fuller reality, the deep politics of war and the curriculum of disillusion. There should be no illusion regarding what is at stake in such investigations, insofar as the imperial wars (as they can be bluntly called) of Western ‘civilization’ currently being waged in North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia serve as a global query as to whether the values publicly promoted as justifying the wars (freedom, democracy, human rights, rule of law, etc.) are in fact the core values of that civilization, or instead are merely rhetorical tropes that serve as a mask behind which the truer intentions of conquest and assimilation are operating. Then,

96

T he D eep P olitics of W ar

if indeed the latter point has more validity than the former, disillusionment will be the fate of many. If curriculum can be broadly understood as the stories that we tell the young about life, the deep politics of the current wars demand a different curricular narrative than the ones currently purveyed in the schools and classrooms of most Western nations. It has been an interesting experience for me personally as a university teacher that when I share in graduate seminars many of the ideas expressed here, non-Western international graduate students will often say, ‘Oh, I/we know all that, but this is the first time I/we have heard it talked about in our university classrooms here in Canada’. Canadian students will sometimes be resistant, sometimes derisive, sometimes angry, often shocked, all symptoms prefiguring disillusionment.

CONTEXT: HISTORICAL ENACTMENTS OF DEEP POLITICS AS A FEATURE OF WAR CULTURE Deep Politics is a term originally coined by Peter Dale Scott, a Canadian academic, writer, and poet and now emeritus professor of the University of California at Berkeley. He used the term to argue that under the surface procedures of daily life, there is an organized set of operations that serve political and financial elites through a systematic repression of information regarding such events and direct provision of misleading information to keep the repression alive. He traced, for example, the historically deep collaboration between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Mafia-organized crime syndicates, teamsters unions, the Pentagon, and the Department of Defense. These relations developed over time through the necessity of using ‘informants’ who could work both sides of an issue, but this strategy led to the systematic corruption of federal law enforcement, since a mutual dependency developed that had

97

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

to be kept secret through public denials, false press releases, and so on. Scott’s (1996) research led him to claim that the assassination of J. F. Kennedy was the product of just such collaboration after senior officials in the Defense Department deemed Kennedy a serious risk to national security because of his desire for détente with the Soviet Union and a negotiated settlement of the Vietnam War. Particularly relevant to curriculum scholars might be the case that Scott (1996) cited of the 1976 Church Committee in the United States. (p. xix). The committee was set up to examine circumstances specific to US war policy in Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s, revealing that the CIA had either planted or secured the services of several hundred academics in American universities who then wrote over a thousand books deliberately feeding and supporting interpretations of events, such as the Gulf of Tonkin incident, that were completely false but deemed necessary for the continuance of government war policy. These books were then reviewed positively by other informants for complicit news organs such as the New York Times and Washington Post. This strategy made deliberately false information a kind of curricular orthodoxy purveyed throughout the schools and classrooms not just of America, but also all of its allied nations such as Canada. An inaugural conference on Deep Politics was held in Seattle, WA, in 2010. One of its founding members is Canadian media analyst Barrie Zwicker. To illustrate that Deep Politics is not a new phenomenon, Zwicker (2006) outlined the classic case in British history of Guy Fawkes, a now mythical figure convicted in 1605 of trying to blow up the Houses of Parliament and assassinate the King of England. The orthodox narrative of the case, which was celebrated annually in England by force of law until 1959, is well known. James I, a Protestant who authorized publication of the King James Version of the Bible, was on the British throne. Fawkes was a well-known agitator who supported English Roman Catholics. On 4 November 1605, royal agents raided a 98

T he D eep P olitics of W ar

parliamentary basement room to find Fawkes in possession of materials capable of igniting gunpowder. Under torture he confessed to trying to kill King James and destroy Parliament and identified 12 co-conspirators. In a trial that lasted less than a day, they were all found guilty of treason, then summarily executed. On Sunday, 10 November the orthodox narrative was promulgated from the pulpits of the Church of England, pulpits being the chief instrument for the dissemination of state information at the time. The Protestant king was saved from the satanic forces of Papism; England retained its own freedom of worship using a vernacular Bible. Fawkes, burned in annual effigy for the next 350 years, was upheld as a public reminder of the consequences of treasonous acts. Recent research has told a different story, however, some of it based on the recovery of a seventeenth-century study by Jesuit historian John Gerard (see Gerard 1897, Nicholson 2003, and Tarpley 2007). In 1605 James I had been considering a policy of détente with Spain, the leading imperial power of the time. However, a powerful group of London entrepreneurs, known as the ‘war party’, led by Cecil, the Royal Chancellor, forced James to retreat from peace seeking to exploit the Spanish empire through a more aggressive foreign policy. The Guy Fawkes narrative was constructed to make this possible, leading to a century of wars with Spain and Portugal and the eventual emergence of Britain as the leading imperial global power until the middle of the twentieth century. Another example: In his 2004 bestseller Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins told of his life as a career operative of a shell company tied to the highest levels of the American government, in turn linked to the world’s largest corporations and financial institutions. In his own words: Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. 99

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

They funnel money from the World Bank, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign ‘aid’ organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization. (xi)

The basic purpose and strategy of EHMs is to seduce world leaders into borrowing billions of US dollars to construct massive infrastructure projects in their home countries in the name of ‘development’. This borrowed money is then paid back to US contracting companies such as Bechtel, Enron, and Halliburton, all of them linked to the deep sinews of Washington power. Debt becomes the key instrument of political control over the countries concerned. The new infrastructure then allows ease of access to and exploitation of desired natural resources. The strategy of economic control as an instrument of political suasion was first used in Iran with the overthrow in 1953 of the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh, who had tried to nationalize the Iranian petroleum industry, an action completely unacceptable to Britain and America, which had controlled the industry to that point. Through a coup, an Anglo-American alliance replaced Mossadegh with Reza Shah, who accepted the burden of being a client state of Britain and America. The success of this operation led to its repetition in many countries around the world such as Indonesia, Panama, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela. These few examples might serve as a basis for inquiring into the deep politics of war in our own time. What in fact is ‘The War on Terror’, and how might it be better understood? What about the current conflagrations in North Africa and the Middle East? Is it even possible for a nonspecialist such as myself to unravel the 100

T he D eep P olitics of W ar

‘truth’ of these phenomena, or is it all so complex and fluid that even those at the highest levels of government are not certain of what is going on? What are the curricular implications of a narrative reading of the current frames of war that are completely different from the surface narrative, even the surface ‘debates’ that are carried on in virtually all public media, controlled as those media are by the vested interests of those in charge of the war agenda (McChesney 2008). In what follows, I fully expect to be labelled by some, if not many, as a conspiracy theorist, and deluded, and hence dismissible as a crackpot of some sort, or worse, a treasonous academic meddling in affairs that are none of his business. Still, since I have been researching these matters for over ten years, do I not, as a publicly funded university professor, bear some responsibility for publicly sharing the fruits of my labour? Even more important and more difficult, what is my moral responsibility as an academic who finds himself at odds with the narratives purveyed as common sense on these matters of great human consequence? Similarly, what should be my relationship to my own tradition when I learn things about that tradition that are deeply disturbing? Shall I simply keep silent? After all, my formal training and practice are in the field of education, not political science. Indeed, some years ago at an interdisciplinary conference on globalization I was challenged precisely on this issue by a fellow presenter who was a political scientist: ‘You’re in education; why are you taking on these deeply political questions?’ ‘Because you are not’ was the only reply I could think of at the time. Later in this chapter, I hope to address his question somewhat less facetiously. What are an educator’s responsibilities in a season of great political untruth? A final point before I try to delineate the frames of war in our current context as a matter of deep politics: Nothing presented here is original with me; I am serving more as a kind of academic ‘journalist of the shadows’, reporting on the courageous efforts of many others to bring to light information, that if ‘faced’ 101

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

responsibly, could change the face of our civil society for the better, or so one might hope. Rightly understood, over the long term disillusionment is good news.

THE FRAMES OF WAR TODAY: THE WAR ON TERROR US President George W. Bush announced that the War on Terror had begun shortly after the twin towers of the World Trade Center were reportedly attacked by a group of Islamic militants sponsored by Al Qaeda, a global terrorist network led by ally-turnedadversary Osama bin Laden, a black-sheep member of a reputable Saudi family with longstanding ties to the US government. The attacks of 11 September 2001, provided justification for the US invasion of Iraq and later Afghanistan, two countries accounted to harbour Al Qaeda terrorist networks, with the former also led by another former ally-now-adversary, Saddam Hussein, purportedly in possession of weapons of mass destruction and hence a security risk not just to the US regional ally Israel, but also even to the United States itself. The invasions were celebrated as a defence of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law, those values cherished at the heart of Western civilization’s self-narrative. The expense of the invasions in terms of casualties and financial resources has reached staggering proportions. Since 2003, 1.5 million Iraqis have lost their lives. More than 4,486 American soldiers have died, and 320,000 US veterans have suffered brain injuries (Griffin 2011). According to the American Civil Liberties Union, since the Afghanistan war began in 2001, the Defense Department has gone to great lengths to control and suppress information about the human cost of the war. Photographers have been banned from taking images or footage of caskets of dead military personnel arriving at home military bases. Journalists have been paid to write positive accounts of the war effort. Film footage of civilian deaths in Afghanistan has been systematically erased 102

T he D eep P olitics of W ar

and publication of civilian casualty statistics banned. Embedded journalists have been required to submit all stories for prepublication review (ACLU 2011). Financially, according to a study by Harvard budget analyst Linda Bilmes and Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz, the true cost of the Iraq-Afghanistan war so far amounts to $3.25 trillion, or roughly $3 billion per week (Bilmes and Stiglitz 2010). The amount of indebtedness incurred by these wars has ensured the potential bankruptcy of the world’s leading economy and the global financial crisis that has spun off it. (For a more detailed analysis of this, see Harvey 2010.) Indeed, understanding the various global crises of capital is essential for insight into primary motivations for most wars of modernity. One argument for justifying the war against Iraq was the fact that Saddam Hussein had signed agreements with several European countries to shift the standard of oil exchange from the US dollar to the Euro. This meant that the world’s largest consumer of petroleum, much of it coming from the Middle East, would soon need to be paying for its most important import in a foreign currency, forcing a new relationship of dependency on Europe, as well as destabilizing the US dollar as a global standard of economic exchange. (See, e.g., Clark 2005). Similarly, very recent research on the war in Libya is pointing to how Muammar Gaddafi had laid the groundwork for a financial coup against both Europe and America by attempting to set up an alternative Africa-based currency, founded on a standard gold dinar, with Tripoli as the new financial centre for Africa (Wile 2011). Another more widely appreciated motivation for the wars in Central Asia and the Middle East, masked by rhetorical appeals for the spread of democracy and human rights, has been the securitization of petroleum resources throughout the region, against the possible encroachments of both China and Russia after the end of the Cold War. The wars are essentially wars of occupation, carried out in preparation for what is called the ‘20/20 Problem’ 103

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

of ‘Peak Oil’. By the year 2020 it is anticipated that the demand for petroleum worldwide will so far outstrip the capacity for supply that there will be a global struggle over the remaining supplies. Details of this situation have been carefully deconstructed by Michel Chossudovsky (2002) of the Centre for Globalization Studies at the University of Ottawa and laid out in his book War and Globalization. The reason that the US government had no exit plan for the war in Iraq is that it did not plan to exit. At a cost of $700 million, the largest embassy in the world has been built in Baghdad, larger than the Vatican State at 104 acres. Behind a heavily bunkered fortress design, its facilities for 1,000 employees and their families include a cinema complex, restaurants, schools, a fire station, and power and water treatment plants (FoxNews. com 2009). Permanent US military bases have been established in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, as well as five bases in Afghanistan and two in Pakistan. The wars against insurgents are not to protect human rights, which have been and are being violated at every turn; instead, the goal is occupation through military support of compliant regimes and the security of oil pipelines through each of the states named above to Pakistani ports in the Arabian Sea. If indeed political freedom is the goal of these invasions, ultimately, this is in the service of market freedom, a condition that ensures the subordination of populations to the rule of capital. A third motivation for the wars in Central Asia and the Middle East concerned the securitization of the state of Israel through (a) ‘elimination’ of perceived regional threats (Saddam Hussein, a nuclearized Iran, etc.), (b) establishment of American military bases throughout the region, and (c) enactment of policies of perpetual regional destabilization (Cook 2008), an extension of what Moshe Dayan, former Israeli Minister of Defense, described as ‘living without a solution’ (quoted in Mayer 2008, 69). The end of the Cold War had inaugurated a new uncertainty regarding Israel’s status in the Middle East. Because it was the 104

T he D eep P olitics of W ar

pivotal US ally in the region during the Cold War, questions arose regarding the nature of that alliance when the threat of Sovietbacked states in the region, such as Syria, was diminished. Israel’s new sense of insecurity led to increasingly vigorous articulations of the need for a strong US-Israel partnership to defend Israel as a bastion of democracy in a broader landscape of Arab and Islamic hostility to it. That hostility stretched back to 1948 with the founding of the state of Israel by Western powers through the United Nations, in the land of Palestine. To this day, Islamic textbooks do not show the state of Israel on maps of the Middle East, a symptom of ongoing rejection of the legitimacy of Israel in the Arab mind. Partly, this rejection and the continuation of hostilities is due to the perpetual irresolution of the displacement of Palestinian peoples subject to the Israeli occupation not just of Palestine per se since 1948, but also of Palestinian designated territories such as the West Bank. Any public conciliatory gestures to Palestinian demands aside, there should be no doubt what the overall agenda of Israeli leadership is on this matter, from the earliest days of the founding of the state to recent pronouncements. Let the leadership speak for itself. All of these quotations are from Petras (2006, 93): ‘We must expel Arabs and take their place’ (David Ben Gurion, former Labor Party Prime Minister, 1937); ‘There is no such thing as a Palestinian people. It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn’t exist’ (Golda Meir, former Labor Party Prime Minister); ‘The partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognized. Eretz Israel (Greater Israel) will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And forever’ (Menachem Begin, former Likud Party Prime Minister; ‘It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonization or Jewish state without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands’ (Ariel Sharon, former Likud Party Prime Minister); and ‘I believed and 105

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

to this day still believe in our people’s eternal and historic right to this entire land’ (Ehud Olmert, Israeli Prime Minister, to the US House of Representatives, June 2006). The concern here is not to sort out the intricacies of Israel-Arab relations with respect to Palestine, but to identify the implications of the US–Israel alliance as they play out in current war theatres, theatres in which Canada, as a US ally, continues to play important roles. A key aspect of the so-called War on Terror is essentially a war both on Arab states that are seen as hostile to Israel and on the militant forms of Islam that are seen to inspire those hostilities. The degree to which Israel has drawn the United States into this war is well reflected in a subtle but important semantic denotation. The Department of Homeland Security was instituted in the United States sequent to 9/11, but from an American point of view this is an odd designation, since, historically, America is a new land, The New World, a land of immigrants. Using the concept of Homeland for an American institution more realistically connotes an Israeli imaginary, serving since the early days of Zionist inspiration as an emotional draw to Jews around the world to return to the putative land of their ancient inheritance. (For interesting counter narratives to the Zionist vision, written by Jewish intellectuals, see Sand 2009 and Rabkin 2006). The deep mutual entanglement of US–Israeli politics has recently become the subject of critical high-level scholarship. In March 2006 John Mearsheimer, Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and Co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, together published an essay in the London Review of Books (no American publisher would accept the piece) titled ‘The Israel Lobby’. The essay, later elaborated into book form (Mearsheimer and Walt 2007), attempts to map out the multiple ways that the state of Israel has gained control of US foreign policy regarding 106

T he D eep P olitics of W ar

the Middle East. This has been achieved by powerful lobby groups in Washington such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Not only is Israel the largest recipient of US foreign aid to the tune of $3 billion per year (never held to account), but it also receives the largest shipments of US military hardware of any country in the world. It invariably controls the patterns of US voting in the United Nations whenever Middle East issues arise. Furthermore, Mearsheimer and Walt argued that no American can hope to gain the presidency without the support of the Israel lobby. As evidenced in American Jewish news and commentary venues such as Forward, The Weekly Standard, Jewish Week, and Commentary (all available online), President Barack Obama is now the subject of repeated negative attacks because of the perception that he is not an unconditional supporter of Israel. Linking the Israeli lobby to the neoconservative movement in the Bush White House that inaugurated the War on Terror is a task that historian Stephen Sniegosky (2008) has taken up in great detail. Clearly, not all neoconservatives were/are lobbyists. Indeed, it is the intimate coalition of Israeli lobbyists, Big Oil interests (see Ruppert 2004) led by former Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and southern US Christian fundamentalists led by figures such as televangelist John Hagee (recently granted an honorary doctorate by the Israeli Netanya Academic College) that enabled neoconservative politics in the US to gain ascendance. However, as Sniegosky pointed out, it was the pro-Israel forces within neoconservatism such as Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith, all from the Defense Department, who, along with key players from Big Oil (Dick Cheney, etc.), gained control of the Bush White House to form a ‘cabal’ at the centre of power capable of acting without a sense of obligation to ordinary channels of command. By establishing the Office of Special Plans (OSP), for example, war propaganda in support of an Iraq invasion was developed and promoted under the guise of intelligence. Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a 107

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

PhD in world politics, was an officer in the department where the OSP was housed. She recounted, ‘I witnessed neoconservative agenda bearers within OSP usurp measured and carefully considered assessments, and through suppression and distortion of intelligence analysis promulgate what were in fact falsehoods to both Congress and the executive office of the president’ (quoted in Sniegoski 2008, 162). She also reported that senior Israeli military officers had a virtual open-door policy with Douglas Feith, the Undersecretary of Defense (Kwiatkowski 2004). The point of these last remarks is to draw attention again to the real causes of the War on Terror. It has never been about the establishment of democracy and human rights amongst a lesser people (so implied), but is a clear agenda to dominate a region of the globe for economic purposes (a currency war) for the purposes of controlling a natural resource necessary for imperial survival (petroleum wars) and securitizing the state of Israel in a region that has never accepted its existence as an occupier. As Sniegoski (2008) and others such as Jonathan Cook (2008), a Middle East specialist, have argued, the War on Terror was at least four years in preparation, much of that before the pivotal event of 9/11, which was simply the semiotic event necessary to bring the war plans into effect. It is on that basis that the orthodox narrative of 9/11, for example, simply cannot be accepted. Rather, 9/11 was most likely an event orchestrated by forces within the Bush White House with strong links to the state of Israel. Indeed, Dr. Alan Sabrosky (2010), former Director of Studies at the US Army War College, has recently proposed that Israeli involvement in 9/11 is a 100 per cent certainty. There is no need here to detail all of the physical evidence (e.g., the controlled demolition of both World Trade Centre towers as well as Tower 7 and the fact that some of the so-called hijackers have since been seen alive) that the orthodox narrative of 9/11 is nonbelievable, since so much is readily available online to anyone with a basic curiosity (see 9/11Truth.org and 108

T he D eep P olitics of W ar

GlobalResearch.ca as good starting resources). Michael Ruppert’s (2004) Crossing the Rubicon remains the best study of how the event was constructed and enacted strategically, including the remote controlled jamming of the airliners that hit the towers. On the basis of painstaking, detailed research, David Ray Griffin (2009), an emeritus professor of religion and theology from Claremont Graduate University, has described the official 9/11 Commission Report as a ‘Big Lie’. At this point I will cease any further discussion of such political developments, because the situation in North Africa and the Middle East appears to have entered a new phase since the War on Terror was first announced, although in all likelihood current unfoldings in some way or another are part of a longstanding intention by Western powers along with Israel to reshape the Middle East. How and why and what the consequences will be cannot currently be determined, the situation being so fluid. Instead, I return to the topics of Deep Politics and the phenomenology of disillusion to explore the curricular implications of living in a world where publicly disseminated information about important global events is so often fabricated to serve an agenda remaining off stage from public view.

INTERPRETATION: MISINFORMATION AND THE CURRICULUM OF DISILLUSION I note here at the beginning that there is a certain irony in the current condition of the Information Age where so much information about everything is so readily available, even while the most important information from a public point of view is sanctioned out of public discourse through highly controlled public media (TV, newspapers, etc.). If the Fourth Estate of democracy (a free press) is no longer free, there can be little doubt that democracy is a spent phenomenon, remaining only in residue as a rhetorical 109

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

ideal. The curricular implications of this simple fact alone are significant. Beginning with the influence of the French Revolutions of the eighteenth century, Western nations have typically held themselves as beacons of a liberal democratic tradition espousing human rights, a rule of law, and public participation in the setting and practice of civic policy. Educational theory itself was grounded in such ideals. A curricular question might be posed: ‘What becomes of constructivism; participatory action research; democratic decision making in community, school, and classroom practices; citizenship education and so on if they reduce to a condition of false hope in a world predetermined by an increasingly centralized and secretive authority?’ If traditional public media have lost credibility as sources of valid information, it is of course the Internet that is now the true bearer of witness to the possibility of truth in public affairs, and one reason that pressures to control the Internet are increasing within centralized governments. Needless to say, there is a whole host of issues surrounding, for example, the ethical irresponsibilities of so much Internet material, including new forms of political abuse of social networking sites to produce the desired outcomes of vested interest. Meanwhile, the Internet still provides the best hope for new forms of democratic mobilization around legitimate and authenticated information running counter to official renderings. Indeed, my own research has benefited greatly from this new technology, and, increasingly, I use it in my teaching. Last semester in an undergraduate Curriculum Studies course, we established and explored a theme we titled ‘The Unpublishable Curriculum’, in which we examined Internet sources for information that would never see the light of day in a standard textbook, including, for example, the topic of Weather Weapons and how technology has been developed to control the weather, including hurricanes and cyclones that are being used for political and military purposes. Students reported being ‘stunned’ by learning about such things for the first time. Similarly, to discover that 110

T he D eep P olitics of W ar

George Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a principal banker behind Adolf Hitler is to confront truths that are, for many, almost beyond bearing. It is a matter of great personal interest to me why the academy generally and the professoriate in particular has been so reluctant to join the work of excavating the deep politics of our time. Of course, as my own journey has revealed to me, inquiry can lead one to places and understandings that are very disturbing, unsettling of many prior assumptions that now seem naïve. And as was the case until recently, in the United States questioning the official narrative of 9/11 in university classrooms could be cause for losing one’s position on the charge of treason. Other reasons of a deeply curricular nature also lie at the heart of academics’ seeming reluctance to seriously engage the auspices of surface curricular narratives. Here I will briefly suggest two before I examine the phenomenon of disillusionment and the fear of it. One involves the knowledge/information explosion itself, whereby, increasingly, scholarship has given up any pretence of being able to ‘think’ the full body of available knowledge into a single unified field of any sort, even through the action of reason. With few exceptions, the day seems to have passed when scholars such as Matthew Arnold in the nineteenth century and T. S. Eliot and Harold Bloom in this argued for a curriculum and manner of education that would provide students with a sense of the Whole. Today, curriculum theorizing is still very much in the residual thrall of poststructuralism, emphasizing difference rather than commonality or indeed comprehensiveness, the consequence being to leave to Others the responsibility for their own domain without seeing how one’s own domain might be related to it other than through a relation of difference. Scholarship today, especially in the humanities, focuses more on micro studies of various sorts, rather than grander theorizing, which, since Lyotard’s (1986) announcement of the end of grand récits, has fallen into disfavour. Poststructuralist theory then provides the perfect alibi 111

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

for refusing to creatively engage the defining issues of our time in any comprehensive way, honouring Others perhaps, but not recognizing how the Other is ‘in’ me/us and me/us ‘in’ him/her/ them within the web of life as a whole. A second related aspect has to do with the curricular phenomenon of specialization. Young academics today are typically encouraged early in their careers to carve out a niche of specialized knowledge for which they become known as experts. As such, they claim no responsibility for the areas of expertise of others. Each person becomes an authority within his/her own intellectual fiefdom, but it is an authority based on isolation rather than collective responsibility for a common good. Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of teacher education. Preparation of teachers in most colleges and universities today most often takes the form of students’ accumulation of credits in a bundle of different course areas such as educational psychology, curriculum and instruction, classroom management, assessment, and so on, with little attention to the overall character of teacher formation and the role of teacher within the broader configurations of culture. Again, this profile enables one to say, ‘I’m a teacher. Don’t bother me with politics.’ It should be noted that specialization is also a feature of industrial capitalism. Frederick Taylor’s (1911/1997) Principles of Scientific Management, first published in 1911, outlined the importance, in the name of efficiency, of breaking production activity into small, specialized tasks for which individual workers or teams of workers assumed responsibility. Taylor was clear that the big picture of production should be left with managers and factory owners. Individual workers had no need of such knowledge; indeed, meddling in such knowledge would impede the overall efficiency of production. Today throughout the academy one can see this logic at work, especially since the introduction of neoliberal management policies in the 1990s. A new class of managers has assumed supervisory control of educational practices, 112

T he D eep P olitics of W ar

for example, via pressures to technologize instruction, as well as educational planning targeted at producing graduates who can directly serve the Market Logic of global capital. In my home province of Alberta, Canada, when neoliberal reforms were being installed throughout the Ministry of Education, deputations were made to local school and university jurisdictions to insist that educational direction would henceforth be given under the guidance of government authority. As the appointed speaker said directly to the particular audience of which I was a part, ‘You row; we will steer.’ So much for the slave galleys of the Roman Empire! I wish to suggest, however, that there is a much more profound reason that resistance to the truth about the War on Terror is so pronounced, and that is a fear of disillusionment. Indeed, when I ask colleagues why they insist on describing as ‘nothing but conspiracy theory’ any counter narratives to orthodox pronouncements on 9/11, the responses invariably include statements such as, ‘I simply can’t believe my government or an allied government would do such a thing!’ or ‘If what you suggest is true, then everything changes.’ Indeed, the question ‘What is it that changes?’ now becomes highly relevant. Possible changes can for the most part be cast in the language of loss and include loss of belief and trust in government, loss of belief in the value of democratic participation, loss of belief in my own tradition as a bearer of ‘civilization’, loss of belief in the power of dialogue and compromise as a basis of civil society, loss of belief in openness and transparency in public policy, loss of faith in my democratically elected government to act on values and principles compatible with my own, etc. etc. No doubt, planners and agents of the War on Terror believed they were doing the right thing through their actions. In their book An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, David Frum, the Canadian responsible for George Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ speech, and Richard Perle (see Frum and Perle 2004), a Defense Department official once charged, later acquitted, of passing US defense secrets to the Israeli military and key planner of the War 113

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

on Terror, clearly believed the war was indispensably justified for the defence of Western civilization, of which America stands, in their minds, as a remaining beacon. This is not the place to engage philosophical questions about whether the ends justify the means in this case. Inevitably, sometimes they do, or so it is argued, with the fourth-century C.E. rationale of St. Augustine for the ‘just war’ providing the argument that Barack Obama used in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech for continuing the current war. My point is simpler: Is there a way of reading the War on Terror that can move it beyond a defence of pure self-interest? By addressing the deeply human fear of disillusion, could it be possible to imagine a world on the other side of such disillusionment, a world no longer clinging to senses of the sacred that might be too naïvely realist, based as they are on belief in the limited gods of transcendentalized Market Logic, undisciplined nationalism, or even religious fundamentalism, to say nothing of democracy, and so on? Here I turn to a kind of phenomenological examination of disillusionment itself. The OED (9th ed.) defines disillusion as ‘freedom from illusions; disenchantment’, with illusion (< L. illudere, ‘mock’ < ludere, ‘play’) meaning, variously, ‘deception; delusion’, ‘misapprehension of the true state of affairs’, ‘the faulty perception of an external object’, ‘a figment of the imagination’, and ‘believe mistakenly, as in being under the illusion of something’. What is interesting in each of these definitions is the underlying virtue of disillusion; namely, freedom – from illusion, mistakenness, faulty perception. Moreover, the implication is that the freedom inspired by disillusion involves a restoration of the ludic quality of human life, the joy of true play. How so? Cultural anthropologists of religion such as Mircea Eliade and Victor Turner have noted that rituals of disillusionment/disenchantment were common amongst peoples yet to suffer the radical secularization of the modern West. Through symbolic rites of passage, initiates were frightened into an awareness that elements 114

T he D eep P olitics of W ar

of life originally regarded as thoroughly sacred (lit. holy) – parents, family, tribe, and so on – and hence to be trusted implicitly and completely, well, these aspects are in fact limited, and at best capable only of pointing beyond themselves. Victor Turner (in Gill 1989) gave the example of the Ndembu of Africa, who, through a ritual of deception, engage young initiates in a killing of Kavula, the cultic spirit of healing. In the ceremony, Kavula is symbolically hidden under a blanket raised by sticks. The initiates are compelled to beat Kavula to death. Afterwards, they are disconsolate, but then the blanket is lifted, and when Kavula cannot be seen, the initiates are informed that he has flown away into the wind, to come again. Dorothy Eggan (quoted in Gill 1989) described the Hopi practice of Kachinas, masked figures who over the course of several nights come to dance, bring gifts, frighten, and sometimes physically hurt the initiates. The most important time comes on the final night, when all are assembled in the kiva to await a final meeting with the kachinas. However, instead of masked figures, the only ones to arrive are familiar members of the initiates’ own community. Eggan reported the effect on one of the initiates: I cried and cried into my sheepskin that night, feeling I had been made a fool of. How could I ever watch the Kachina dance again? I hated my parents and thought I could never believe the old folks again, wondering if gods had ever danced for the Hopi as they said and if people really lived after death. I hated to see the other children fooled and felt mad when they said I was a big girl now and should act like one. But I was afraid to tell the others the truth for they might whip me to death. I know now it was best, and the only way to teach children, but it took me a long time to know that. (107)

R. H. Matthews (quoted in Gill 1989) described the initiation rites of the Wiradthuri peoples of Australia. In the final stage, 115

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

boys are prepared for an encounter with the spirit Dhuramoolan. They are covered in blankets, then the elders inform them that ‘Dhuramoolan is coming’. They make a loud whirring noise with bullroarers constructed of small planks whirled overhead on string. The elders reach under the blankets and chisel out an incisor tooth from each boy. The boys think the spirit is stealing their teeth while sparing their lives. On the last day the boys are again covered with blankets and placed around a crackling fire. The bullroarers are whirring close by, and the boys are informed that Dhuramoolan is coming to burn them. When the boys’ terror has reached fever pitch, everything stops. The blankets are removed, the source of the noisemaking is revealed, and the performers of the ritual are revealed as familiar people. The newly initiated take an oath never to tell the uninitiated what has just happened. As Sam Gill (1989) explained, in each of these examples ‘the whole process of initiation builds to a climax in the shock of disenchantment. The sacred objects are destroyed in the eyes of the initiates’ (108). Within the dynamic of disenchantment, the first and essential ingredient is encouraging identification of the sacred with the cult object. The uninitiated must come to believe that the objects and the sacred are exactly identical …. Ingenious techniques of secrecy and deception (are) devised to nurture a perspective of naïve realism, and the effectiveness of the initiation depends on how firmly this viewpoint is established. [Finally,] … the experience makes a return to the previous state of life impossible. The naïve realism of the uninitiated perspective has been exploded. The rites have demonstrated irreversibly that things are not simply what they appear to be, that one-dimensional literalism is a childish faith that one has to grow beyond or else despair of a life rich in meaning and worth … [Being] thus forced to abandon one’s ingrained notion of reality is to experience a true death of the former self. (108) 116

T he D eep P olitics of W ar

I leave it as a task for educators and curriculum scholars to play with the idea of who plays the respective roles of elder, what specific rituals of disillusion might be in our current circumstances, and whether, indeed, Deep Politics has its own illusions that need divestment. Curricularly, Paul Buchheit (2008) provided an excellent assemblage of illusory war myths in the American context. Joel Kovel (2007) wrote an eloquent scenario for the seemingly intractable Israel–Palestine impasse. Here, it simply remains to be said that disillusionment is only the first stage of a new lifelong challenge. In a sense, the newly initiated must confront the prospect that all so-called sacred objects can never again be accepted as fully containing the reality to which they point; instead the sacred always calls one out of one’s limited perception to an appreciation for the wholeness of life, perpetually resisting reduction to any human concept or material practice. This is the true vocation of lifelong work; namely, to learn to live freely yet without certainty, except the certainty that clinging to concepts beyond their functional ability to serve the human prospect well will result in ever-deepening forms of estrangement as the concepts fail to address the new realities that confront them. This might be the situation in which we find ourselves as a global community. The Western tradition embodied in the Anglo-American-Israeli nexus finds itself confronting refusals to accept its self-defined universalistic presuppositions. Or even when there is growing acceptance of those presuppositions, so also is there naïveté regarding their underbelly; namely, that the rhetorics of freedom mask new forms of enslavement to the tentacles of monetary dependency. The human world is changing in paradigmatic ways, with new forms of alliance designed to resist the domination of only one version of a better ground of being. The War on Terror might be the last war of an older regime of truth, with Deep Politics of assistance in illuminating why such a regime change might be necessary. An ability to face the necessary disillusionment points paradoxically to the source of our hope. 117

CHAPTER 5

From Leo Strauss to Collapse Theory: Considering the Neoconservative Attack on Modernity and the Work of Education I Modernity (< L. modo, ‘just now’) is a temporal conceit of Western civilization that begins in 1492 with the Columban landfall in the Caribbean (Dussel 1995, 1996). The enormous wealth that flowed into Europe sequent to the conquest of the Americas inspired a complete overturning of the static hierarchical theocentric universe of the Middle Ages. Ushered in were new understandings of the human person (now the rational autonomous Subject); new relationships to the natural world (now to be objectively explored, examined, controlled, and exploited); new forms of refusal of traditional authority in favour of individual liberty (now referable, for want of a better term, as the ‘protestant reflex’); a new morality of wealth (now if you are poor, it is your own fault); and new anxieties about the future arising from a de-divinized public cosmology (now God is allowed only as a private concern). Postmodernity can be understood as a kind of confused engagement with modernity - critiquing on the one hand the rational 119

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

autonomous Subject while affirming the rights of minority and marginal groups as if their respective identities were solid and non-dependent; eschewing an objectivist approach to nature in favour of an ecologism that turns Nature into a romantic loveobject; maintaining the protestant refusal of authority while denying the suffering caused by its inherent nihilism; and turning to psychoanalysis to alleviate the pain of cosmological uncertainty. The conservative attack on modernity has been present from the beginning, coming largely from those institutions and classes of persons displaced or marginalized by modernity’s ascendance – monarchies, the Roman church, the lineaged aristocracies, and those who would pretend to the same on the basis of their own newly accumulated wealth and secured entitlement. To be conservative means to be possessed of the desire to keep things the way one perceives they were meant to be (< L. com- ‘with’ + servare ‘keep’), and, ultimately, this desire can be secured, in the material realm at least, only through instrumentalities of power. In recent times, over the last 30 years or so, the conservative assault on modernity has taken on a new aggression, by turns attacking the presumptions of postmodernity and inveighing against the liberalism of modernity’s roots. The new conservatism can therefore be characterized as a deeply argued ideological position as much as a phenomenon to emerge from traditional wealth and privilege, and in this chapter I wish to explore the manner in which the new conservatism has constructed itself particularly through the philosophical ideas of Leo Strauss. Some have argued that the influence of Strauss in contemporary neoconservative thinking is overdrawn (Halper and Clarke 2004), but the high numbers of political leaders within the Bush administration, for example, who can trace their intellectual lineages to Strauss is undeniable, which makes public discussion of Strauss’s ideas particularly relevant. After examining key ideas from Strauss, I will explore ways in which his critique of Western modernity is actually helpful in illuminating issues in teaching and pedagogy today, even though, 120

the N eoconservative A ttack

personally, I disagree with his overall philosophical orientation. It is precisely because one can ‘hear’ Strauss within the languages, policies, and actions of the new conservatism that his ideas need to be more publicly expressed and deliberated as a prelude to working out forms of understanding that are more responsible to the intercultural complexities that all peoples face, as we are increasingly brought into contact with each other through processes of globalization. The geopolitical context of neoconservatism today can be characterized by two aspects: (a) a general ongoing dissolution of what might be termed the Eurocentric imagination (itself the result of globalization processes) and (b) pressures to preserve that same imagination through various efforts to name and declare what specifically marks the uniqueness of the Western tradition, as a precondition of its participation in the formation of human futures (see, e.g., Ratzinger and Habermas 2006, and Huntingdon 1998). The dynamic can be read thus: The world that has been brought into being through the assumptions and instrumentalities of power of the Western Euro-American consensus, in particular the structurations of global capital and its deeply embedded institutions, including state-sponsored Education – this world is under attack from forces outside of its self-justifying discourse parameters, as well as from inside through difficulties in managing the cultural pluralism/multiculturalism that – while being a product of modernity – cannot be sustained by modernity’s operating paradigms. The external attack comes not just from the West’s favourite demon, Islam, but also indirectly from two other sources: all those Others who have suffered the West’s imperial domination over the last 300 years or so (now represented by Indigenous Peoples and by countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, and various African nations) and the indirect challenge via the ascendance of the Asian economies. 121

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

The internal vulnerability arises from difficulties in dealing with the consequences of a world now interpenetrated, culturally speaking, with rising expectations from those who have moved from the peripheries to the centres of global capital. As Kris Gutierrez (2006) has suggested, in an ironic twist the monoculture behind the emergence of global capital has produced the multiculturalism of contemporary reality through centre–periphery exchanges, but the implications are not well received by the original movers. The current conservative attack on the so-called failures of multiculturalism in Britain and America (for example) can be interpreted as a desire to return to a kind of premodernist consensus perceived to be capable of restoring a more primal order. British and American invocation of the ‘International Community’ as the supportive scaffold to their imperial venturing is but a thinly veiled disguise of the fact that it is their two specific and special interests that are at stake. The futility of the neoconservative agenda in a globalizing world needs to be addressed epistemologically as well as pedagogically. This is because questions regarding human futures require facing the impossibility of banishing or converting or holding at bay others to secure one’s self or one’s collective identity in some mythically pure form. Indeed, the assumption that the West needs to clarify and articulate its own intrinsic nature – both to protect itself from encroachment and dissolution and as a precondition of engagement with other traditions in global times – is what needs to be challenged. Phenomenologically, in terms of lived experience, it tends to produce paranoia and then, ultimately, violence when others come to be seen as inevitably a threat to one’s self- predeterminations. Furthermore, as recent scholarship has been illuminating, the West itself is a dependent construction; there has never at any time been a ‘pure’ Western civilization (Abu Lughod 1989, Frank 1998, Hobson 2004).

122

the N eoconservative A ttack

II As a political philosopher, Leo Strauss is important because of his intellectual prominence in the formation of the contemporary neoconservative movement in the United States (Drury 1999). For educators, Strauss’s influence was/is carried with particular strength through two of his former doctoral students, Alan Bloom and William Bennett. Bloom’s 1980s indictment of liberal and progressive education in America, articulated in 1987 in Closing of the American Mind, provided the basis for a new curriculum for schools and universities, constructed around study of the ‘Great Books’ of Western civilization and the direct study of Western civilization itself. Needless to say, liberals and postmodernists ridiculed Bloom for the ways that his lists of books and civilizational markers suffered from various politics of exclusion and essentially celebrated the traditions of White male privilege. William Bennett served as Secretary of Education during the Reagan administration and was instrumental in drafting proposals that set the stage for the business/corporate takeover of public education, a move imitated by Western ‘democracies’ around the world. Many of Bennett’s reforms are still widely practised today: competency testing for teachers, opening the teaching profession to people who have not graduated from faculties of education but have degrees in other teachable subjects, performance-based teacher pay, holding educators accountable for how much children learn, national and state examinations to find out exactly how much children know, and parental choice of schools. It is easy to see how such reforms could only emerge from a conservative psychology that will not submit to an open future and is determined to control the story of human futures from the back end, so to speak. Ironically, Bennett, who made his case in the name of moral and character education (see, e.g., his Children’s Book of Virtues [1995]), eventually fell from grace through a corruption

123

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

scandal of his own (gambling). Other students of Strauss who have assumed leadership roles in the neoconservative movement of the United States, including the Bush White House, include Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz (both once active in the Defense Department and heavily responsible for planning the Iraq war) and others who framed the Statement of Principles for the Project for a New American Century, a kind of blueprint for American contemporary foreign policy, which has Straussian undertones. In Canada, Prime Minister Stephen Harper studied under Thomas Flanagan, an American Straussian who taught at the University of Calgary and who once served as Harper’s Special Advisor. The relevance of Leo Strauss and his philosophical oeuvre finds focus in his searing indictment of the liberal tradition of Western modernity. This was not an attack on liberalism per se, but on what had become of it largely as a consequence of the historicizing influences of the European Aufklarung (Enlightenment), and especially German influences through the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Indeed, writing in America in the early 1950s, Strauss deplored what he saw as the ‘moral crisis’ of America that arose from the consequences of German historicism, and he once suggested that Germany actually won the Second World War because so many German academics, trained in the Kantian critical-historical tradition, took up residence in British and American universities: ‘It would not be the first time that a nation defeated on the battlefield … has deprived its conquerors of the most sublime fruit of victory by imposing on them the yoke of its own thought’ (Strauss 1953, 2). Strauss’s (1959) critique of modernity can best be summarized through what he called the ‘three waves of modernity’, each of which tried to secure political truth in new forms of liberal ideas that Strauss called passions – including the passion for historicism – which he saw as a kind of crypto theology because of the way it ascribed meaning to history. The first wave was inspired by writers such as John Hobbes and John Locke, who 124

the N eoconservative A ttack

took Machiavellian ideas to secure natural human rights in the desire for self-preservation and productive accumulation. The second wave drew cause from Rousseau (nature as moral) and led eventually to Hegel and Marx, whereby nature was supplanted by history, with history now impregnated with cosmic meaning and people’s passions held accountable to the perceived moral ends of historical processes. The third wave of modernity began with Nietzsche’s critique of historical reason and led eventually to Heidegger’s ‘fundamental ontology’, in which he attempted a complete phenomenology of Being (Dasein). Although Strauss called Heidegger ‘the highest self-consciousness’ of modernity, he also recognized the inevitable negative implications of Heidegger’s ontology, which was its inability to move people beyond a trusting in fate or believing in any interpretation of destiny put forward by, say, a charismatic figure possessed of inordinate rhetorical skill. If Heidegger represents the problem of ontology without history, the question of history itself still needs to be addressed, without lapsing into the kind of historicism Strauss was determined to condemn. More on that later. By historicism, Strauss meant the argument that human phenomena and events can be understood only as the result of their historical context, never the result of some inherent independent quality lying outside the operation of reason. The title of Strauss’s most important book, Natural Right and History (1953), signalled his desire to claim the possibility of natural rights that lie independent of their historical context. Such rights have the right of assertion by virtue of their uniqueness and their capacity to call forth moral conduct. Another way of expressing the matter is through the tension between reason and revelation that Strauss argued has defined the Western tradition since the time of classical Greece. It is to this period of the ancients that Strauss suggested the West needs to return to recover its political integrity. The tension between 125

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

reason and revelation Strauss named as one between Athens and Jerusalem, and in that formulation Jerusalem is the signifier of revealed truth exemplified in the Mosaic law. This truth is not the consequence of reason, but of divine issuance, and is therefore eternal, never historically reducible to time and context. It is truth as ‘pure event’, as Badiou (2003) would later call it. The only possible outcome of historicism is nihilism, argued Strauss, and the face of nihilism in the contemporary context is a kind of cultural relativism conducted in the name of a liberalism that has diminished itself by becoming mere populism. The principles of universal freedom based on universal reason (Kant) have shown their poverty by metastasizing into forms of tyranny, most notably Soviet Marxism, but also the secular Western state emptied of moral content. Straussian scholar Steven Smith (2006) paraphrased the matter thus: ‘The universal homogenous state has as its end the replacement of politics with administration and the reduction of prudent judgement to the technical rules of expertise’ (p. 192). As Strauss (2000) put it, this is a world of ‘specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart’, which resulted in technological utopias and economies of scale that are ‘destructive of humanity’ and ended in the Nietzschean spectre of ‘the last man’ (208). Strauss’s disillusionment with liberalism was ignited by his experience growing up as a Jew in the Weimar Republic of the 1920s. As an experiment in liberal democracy along Enlightenment principles of universal reason, the Weimar proved itself incapable of standing against the tyranny of anti-Semitism, always in the name of liberty. In such a society, what mechanism is there to protect the specific identities of individuals and groups from being lost to the pressures of assimilation and accommodation within a new cosmopolitanism? In the name of universal reason and its cousin of pure tolerance within a reign of absolute equality, what happens to ‘particulars’ and the ability of people to secure their uniqueness? Indeed, Strauss (1968) proposed that ‘The Jewish Question’ 126

the N eoconservative A ttack

haunting the Western tradition for over two millennia is in fact ‘the most manifest symbol of the human problem insofar as it is a social or political problem’ (230). In Strauss’s (1997) description of the Jewish people as ‘the living witness for the absence of redemption’ (327), he indicted as delusional all those attempts that have been part of the Western tradition from the earliest days of Christendom, extending through the Enlightenment proposals of ‘perpetual peace’ (Kant), which imagine a world of harmonious relations based on pure tolerance and full equality before the law of reason. Strauss was not an enemy of liberal democracy per se; his concern was with the multiple ways that the liberal democratic tradition had degenerated into a form of mass culture. ‘Democracy’, wrote Strauss (1968), ‘is meant to be an aristocracy that has broadened into a universal aristocracy’ (4). The means for achieving this is, in fact, liberal education, but within the medium of mass culture, studies of the ancients and the deep enduring questions of human life are supplanted by science and technology, which are the means by which mass desire is fulfilled, through consumer products and the satisfaction of shifting appetites (S. Smith 2006, 191). Strauss scholar Steven Smith (2006) has suggested that Strauss’s overall work is defined by a set of three antinomies in tension: reason/revelation, ancient/modern, and philosopher/poet (5). Strauss framed them as three questions: ‘Is reason or revelation the ultimate guide to life?’ ‘Has the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns been decided in favour of modernity?’ and ‘Are the philosophers or the poets better educators of civic life?’ (quoted in Smith, 5). I have already briefly discussed the reason/revelation tension, but it is useful to underscore Strauss’s belief that any programme of civic reform must attend to people’s religious experience and their exhortation of ‘the gods’; this is not something that can simply be dismissed in the name of science or technology as secular forms of salvation. With respect to the other two 127

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

antinomies, Strauss’s sympathies clearly lie with ancient philosophers. Indeed, it is his rereading of the philosophical writings of Plato that constitutes perhaps the most controversial aspect of Straussian thinking generally, and several themes of that work are relevant here. The standard reading of Plato, and especially the Republic, is that Plato was the arch anti-liberal who banished the poets and invested the authority of political leadership within a class of philosopher kings. Ordinary people are simply incapable of discriminating between the shadow images of life and their ideal forms. Human well-being in the kallipolis, or ‘best city’, is achieved through a union of philosophy and politics. Ordinary people have opinions rather than knowledge, and it is the duty of philosophers to convert such opinions into knowledge. The perfection of the city is achieved through the rule of philosophy and the power of persuasion. Strauss’s determination was to fracture the assumed relationship in the Republic between philosophy and politics. In the Republic, the kallipolis is represented as a cave, and a central question is how the philosophers can be made to enter the cave to inaugurate the rational enlightened society. Strauss argued that, by their nature, philosophers are supremely reluctant to leave the lofty and leisured heights of their activities to assume the messy labour of administering justice in the marketplace. It is also unlikely that the cave dwellers or ordinary people can persuade them into service, in which case the only alternative is compulsion by necessity. But who will do the compelling? Certainly not the philosophers themselves. As Strauss (1964) put it, ‘Having perceived the truly grand, the philosophers regard the human things as paltry. Their very justice – their abstaining from wronging their fellow human beings – flows from contempt for the things for which the nonphilosophers hotly contest’ (125). Instead of philosophy being by itself the perfecter of civil life, Strauss argued that, in fact, they work in opposite directions. The Republic is not a testimonial to 128

the N eoconservative A ttack

the power of persuasion, but instead an elucidation of its limits. When persuasion fails, compulsion is the only alternative. Through the figure of Thracymachus in the Republic, Strauss (1964) tried to show how philosophy (persuasion) and compulsion are both needed in the ideal society. Plato described Thracymachus as savage, like a ‘wild beast’ who identified justice with ‘the advantage of the stronger’ (123). It seems at first that Thracymachus is dismissed as a viable leader of the kallipolis, but later Plato resuscitates him because he represents the art of being able to persuade the common man through the force of his personality as much as his arguments. Strauss suggested, therefore, that the best city requires both Socrates and Thracymachus, both philosophy and force. Echoing his earlier indictments of Enlightenment rationality as a basis for civil life, Strauss argued that the Republic highlights also the rule of necessity and hence the ‘essential limits’ of politics (45). Sometimes justice requires compulsion when the moral life and the philosophical life are incommensurable. A final feature of Strauss’s work deserves mention: his demarcation of the difference between esoteric and exoteric writing, in Persecution and the Art of Writing (Strauss 1988). Exoteric writing is the more usual form, in which philosophers exercise their political responsibility and make a public proposal for civic reform. Esoteric writing, on the other hand, is a practice that some writers have used in times of persecution, or when they wrote in ways that threatened the status quo and feared for their lives. In particular, Strauss explored the use of esoteric writing in the works of medieval philosopher Maimonides and later Machiavelli, in which he exposed the necessity of ‘reading between the lines’ of their work to learn their true intentions: ‘the real opinion of an author is not necessarily identical with that which he expresses in the largest number of passages’ (30). In other words, the real intention of a writer might be hidden in subtle allusions, throwaway lines, or deliberate ambiguities rather than in full-frontal declarations 129

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

or elaborate expositions. Some critics (Dart 2004, Drury 2003) have pointed to this aspect of Strauss’s work as justifying within contemporary neoconservative practice not telling the public the truth about either their intentions or their operations, such as constructing the false case regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for invasion, as well as other scenarios that I will note later. Let Strauss’s most comprehensive, sympathetic, and current interpreter, Yale Professor Steven Smith (2006), give the last word on him: ‘The highest task of the statesman is to resist the illusory belief in some cosmopolitan social order based on universal human recognition and to recover the self-respect deriving from loyalty to particular and competing political traditions [emphasis added]’ (196). Does this mean that the Straussian vision is essentially a call to war? If particular traditions are left to compete with one another and the arts of persuasion (dialogue, conversation, negotiation) are overruled by cynicism regarding their efficacy, in favour of force and compulsion, the answer looks like a yes. This alone should be cause for concern about the true intentions of the neoconservative agenda, especially given the Straussian assumption that those true intentions need not be stated in public; indeed, might be deliberately shielded from the public though mystifications and misrepresentations.

III In this section I examine how four points from Strauss’s work that I articulated above operate in contemporary contexts of curriculum and pedagogy. Curriculum and pedagogy today suffer from many of the difficulties that Strauss has identified. The question is whether his proposed solutions are adequate to the diagnosis, and on that point the pronouncement must be negative – epistemologically, pedagogically, and in terms of new global realities. How might the difficulties that Strauss has helped to identify be 130

the N eoconservative A ttack

addressed differently for global times? That question will guide the final comments of the chapter.

Straussian point 1 The liberal/modern concept of an open society guided by principles of pure tolerance and equality of rights under the law is ultimately a prescription for nihilism and is incipiently violent insofar as there is no way that particular identities can be protected from either the encroachments of assimilationism or attacks by other stronger identities that operate in the name of their own freedom. The Jewish experience in Weimar is the exemplary case. In terms of contemporary educational practice, it is easy to see how principles of pure tolerance and equality of rights under the law can lead to ‘nihilism’, although the term itself should not be taken as something pre-given in understanding. As D. M. Levin (1988) has argued, nihilism (< L. nihil, ‘nothing’) is a consequence of the corruption of two central commitments in modernity, the centrality of the Subject (egocentrism) and the undermining of patriarchy. Later I will discuss how the concept of nothingness can be interpreted creatively to address the irreducibility of experience to pregiven linguistic and cultural interpretations and that this in fact can be taken as a starting point for new conversations about human futures. In the meantime, I suggest that the liberal/ modernist affirmation of tolerance and equality leads not to nihilism, but to an understanding of what can be called the infinite referentiality of all things. Of course, it is precisely the explanation of one thing by another to which Strauss was so vehemently opposed, and he argued in favour of revelatory experience that was noncontingent, the Mosaic Law being prototypical. However, even in this case the contingencies are evident. If Abraham marked the beginning of Jewish (and Christian and Muslim) faith and was the forebear of Moses, even Abraham revealed his debts through his own name. As Alvin Kuhn has shown, Abraham is derivative of 131

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

two Sanskrit words, A (a negation) and Brahm, the Hindu creator god of the universe. So Abraham essentially means ‘not god’ and is therefore a relational term, theologically and culturally (quoted in Harper 2004, 121). The infinite referentiality that modernism installed in the Western imaginary in the name of liberty plays out in contemporary classrooms in many different ways. For example, take the dictionary as a focal classroom object. Students are often exhorted, ‘If you don’t know the meaning (an ironic assumption in itself) of a word, look it up in the dictionary’. If you look up dictionary in the Concise Oxford Dictionary (9th ed.; Thompson 1995), the given definition is ‘a book that lists or explains the words of a language or gives equivalent words in another language’ (147). The conundrum is obvious: If you don’t know the meaning of words such as lists, explains, or equivalent, then you have to look up those words; and when you do, you are presented with yet more words that require research, and so on in an infinite referential series. In this sense, however, infinite referentiality is related both to liberty and to the project of humanization, which is liberal education’s most profound obligation. The freedom to wonder, to explore, leads only to more wondering and exploring. Every research report in the New England Journal of Medicine contains a statement regarding the limits of the research and where future research is needed. If liberty leads to questioning and questioning to findings that lead to more questioning, eventually the result is a kind of humility, which might be our true condition as a human species (< L. humus, ‘ground’). Genuine humanness implies humility. It is precisely on this point that debates on the value of liberal arts education need to be drawn. The liberal arts should not be defined by Great Books (Bloom 1987), the Ancients (Strauss 1968), or any other standardization of curriculum. There is only one obligation for liberal education, which is to accept the condition of liberty under which the processes of education can continue to live. And that is where the conservative attack on public 132

the N eoconservative A ttack

education falls down. In the name of protecting a specific configuration of curriculum and pedagogy, it undermines the very possibility of curriculum and pedagogy as living, organic entities. Conservative pedagogy is inevitably deadly for both students and teachers, who find themselves constrained by conditions that violate their deepest senses of obligation to truth; that is, to the Life in which any particular truth is sustained. Furthermore, conservative prescriptions for educational reform are notable precisely for their lack of humility, indeed for their underlying arrogance and presumptuousness, and they therefore fail to be truly educative, engaged in the work of inspiring wonder. The ‘shock and awe’ objective of contemporary imperial war theatres, for example, cannot inspire wonder about the West, only fear, which results in disdain for the forces who enact it. The dictionary is a relevant cultural artefact in another way as well. As Henry Hitchings (2005) has shown, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755 was an attempt to ‘define the world’ when Britain was assuming its preeminence as a world power. The fact that the determination to define the world through defining its language can only end in futility by virtue of the impossibility of securing the parameters of meaning of any particular word, is instructive for the conservative educational project too. What might begin as a desire to ‘fix’ public education through multiple instruments of standardization ends in futility because the genuine journey of wonder will inevitably break any epistemic bonds that would be placed upon it. The Straussian concern that the particulars of life, in their uniqueness, cannot be protected from the inevitable proliferation of meaning that liberalism inspires, along with the subsumption of those particulars into new configurations of meaning and purpose – these developments may be viewed as a loss if the very idea of uniqueness is assumed to be securable. Ecology theory (Naess 1990), complexity theory (Davis and Sumara 2006), quantum theory (Bohm 1989), and Buddhist social theory (Loy 2003) 133

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

would all point to the impossibility of such securing. Any identity exists only for now, to be subsumed, transcended, or morphed into something new through new encounters and engagements. Attempts to secure identity as something unique and eternal result in parochialism, tribalism, hypernationalism, and other forms of fundamentalism for which narcissism, paranoia, and hostility to the Other are the defining characteristics.

Straussian point 2 The cosmopolitanism of modernity is based on a universalist idea that is inherently totalitarian. It comes from the historico-critical vision of the Enlightenment and the belief in reason as a universal quality that applies across the board of human experience. Any universalist or totalitarian philosophy inevitably produces a culture of management that becomes incapable of appreciating experience based on revelatory insight. The Straussian suggestion that any universalist/totalitarian prescription results in a culture of management is readable in a number of different ways. Applied to the realms of curriculum and pedagogy, the historical evidence is that these have always been conducted post facto to predetermined interpretations of broader social and political truths and that they therefore indeed serve a management function in the service of those predeterminations. This is true whether it be the Catholic foundation of monastic schools to serve the universalist proclamations of medieval Christendom, the British system of streamed schooling to serve both the domestic class structure and that of the imperium, or today in North America, the massification of public education to serve the ideal of liberal democracy. The issue that Strauss raised therefore needs to be deliberated on the topos of which universalist prescriptions inspire which management practices. The modernist/liberal agenda inspires a host of pedagogical practices that find their identity in the founding 134

the N eoconservative A ttack

myths of liberalism. The myth of the rational autonomous Subject, for example, produces inquiry-based Project approaches to instruction (Chard 1998), psychologies of childhood self-esteem (LaFrançois 2000), and Piagetian-based stage theory, for which the end state of cognitive maturity is logico-mathematical, with Progress Reports registering child development against an adult figure of rational autonomy (Jardine 2005). Strauss argued somewhat correctly that the liberal democratic ideal had morphed into an educational agenda that serves the interests of science and technology, because these in turn serve to create the objects of mass consumption, the insatiable desire for which is, in Straussian terms, an inevitable by-product of liberalism. This argument needs to be finessed to accommodate the ways that science and technology serve not just, or even primarily, mass consumption, but also, more profoundly, the whole operating modus of global capital. Indeed, as David Loy (2003) has suggested, The Market is now the world’s first truly universal signifier. From mountain-pass villages in the Himalayas to Bedouin tents in the Negev to bistros in the new Moscow – everywhere television screens bring the same suggestibilities of consumption to the most diverse populations. But these same suggestibilities feed not just consumption, but also the larger semiotic loop of corporate capital ultimately tied to the militarism necessary for its preservation (McMurtry 2002). So the contemporary conservative attack on public education, desiring to make education accountable to a transcendentalized Market Logic rather than to liberal/modernist ideas, is indirectly a way of securing the kind of psychology necessary for the preservation of the militarist state itself. If Market Logic is constructed on principles of competition, comparative advantage, victimization of the weak, and the commodification of everyday life, then the management of this particular universal ideal, pedagogically speaking, can only be brutal. It turns schools and classrooms into places where winners and losers are determined, not on the basis of ability 135

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

per se, but on the basis of particular abilities necessary for success within the market, such as physical attractiveness (especially for women), personal aggression, contempt for the weak, and so on. The Straussian point that universalist/totalitarian solutions turn the civil space into a site of management is related to the issue of open futures. If the teleology of everyday life is predetermined, then the work of life can be nothing more than making the daily means serve the final ends. This is a recipe for hopelessness and despair, and educators need to carefully address the fact that increasing numbers of young people find the universalization of Market Logic a source of despair. Peter McLaren’s (2006) poignant description of chronic student drunkenness near his home close to UCLA is apposite in this regard: ‘Nearly every night I hear the wailing cries of drunken students, cries which at once evoke the empty humor of Hee-Haw and the more serious, reflective pain of youthful bodies responding to the slow commodification of their will under late capitalism’ (173).

Straussian point 3 The link between politics and philosophy is not to be assumed. Philosophy as the practice of persuasion has its limits, beyond which the practical necessities of life require the use of force. Every parent or teacher in his or her dealings with young people eventually faces the limits of persuasion. Any use of force, however, to bring about desired results usually marks a pedagogical breakdown in terms of loss of mutual trust and dignity, hurt feelings, and so on. Most important, however, may be a revealing to the young that adult power lacks intrinsic justification; that is, to be implemented it requires an exercise of power that defies rationalization, at least from the young person’s point of view. In a sense, then, the resort to force can be interpreted as a sign of weakness, a failure to communicate desired outcomes in a language of which the young can make sense. 136

the N eoconservative A ttack

The problem with persuasion in the Straussian conservative vision is that it presumes that the persuader, the one persuading, is necessarily correct and that if the one subject to the persuasion fails to be persuaded, then that person is at fault, and the persuader is justified in exercising force to ensure the intended result. This dynamic has a long history in the Western tradition. Argentine philosopher Enrique Dussel 1995, 1996), for example, shows it to be the defining modus of Roman Catholic evangelization of Latin America, which drew on a theo-logic from St. Augustine in the fourth century C.E.: Indigenous peoples must be invited into the Kingdom of God as defined by the Church, but then if they refuse, they must be compelled to ensure the truth of the Church’s revelation into future generations. The ends justify the means. East Indian social theorist Ashis Nandy (1988) has suggested that conservative cultures are inherently pedophobic; that the young are feared as potentially insurrectional and therefore to be sternly disciplined into conformity. Philosopher of childhood David Kennedy (1983) has coined the term adultomorphism to describe an adult, indeed cultural prejudice, that attempts to turn all children into replications of an idealized and reified concept of adulthood. If God is Father, then Father is God. Within the Western tradition, especially in the context of modernity, adultomorphism and the liberal (Rousseauean) concept of the free child exist uncomfortably together as hubris and nemesis, often in a state of war, as evidenced in the generational wars of the 1960s. The conservative attack on public education today can be read as a contemporary iteration of this longstanding conflict. Indeed, Halper and Clarke (2004) have suggested that neoconservatives in the United States were quite explicit in conversations amongst themselves that one reason the United States lost the Vietnam War was that the young, inspired by their liberal education, had assumed an inordinate right to challenge their elders. By extension, the agenda for the projected imperial war 137

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

in Central Asia must be protected by an elimination of liberal ideas in the teaching profession and in the nation’s schools and classrooms. The tragedy of this bifurcation of the right to power lies not just in the hermeneutic failure it inevitably inspires, but also in the complete misunderstanding of either side by the other. The worse result is its pedagogic failure, on both sides; that is, the failure of either side to learn from each other. Contra Strauss, the truth of a situation is both contextual and relational. My sense of the world is always situational in terms of time and place, as is yours. For us to come to an understanding of the situation we now share by virtue of finding ourselves together in it, we must share our different horizons of understanding of this now common moment to construct together a vision of it that includes us both. The commonness that we now are requires a new form of expression to accommodate and articulate the new reality that we now share. It is this form of human understanding that can provide a foundational ethic for global times, turning attention away from the rhetorical arts of persuasion to a more phenomenological consideration of the life that is always already shared by virtue of our common human habitation on a single planet.

Straussian point 4 The perceived truth of things, of a political (or indeed pedagogical) situation, need not be spoken directly, and the reasons most vigorously offered in public for certain actions need not be the actual reasons. This might be one of the most controversial suggestions to come from Strauss, and whether indeed contemporary developments in the global public space can trace their origin to Straussian influence might be beside the point. The fact remains that contemporary neoconservative politics are constructed on a platform of massive public deception, an issue that I have addressed more 138

the N eoconservative A ttack

fully elsewhere (Smith 2003). Concerning the most obvious example, there is not a shred of possibility that the official version of the 9/11 event is true. More likely, the attack was carefully orchestrated by a kind of parallel government covert within the US administration (see, for example, Ahmed 2002, Griffin 2011, McMurtry 2013). This and other events, even such horrific possibilities as ‘earthquaking’ Muslim nations and precipitating the Indonesian tsunami, the military technology for which exists (see Bingham 1999, Solomatin 2004), may have been conducted and then misrepresented under a policy legitimized as ‘information warfare’ (Research Unit for Political Economy 2003, 77). These practices bring to the fore the question of whether any publicly mediated information today is to be trusted, especially given the collusion between most major global media networks and the neoconservative agenda (McChesney 2004). As a curricular issue, many other questions come into play: What is the status of curricular knowledge constructed unknowingly on deliberate misinformation? Can state-sponsored education survive the pressures of unknowledgeable conformity now forced upon it? What are the phenomenological consequences for both students and teachers of being lied to? What should be the response of educators to this state of affairs? Most profound, if the modernist project of liberal democracy now lies in shambles, can public education, historically its primary instrument of assurance, survive? As one of my graduate students remarked recently in a class discussion, ‘Misrepresentation is built in to the very idea of “curriculum”’. This is an important point, and making it greatly accentuates the way that creative teaching must be understood first and foremost as a hermeneutic endeavour. All curriculum requires interpretation. The conservative desire to mandate curriculum as a reified static commodity, to make curricula that are ‘teacher proof’, to rate teacher performance by student achievement on narrow standardized tests – all of these kinds of 139

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

measures serve to undercut the one aspect that makes teaching a worthwhile activity and mutually vivifying for both students and teachers: teaching as an engagement with the young over questions of life and death and the way that one’s own and other traditions in the past have addressed those questions, and the ways that they can be addressed in the present. This suggestion can be read as relevant whether the curriculum subject is mathematics, physics, literature, or philosophy. What matters is that the work of inducting the young into the broader human life-stream be honoured, without which education quickly becomes an act of human alienation. It requires of both teachers and students that they see their work together as a labour of mutual authentication in which the search for truth in any situation must inevitably trump political expediency. It has always struck me as odd, as both a former school teacher and a university Professor of Education for over 30 years, that never in the entire history of public education has there been a textbook for students that discusses the history of public education, a book on schooling for those who spend 12 years of their lives in school. Such a project might be a good place to start the work of healing for a human habitat in so much trouble.

IV To conclude, I note a recent development on the Web preoccupied with the sense of social and cultural collapse, especially in the United States. Site readers are enjoined to forget about the old tried and now-untrue methods of political action, such as writing to their elected government officials, marching in the streets, forming new political parties, telephone campaigning, and so on, because conservative control of public information and processes of political influence is so severe that any form of citizen action in the name of democratic practice is guaranteed to be nullified. George Bush’s signing into law of presidential power to override 140

the N eoconservative A ttack

US state gubernatorial authority in the deployment of armed forces to quell domestic violence might signal what lies ahead on the home front. As one writer recently put it, ‘As a nation and as a planet, we are screwed, fucked, and shit out of luck, or if you prefer Spanish, estamos jodidos’ (Baker 2007, para. 2). Under collapse theory, as it might be called, strategizing for personal survival is all that remains for the average citizen. The collapse into self-enclosure as a means of survival is merely an extension, perhaps an inevitable extension, of the logic of modernism itself (Dussel 1996, D. Smith 2006), and it suffers from failing to find a third way out of its binary entanglement with the conservative logic it rejects. This is because it still is locked within what I termed earlier the Eurocentric imagination. This is the endemic problem of virtually all of the disciplines of the Western academy, which still define the epistemological ground rules for most of the world. Epistemological revolutions are never the pure product of philosophy. Instead, they tend to be by-products of a changing imagination in the public sphere inspired by some momentous new development. As noted, European modernity began in 1492 with the discovery of the New World, an event that inaugurated the gradual devolution of Christendom’s monolithic control of the imaginal space (Crosby 1972). I suggest that today there are five requirements for breaking the habits of self-enclosure that currently define the Eurocentric episteme, and, unfortunately, there is space here to note them only briefly: 1. For the first time in human experience, the challenge is to see the entire world as a unified integral field, in which all entities (peoples, cultures, traditions, as well as the ‘natural’ world) play an integral part. This new vision is not just a philosophical proposal, but the consequence of what can be called the ‘astronautical imagination’. For the first time, the world has been seen as

141

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

a single planetary unit, suspended in space. There is no other place to which people can go to solve their problems; they have to be solved here, Mars exploration notwithstanding. 2. The chief problem-solving orientation to human difficulty has to shift away from trying to convince others of one’s own universal (even this one now proposed) with the adjunct duty of other people doing all the changing. Instead, the process has to begin with a new form of human conversation in which the abiding concern must be the alleviation of human suffering taken as a global responsibility. 3. This new conversation places more emphasis on listening than speaking, especially for those (Western) cultures that have, since the rise of the modern period, seen it as their duty to dictate the terms of human existence to all others. It is the deafness of the Western imperium to the cries of those suffering under it that is responsible for most of the global conflict in action today, and here Western imperium also includes those developing countries (India, China, etc.) that are mimicking the Western ideology of development without acknowledging its essential nonsustainability. Part of this work can be called the labour of mnemonic reparation (D. Smith, work in progress) and by this is meant a ‘repairing’ of the grand narrative of Western modernity (with postmodernity and the conservative response included) that began in 1492 to include all those who have been excluded from it, except as victims or those deemed to be in need of (Western) redemption. 4. A new vision for a new earth requires a broad range of phenomenological research on human living so that the lived truth of human lives can be better seen and relevant programmes, including educational programmes, developed for nurturance into ever-deeper human maturity.

142

the N eoconservative A ttack

5. Education must be oriented not by knowledge and knowledge accumulation per se, but by wisdom.

In the meantime, over 500,000 Iraqi children have died on the altar of neoconservative truth since 1990 (McMurtry 2002).

143

CHAPTER 6

Engaging Peter McLaren and the New Marxism in Education: An Essay Review of McLaren’s Rage+Hope Peter McLaren is one of my heroes. I wanted to put this up front, especially after a recent experience in a doctoral oral when I attempted to address a point in the thesis using an argument McLaren might have made. Honestly, you’d think I’d invoked the Devil Incarnate! McLaren’s name had barely passed my lips when eyes started rolling, various hurrumphing and moaning noises were heard, and for a moment I thought one member was about to swallow her tongue, so intense was her apoplexy. Whew! If only more of us could inspire such depth of feeling with our scholarship and rescue contemporary educational thinking from its current morass of banalities and cowardly evasions of the defining issues of our time. I love Peter McLaren, not because I necessarily agree with him, but because he has guts, commitment, and a brilliant intelligence capable of naming sources of our personal and collective pain. His writing is often too verbose, but just as often it explodes in epiphanic utterances of pure poetry. As a former theologian, I judge Peter McLaren to be a prophet, and prophets are seldom recognized in their own countries especially when they tear away veils of hypocrisy, and then …? In January 2006 the Bruin Alumni Association of the University of California at

145

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

Los Angeles (UCLA) published a ‘Dirty Thirty’ list of the university’s most ‘radical … leftist’ professors. McLaren, a professor in UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, was named #1 and described as ‘a monster’ and ‘a demagogue’. Fearing for his family’s safety, McLaren felt compelled to remove all their pictures from his website. Such strong responses to McLaren’s work clearly indicate that he is addressing something deep within our collective and personal psychic habitudes, and whether the news is good or bad depends on where one is located on the spectra of orthodoxy concerned with politics and culture, including education. If you have a lot to lose by taking McLaren’s analyses seriously, you’ll hate him. If you are among the 80 per cent of the world’s population suffering the imperial weight of the Euro-American tradition, and particularly its current rendition as the self-defined bearer of the world’s first universal, transcendental logic – Market Logic – or if you are one of those struggling mightily but often alone against that logic, then you will find much assistance, indeed reassurance, in solidarity with Peter McLaren and those with whom he is associated internationally. The vitriol with which McLaren’s work is denounced by currently dominant conservative forces in North America is counterpointed by the celebration of that work throughout other parts of the world, especially Latin America. For example, the University of Tijuana in Mexico has opened the Peter McLaren Institute for Critical Pedagogy (Fundacion Peter McLaren de Pedagogia Critica), and the University of Argentina has founded The Peter McLaren Institute (Instituto Peter McLaren). An examination of McLaren’s curriculum vitae, a staggering 98 pages available on his website, reveals vast international interest in his work. In the last five years alone, he has given invited presentations in Sweden, Australia, South Africa, Taiwan, Pakistan, Palestine, Israel, Spain, England, Germany, and South Korea, as well as Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil. His work has been translated into 146

P eter M c L aren and the N ew M ar x ism

Turkish, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Portuguese, Greek, Slovenian, and German. In 2005 Marc Pruyn and Luis Huerta-Charles edited a book called Teaching Peter McLaren to assist those offering courses dedicated to the study of McLaren’s now significant oeuvre, which includes no less than 30 books and monographs; 16 edited books; 10 translated books; over 170 scholarly articles, essay reviews, reviews, and interviews published in scholarly journals; 109 book chapters; along with dozens of film reviews, forewords, prefaces, magazine articles, and book-series editorships. Someone once teased McLaren that he had ‘never had a thought go unpublished’ (McLaren 2006, 341). How anyone can possibly maintain such a level of scholarly productivity while teaching courses regularly, to say nothing of having a family life, completely boggles an average professorial mind like my own. That Peter McLaren is able to do it means surely that some special dharma is alive in his work; dharma is a Sanskrit word that means ‘that which carries and sustains us’. A glance at the titles of McLaren’s key texts provides an introduction to a more formal consideration of his ideas. Along with Rage+Hope (2006) are Radical Pedagogy (forthcoming); The Havoc of Capitalism: Educating for Social and Environmental Justice (forthcoming); Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of Empire: Towards a New Humanism (2006); The Critical Pedagogy Manifesto (forthcoming); A Che Guevara Primer (forthcoming); Life in Schools (5 editions); Capitalists and Conquerors: Critical Pedagogy Against Empire (2005); Red Seminars: Radical Excursions into Education Theory, Cultural Politics, and Pedagogy (2005); Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy (2005); Red Chalk (2000); Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution (2000); Revolutionary Multiculturalism: Pedagogies of Dissent for the New Millennium (1997); Counter Narratives: Cultural Studies and Critical Pedagogies in Postmodern Spaces (1996); Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture: Oppositional Politics in a Postmodern Age 147

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

(1995); Schooling as a Ritual Performance (3 editions); and Cries from the Corridor: The New Suburban Ghettos (1980). Reading the list backwards from 1980, familiar readers will identify the intellectual trajectory that McLaren acknowledged as a journey through ‘Deweyan critical pragmatism’; the neoMarxist critical theory of the ‘Frankfurt School’ (Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Fromm, Habermas, etc.); ‘post-structuralism’; and eventually a re-taken-up and radicalized Marxism that McLaren called ‘Marxist humanism’ (McLaren 2006, 356). Rage+Hope is actually a collection of interviews with McLaren conducted by different scholars over the past ten years or so, all of which have been previously published in other venues, and throughout the book the basic themes of McLaren’s trajectory keep reappearing as he addresses questions from his interviewers regarding contemporary political and cultural conditions, particularly in the United States. Paulo Freire may be the one constant figure, and this confirms McLaren’s fundamental interest in critical pedagogy, now radicalized by his renewed interest in Marx. His judgment of mainstream critical pedagogy today is negative: ‘It fights capitalism’s second hand smoke without putting out the cigar’ (118). McLaren’s own intellectual passage is worth noting because he has seriously engaged and worked with pedagogically most of the defining movements within the social sciences and humanities (including education) of the past 30 years or so, and teachers and educators today can benefit from that experience. I will take up McLaren’s engagement with Marxism in more detail later. In the meantime, his perspectives on postmodernism and multiculturalism bear articulation here – postmodernism not just because of the ways that most humanities and social science departments today have been saturated by it, but also because of the way McLaren renounces his own flirtation with it. In a way too, multiculturalism is a spinoff of ‘post’ thinking, and McLaren’s comments about it, along with those of one of his best interlocutors in the book, Kris 148

P eter M c L aren and the N ew M ar x ism

Gutierrez, might be particularly apposite for Canadians proud of Canada’s official multicultural heritage. This is not the place, obviously, to review the whole history and content of discussions about ‘pomo’ (postmodernism and other ‘posts’ such as poststructuralism, postcolonialism, etc.) except to note its emergence in the 1960s from the influence of Franz Fanon of Martinique through the so-called ‘French Gurus’ (Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Kristeva, Cixous, etc.). However, the high priest of postmodernity, or, better, its primal prophet (both ironic designations given his trashing of clericalism and religion) is really Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900), who foresaw the crisis of modernity arising from the collapse of belief in conventional religious and metaphysical paradigms and the impossibility of securing any form of foundational identity. One can read Nietzsche as the godfather (another ironic term) of postmodern nihilism whereby nothing is ultimately determinable except as a kind of artistic play of differences manifest primarily through discoursing and ‘languaging’ with an Other. Or you can read Nietzsche as, in fact, profoundly concerned about the nihilistic void following the bankruptcy of traditional values and searching for an answer in the life of creativity. McLaren came out clearly on the former view in his interview with Marcia Moraes, one of his former doctoral students who is now teaching in Rio de Janeiro: Over the years I became increasingly concerned that if we are simply little more than an ‘other’ to somebody else’s ‘other’, staring at each ‘other’ in an endless hall of mirrors, … we need to do more than affirm our right to difference as a call for dignity and respect. I began to critique postmodern rebellion as a rebellion without a rationality, without an argument, … where social life is reduced to barroom conversations among political drunkards trapped in a sinkhole of slumbering inertia and collapsing heresies. (McLaren 2006, 122) 149

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

Later in an interview with Glen Rikowski, the attack on postmodernists is intensified: ‘These absent guardians of pure contingency – their performative cross-dressing, their fashionable apostasy and back alley brigandism, their discursive prestidigitations – has given their politics an ambivalence that merely reconfirms their interdictions as they unwarrantedly assimilate the marriage of democracy to that of neo-liberal capital and its exalted glorification of profit’ (356). Later I will discuss how the second more creative reading of Nietzsche can actually address the kinds of political and cultural struggles with which McLaren identifies, but it is valuable to note his broader argument that pomo has politically emasculated the academy as a site for the promotion of global justice. If, as pomo suggests, ‘grand narratives’ (Lyotard 1986) or comprehensive interpretive schema are impossible to defend, this plays elegantly into the hands of those who would proclaim otherwise. In the context of the defining grand narrative of our time, global capitalism, pomo is the perfect legitimizing discourse for infinite differentiation, which in turn feeds the market’s endless need and pursuit of innovation, difference, newness. Pedagogically, because pomo can celebrate only difference rather than any unified foundational field of meaning, teaching loses all authority because there is nothing left to defend or to register any particular difference definitively against. Everything becomes simply a matter of opinion or perspective or situated understanding. Education becomes a site of management of differences, no longer a place where enduring, indeed common, human values are deliberated and decided upon as courses of action. In the meantime, two million innocent people have died in Iraq while the imperial Euro-American grand narrative keeps spinning its will without any full-blown organized resistance. In one way, multiculturalism and diversity policies are the inevitable extensions of pomo understanding. The breakdown of univocal truth results in the honouring of different traditions of 150

P eter M c L aren and the N ew M ar x ism

truth, and much of the impetus for this has come from postcolonial movements whereby formerly colonized peoples have sought equal recognition with their former overlords. However, the unresolved tensions at the heart of this state of affairs still bear serious examination. Again, one of the best interviews in the book is with Kris Gutierrez, a colleague of McLaren’s at UCLA, who pointed out (McLaren 2006) that multiculturalist movements emerge because of ‘the inability of monocultural systems to control the processes of globalizing capital and to enforce the sustained subordination of a racialized strata of its working people [emphasis added]’ (185). In other words, multiculturalism is a revolt against monoculturalism, but maybe the historical ironies need to be better understood. In historical terms, European imperial venturing in the nineteenth century, which essentially constructed the global order that still operates today through organizations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and even the United Nations, although selfvalidated through its belief in a single universal logic of reason, inadvertently brought into its own house all those peoples of the world now challenging the master’s rule. The massive postindependence population movements from Africa and Asia to former colonial capitals such as London and Paris and to White European settler countries such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, installed within a European monoculture new kinds of ‘un-settling’ alterities, and how the tensions between the two are to be creatively negotiated within single political entities such as states is still uncertain, as poignantly underscored by the current controversies over the Church of England’s support for Islamic sharia law in British state courts. As Gutierrez argued (quoted in McLaren 2006), ‘Monoculturalism requires a hierarchy of cultures and particular power relations’, whereas ‘multiculturalism requires a transformation of these hierarchies and the accompanying social relationships among diverse populations [emphasis added]’ (185). This 151

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

is a point, perhaps the point, on which the second interpretation of Nietzsche is relevant. Postmodern theory, at its best, is not inherently nihilistic, relativistic, or solipsistic, contrary to what British Marxist Glen Rikowski claimed in this book (249). Postmodern theory and its enactments are primarily, implicitly, and historically political strategies that implicitly destabilize a univocal monocultural centre. The lack in postmodern work though is that its emphasis on the play of the world has refused or been unable to address and engage the specific and concrete realities of its univocal and monocultural ‘Other’, namely, the transcendental logic that currently rules the world in the form of Capital. Amongst my own colleagues in a faculty of education, for example, it is the seeming unwillingness, perhaps hiding of an inability, to engage the epistemological, religious, and cultural roots of contemporary political economy that is the source of deep distress for me personally, because the respective agonies of students and teachers today cannot be alleviated without that engagement. More on this later. Postmodernism, then, is best understood as being on the side of an open future that is pluralistic and free. The challenge is to see that this requires a fight or a new form of work in relation to the other dominating logic of freedom, which is, in fact, a non-freedom operating in the name of freedom, and it is nonfree because its telos, or end-in-view, is completely predetermined. Market freedom is not the same as human freedom, contrary to what neoliberal politicians would like to tell us or sell us. But what shall be the political requirements and conditions of freedom today, in a globalizing world, plural and replete with difference? At the moment, in a time of conservative regnancy, it seems almost impossible to even get a meaningful public debate going on these matters of ultimate concern. The New Marxism, as it might be called, has some important things to propose about all this, to be discussed in more detail shortly. For now, suffice it to say that the fight that is required cannot be a simple attack on 152

P eter M c L aren and the N ew M ar x ism

capitalism of the kind McLaren has proposed. What is required, in my view, is a new form of mindfulness and epistemology that reconsiders the human relationship to the material world. This is not a call to a new Hegelianism, wherein the mind constitutes the world; nor is it a validation of Marx’s view that the material world constructs mind. Instead, it is a call to see the material world as itself pedagogical; that is, instructive of our basic human condition, particularly its qualities of impermanence, ambiguity, and mystery and constrained in the tension between birth and death, arising and dying. It is the utopianism of the Marxist vision that is its chief liability, although I am cheered by articulations of British Marxists such Glen Rikowski and Paula Allman, who, in rereading Marx, emphasized the project of human ‘becoming’ rather than working towards preformulated notions of what it means to be human. Again, more later. Before proceeding to a fuller discussion of the new Marxism in education, I would like to address an important point that both Gutierrez and McLaren raised through the multiculturalism debate, and McLaren in one of his interviews with Glen Rikowski, and that has to do with the relation of race to class. This is important not only because antiracism has become a dominant interest in both educational research and teacher education, but also because many antiracism theorists have derided Marxists for privileging class over race as the central issue for human justice. Gender theorists have levelled similar criticisms. Citing his work with co-author Valerie Scataburlo-D’Annibale, McLaren emphasized, however, that class sustains the conditions that produce and reproduce the other antagonisms [race and gender] … In other words, class struggle is the specific antagonism – the generative matrix – that helps to structure and shape the particularities of the other antagonisms … [It] creates their conditions of possibility…. Class struggle is a determining force that structures ‘in advance’ 153

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

the very agnostic [sic – agonistic?] terrain in which other political antagonisms take place. (363)

To me, this is a very key point: The colour of one’s skin is not the issue (although whiteness still rules to a large extent; ‘the eternal occurrence of whiteness’ McLaren (2006, 49) called it, while naming himself ‘a traitor to whiteness’ [165]) so much as one’s position in the relations of production. This is confirmed by the way the Bush administration brought people such as Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice into the White House. As African Americans, their surface signification is to announce the colour blindness of conservative politics. In the meantime, those politics still uphold the relations of production that keep the majority of people, regardless of race or gender, servile. Harry Belafonte, the AfricanAmerican singer and activist, criticized Powell as an extension of plantation slave culture, in which Black slaves are brought into the master’s house to do the master’s bidding (Blackcommentator. com 2002). In the meantime, the life and work of the master is never questioned. Now to address the most pivotal matters raised in this book (McLaren 2006), and they can be framed by a series of fairly simple but perhaps exemplary questions: Is the human world unfolding as it should, requiring only a tweak here, a reform there, perhaps a little war now and then, or maybe a big one, to keep things on a positive evolutionary path; or is there something fundamentally wrong with the current order of things, some systemic malignancy that has taken over the whole human body globally? Are developing nations, well, developing? Or under the ruling logics of the day, are they destined to eternal poverty? Are young people in the United States, the United Kingdom, Norway, Canada, and other places becoming more and more violent against themselves because they are receiving an inadequate ‘character’ education, or because something is deeply wrong in our basic assumptions about how to live with the young, such that despair is their only 154

P eter M c L aren and the N ew M ar x ism

option? Is global warming something that can be simply remedied by new policies to force down carbon emissions, or is global warming itself a symptom of a particular cultural logic that has placed the entire future of homo sapiens in jeopardy? Peter McLaren was very clear on where he stands. Conditions are such that reform is not enough. Only a complete revolution can heal the global human body. The demon here is capitalism, and what is required is ‘to defeat the capitalists, but also capital’ (248). But what is capitalism? What is capital? Is it silly to even ask these questions? After all, has the end of the Cold War not legitimized capitalism as a universalizable form of political economy over its atrophied nemesis in the former Soviet Union? Is the entire world not now so enwrapped within the logic of capital that any form of resistance is futile? Is capitalism now so much just a matter of common sense that it has entered a realm beyond critical debate? My argument is that the somnolence and silence of the contemporary academy on these questions are not just marks of the way in which capitalist logic itself has shut down the possibilities of open debate, largely through media control hiding the true human and planetary costs of capital’s operation. Also involved is a shrouding of the conditions of human freedom within a forced logic of liberal democracy, which is itself the very instrument of capital politics. The consequence is well described by historian of capitalism, Michel Beaud (2000), who suggested that the world today suffers from ‘a-cracy’ (263); that is, the inability of any government to control the logic of capital for the broader service of meeting real, not constructed, human need. The somnolence and silence of the academy, too, are all the more dangerous as indicators of obliviousness to the dangers inherent in the current state of things, just as they are regrettable for signifying so completely a lack of imagination on how the human prospect might be conceived differently. The result might be what Beaud called ‘a new category of crime: crime against the Earth, against those who are destitute, and against future generations’ (300). 155

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

One of the most remarkable aspects of capitalism is the simplicity of its own theoretical base. I regularly peruse the business section of Canada’s national newspaper The Globe and Mail for the sole purpose of decoding the logics at work in the operation of business, nationally and internationally. What is so evident is how the requirements for success have little to do with broad critical intelligence so much as with following a very particular, very simple logic with absolute determination and iron will. The true challenges encountered have more to do with risk, calculating the odds for success, keeping a vigilant eye on what is new and emergent in terms of product development, knowing the competition and figuring out how to beat it, and, finally, managing the workforce with maximum efficiency. There is ultimately only one criteria for success, and that is profit – monetary gain that can be paid to company shareholders as well as reinvested in new product development and marketing. The language of growth predominates. Fundamental questions of ethics, purpose, meaning, and valuing have all been precluded under the acceptance of an iron law of capital accumulation. This very simplicity, however, belies profound complexity within actual modes of operation on a global scale. For the entire system to survive requires all players’ implicit acceptance of the rules of operation, rules regarding competition, monopolization, and entrepreneurial innovation, which in turn rely on systems of trading, borrowing/credit, investment, and so on – all of which are founded on what Beaud (2001) called ‘a wager about the future, [which indeed] helps produce the future’ (308–309). The social logic of capitalism ‘destroys [all] other productive forms, and destroys formerly existing activities, social forms and resources … It gives rise to a totality … [that is] both territorialized and worldwide, and is in a state of constant change [while] demonstrating an increased autonomy relative to the societies in which it has been formed’ (309). Economic historian Joseph Schumpeter (1942) has described this process of forming a future 156

P eter M c L aren and the N ew M ar x ism

of endless transformation in the name of capital as ‘a perpetual whirlwind of creative destruction’; indeed, ‘Creative Destruction constitutes the fundamental fact of capitalism’ (116–117). It is not the place here to recapitulate the history of events that have brought the contemporary situation into being, although that will be a fundamental requirement of curriculum development, for example, in the future as more and more people struggle to understand not just their predicament, but also their future possibilities. Suffice it to say two things. One is that capitalism is a distinctly Western phenomenon that has arisen out of the particular struggles of the Western tradition. These have been struggles over identity and authority, god and monarchy, rights and privilege, private property and community. Later I will discuss the importance of ensuring that this full range of issues is part of any discussion of human futures, rather than reducing the whole question of capitalism and its effects to, for example, a matter of ‘alienated labour’ as earlier and some contemporary Marxists are wont to do. The second point arises from the first, which is that, as a distinctly Western tradition founded particularly upon a principle of religious exclusivism, capitalism suffers from appalling ignorance of ‘other’ traditions, and this results in the kind of epistemological poverty in which we indeed cannot see the other traditions as having intrinsic merit of their own. This condition in turn inspires rage from those others, who become labelled in the West as terrorists, extremists, or fundamentalists. In these circumstances, it is the West that is ‘terrified’. There is no doubt that the most enduringly insightful examination of capitalism and its operations comes from Karl Marx. I say this with some embarrassment insofar as I am a professor in his 60s who has come very late to a serious examination of Marx, and I am now really only a beginner. Although I hold five university degrees, including a Doctor of Philosophy degree, never once in my entire educational journey was I invited to consider Marx seriously, except perhaps in the form of dismissive commentary 157

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

or indirectly through the work of Paulo Freire and the critical pedagogy school, as well as the Frankfurt school of critical theory of the 1960s. Such is the nature of student victimization within the liberal tradition of education. Actually, I did begin reading Capital some 30 years ago, but there was no support for it, nowhere to go. Fortunately, the situation is beginning to change, in large measure through the emergence of what might be called The New Marxism in Education, under the inspiration of some leading figures to whom I was introduced in this book of Peter McLaren’s. The extensive conversations between McLaren and British Marxist Glen Rikowski, for example, in Rage+Hope, have been extremely illuminating, and I have followed up on several other figures McLaren mentioned, most notably Paula Allman, and her new book, On Marx. Allman noted that the full corpus of Marx’s work was not available in English until the 1970s, a significant point in itself – the reluctance of the centre and source of capitalism, that is, the English-speaking world, to seriously engage its most perceptive critic. I will leave the responsibility for a more comprehensive understanding of the central themes of Marxist analysis to interested readers themselves, and I highly recommend the Allman resource as a place to start. For now, a few summative points are in order. Within Marxist understanding, capitalism is not a thing, but a relation, a relation between the owners of capital (which includes not just money, but also production machinery, financial instruments, etc.) and those who produce that capital, people who surrender their labour power in return for a portion of the surplus value, or profit, created by their labour. Insofar as relations among capitalists are always competitive – for markets, market share, natural resources, and indeed labour itself – a primary requirement is to keep the costs of labour low so that the surplus value, or profit, from production can allow the further development necessary to sustain competitive advantage. Because of the nature of this 158

P eter M c L aren and the N ew M ar x ism

relation within capitalism, poverty is actually a requirement for capitalism’s functioning. The deep recession in Western economies of the 1970s was due, among other things, to the fact that the negotiated Bretton Woods pact between capital and social development after World War II had resulted in demands from powerful labour unions for an increasing share in profit taking and social welfare, such that Western firms were losing their competitive advantage to the emerging economies of Asia. The result was a complete fracturing of the Bretton Woods concord, which gave European and American firms the right to dismiss hundreds of thousands of their workers and move operations offshore for cheap labour. Either the budgets of most public services in Western economies (schools, hospitals, parks, recreation facilities, etc.) were slashed, or the services were driven into private enterprise. Similar massive major adjustments were made in the 1980s and 1990s in the name of neoliberalism and globalization, terms that ultimately meant that major Western firms gave themselves the right to operate freely and everywhere. A whole new vocabulary has become associated with the educational enterprise (to call education an enterprise is symptomatic in itself) since the end of Bretton Woods. The new knowledge economy names how knowledge development has been delinked from broader questions of human value, purpose, and meaning and connected solely to economic development controlled by capital interests. The information age means that knowing has been severed from being and that information has evolved into a standalone commodity for use as needed but without the necessary connection to those who produced the knowledge or for whom having knowledge bears any particular personal responsibility beyond serving those who demand the information. Multitasking is a euphemism that hides the requirement that workers work more efficiently and cost effectively, often being driven to distraction. Lifelong learning is another euphemism that means, basically, that lifelong career jobs are a thing of the past; expect to lose 159

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

your job at any time, and be prepared to reskill as companies need to perpetually restructure to remain globally competitive. The structural inequality inherent in the labour–capital relation is based on a shift within capitalism from use value to exchange value. Use value refers to the value of things as they lie at hand and was the common currency within earlier forms of barter trade. Exchange value refers to the value of something that is registered against a common currency, such as gold, silver, or, today, money. Within a system of exchange value, everything becomes commodifiable as an object of exchange for money. Whether something is useful is beside the point; what matters is whether it can be sold for profit. Within such an understanding, human beings lose their value too insofar as they have value only to the degree that they can generate profit for the holders of capital. The corrupting influence of the exchange value assumption is readily discernible in the public realm. Retail clerks are trained to be warm and friendly to customers, not because they must really care about the customers, but because giving off a warm and friendly persona makes customers more responsive and willing to purchase. In education, being happy and perpetually smiling is designed to make teachers likeable and students more eager to learn from them. Emotional affect becomes a matter of pure technique and a source of deep alienation for both giver and receiver. (For a good discussion of this, see Arlie Hochschild 2003.) Not only is the most pernicious end result of capitalist formations the inevitable widening of the gap between haves and havenots, between rich and poor, but the drive for monopolization also places control of capital in fewer and fewer hands. (Today, the three richest people in the world have more money than the gross domestic product of 48 of the world’s poorest nations, and the 225 richest people earn more than the total annual income of 47 per cent of the total world population.) The worse result is that, in the deepest of ironies, humanity itself becomes superfluous. In that capitalism is not about sharing wealth so much as 160

P eter M c L aren and the N ew M ar x ism

accumulating it, the vast majority of the world’s people have little use beyond their role as producers and consumers. As technology makes production simpler and more efficient, so too drops the value of persons. Given that overproduction is built into the very operation of capitalism (a subject too complicated to discuss here), not only can all goods not be consumed (usually they are dumped in developing countries, thereby undermining local economies), but, eventually, the capacity to purchase/consume lags so far behind the capacity to produce that consumers themselves drop out of the loop, as the current credit crisis in the USA is bearing witness. The most sinister unfolding of this scenario can be noted in actual discussions that have taken place in the US government on how global populations, particularly in Africa, might be deliberately diminished (see Ruppert 2004). It also explains why European powers deliberately turned a blind eye to the genocide in Rwanda and why huge Western pharmaceutical firms consistently refuse to provide cheap antimalarial drugs and AIDS antiviral drugs to Africa. On the operation of capital in daily life, I will let McLaren (2006) speak for himself: ‘Our subjectivities are being created out of the detritus of productive forces, the expelled vomit of overaccumulation, and the bloated promise of globalized capitalist relations’ (48). ‘If U.S. capitalists could have their way, they would market for sale the tears of the poor’ (64). (Actually, I would say that this is already the case through the massive television campaigns of organizations such as Save the Children and World Vision.) I believe that we are witnessing the hyper-real formation of an entirely new species of fear. I live not far from the UCLA campus in Westwood and nearly every night I hear the wailing cries of drunken students, cries which at once evoke the empty humour of Hee-Haw and the more serious reflective pain of youthful bodies responding to the slow commodification of 161

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

their will under late capitalism … Capitalism raises productivity to a level of mindnumbing enormity yet does nothing to limit scarcity … [The] momentum capitalism has achieved makes it unlikely that it can be derailed without tremendous effort and sacrifice. It constitutes a resplendent hemorrhaging of the labor-capital relation, where commodities vomited up from the vortex of accumulation are hungrily consumed by tormented creatures, creatures who are deliriously addicted not only to new commercial acquisitions, but to the adrenaline rush of accumulation itself … All of capitalist society is a theft of the surplus value of workers. (McLaren 2006, 183)

Capitalist formations of the educational project are worth underscoring too: ‘Schools … act as vital supports for, and developers of, the class relation, at the core of capitalist society and development’ (Glen Rikowski, quoted in McLaren 2006, 113). Then, an education that is subordinate to transnational capital can only be detrimental to any attempts to bring about social justice through education … The corporate agenda for public and higher education fundamentally contradicts education in principle … University research has been transformed increasingly into a privately sponsored affair driven mainly by industries in bioscience and information technology … The marriages between capitalism and education, and capitalism and science have created a foundation for science education that emphasizes profitability and control at the expense of social justice and human dignity. (222–228)

So, for example, pharmaceutical scientists are trained and contracted to work not on drugs for the newly resistant strains of malaria, tuberculosis, and respiratory infections that killed 6.1 million people in underdeveloped countries in 2001, but on 162

P eter M c L aren and the N ew M ar x ism

‘creating lifestyle drugs for impotence, obesity, baldness, and wrinkles’ (226). Of the 1,223 new medications introduced that year, only 1 per cent were developed for those illnesses in poor countries. Viagra sales totalled more than $1 billion dollars in its first year alone, whereas the total global expenditures for malaria treatment stood at $84 million (226). Within capitalism, ‘education is now seen as a US$2.2 trillion a year market’ (325). An educational remedy within a radicalized Freirean critical pedagogy must involve ‘educators committing class suicide in order to be baptized into the popular character of the culture of the students’ (McLaren 2006, 312). A revolutionary critical pedagogy ‘tries to find ways of wedging itself between the contradictory aspects of labor-power creation and, among students, creating different spaces where a de-reification, de-commodification, and decolonization of subjectivity can occur’ (361). Because capitalism, as Marx held, is a ‘social relation’, the abolition of capital requires an abolition of ‘a particular form of social relation’ (McLaren 2006, 41). Insofar as this particular form of social relation has, particularly since the end of the Cold War, insinuated itself into the innermost workings of almost all forms of human behaviour, not only has capitalism become a kind of cancer (McMurtry 2002), a malignancy feeding not just on the global human body, but also on the planetary resources of human survival – water, food supplies, even air – and because no one can escape the tentacles of capital’s operations (everyone is hooked into the system in one way or another), in the most profound sense, capitalism-is-us. As Glen Rikowski (quoted in McLaren 2006) emphasized, ‘I am capital; I am money … In capitalism, social reality writes itself through us, as ourselves, as we live its forms and aspects’ (268–269). Specifically with reference to education, Paula Allman (2007) noted that Marx would likely have ‘scorned’ the idea of a Marxist educational theory, because ‘it implies that education belongs to some separate aspect of human life rather than being an integral 163

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

part of the process of ‘becoming’, i.e., the lifelong process of developing all of our human potentials and powers’ (52). This emphasis on human becoming that Allman underscored in Marx’s work is a counterpoint that the New Marxists (Glen Rikowski, Mike Cole, Dave Hill, etc.) have raised against the older mechanical, deterministic, structuralist modes of Marxist theory that were prominent until fairly recently, even, for example, in the classic work of Bowles and Gintis (1976), Schooling in Capitalist America, where they inadequately addressed the issue of human agency. To speak of human becoming is to articulate that the human project is always open, not predetermined. Not only that, instead of relying on a theory of being, whereby human action is interpreted according to a pre-understanding of human nature, by insisting that we are always ‘becoming’ draws attention, in Marxist terms, to how our understanding of ourselves is always in a process of construction through both our human relations and our sensory relations with the material world. This is related to Marx’s profound concept of internal relations, whereby the entities of experience cannot be separated from one another, but only understood in relation to one another. The few specific recommendations that Marx made about education bear reference to this (Allman 2007, 53): There should be no dichotomization of mental and manual work; there should be an integration of productive work with education and learning; education should be integrated into as many aspects of life as possible; and, most important, those involved in education for social action (all teachers, really) should themselves, and in their relations with one another, be perpetually engaged in their own self-education and self-transformation for a better world. This last point is related to Marx’s conviction that we must always struggle for the future in the present and never project the struggle idealistically to some ‘other’ place or to a future time. More broadly, the theory of internal relations also names the immutable unity of epistemology and ontology, so relevant to 164

P eter M c L aren and the N ew M ar x ism

education. In Marx’s terms, knowledge and being always exist in a dialectical relationship to form our consciousness of the world. Within capitalist formations, however, they are assumed to be separate. As idealist and transhistorical, separated from specific times and places, epistemology becomes unchangeable, static, and reified (turned into a ‘thing’ < L. res); and in this condition, so also are the ways that people relate to it conditioned. If knowledge is a thing, then to become knowledgeable means to possess knowledge, and as much of it as possible. As Allman (2007) suggested, ‘The only possible relation to knowledge afforded by this [split/ dichotomized] epistemology is an acquisitive one’ (p. 60). In education today, it is easy to see how such epistemology produces the cult of the expert, the person who ‘knows about’ other people and places, but has no awareness of the origins of his or her knowledge or any understanding of its connection to those people and places. Hence so much of ‘education’ today suffers from historical amnesia. In the entire history of mass public education, since the late nineteenth century, as far as I know, never once has there been a historical text available to students to help them understand the assumptions, aims, and intentions behind their 12 years of institutional compulsion. They have no means of seriously engaging the predetermined auspices of their lives. Under this condition, what is surprising is that student violence, both self-inflicted and projected outwards, is not more widespread than it is already. When ontology is split from epistemology, the consequences are similar. Education becomes excessively psychologized, whereby the being of the student is split from any dynamic relationship with what he or she knows. What matters is that the student is happy, well adjusted, and capable of learning. By definition, the relevance of the content of the learning to the deep formation of the student is completely beside the point; the requirement is that students simply learn so that they can take their respective places in a predetermined social world. For the teacher, a dichotomized ontology means that the teaching act is reduced to didacticism, a 165

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

simple imparting of predetermined knowledge to students whose own being is itself already predetermined. This condition also sets up the private/public dichotomization one often hears in school staffrooms: ‘What I do in private has nothing to do with my public life as a teacher!’ Doesn’t it? Marx’s theory of internal relations would suggest that they are inextricably related and that to try to keep them separate is a recipe for personal and professional disaster, for a kind of teaching without means of human authentication. In insisting on the unity of ontology and epistemology, Marx’s interest is to overcome the human alienations produced by their being split. What this requires though is an understanding of ‘knowing’ to ‘becoming’. Because all knowledge is historically specific, it cannot be universalized in advance of a human encounter with it, which in turn changes it, modifies it within the temporal ‘now’. Therefore, knowledge is never completed or finished, but must be persistently scrutinized, tested, and critically assessed for its validity in the now. The most important question is whether the knowledge enhances our ability to transform ourselves and our relations within a common weal, whether the knowledge contributes to our human becoming, to our becoming human. As Allman (2007) suggested, Marx’s ‘ontological vision was for human beings to become the critically conscious creators, the “makers”, of human history … Rather than human nature, for better or worse, being antecedent to social being, pre-existing our existence within historically specific socio-economic relations, it develops, as does humanity’s nature, within human praxis’ (61). Emphasizing the internally related dialectical nature of human experience also means acknowledging the inherent tension between the pairs of so-called opposites, the dichotomies that make up the dialectical relation. Human alienation is intensified and reproduced when this dialectical tension is not well understood and when each aspect of the dialectical pair defines its identity only in relation to its so-called opposite. So, for example, a student might understand his or her human dignity only in terms 166

P eter M c L aren and the N ew M ar x ism

of becoming just like the teacher, instead of rethinking the entire pedagogical relation in a way that acknowledges the mutual validity of both student and teacher as co-participants in the project of human becoming. Within capitalism and capitalist formulations of the pedagogic relation, for the entire system to be maintained, the so-called opposites in the dialectical relation must be kept frozen in place, with respective identities understood as secure and unalterable. Hence, the poor must be kept poor for the rich to maintain their wealth, just as students must be kept perpetually students for teaching expertise to survive its contemporary configuration. Credentialing becomes a means of social control as young people try to escape their socially positioned entrapment by means of endlessly furthering their education, but by that strategy actually only making matters worse for themselves. Within a Marxist understanding, both students and teachers need to surrender their preconceptions of the pedagogic relation to more humanly re-create themselves within the broader horizon called Life. Students of Paulo Freire will recognize many of these themes in his classic work Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), and what has always appealed to me about Freire is his deep human compassion, arising precisely from a recognition of what might be called the organic interpenetrated nature of dialectical relations. The oppressor is in the oppressed, just as the oppressed are in the oppressor, and neither can be free until there is a coming together to work out a mutual freedom. To be an oppressor is to be oppressed oneself, insofar as the unfreedom of the other is implicitly a denunciation of freedom itself, and hence my own. This kind of compassionate dialectics, as I like to call it, is evident in the New Marxism coming out of Britain in the writings especially of Glen Rikowski and also Allman, an American who has lived in the UK since the 1970s. This work has quite a different ‘spirit’ to the Marxism of Peter McLaren, and it is interesting, indeed relevant, that Rikowski in his main interview in 167

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

Rage+Hope repudiated the abolition of capitalism through a ‘maximum programme’, ‘all or nothing’, ‘taking the message neat’ approach (McLaren 2006, 295) which seems to typify McLaren’s formulations and is reflected in the rhetorical hyperbole of much of his prose. Rikowski’s sagaciousness comes from his witnessing of the all-or-nothing approach in the history of the Revolutionary Communist Party in England and its failure. This is not to say that Rikowski works from compromised interpretations of Marx – far from it. But it is his recognition of the interpenetrated nature of the labour–capital relation, that no one today stands outside of this relation, including Peter McLaren, and that we are all implicated in it and its deeply inherent injustice that requires forms of resistance that acknowledge the mutual horror of it all: ‘The politics of resistance is simultaneously a politics of horror, as it includes fighting against the horrific forms of life that we are becoming’ (258). In a way, this ‘we’ signs a new overcoming of the older us-them dialectic and a new manner of struggle that must include oppressor and oppressed alike around what McMurtry (2002) called a new sense of the ‘civil commons’. To me, McLaren’s approach seems less mature, and this is not a putdown, but perhaps simply a comment about wisdom and the need for it. The very title of the book invites one to consider what indeed is the relationship between rage and hope in the context of revolutionary struggle. Is this a dialectical pair? Does rage produce hope, and hope rage? Or, what kind of hope is produced by rage? Can, in fact, rage produce hope, or just another more intensified tantrum? Actually, I would suggest that neither rage nor hope is a helpful trope in the necessary struggle for global justice. Ironically, the word rage in Australia and New Zealand means, colloquially, ‘seeking enjoyment; having a good time’ (Thompson 1995, 1132), which hardly describes what this project is about, surely; or if it does, then the project is far more selfabsorbed and narcissistic than I would want it to be. It is the slight hint of this in McLaren that might have inspired conservative 168

P eter M c L aren and the N ew M ar x ism

Kenneth Zeichner’s criticism of McLaren’s dress, tattoos, and so on (286). After all, Peter, what are the dramatic personal adornments about, exactly? Remember, Che Guevara was well known for his self-transcendence. Generally though – and positively – I see the adornments as an extension of McLaren’s longstanding interest in theatre. His first degree, from Canada’s Waterloo University, was in Elizabethan drama, and there is a need for theatre in politics; indeed, politics might be theatre in some profound sense. More definitively though, rage comes from the Latin rabies, which is quite scary because rabies is ‘a contagious and fatal viral disease, … causing madness and convulsions’ (Thompson 1995, 1128). Rage therefore implies a kind of dissociative state, and that is precisely what is not required today because it violates the careful phenomenological attention to our specific human circumstances that is so necessary if we are to understand what to do for our betterment. Nor is hope much better. In a remarkable paper entitled Teaching without Hope, Peter Taubman (2000) unpacked psychoanalytically what might be operative in the very concept of hope: ‘Hope may be little more than a fantasy that keeps us from facing both our desires and our fears and at the same time prematurely forecloses the possibility of analyzing and working through the fantasy or the possibility … of being mindful’ (25). Later I will explore further the meaning of mindfulness. Taubman continued by quoting French therapist and theorist Jacques Lacan: ‘I just want you to know that more than once I’ve seen hope – what they call bright new tomorrow – drive people … to kill themselves’ (25). Said Taubman, ‘Any ideology of hope, conservative or radical, diminishes the irreducible specificity of each situation and imprisons us in overdetermined scripts or fantasies’ (27); and worse, ‘because it is a fantasy, [hope] sustains the very problems it is meant to solve’ (26). Because hope is also a projection into the future, there is an element of avoidance of the present, and ‘one result of this avoidance is that the same problems and the same 169

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

hopes return again and again’ (28). Taubman also reminded us of Freire’s ‘“malefic generosity,” … the impulse of the well intentioned to impose solutions informed by their own prejudices and “understandings”’ (27). Indirectly, Taubman’s interpretations raise the question of what is the end in view of McLaren’s vision, and perhaps of the new Marxists more generally. What is the vision of human society that he is proposing, and what assumptions about human nature underwrite that vision? It is not enough to say that the new Marxism has no predetermined telos, because it is all about human becoming that is worked out in the now. What distinguishes, say, the becoming of a criminal from that of a clergyman? One might joke, ‘Maybe nothing’; but the point is that becoming, even in the sense of becoming together as critical praxis, has no possibility of a good result if there is no understanding of what that result might look like so that it can be affirmed when it is witnessed. This is indeed my main complaint about the Marxist vision. I strongly support the analysis of capital, but the proposed solutions sometimes leave me wondering. We must remember that Marx at least partly stood in the tradition of German romanticism, and there was a certain romantic quality to the prescriptions regarding the central issue of human labour, for example. It is true that ‘labor does not need capital; capital needs labor’ (McLaren 2006, 113) and that it is the unfettered exploitation of labour in the cultivation of surplus value that is the central disease of capitalist formations, so that ‘the worker creates the very relation that exploits her’ (p. 97), but an ameliorated understanding of labour in Marxism needs further elucidation. Yes, labour needs to be delinked from the necessity (Allman 2007) of serving its own alienation through capital, but the human condition cannot be delivered from the necessity of labour itself, of the need to work even when one doesn’t feel like it. There might be something intrinsically alienating about labour that is not connected to class. Biblically speaking, the necessity of work is linked to the curse of 170

P eter M c L aren and the N ew M ar x ism

being human (Genesis 3:17). Labouring itself is a highly complex human phenomenon, not reducible to a set of social relations or class analysis, although of course that is part of the story (e.g., Willis and Aronowitz 1981). Indeed, phenomenological studies of labouring would contribute greatly to our understanding of the war that is at the heart of working, as a form of human action. So also Marxist appeals to ‘cooperation, solidarity and equality’ (100) among workers are important, but what ensures a good spirit of solidarity within a reconfigured social realm? I accept the Marxist point that nature cannot be appealed to as an external authority for moral norms, but at the same time the interpretation of human nature within Marxism often seems to me both naïve and not well grounded. The Hebrew prophet Jeremiah proclaimed in the midst of his denunciations of social injustice, ‘The human heart is deceitful above all things’ (Jer. 17:9), and this quality is no respecter of persons, wealthy or poor. The point is that human solidarity requires confession and repentance, but facing the burden of that is something most of us would do anything to avoid. And all this is not just a matter of our material conditions. Those interested can read some outlines for a better world in various places in Rage+Hope, such as in the interview with Lucia Coral Aguirre Munoz (McLaren 2006, 57–109). For example, ‘Market relations must be subordinated to a democratic regime based on direct popular representation in territorial and productive units’ (100). Those interested in Marxist recommendations for new educational forms and practices, in particular, will find the work of Dave Hill (Institute for Education Policy Studies 2009), Mike Cole (2008), Glen Rikowski (2003), and others helpful. Rikowski, for example, lamented the business takeover of schools and the turning of education into ‘the social production of labour power for competitive advantage’ (573). Here I would simply like to address some issues not dealt with in Rage+Hope while acknowledging with apology that McLaren might have addressed them in other more recent works with which I am not familiar. 171

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

As Marx and Engels emphasized in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, the appearance of capitalism marked a break with all previous forms of human history. For the first time, human life became characterized by ‘constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation … All fixed, fast-frozen relations are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned’ (quoted in Beaud 2000, 307). Can the human world sustain such a manner of being forever? Unequivocally, no. Does this mean we are on the verge of another historical breaking point or even breakthrough? Reservedly, I would say yes, that the dialectic between capitalism and Marxism that has defined most of the last 100 years of European history has not been settled in favour of capital, but has exploded into new formations that will eventually transcend the old logics. One might hope that new configurations of human leadership will emerge that can guide these new formations creatively and helpfully, although inordinate conflict will no doubt be a part of the whole process. Michel Beaud (2001, 263) has usefully identified five characteristics of this new historical moment: (a) the crisis in the West, (b) the economic morass of many parts of Africa and South America, (c) the unprecedented growth in many parts of Asia, (d) the emergence of new technologies, and (e) globalization. These characteristics might be elaborated briefly by noting that the contemporary crisis in the West is indeed largely an economic reality issuing primarily from the imperial venturing precipitated by the energy crisis, a situation masked by a war against Islam in the name of democracy and human rights. The Euro-American tradition, and especially the American version, finds itself increasingly delegitimized within the broader international community, with its own economic resources rapidly hollowing out.

172

P eter M c L aren and the N ew M ar x ism

The massive difficulties of Africa and South America are legacies of European colonialism, and the suffering millions of those continents stand as a judgment against the very veracity of the West’s operating paradigms. The fact that the suffering will only intensify under the looming food, water, and fuel shortages caused by the West’s own desperate strategies for survival portends a living nightmare of unprecedented proportions. The emergence of Asia, particularly India and China, as a source of global economic strength, in competition with the West, ensures that the capitalism of the future, if it survives as such, will have a very different face than that of the Euro-American tradition. This is because both India and China, as examples, have a long and deep experience of what it is like to live under the colonial conditions rooted in European forms of imperial capital. It is too early to tell what specific contributions Asia might make to social and economic theory of the future, but one might hope that such values as Hinduism’s rejection of materialism as a total philosophy, Confucian emphasis on civic responsibility, Taoist conceptions of balance and harmony, and Buddhist understandings of the emptiness or indeterminateness (SK. shunyata) of reality might become part of the necessary conversation on how we can best live together as a global community. The new technologies have created what Beaud (2000) called ‘technoscientistic capitalism’, which is controlled by a small number of corporations, with new commodities (hardware and software programmes, networking capabilities, etc.) ‘embedded into … systems which impose their own procedures and norms’ (p. 304). These new technologies have introduced new levels of virtuality into economic planning and procedure, and they also cut across national boundaries to create new forms of globalizing community through interfacing, gaming, and strategizing. What is most important is that they are not accountable to governments, at least not in the West.

173

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

Globalization as a vision of the neoliberal economists of the 1990s (‘Globalization is another word for American imperialism’, Henry Kissinger once remarked) is probably a dying dream. Dependent as it is on petroleum (65 per cent of all petroleum is used in transportation services – trucking, air transport, shipping, rolling stock, etc.), globalization as the free movement of peoples, goods, and services (including education) is probably unfolding as an unlikely scenario for the future. The point of Beaud’s (2000) taxonomy of capitalism’s contemporary milieu is to underscore its complex and diverse nature, its morphing into forms of relation that cannot be contained by the Eurocentric thinking that provided its initial impetus. What is needed so badly today are both forms of resistance to the now almost universal enslavement within the labour–capital nexus and new creative ways of imagining a better world, what Michael Peters (2007) has recently described as a new ‘metaphysics of existence’. In my own teaching this work has taken four forms: (a) embarking with students on a radical mutual deconstruction of our own subjective formation under the rubrics of capital; (b) undertaking a new discipline of ‘mindfulness’ that allows us to better identify what indeed are our true needs as persons, and allowing the detritus of consumer capital fantasies to fall away, giving us more energy to name and affirm our human authenticity and to resist the powerful encroachments against the same; (c) challenging the Market Logic of capital as essentially irrational; that is, it cannot withstand any truly critical evaluation of its methods for securing human betterment. Schools of Business on university campuses, for example, need to be held to account for the failure of Market Logic in the current meltdown of global financial markets, a meltdown precipitated precisely by the radical free Market Logic of neoliberalism of the last 20 years or so; and (d) working to understand capitalism as now fostering a truly global crisis, not just a parochial one, or an American or European one, a crisis in which those of us in positions of material privilege are hugely 174

P eter M c L aren and the N ew M ar x ism

implicated. For example, new all-encompassing patent laws, such as those covered under the agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (see Drahos and Braithwaite 2002), that promise to place everything from children’s spontaneous play activities to ancient traditional medicines under private corporate control, subject to binding legal compliance, can only augur increased global violence as more and more people find themselves stripped of even the bare necessities for living, except at a monetary cost they cannot afford. In conclusion, let it be said that anyone with a conscience needs to read the work of Peter McLaren and the new Marxist humanists. As educators, we cannot understand the troubles of our students without understanding the deep politico-economic grammar that is underwriting their lives and our own as teachers. Nor can we understand the contemporary agonies of teaching without understanding the so-called logic behind most current reforms. How to proceed from that understanding is the true challenge both for today and for tomorrow.

175

CHAPTER 7

Hermeneutic Inquiry The English word hermeneutics is derived from the ancient Greek hermeneutike, which means ‘interpretation’. First used by Plato (427–347 BCE) in the Politicus (see Grondin 1995), it was usually linked with another word, mantike, ‘divination’, because an act of interpretation was regarded as necessary to translate divine messages from oracles and omens. Insofar as such messages were usually mysterious, they required intermediary interpretation to be rendered understandable. The basic assumption, then, of all hermeneutic endeavour is that there is always a difference between what is said (the surface phenomenon of language) and what is meant (the fuller range of possible meanings contained within the surface phenomenon). Because all educational practices, including curriculum, are mediated through language, they are subject to interpretation. But what does it mean to interpret? Here we will examine how that question has been answered historically in the Western tradition, from the classical age through to the contemporary situation. Hermeneutics always stands in tension, often conflict, with the desire to secure and fix meaning once and for all. The aim of hermeneutics, however, is never simply to spin one interpretation after another in an endless play of possibilities. Instead, the purpose is to lift that burdensomeness of events, texts, and sayings that pertains when the original question that called them into being has been forgotten, rendering current practices alienating and estranging. Contemporary hermeneutics operates largely in the shadow of German philosopher H.-G. Gadamer (1900–2002) 177

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

(see 2004), who suggested that creative interpretation begins with a query: ‘What is the question for which this (event, text, saying) is the answer?’ Recovering the originating question in turn enables a reconsideration of whether conventional responses to it are currently relevant. The purpose is never to dismiss convention, or orthodoxy, but to ask for their capacity to sustain things in the present in such a way that allows human life to go on, creatively. The Greek god from which the word hermeneutike received its character was Hermes, known for eternal youthfulness. This might be why hermeneutics is particularly relevant to education and curriculum studies, through its capacity to protect the conditions for young people to be able to live and learn in an atmosphere of creative vitality. Before the advent of writing, the age of orality, words were always connectable to a speaker. This enabled the meaning of speech acts to be relatively transparent, because hearers could deduce meaning from body language, tone, and commonly shared expressions. Hermeneutics, as a formal investigation of how meaning arises in communication, essentially only became necessary with the advent of writing, because writing removed the requirement of a speaker’s being present for thoughts and ideas to be conveyed. But, as Plato argued in the Phaedrus (see Plato 2005), writing is responsible for a kind of double alienation, which he called its peril. The peril of writing is twofold. In removing the requirement of the original speaker, words rendered as texts are easily subject to interpretations that the original speaker never intended. Furthermore, in removing words from their spoken context, those (mis)interpretations can often take bizarre and ridiculous form, in turn making the original speaker look, quite unjustly, bizarre and ridiculous. The wise interpreter, said Plato, must have the ability to return written words back to the spirit of their original occasion through an understanding of their context and what he called their soul in the original speaker. This inevitably involves a kind of dialogue between the present and the 178

H ermeneutic I nquiry

past, but it also implies a certain indeterminateness of meaning in all language. Not only does written language inevitably contain a supplement of meaning lying beyond the restrictions of the text; but so also is a speaker incapable of expressing the fullness of what can be thought. According to the Greek understanding of language, behind, beneath, and over any graphic or phonetic expression is that which ‘wishes to be thought’, an excess of meaning that inhabits every written or spoken word, which it is the interpreter’s job to better, though never fully, understand. Aristotle (384–322 BCE) was also interested in hermeneutics (see On Interpretation 2012), but it is worth noting that the biggest difference between Aristotle and Plato had to do with the capacity or incapacity of language to contain the fullness of meaning, and the non-resolution between their two views continues to haunt the Western tradition even to the present day. This is evident in arguments between science and religion, for example, or in conflicts between ‘standard’ views of language and vernacular or creolized usages and the question of which should have relative authority in the public realm. Aristotle always seems to have assumed that nothing is ever lost in the transmission from soul to speech to writing; that writing simply marks the intentions of a speaker and makes them available to everyone. Such an assumption undergirds the propositional logics of science and analytical philosophy that rely on predicative statements such as ‘S is P’ or ‘this’ means ‘that’, as if all identities and distinctions were clear and self-evident. It can readily be seen how such assumptions feed into logics of power and control. If meaning can be fixed through the signs of language, then all knowledge itself becomes fixable (made static) once and for all. Curriculum becomes simply a kind of fixed cultural deposit, and teaching is nothing but an act of transmission. For Plato, such assumptions are unsustainable. The first historian of hermeneutics, Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), argued that the formalization of hermeneutics as a discipline did not begin until the sixteenth century with the 179

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

Protestant Reformation (see Makreel 1992). The rallying call of reformer Martin Luther was that the interpretive authority of the Christian church and of Christian faith itself lies in scripture alone – sola scriptura – rather than also in the Roman Catholic tradition and its Episcopal offices. This call brought forth the question, ‘What then is the nature of authority in interpretation itself?’ A series of treatises appeared in an attempt to answer the question, the first being Matthias Flacius Illyricus’s Clavis scripturae sacrae in 1567 (see reproduction, 2011). The primary requisite for authoritative interpretation, said Flacius, is grammatical, linguistic knowledge. This focus on the importance of understanding language – how it functions, its lexical and grammatical origins and operations, and so on – has remained a primary requirement of hermeneutic inquiry right to the present day and has been emphasized by all philosophers of hermeneutics since Flacius. A good etymological dictionary, for example, is an essential tool for all hermeneutic work. The Protestant Reformation marked the beginning of the end of the unitary worldview of a Christendom controlled by the Catholic Church. Fragmentation became the new reality, evident not just in religion, but also in politics and philosophy. By the eighteenth century, the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724– 1804) in Critique of Pure Reason (1781/2008) declared the end of metaphysics, or the possibility of philosophically constructing an explanation of how the world ‘actually is’. We cannot gain access to the world in itself, said Kant, because the things we know are already interpreted and schematized by our prior experience of them. An objective apprehension of the world is impossible. All we can do, therefore, is to examine the manner of our reasoning itself, how, in fact, we ‘produce’ the world through our interpretations of it. Since Kant, Western philosophy has been ‘doomed’ to interpretation, as some scholars have put it. Kant’s contemporary, Friedrich Jacobi (1743–1819) (see Breazeale 2006), coined the term nihilism to describe the condition of human life as nothing 180

H ermeneutic I nquiry

but an endless round of interpretation, nothing but hermeneutics, with no anchor in objective truth of any kind. Instead of nihilism, Jacobi proposed fideism: All of our actions presuppose a sustaining power in the universe that must be trusted implicitly for life to go on at all. The death of metaphysics – that is, of certainty concerning any claims we might make about the world – produced a crisis in the Western tradition that has not been put to rest to this day. Like the good Lutheran he was, the progenitor of modern hermeneutics, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1843), took Jacobi’s fideism (‘We live by faith, not by reason’) and imbued it with feeling or sentiment. Understanding one another and the world is largely a matter of empathy rather than reason (see Scheiermacher 1991). Actually, Schleiermacher distinguished between two forms of interpretation, or understanding: loose and strict. Loose or relaxed understanding is what happens all the time. Whether we are reading a book, talking with friends or students, or watching a movie, most of the time we feel that we understand what is going on. Based on a kind of mutual feeling, interpretation in this sense is a natural process that can simply be taken for granted. The real issue arises when we are confronted with something that we do not understand, as, say, in the case of engaging a work of genius that cannot be understood through any interpretive frames currently available. Or perhaps we experience trauma, like a soldier who has ‘studied’ war, but on the battlefield finds him-/herself faced with realities that are literally unspeakable; that is, no words in the available lexicon are adequate to describe them. Hence, it is precisely misunderstanding and incomprehension that make interpretation necessary. This identifies Schleiermacher’s sense of strict hermeneutics, the need for a way of creatively engaging with that which one does not understand. Premised on the universality of misunderstanding, Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics proposed a necessary dialectic or dialogical relationship between what one understands and what one doesn’t. In a way, this echoes Plato; 181

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

it also foreshadows the later twentieth-century hermeneutics of H.-G. Gadamer, to be discussed later. Schleiermacher was preoccupied with developing a method for interpretation (Ger. Kunstlehre), a project that he eventually abandoned. But one contribution from that effort was the insistence that interpretation is a creative act; that is, understanding the truth of a strange or difficult situation requires an act of imagination to see possible meanings rather than just expecting meaning to reveal itself, by itself, and then simply to be reported by a researcher. Again, echoing Kant, the truth of something cannot be known fully in itself; it requires a creative leap of understanding, which can then be folded back dialogically into the formation of new comprehension. Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) (see Makreel 1992) later took up the desire for a specific method for hermeneutics; he was the first to make a distinction between the natural sciences and what he called the human sciences. Nature we ‘explain’, said Dilthey, but humans we must ‘understand’ (Ger. Verstehen). Under the influence of the new phenomenological investigations of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) (see 2010), Dilthey described understanding as a category of life that is at work when we are able to show how texts, artefacts, works of art, and so on are expressions of lived experience. To understand a novel, to interpret it correctly, requires showing how it reveals experience as lived. Good interpretation shows the connection between experience and expression. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is arguably the most important (Western) philosopher of the twentieth century. In the tradition of arguing against metaphysics, Heidegger proposed that all attempts to secure the meaning of life through method are not just impossible, but positively delusional. They represent the human refusal to accept the infinite and limitless character of Being (Ger. Dasein). Indeed, metaphysics and, its handmaid, method are nothing but a fearful flight from mortality. Because we are afraid of the infinity of Being, we try to secure ourselves through interpretations we 182

H ermeneutic I nquiry

hope can be drawn ever tighter. The worst form of this is traceable right back to Aristotle’s propositional logic ‘S is P’: This subject has this predicate. If A happens, B will always follow. It is a linear theory of causality that Heidegger explicitly rejected because there is always more to be said about a situation than can be contained in any proposition. Take, for example, the simple proposition, something a student might say regarding a curricular work: ‘This text is difficult.’ Standing alone, the meaning seems obvious. Hermeneutically, however, a whole range of possible meanings is present. Who is the speaker, a Grade 4 pupil or a postdoctoral fellow? Maybe the proposition comes from a postdoctoral fellow doing research on a child’s writing. Or maybe the speaker is an international student struggling with a class reading in English, not her mother tongue, an interpretation that opens up the whole issue of internationalization in education today. What makes the text difficult? Is because of content, format, or font? Does the difficulty arise because of a pedagogical failure on the part of the instructor, who has not made clear what a reader might expect from the text or how it fits into the broader themes of the course of which it is a part? Etc., etc. The point is, the simple proposition cannot be held to a single meaning but is always already loaded with possible meanings, each of which also spins off into other ranges of possible meanings. This is not a problem, as might be made under a charge of relativism; it simply describes the irreducible quality of human life and experience, its reflection of the infinity of Being. For Heidegger, hermeneutics involves ‘hearing’ the logos or word that has been lost or suppressed by metaphysical philosophy. Many have noted that virtually all of Western philosophy since Kant has been obsessed with the determination to overcome metaphysics – not just the figures mentioned here so far, but also Freud, Marx, Habermas, Wittgenstein, Foucault, and Derrida. The one major philosopher who has refused this determination is H.-G. Gadamer, a student of Heidegger. Gadamer argued (2004) 183

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

that because metaphysics itself operates as a language, it too can be hermeneutically interpreted, but never overcome. What is important is to understand how metaphysics is locatable as a tradition in the West that attempts to solve particular kinds of problems. This inspired Gadamer to formulate his famous ‘logic of question and answer’ noted earlier. Gadamer’s suggestion that all knowledge arises in the context of tradition might be his most important contribution to hermeneutics, and it has two major implications. The first is that all understanding takes place within a horizon of past, present, and future. Whatever meets me as new arrives on my consciousness, which has already been formed by my past. My mind and being are never tabulae rasae, but instead are the very means by which anything new can be registered as such at all. In a way, I always, already am a tradition, and this is not something to be overthrown because my tradition (my ‘prejudice’, Gadamer called it) provides the means by which any new thing, event, or circumstance can even be seen as such. Whether my comprehension of what is new is accurate, however, is not something I can judge solely by and for myself. It requires a ‘conversation’ with the (new) stranger in front of me, so that together we might come to a common understanding of each other. It is interesting to note that one of Gadamer’s doctoral students, Helmut Kohl, became Chancellor of Germany in 1982. In his work to bring an end to the Cold War, organize the reunification of East and West Germany, and draw plans for the new European Union, one can see the Gadamerian principles of hermeneutic dialogue at work and the envisioning of a new politic based on mutual recognition and understanding. A second implication of Gadamer’s hermeneutics is that it is impossible to live outside tradition. There is no pure place in which to start a totally new life, because one always carries what went before into the present, which works into the future. The challenge lies in dealing with one’s old life in a new way. This view set Gadamer at odds with neo-Marxist philosophers such as 184

H ermeneutic I nquiry

Jürgen Habermas (1929–) (see 1972) and any who would posit a radically revolutionary view of social reform, a vision of a future disconnected from the past. It is also the point on which interesting debates are currently going on between hermeneutics and the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida (1930–2007) (see Caputo 1996), articulated by John Caputo (1940–) under the name ‘radical hermeneutics’. How does the undecideability or ambiguity of life work in relation to the weight of tradition? That question is too large to be entertained here. In conclusion, I might note that in the academy, hermeneutics has been of particular interest to international graduate students who have come from places of strong tradition. In hermeneutics they find a way to discern openings in their own traditions, which in turn enable creative dialogue with other traditions. In this sense hermeneutics holds promise for a new conversation amongst the world’s people regarding our shared future. Curricularly, there can never just be ‘my’ tradition, only my-tradition-in-relation-toothers. In underscoring curriculum as a relational phenomenon, hermeneutics implicitly places ethical concern at its centre.

185

CHAPTER 8

Spiritual Cardiology and the Heart of Wisdom: A Meditation on Life Writing Dr Shelby Haque is the Islamic Chaplain at the University of Alberta, where I too live out my profession as a professor of education. As well as being an Islamic scholar, Dr Haque is a Westerntrained medical doctor. On the university Chaplain’s Association website link to him, Dr Haque makes a remarkable suggestion: ‘We have a billion-dollar healthcare system (which ought to be called a disease-care system) that treats people after they become physically sick; what we really need are spiritual cardiologists who can help humans cure the diseases of our spiritual hearts.’ In terms of introduction, let me also note that, according to Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, in North America ‘mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children’ (Ridgeway 2011, para. 7). The statistics are partly the consequence in contemporary psychiatry of ‘diagnosis by prescription’; that is, if you feel better after taking an antidepressant, you must have been depressed. Still, it is the very fact that so many kids are troubled that is so troubling. And not only kids. Mental illness is now the leading form of human suffering in North America. I want to juxtapose the above notes with the words of Peter of Damaskos, an eleventh-to-twelfth-century sage of the Greek Orthodox tradition. These can be found in Volume Three of 187

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

the Philokalia, a compendium of Orthodox spirituality from the fourth to fifteenth centuries. Philokalia literally means ‘love of the beautiful, the true’. Peter declares, ‘Distraction is the cause of the intellect’s obscuration’; ‘Forgetfulness [is] the greatest of evils’; and ‘Stillness [marks] the beginning of the soul’s purification [and is] the first form of bodily discipline’ (Palmer, Sherrard and Ware 1995, 182). These opening notes come to focus in my response to a manuscript titled Life Writing and the Heart of Wisdom, which authors Cynthia Chambers and friends have invited me to reflect on (see Chambers et al. 2012). Strangely, I had the same response as that when reading the manuscript of their 2009 book Life Writing and Literary Metissage (see C. Leggo et al.). I was overcome by an experience of stillness, of wanting to be completely and meditatively quiet, to simply allow the work to penetrate my endlessly distracted life and draw me into an understanding of Life that is deeper, truer, and indeed more hauntingly beautiful than anything my conceptually overburdened imagination could possibly imagine. In hermeneutic terms, I could say the burden of my own specificity was lifted as I bore witness to the life stories of others, and I was loved into a new kind of community, something quite beyond what any one particular story in this compendium would be capable of producing by itself. Life Writing and its necessary sibling Life Reading might best be described as acts of human recovery, indeed of healing. But a recovery from and healing of what? And how so? Life Writing implies Life Reading – or does it? Sometimes I had the sense in reading these stories that the writing alone had achieved its purpose for the writer and that it wouldn’t actually matter if the material produced was never read. The writing had allowed, indeed demanded of, the writer to slow down, to concentrate and focus (become less distracted), to remember, and to be still enough to allow for a certain purification of soul so that what might be written might also escape the tentacled entrapments of 188

S piritual C ardiology and the H eart of W isdom

pure self-interest. You can see Peter of Damaskos’s logic at work here: Cut through the smoke of distraction, learn to be still, and you will start remembering what you are forgetting – forgetting by selective choice, or by fear, or by simple laziness. Through that process you’ll start to feel better, more ‘recollected’, as they say in Benedictine spirituality, and this mainly because you are affirming the ever-elusive wholeness of your being. It’s a form of soul purification and indeed bodily discipline that actually can be quite terrifying. I was going to say ‘Not for the faint of heart’ but then realized that it is precisely because we are fainthearted that we must do this work. Spiritual cardiology. What happens in the act of Life Writing? Long-held secrets bubble up, betrayals are noted, simple joys giggle forth like teenagers; there’s an unusual attention to the details of material existence and the experience thereof, alongside a heightened awareness arising of the absolute intractability of our human interdependence, sabotaging the myth of autonomy. Do these sensibilities alone produce a ‘heart of wisdom’? Indirectly, I would say yes, but the process itself needs to be carefully understood. For one thing, at the heart of wisdom lies discipline, and much of the time we are reluctant to be disciplined, or at least we have to acknowledge that discipline is often painful. In Buddhist theory, discipline is the suffering we have to endure to put an end to our greater suffering. A friend is quitting smoking after being chained to the habit for 50 years, having started at age 15. The first three months were absolute hell, but at least the coughing has stopped, and there’s a new sense of vitality and energy. Still, every day is a struggle, since demons arrive through daily encounters with the seductive temptation filtered right into the ego itself: ‘I need a cigarette.’ Personally, I find writing extremely difficult; the discipline required to stop doing ‘other’ things, to actually sit down and start allowing words to work their way through me – these things are no joy, personally. Sometimes joy comes later; for example, when an insight seems to break 189

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

forth from the husks of my reluctant obedience to writing’s call. Anyway, the point is … discipline. There’s a lot of confession in these stories, and I have a confession of my own to make. The editors had asked me to write a piece for the collection, which I did, duly submitted. Then I started having nightmares about it. It was my first attempt at Life Writing, and clearly I didn’t know what I was doing. I’d used the piece far too much for purposes of self-vindication, vengeance even, against those I’d long held responsible for childhood traumas and hurts. So the ghosts of the dead rose to challenge my interpretations. I decided to withdraw the piece until I had gained greater clarity into how to speak of one’s relations, especially relations of hurt, to honour the ‘other’ side of the experience. So how does Life Writing nourish the heart of wisdom? In my own case, the act of writing exposed me to myself in unexpected ways, and perhaps that is the first step. The exposure arrives as an invitation to consider the auspices of an unreflective sentiment. Now we are back to Peter of Damaskos and the problem of ‘the intellect’s obscuration’. The Greek Orthodox tradition has a lot in common with Buddhism and Taoism and the Muslim/Arabic term waqt. Orthodox practice emphasizes hesychiastic experience; that is, the experience of deep silence and stillness (Gk. hesychia) through which the practitioner comes to realize a union with God, the Wholly Other. This theological language, about a reconciliation between the human and divine, simply describes the most primordial work in human experience: working out the relation between Self and Other. It is the primary work of re-ligion, which literally means ‘joining together again’ (L. religere). Buddhism emphasizes the work of finding one’s ‘Original Face’, the face that is lost through actions of the delusional idea of an independent ego. Taoism speaks of the ‘stillpoint’ each of us must discover for ourselves so that we can participate in life harmoniously with the Tao or Way of Life rather than always fighting against it or trying 190

S piritual C ardiology and the H eart of W isdom

to push it in predetermined directions (e.g., through ‘education’). All of these terms have a parallel or equivalent in the Arabic waqf. It is important to emphasize that working towards stillness is not an act of quietism or passivity or even withdrawal of life. Instead, it involves the capacity of beginning to ‘see’ life for what it really is, without the embellishments of culture or tradition. Buddhism speaks of this in terms of ‘mindfulness’: clearing the garbage out of one’s mind so that the mind can actually function freely to engage what is truly necessary to be done in any particular situation. Mindfulness is intimately connected to the heart, and in Chinese, heart and mind have the same word, hsin. In the Greek tradition too, the same connection is maintained. When Peter of Damaskos referred to the ‘intellect’s obscuration’ he used the Greek word nous for intellect, rather than dianoia, which refers to the functioning of the intellect to formulate abstract concepts and then arguing on the basis of this to conclusions reached through deductive reasoning. The intellect, or nous, is the highest human faculty through which a person begins to ‘know God’ – that is, the reality that transcends all concepts – and perceive the inner essences or principles of created things and our participation in them. Even more important, nous also constitutes the innermost aspect of the heart and is sometimes called the ‘organ of contemplation’ or the ‘eye of the heart’. (For further discussion, see Palmer, Sherrard and Ware 1995, 360.) ‘Distraction is the cause of the intellect’s obscuration’, says Peter (Palmer, Sherrard and Ware 1995, 182). As a culture of great suffering today, especially mental and emotional suffering, grasping the relevance of Peter’s words may hold great value. Obscuration literally means ‘darkening’ (L. obscurus, dark). So when our minds have become darkened through ‘distraction’, we are in deep trouble. Today, much of the time our highest human faculty has become subjugated and dominated by nonsensical phantasms perpetrated by intense and powerful media; education now reigns as a project of human engineering to serve only the 191

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

material prospects of the market; violence is intentionally invited into our minds and imaginations as a form of entertainment – in short, distraction rules, and we become ‘forgetful of Being’, as the philosopher Heidegger (1962) liked to express it. For all of this, there is only one possible consequence as a long-term phenomenological reality: We start losing our minds. And when we have lost our minds, ‘darkness covers the earth, and gross darkness the people’, according to the Hebrew prophet Isaiah some two and a half millennia ago (Isaiah 60:2). In North America, antipsychotic drugs now outsell all other medications, including those for heart disease and stroke. There is now a psychosis at the heart of Western ‘civilization’, induced by the lies and duplicities the corporate and financial elites use to protect their interests, even in universities. Most specifically, this has involved demonizing a whole other civilization, Islam, through war policies based on paranoia and delusion, creating what Michael Fisher (2011) of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver B.C. has called ‘a culture of fear’. More immediately, a fundamental split has evolved between the rhetoric of democracy, which holds out the promise that everybody matters in the conduct of public life, and the reality that this rhetoric now serves as a mask for material and spiritual exploitation, both at home and abroad. The point is, as commentators such as David Harvey (2010) have argued (see his recent book The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism), a global meltdown is currently taking place whereby older sureties of social, political, and economic theory are hollowing out, and once-venerated gurus are left wheezing exhausted platitudes that are no longer working and hence no longer relevant. What are we to do? Where shall we turn for personal and cultural healing? I sense that Life Writing and Life Reading hold promise, as follows. As the comments above imply, Life Writing involves a kind of recovery of, well, Life. As the stories in this collection testify to so well, the writing process practised in a disciplined way allows 192

S piritual C ardiology and the H eart of W isdom

for the ‘coming through’ of life experiences that don’t count in conventional registers of value, mainly because those registers (status ideologies of intelligence, beauty, etc.) can’t allow for the true complexity and deep interdependence of all of life, to say nothing of its subtleties. Life Writing is a form of permission giving, a granting of permission to feel and sense life responses that have been repressed under dominant dispensations of worthiness. Paradoxically, this ‘allowing’ through the heart brings things to mind, so that the mind is challenged to (re)incorporate and reevaluate things that have been forgotten and left for dead, out of fear, pride, false courage, cultural prejudice, or sheer stubbornness. In this sense then, heartwork is headwork, so that through the unification of their relative experience, wisdom has a chance to arise, since what comes to be known is known both experientially and reflectively. More important, the Life Reading or Life Writing ensures that my own accounts of my own experience do not drown in the pool of my own reflection, since awareness of the lives of others rescues me from myself and produces the kind of forgetfulness that is truly life giving, claiming nothing for itself, by itself, only the wonder of ‘us’, to the full extent of the ambiguity and difficulty involved in the same. I applaud Cynthia Chambers and friends for the courage they have shown in producing this remarkable collection of life stories. They have contributed to the contemporarily massive and necessary work of cultural healing.

193

CHAPTER 9

The Prophetic Voice in Curriculum: Reflections on the Legacy of Dwayne Huebner In the 1970s, Dwayne Huebner, a Professor of Education at Columbia University in New York, was identified by William Pinar (1975) as one of the pioneer ‘reconceptualist’ thinkers in the field of Curriculum Theory. The reconceptualist movement, still very much alive today in such organizations as the International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies (IAACS) and the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (CACS), was known for lifting the field of Curriculum out of its historical entrenchment in school administration and recasting it more fundamentally as an interdisciplinary field embedded in the broader concerns of culture. This move meant that curriculum theorists could give themselves permission to address curriculum issues (policy, design and implementation, etc.) through the larger interpretive discourses of the human sciences, including continental European philosophy (phenomenology, hermeneutics, language theory, even theology), psychoanalysis, neo-Marxism, and more lately various forms of French theory (Derrida through to Deleuze). Huebner’s work drew on many of these traditions, and because his published writing began as early as the 1960s, his voice can be recognized in retrospect as clearly prescient. This was intuited early by some of his colleagues and especially younger scholars 195

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

at the time like Pinar. In his introduction to the collected works of Dwayne Huebner (The Lure of Transcendence, edited by Vicky Hillis 1999), Pinar noted this distinctive prophetic quality of Huebner: Consider the following: a decade before political issues would consume a wing of the field, Huebner was writing about the importance of political theory to curriculum studies. Fifteen years before phenomenology would emerge as an important discourse in the field, Huebner was studying Heidegger and Jaspers. Nearly a decade before Joseph Schwab judged the field moribund, Huebner declared the field lacked vitality. And twenty years before religious and theological studies would constitute a major sector of curriculum scholarship, Huebner was studying transcendence while teaching courses at the Union Theological Seminary in New York … (p. xv)

Alice Miel, a curriculum cohort of Huebner, once declared, ‘Dwayne Huebner is our prophet.’ So far as I know, nobody has taken up for serious examination the role of prophecy in educational inquiry. Of course futurologists, cheap prognosticators, armchair wand-wavers, and trajectory specialists abound, and always have, but Huebner’s contribution contained something quite different. Most uniquely, his was the hermeneutic ability to see in the details of everyday life and practice things of much larger import, and if this ability has any value for our work as contemporary scholars, perhaps it behoves us to explore what makes it possible. What is the nature of genuine prophecy, and what characterizes an authentically prophetic voice? At this point I refer to an article written by biblical scholar Walter Conrad Klein on prophecy and prophets that first appeared in James Hastings’s Dictionary of the Bible in 1963. While Klein’s study is primarily of the Hebrew prophets, he notes that ‘no ancient society would 196

R eflections on the L egacy of D wayne H uebner

have done without’ such a person, with many traits, habits, and methods held in common. The first task of prophecy according to Klein is to ‘break the people’s faith in the ritual stereotype of destiny (conquest, prosperity and honour…)’ and bring them back to their most fundamental responsibility, that is, faith in the One who has created them, and to live righteously and justly. Indeed it is estrangement from God, the personal creator of human beings who desires to live personally with his creatures, that is the root cause of an ‘aimlessness that is worse than death’. In the words of the prophet Amos, ‘Seek Him and live’ (Amos 5:4). ‘Creation has a goal, and the proper role of man [sic] is to contribute to the attainment of the goal’ (p. 808). Running away from that responsibility in the name of self-interest, rebellion, pride, forgetfulness, indifference, self-satisfied ignorance etc. is the nature of sin, a conscious standing over against goodness and divine intention. The essence of sin is to deliberately ‘miss the point’ (Gk. hamartia) of human life. The prophetic view is to see human beings as divinely gifted but possessed of ‘a fatal ability to foul the world that God has given (them)’ (p. 807). In the words of the prophet Isaiah: ‘And he expected honesty, but beheld homicide/ And righteousness, but behold wretchedness’ (Isaiah. 5:7). This ‘fatal ability’, however, is never beyond redemption. Prophecy is always a summons to repentance – to return to fidelity, and forgiveness is always granted. Redemption involves a ‘reconstituted nature in a re-energized universe’ (p. 808). This basic dialectic can be summed up in the words of two Hebrew prophets: ‘The person who sins shall die’ (Ezekiel 18:4); and ‘The righteous shall live by his faithfulness’ (Habakkuk 2:4). If the above briefly describes the theology that inspires prophecy, this is not to be understood abstractly. Indeed it is precisely the mark of true prophecy that it is temporally and existentially specific. That is, the true prophet identifies the specific 197

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

characteristics of sin in his own specific time. As Klein suggests, ‘All prophetic teaching … is given under the stimulus of a situation and is meant primarily to show how corporate righteousness is to be maintained in the face of the unfamiliar difficulties of the situation’ (p. 808). It is on this point that I think we come back to Dwayne Huebner. There is throughout Huebner’s oeuvre a deeply passionate righteous indignation that the specific political, philosophical, and cultural assumptions and practices of our time are too narrow and constraining, that the fuller range of human potentiality is being undercut. Huebner’s later writings in particular reveal that behind this passionate concern for the human condition is a profound love of God. In a 1996 essay, ‘Challenges Bequeathed’, Huebner issued a call for educators to be guided by five basic responsibilities: Surpass the technical foundations of education; affirm the significance of the imagination; use the world’s intellectual traditions and achievements; engage in public discourse about education; and speak out for children and youth (See Lewis and Tupper 2009: xvii). Reflect on the five challenges and one finds the basic grammar of the prophetic call: ‘surpass’ any understanding of education that is purely instrumental or technical, tied to the material realm alone; ‘affirm the imagination’ as what can draw one out of oneself and one’s circumstances, that is, to be open to That which can lead us to new worlds; use the ‘world’s’ (Gk. aeon) intellectual achievements and not be stuck in parochial understandings so often tied to blind and naïve patriotism and other ills; and engage in ‘public’ discourse about education because what goes on in education should concern us all, not just special or private interests. Interestingly, Huebner’s last challenge concerning speaking out for children and youth reiterates a strong theme in classical prophecy. In the prophet Malachi’s vision of redeemed community, the prophet Elijah ‘will turn the hearts of fathers to their children …’ (Malachi 4:6) In other words, inattention to the needs of children is a mark of grave sin. 198

R eflections on the L egacy of D wayne H uebner

One final point about the prophetic tradition is worth mentioning. Klein emphasizes that ‘while … prophecy utilizes cultic facilities, it remains an essentially autonomous force, never wholly explicable in cultic terms’ (p. 801). This is important because it underscores how an effective prophet must necessarily live and operate within the context he or she decries. Prophecy is never armchair theorizing about ‘other’ people; prophecy is always about ‘us’. and it is practised in the veins, arteries, and capillaries of institutions like schools and universities without succumbing to their idolatrous capitulations. Again, Huebner is exemplary. To sum up here, my resounding purpose in directly linking Dwayne Huebner to the prophetic tradition is pedagogical. If as graduate students and colleagues we find Huebner’s work inspiring, I think we are under some obligation to try to better understand Huebner’s own inspiration. Of course this can never be a matter of pure reduction; indeed the whole prophetic tradition speaks implicitly against this, to the importance of honouring the freedom of God and persons to act freely and autonomously, not fettered by convention or context. There is a way in which the ultimate source of human inspiration cannot be named, and that any attempt to do so actually violates inspiration itself. Such is the nature of true faith, living without ‘knowing’. So the Hebrews understood/understand that God actually cannot be named fully, just as LaoTzu said: ‘That which can be named is not the Constant Name’. The deepest Way of life defies any a priori reduction in language. To be human is to live ever more fully in the presence of Presence, i.e., to be ever more fully present, to be here, to attend to what needs to be done now, to take up responsibility for co-creation with the creator. How can this be done? Are there manners of preparation that can facilitate its possibility, and if so do they have pedagogical relevance? Ironically, the biggest impediment today to the kind of human maturity to which authentic prophecy calls us may in fact be the god concept itself. Generally I am sympathetic to the rants 199

T eaching as the P ractice of W isdom

against god belief by people like Christopher Hitchins (2007) and Richard Dawkins (2008). This is because we live in a time when even the most radical monotheisms have been conflated with specific, narrow temporal agendas, whether they be the invisible hand of the Market, democracy, land of the free, or war against the infidel. What happens under such circumstances is a forgetfulness of the necessary dynamic between the specific and the universal, between ‘this’ commitment and everything that lies beyond it. Eventually ‘this’ becomes so full of itself that it either implodes or explodes, or, through a process William Irwin Thompson (1987) calls ‘enantiomorphism’, turns into its opposite. The Market crashes, democracy becomes an instrument of tyranny, freedom becomes unfreedom, and fidelity against the infidel a call to suicide. Does this mean we should give up on ‘God’? That will never happen, since deep within the human imagination is the realization that we are always more than ‘this’, this set of circumstances which are always subject to the limits of our interpretive ability of the moment. A most telling image in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth is of the planet Earth taken from millions miles out in space. For the first time in the human story we can see ourselves for what we are, a tiny dot within the infinite expanse of all there is. It’s time to shift from our petty theories of difference to a new understanding of our commonality, our human unity, and an ancillary effort is required to re-imagine and re-articulate what ‘God’ might mean and be for us. Actually such a task turns us backward as much as forward, to the ancient wisdom of prophets and mystics. The prophets, we have heard from here already, with Dwayne Huebner a contemporary witness. W. H. Auden, another more contemporary prophet, and poet, once remarked, ‘If there is to be a twenty-first century, it will be mystical.’ Below I cite a sixteenth-century poem from one of the Western tradition’s greatest mystics, Juan de Yepes, better known as John of the Cross (1987), author of the term ‘the God beyond all knowing’: 200

R eflections on the L egacy of D wayne H uebner

To come to the pleasure you have not you must go by the way you enjoy not To come to the knowledge you have not you must go by a way in which you know not To come to the possession you have not you must go by a way in which you possess not To come to be which you are not you must go by a way in which you are not.

Those familiar with Eastern wisdom traditions will recognize in John’s words what has long been recognized, that ‘this’ and ‘not this’ always exist in an organic unity. In today’s world, which as I write seems to be at the end of something as much as at a beginning, this call to recover the ‘negative’ constitutes a call not just for a new way of knowing and being; it articulates the basis of ethics. Reach out to the stranger; investigate what you think you hate for it may bear the news of how to love; lasting pleasure cannot be found in trying to secure what gives you pleasure now; do not cling to your possessions or they will possess you; be open to what you are yet to become. Can these words be translated into the work of curriculum, teaching/pedagogy, and scholarship today?

201

Bibliography Aaronson, Trevor. 2013. The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism. Brooklyn, NY: IG. Abu-Lughod, Janet L. 1989. Before European Hegemony. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ACLU. 2011. ‘The Human Cost: Civilian Casualties in Iraq & Afghanistan.’ Accessed 19 February. http://www.aclu.org/ human-cost-civilian-casualties-iraq-afghanistan Ahmed, Nafeez M. 2002. The War on Freedom: How and Why America Was Attacked on September 11, 2001. Joshua Tree, CA: Tree of Life and Institute for Policy Research and Development. Allman, Paula. 2007. On Marx: An Introduction to the Revolutionary Pedagogy of Karl Marx. Rotterdam: Sense. Amin, Samir. 2004. Obsolescent Capitalism: Contemporary Politics and Global Disorder. London: Zed Books. Aristotle. 2012. On Interpretation. Trans. E. M. Edghill Acheson Press. Arrighi, Giovanni. 2009. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the 21st Century. London: Verso Books. Audi, Robert, ed. 1999. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Badiou, Alain. 2003. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Cultural Memory in the Present). Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Baker, Carolyn. 2007. What to Do? What to Do? Taking Action in the Face of Collapse. Accessed 4 August. http://www.911truth.org/article. php?story‌=20070730124933975 Basso, Keith. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Language and Landscape Among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Battiste, Marie. 2000. Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press.

203

B ibliography

Battle, Michael. 2009. Ubuntu. New York: Seabury. Beaud, Michel. 2000. A History of Capitalism: 1500–2000. Trans. Tom Dickman and Anny Lefebvre. New York: Monthly Review Press. Beck, Charlotte Joko. 2007. Everyday Zen: Love and Work. San Francisco: HarperOne. Becker, Ernest. 1973. Denial of Death. London: Macmillan. Becker, Gary S. 1976. The Economic Approach to Human Behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bello, Walden and Anuradha Mittal. 2001. The Future in the Balance: Essays on Globalization and Resistance. Oakland, CA: Food First Books. Bennett, William J. ed. 1995. The Children’s Book of Virtues. New York: Simon and Schuster. Bernays, Edward. 1951. Crystallizing Public Opinion. 1923. Brooklyn, NY: IG. ———. 2005. Propaganda. 1928. Brooklyn, NY: IG. Bilmes, Linda and Joseph Stiglitz. 2010. The True http://www. thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/10/27/the-economic-crisis-and-thehidden-cost-of-the-wars.html cost of the Afghan war. Bingham, Eugene. 1999. Tsunami Bomb NZ’s Devastating War Secret. Accessed 28 December 2006. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/ article.cfm?c_id‌=1&objectid=14727 Blackcommentator.com. 2002. Harry Belafonte on Colin Powell: CNN Larry King Live Interview with Belafonte. http://www.blackcommentator. com/‌14_belafonte.html Bloom, Allan. 1987. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster. Bohm, David. 1989. Quantum Theory. London: Dover. Borg, Marcus J. 2008. Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teaching and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary. New York: HarperOne. Bowles, Samuel and Herbert Gintis. 1976. Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. Sydney, Australia: Law Book Company of Australasia. Breazeale, Daniel. 2006. ‘Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich.’ In The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy,2nd ed. Ed. Robert Audi, 449. New York: Cambridge University Press. Buchheit, Paul, ed. 2008. American Wars: Illusions and Realities. Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press. Burke, Peter, ed. 1973. A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

204

B ibliography

Bzrezinski, Zbigniew. 2012. Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power. New York: Basic Books. Caputo, John D. 1996. Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 2000. More Radical Hermeneutics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Chah, Ajahn. 2002. Food for the Heart: The Collected Teachings of Ajahn Chah. Ed. Ajahn Amaro and Jack Kornfield. Boston: Wisdom. Chambers, Cynthia M., Erika Hasebe-Ludt, Carl Leggo and Anita Sinner, eds. 2012. A Heart of Wisdom: Life Writing as Empathetic Inquiry. New York: Peter Lang. Chang, Ha-Joon. 2012. 23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism. New York: Bloomsbury Press. Chard, Sylvia C. 1998. The Project Approach: Managing Successful Projects. New York: Scholastic. Chodron, Pema. 2004. Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living. Boston: Shambhala. Chossudovsky, Michel. 2002. War and Globalization: The Truth Behind September 11. Shanty Bay, ON: GlobalOutlook. ———. 2005. America’s War on Terrorism. Pincourt, PQ: Global Research. Church, Elizabeth. 2010. ‘For Canadian Universities, India is a Land of Opportunity.’ Globe and Mail, 3 July. Clark, William R. 2005. ‘Petrodollar Warfare: Dollars, Euros and the Upcoming Iranian Oil Bourse.’ Accessed 26 April 2009. http://usa. mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/17450 Cole, Michael. 2008. Marxism and Educational Theory: Origins and Issues. London: Routledge. Connell, Raewyn. 2007. Southern Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Cook, Jonathan. 2008. Israel and the Clash of Civilizations: Iraq, Iran, and the Plan to Remake the Middle East. London: Pluto Press. Crosby, Alfred W. 1972. The Columban Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Dart, Ron. 2004. The American Empire, Canadian Compradors, and the Calgary School: A Tory Talks Back. Accessed 19 October 2006. http:// www.vivelecanada.ca/article.php/200410041306150 Davis, Brent and Dennis Sumara. 2006. Complexity and Education: Inquiries into Learning, Teaching, and Research. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Dawkins, Richard. 2008. The God Delusion. London: Mariner Books.

205

B ibliography

deWaal, Esther. 1989. Living with Contradiction: Reflections on the Rule of St. Benedict. San Francisco: Harper and Row. Donald, Dwayne. 2008. The Pedagogy of the Fort: Curriculum, AboriginalCanadian Relations and Indigenous Metissage. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Alberta, Canada. Donin, Hayim H. 1980. To Pray as a Jew: A Guide to the Prayer Book and Synagogue Service. New York: Basic Books. Dooling, D.M. and Paul Jordan-Smith. 1989. I Became Part of It: Sacred Dimensions in Native American Life. New York: Parabola Books. Drahos, Peter and John Braithwaite. 2002. Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy? New York: The New Press. Drury, Shadia B. 1999. Leo Strauss and the American Right. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2003. Saving America: Leo Strauss and the Neoconservatives. Accessed 22 October 2006. http://evatt.labor.net.au/publications/ papers/‌112.html Dussel, Enrique. 1995. The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of ‘the Other’ and the Myth of Modernity. Trans. Michael D. Barber. New York: Continuum. ———. 1996. The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Rorty, Taylor, and the Philosophy of Liberation. Ed. and trans. Eduardo Mendietta. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Eisner, Eliot, and Elizabeth Vallance, eds. 1974. Conflicting Conceptions of Curriculum. Berkeley, CA: McCutcheon. Eliade, Mircea. 2005. The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History. 1954. Reprint. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Engdahl F. William. 2009. Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order. Joshua Tree, CA: Progressive Press. Erlendson, Rick. 2003. Without a Map: Teaching Business in an Age of Globalization. EdD diss. Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta. Ferrari, Michel, and George Potworowski, eds. 2009. Teaching for Wisdom: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Fostering Wisdom. New York: Springer. Fisher, Michael. 2011. Culture of Fear and Education: An Annotated Bibliography 1990–2011. 2nd ed. Carbondale, IL: In Search of Fearlessness Institute. FoxNews.com. 2009. ‘U.S. Embassy in Iraq Largest, Most Expensive Ever.’ Accessed 14 March 2010. http://www.foxnews.com/ story/ ‌0,2933,476464,00.html Frank, Andre Gunder. 1998. ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press.

206

B ibliography

Freire, Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum. Frum, David and Richard Perle. 2004. An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror. New York: Ballantyne Books. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2004. Truth and Method. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Gerard, John. 1897. What Was the Gunpowder Plot? The Traditional Story Tested by Original Evidence. 1971. Reprint. London: Osgood, McIlvaine. Gerhardt, Heinz-Peter. 1993. ‘Paulo Freire.’ Prospects: The Quarterly Review of Comparative Education, 23, no. 3/4: 439–458. Gill, Sam. 1989. ‘Disenchantment.’ In I Became Part of It: Sacred Dimensions of Native American Life, ed. D. M. Dooling and Paul Jordan-Smith, 106–109. New York: Parabola Books. GlobalResearch.ca. 2010. ‘Systemic Crisis of the World Economy: Geopolitical Dislocation.’ Accessed 6 June. http://www.globalresearch. ca/‌PrintArticle.php?articleId=19814 Grant, Tavia. 2008. ‘What Happened to My Dream Job?’ Accessed 30 October. https://secure.globeadvisor.com/servlet/ArticleNews/story/ gam/20081027/ ‌R BIZSTUDENTS24 Gray, John N. 1998. False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism. London: Verso. Griffin, David Ray. 2009. The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Official Report about 9/11 Is Unscientific and False. Northampton, MA: Olive Branch. ———. 2011. 9/11 Ten Years Later: When State Crimes Against Democracy Succeed. Northampton, MA: Olive Branch. Griffis, Margaret, ed. 2012. ‘Casualties in Iraq.’ Accessed 11 February. http://antiwar.com/casualties/ Griffiths, Bede. 1989. A New Vision of Reality: Western Science, Eastern Mysticism and Christian Faith. Springfield, IL: Templegate. Groen, Rick. 2011. ‘A Pervasive Sense of Loss.’ The Globe and Mail, 30 December. Grondin, Jean. 1995. Sources of Hermeneutics. Albany, NY: State University of New York. Gutierrez, Kris. 2006. ‘Interview 7: Pedagogies of Dissent and Transformation: A Dialogue about Postmodernity, Social Context, and the Politics of Literacy.’ In Rage+Hope: Interviews with Peter McLaren on War, Imperialism+Critical Pedagogy, ed. Peter McLaren, 169–191. New York: Peter Lang. Gwyn, Richard. 1996. ‘Voice of Angell Provides Hard Truths.’ The Toronto Star, 6 October.

207

B ibliography

Gyatso, Tenzin. 1985. Kindness, Clarity, and Insight. Ed. Jeffrey Hopkins. New York: Snow Lion Press. Habermas, Jurgen. 1972. Knowledge and Human Interest. Trans. Jeremy. Shapiro. New York: Beacon Press. ——— and Joseph Ratzinger. 2006. The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Halper, Stefan and Jonathan Clarke. 2004. America Alone: The Neoconservatives and the Global Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hanh, Thich Nhat. 1988. ‘Look into Your Hand, My Child!’The Acorn: A Gandhian Review, 3, no. 1:10–12. ———. 1999. The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation. Boston: Beacon Press. Hardimon, Michael O. 1994. Hegel’s Social Philosophy: The Project of Reconciliation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hardon, John A. 1985. Pocket Catholic Dictionary. New York: Image Books Doubleday. Harvey, David. 2010. The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hayek, F. A. 1944/2007. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. New York: Harper and Row. ———. 2008. Basic Writings. Ed. and trans. David Krell. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics. Heilbroner, Robert L. 1999. The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers. New York: Simon and Schuster. Henricks, Robert G. ed. 1989. Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching. New York: Ballantyne Books. Herbert, A. 1963. ‘Wisdom.’ In Dictionary of the Bible, ed. James Hastings, Frederick C. Grant and H. H. Rowley, 1039–1040. New York: Scribner’s Sons. Hitchings, Henry. 2005. Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. Hitchins, Christopher. 2007. God Is Not Great. London: Twelve Books, Hachette Book Group. Hobson, John M. 2004. The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

208

B ibliography

Hochschild, Arlie. 2003. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hume, David. 1983. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Ed. Jerome B. Schneedwind. 1751. Reprint. Indianapolis IN: Hackett. Huntingdon, Samuel P. 1998. The Clash of Civilizations and the Making of World Order. London: Oxford University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 2010. The Idea of Phenomenology. Trans. L. Hardy. New York: Springer. Hwame, Munyaradzi. 2012. Towards a Critical Colonial Analysis of the Crisis in Higher Education in Zimbabwe: A Case Study of the University of Zimbabwe. PhD diss. Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta. Illyricus, Matthias Flacius. 1567/2011. Clavis Scipturae Sacrae. Charleston, SC: Nabu Press. Institute for Education Policy Studies. 2009. Dave Hill. Accessed January. http://www.ieps.org.uk Jardine, David W. 2005. Piaget and Education: A Primer. New York: Peter Lang. Jaspers, Karl. 1966. Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus. New York: Mariner Books. Reprint. ———. 1974. Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plotinus, Laotzu, Nagarjuna. New York: Mariner Books. John of the Cross. 1987. Selected Writings. Ed. K. Kavanaugh. New York: Paulist Press. Kadarkay, Arpad. 1991. Georg Lukacs: Life, Thought, and Politics. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. Kant, Immanuel. 2008. Critique of Pure Reason. 1781. Reprint. Ed. and trans. Marcus Weigelt and Max Müller. New York: Penguin Classics. Katz, Barry. 1982. Herbert Marcuse and the Art of Liberation: An Intellectual Biography. New York: Schocken Books. Kaufmann, Walter, ed. and trans. 2000. Basic Writings of Nietzsche. New York: Modern Library Press. Kennedy, David. 1983. Toward a Phenomenology of Childhood. PhD diss. Louisville: University of Kentucky. Klein, Walter. 1963. ‘Prophecy, Prophets.’ In Dictionary of the Bible, ed. J. Hastings, 800–809. New York: Scribners. Knudsen, Jonathan B. 1986. Justus Moser and the German Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kornfield, Jack. 2001. After the Ecstasy the Laundry: How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path. New York: Bantam.

209

B ibliography

Kovel, Joel. 2007. Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine. London: Pluto. Kristof, Nicholas. 2012. ‘Working in Private Equity Isn’t Immoral or Evil: But Wall Street Featherbedding is Tarnishing The public Image of Banks and Business.’ Edmonton Journal, 23 January. Kuttner, Robert. 1999. Everything for Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets. New York: Alfred Knopf. Kwiatkowski, Karen. 2004. ‘Open Door Policy: A Strange Thing Happened on the Way to the War.’ American Conservative. Accessed 18 March 2010. http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0110–03 Lefrançois, Guy R. 2000. Of Children: An Introduction to Child Development. New York: Wadsworth. Leggo, Carl, Erika Hasebe-Ludt, and Cynthia Chambers. 2009. Life Writing and Literary Metissage as an Ethos for Our Times. New York: Peter Lang. Levin, David Michael. 1988. The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation. New York: Routledge. Lewis, Patrick and Jennifer Tupper, eds. 2009. Challenges Bequeathed: Taking Up the Challenges of Dwayne Huebner. Rotterdam: SensePublishers. Loy, David. 2000a. ‘The Spiritual Origins of the West: A Lack Perspective’. International Philosophical Quarterly, 40, no. 2:215–233. ———. 2000b. ‘The Religion of the Market.’ In Visions of a New Earth: Religious Perspectives on Population, Consumption and Ecology, ed. H. Coward and D. Maguire, 15–28. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. ———. 2003. Great Awakenings: Buddhist Social Theory. Boston: Wisdom Books. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1986. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Macarov, David. 2003. What the Market Does to People: Privatization, Globalization and Poverty. Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press. MacDonald, Elizabeth and Dennis Shirley. 2009. The Mindful Teacher. New York: Teachers College Press. Mahajan, Rahul. 2003. Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond. New York: Open Media. Makreel, Rudolph. 1992. Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Culture. Boston: Basic Books.

210

B ibliography

Mayer, Arno J. 2008. Plowshares into Swords: From Zionism to Israel. London: Verso. McChesney, Robert W. 2004. The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the 21st Century. New York: Monthly Review Press. ———. 2008. The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas. New York: Monthly Review Press. McLaren, Peter. 2006. Rage+Hope: Interviews with Peter McLaren on War, Imperialism+Critical Pedagogy. New York: Peter Lang. McMurtry, John. 2002. Value Wars: The Global Market Versus the Life Economy. Toronto, ON: Garamond Press. ———. 2013. ‘The Moral Decoding of 9–11: Beyond the U.S. Criminal State.’ Journal of 9/11 Studies, 35, February. Mearsheimer, John and Stephen Walt. 2006. ‘The Israel Lobby.’ London Review of Books, 28, no. 6: 3–12. Accessed 17 June 2009. http://www.lrb. co.uk/v28/n06/joh-mearsheimer/the-israel-lobby. ———. 2007. The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Toronto, ON: Viking. Mellyn, Kevin. 2012. Broken Markets: A User’s Guide to the Post-Finance Economy. New York: Apress. Merton, Thomas. 1975. The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton. New York: New Directions. Mill, John Stuart. 2010. Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy. 1874. Reprint. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger. Miller, John P. 2006. Educating for Wisdom and Compassion: Creating Conditions for Timeless Learning. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin. Mittelstaedt, Martin. 2012. ‘Cheat, Lie, Break the Law? Chances Are You’re Rich, Studies Show.’ The Globe and Mail, 28 February. Morck, Robert. 2009. ‘Why Markets Fail’. Keynote Address at a SSHRC Panel on Why Markets Fail. University of Alberta, Edmonton. 24 November. Muller, Jerry Z. 2003. Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought. New York: Anchor Books. ———. 2010. Capitalism and the Jews. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Naess, Arne. 1990. Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecophilosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nandy, Ashis. 1988. Tradition, Tyranny and Utopia: Essays in the Politics of Awareness. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

211

B ibliography

Neng, Hui. 1969. The Diamond Sutra and the Sutra of Hui Neng. Trans. A. F. Price and Wong Mou-Lam. Boston: Shambhala. Nicholson, Adam. 2003. God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible. New York: HarperCollins. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2000. Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Modern Library. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. 1996. Human, All too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. 1878. Reprint. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale and Richard Schacht. New York: Cambridge University Press. Padoux, Andre. 1990. Vac: The Concept of the Word in Selected Hindu Tantras. Trans. Jacques Gontier. Albany: State University of New York Press. Palmer, G.E.H., Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, eds. and trans. 1990. The Philokalia: The Complete Text. Vol. 2. London: Faber and Faber. ———, eds. 1995. The Philokalia: The Complete Text. Vol. 3. London: Faber and Faber. Pandita, Sayadaw U. 1992. In This Very Life: Liberation Teachings of the Buddha. Boston: Wisdom. Pasha, Mustapha Kamal and Ahmed I. Samatar. 1996. ‘The Resurgence of Islam.’ In Globalization: Critical Reflections, ed. J.Mittelman, 83–113. London: Lynne Rienner. Patel, Raj. 2009. The Value of Nothing: Why Everything Costs so Much More Than We Think. Toronto, ON: HarperPerennial. Perkins, John. 2006. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. London: Plume. Peters, Michael A. 2007. Knowledge Economy, Development, and the Future of Higher Education. Rotterdam: Sense. Petras, James. 2006. The Power of Israel in the United States. Atlanta, GA: Polity Press. ——— and Henry Veltmeyer. 2001. Globalization Unmasked: Imperialism in the 21st Century. London: Zed Books. Pinar, William. 1975. Curriculum Theory: The Reconceptualists. Berkeley, CA: McCutcheon. Plato. 2005. Phaedrus. Trans. Christophe Rowe. Rev. ed. London: Penguin Classics. Podhoretz, Norman. 2008. World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism. New York: Vintage. Polanyi, Karl. 2001. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. 1944. Reprint. Boston: Beacon Press.

212

B ibliography

Pruyn, Marc, and Luis Huerta-Charles, eds. 2005. Teaching Peter McLaren. New York: Peter Lang. Rabkin, Yakov M. 2006. A Threat From Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism. Winnipeg, MB: Fernwood Books. Research Unit for Political Economy. 2003. Behind the Invasion of Iraq. New York: Monthly Review Press. Rickards, James. 2011. Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis. Portfolio/Penguin. Ridgeway, James. 2011. ‘Mass Psychosis in the US: How Big Pharma Got Americans Hooked on Anti-psychotic Drugs.’ Accessed 12 July. http:// english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/07/‌20117313948379987.html Rikowski, Glen. 2003. ‘Alien Life: Marx and the Future of the Human’. Historical Materialism, 11, no. 2:121–164. Ruppert, Michael C. 2004. Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society. Sabrosky, Alan. 2010. ‘The US Military Knows MOSSAD and Traitorous Elements in US Government did 9/11.’ Accessed 23 April 2012. http:// socioecohistory.wordpress.com/2010/03/23/dr-alan-sabrosky-ex-directorof-studies-at-the-us-army-war-college-the-us-military-knows-mossad-andtraitorous-elements-in-us-government-did-911/ Sand, Shlomo. 2009. The Invention of the Jewish People. London: Verso. Scaff, Lawrence. 1989. Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics, and Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber. Berkeley: University of California Press. Scherman, Nosson. trans. 2011. The Complete ArtScroll Siddur. New York: Mesorah. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1991. ‘Hermeneutics: Conversations With History.’ In Schleiermacher, ed. Keith Clements, 58–64Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1973. Essays and Aphorisms. 1851. Reprint. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Classics. Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1942. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. New York: Harper. ———. 2008. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics. Scott, Peter Dale. 1996. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2010. American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

213

B ibliography

Seidel, Jackie. 2006. ‘Some Thoughts on Teaching as Contemplative Practice’. Teachers College Record, 108, no. 9:1901–1914. Smith, Adam. 1976. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Ed. Roy Campbell and Andrew S. Skinner. 1776. Reprint. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1982. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Ed. David D. Raphael and Alexander L. Macfie. 1780. Reprint. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics. ———. 2003. ‘On Enfraudening the Public Sphere: The Futility of Empire and the Future of Knowledge after “America”’. Policy Futures in Education, 1, no. 3:488–502. ———. 2006. Trying to Teach in a Season of Great Untruth: Globalization, Empire, and the Crises of Pedagogy. Rotterdam: Sense. Smith, David Geoffrey. 2008. ‘Wisdom Responses to Globalization: A Meditation on Ku-Shan.’ Paper presented at Simon Fraser University, Faculty of Education, Burnaby, BC, 8 April. ———. 2009. ‘An Essay Review of Peter McLaren’s ‘Rage+Hope: Interviews with Peter McLaren on War, Imperialism+Critical Pedagogy.’ Interchange, 40, no. 1:93–117. ———. 2010. ‘Hermeneutic Inquiry.’ In Encyclopedia of Curriculum Studies Vol.1, ed. Craig Kridel, 432–436. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. ———. 2011. ‘Can Wisdom Trump the Market as a Basis for Education?’ In Contemporary Studies in Canadian Curriculum: Principles, Portraits and Practices, ed. D Stanley and K.Young, 153–185. Calgary, AB: Detselig. ———. 2012. ‘From Leo Strauss to Collapse Theory: Considering the Neoconservative Attack on Modernity and the Work of Education’. Critical Studies in Education, 49, no. 1:33–48. ———. 2014. ‘Wisdom Responses to Globalization: The Pedagogic Context.’ In The International Handbook of Curriculum Research, ed. William Pinar, 45–59. New York: Routledge. ———. In progress. Mnemonic Reparation as a Condition of Healing Nightmares: The New Global Context for Educational Practice. Smith, Steven. 2006. Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sniegoski, Stephen J. 2008. The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel. Norfolk, VA: Enigma.

214

B ibliography

Social- Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 2009. ‘Enhancing Prosperity and Innovation Through Research – Canada’s Competitive Edge.’ Accessed 26 May. http://www.sshrc.ca/newsletterbulletin/spring-printemps/2009/mbf-eng.aspx Solomatin, Yuru. 2004. HAARP Poses Global Threat. Trans. Dmitry Sudakov. Accessed 4 August 2007. http://www.bariumblues.com/ ‌haarp_ geophysical_weapon.htm Strauss, Leo. 1953. Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1959. What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies. New York: Free Press. ———. 1964. City and Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1968. Liberalism Ancient and Modern. New York: Basic Books. ———. 1988. Persecution and the Art of Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1997. Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity. Ed. Kenneth Hart Green. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. ———. 2000. On Tyranny, Including the Strauss-Kojeve Correspondence. Ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael Roth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Suzuki, David. 1994. Essays in Zen. New York: Grove Press. Swanson, Darlene M. 2007. ‘Ubuntu: An African Contribution to (Re) Search for/with a “Humble Togetherness”’. Journal of Contemporary Issues in Education, 2:53–67. Tarpley, Webster. 2007. 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in the USA. Joshua Tree, CA: Progressive Press. Taubman, Peter. 2000. ‘Teaching Without Hope: What Is Really at Stake in the Standards Movement, High Stakes Testing, and the Drive for “Practical Reforms”’. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 16, no. 3:19–33. Tawney, Richard H. 1960. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. 1926. Reprint. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin. Taylor, Frederick. 1997. Principles of Scientific Management. 1911. Reprint. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. Thompson, Della, ed. 1995. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English. 9th ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Thompson, William. 1987. ’The Cultural Implications of the New Biology’. In GAIA: A Way of Knowing, ed. W.Thompson, 45–56Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Press.

215

B ibliography

Trungpa, Chögyam. 1988. The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation. Boston: Shambhala. ———. 1990. Meditation and the Myth of Freedom. Boston: Shambhala. ———. 2001. Crazy Wisdom. Boston: Shambhala. Voltaire. 1980. Letters on England. Trans. Leonard Tancock. 1734. Reprint. New York: Penguin Classics. ———. 2009. The Works of Voltaire: A Contemporary Version. Vol. 36. Trans. William F. Fleming. 1901. Reprint. Paris: E. R. Dumont. von Hayek, Friedrich. 2007. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago. Wa Thiongo, Ngugi. 2011. Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Oxford: James Currey/Heinemann. Waley, Arthur. 1992. Confucianism: The Analects of Confucius. Ed. and trans. Jaroslav Pelikan. New York: Book of the Month Club. Warmington, Eric and Philip Rouse, eds. 1956. Great Dialogues of Plato. Trans. Philip Rouse. New York: New American Library. Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society. Ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1980. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 1920. Reprint. New York: Scribners. Whitaker, Robert. 2010. Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America. New York: Crown. Wilde, Sandra. 2007. The Pedagogy of No-Separate-Self. PhD diss. Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta. Wile, Anthony. 2011. ‘Gaddafi Planned Gold Dinar, Now under Attack.’ Editorial. The Daily Bell, 5 May. Accessed 10 June 2012. http://www. thedailybell.com/2228/Gadaffi-Planned-Gold-Dinar-Now-Under-Attack. html Willis, Paul and Stanley Aronowitz. 1981. Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York: Columbia University Press. Willis-Bund, John William and J. Hain Friswell. trans. 1871. Francois de la Rochefoucauld: Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims 1681. London: Simpson Low, Son, and Marston. Wolff, Kurt. ed. and trans. 1965. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. New York: Free Press. Wu, Zongjie. 2011. ‘Confucianism, Modernization and Chinese Pedagogy: An Introduction.’ Journal of Curriculum Studies, 43, no. 5:561–568. Zwicker, Barrie. 2006. Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-up of 9/11. New Society Publishers.

216

Index Aaronson, Trevor 11, 203 Abu-Lughod, Janet L. 122, 203 adultomorphism 137 Aesop’s Fables (ancient morality tales) 44 Afghanistan war 102–3 ‘African Renaissance’ 27 After the Ecstasy the Laundry: How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path (Jack Kornfield) 47 Ahmed, Nafeez M. 139, 203 Allman, Paula 153, 158, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 170, 203 all-or-nothing approach 167 Amin, Samir 60, 203 Anger (righteous indignation) 40, 91 Anglo-American models of education 23 Arab Spring phenomenon 9 Aronowitz, Stanley 171, 216 Arrighi, Giovanni 87, 203 ‘astronautical imagination’ 141 Audi, Robert 32, 203

Basso, Keith 55, 203 Battiste, Marie 77, 203 Battle, Michael 27, 204 Beaud, Michel 155, 156, 172, 173, 174, 204 Beck, Charlotte Joko 47, 204 Becker, Ernest 86, 204 Becker, Gary S. 29, 204 Bello, Walden 74, 204 Benedictine spirituality 33 Bennett, William J. 123, 204 Bernays, Edward 8, 9, 204 Bilmes, Linda 103, 204 Bingham, Eugene 139, 204 Bloom, Allan 123, 132, 204 Bohm, David 133, 204 Borg, Marcus J. 33, 204 Bowles, Samuel 164, 204 Braithwaite, John 175, 206 Breazeale, Daniel 180, 204 Broken Markets (Kevin Mellyn) 55 Buchheit, Paul 117, 204 Buddhist social theory 133–4, 189 Burke, Peter 59, 204 Bzrezinski, Zbigniew 17, 205

‘bad infinity’ (pleonexia) 40 Badiou, Alain 126, 203 Baker, Carolyn 141, 203 bankruptcy, of world’s leading economy 103

Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (CACS) 195 capitalism 30, 60, 155–6, 158 industrial 112–13

217

INDEX

contemporary economic theory 20 contemporary neoconservative politics 138–9 Critique of Pure Reason (Immanuel Kant) 83–4, 180 Crosby, Alfred W. 141, 205 Crossing the Rubicon (Michael Ruppert) 109 crypto theology 124 cultural pluralism 121 ‘Culture of Fear’ 19 currency, global war over 17 curriculum and pedagogy 80, 83, 130, 133 Canadian context 84–5 curriculum theory 195

Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (Joseph Schumpeter) 67 Caputo, John D. 185, 205 Chah, Ajahn 55, 205 challenges 198 ‘Challenges Bequeathed’ 198 Chambers, Cynthia M. 188, 193, 205, 210 Chang, Ha-Joon 24, 205 Chard, Sylvia C. 135, 205 Chinese capitalism 27 ch’ing-t’an 89 Chodron, Pema 47, 205 ‘Choice Theory’ 48 Chossudovsky, Michel 72, 104, 205 Chuang Tzu 89 civilization 192 Clark, William R. 103, 205 Clarke, Jonathan 120, 137, 208 Clavis scripturae sacrae (Matthias Flacius Illyricus) 180 Closing of the American Mind (Allan Bloom) 123 coincidence of opposites 6 Cold War 103–5, 155, 184 Cole, Michael 164, 171, 205 collapse theory 141 Color Revolutions in Eastern Europe 9 complexity theory 133–4 Concise Oxford Dictionary (Thompson) 132 Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (John Perkins) 23–4, 99–100 Connell, Raewyn 27, 205 Cook, Jonathan 104, 108, 205 consciousness 32–3, 36 conservative forces 146 conservative pedagogy 133 conservative politics 154

Dart, Ron 130, 205 Davis, Brent 133, 205 Dawkins, Richard 200, 205 Deep Politics 95–6 as feature of war culture 97–102 delusion 40 ‘democracies’ movement 123 Denial of Death (Ernest Becker) 86 determinism, economic 20 deWaal, Esther 45, 206 Dharma 34, 85–6 ‘Dharma Cycles’ 85–6 Dhuramoolan 115–16 dialectical tension 166 dianoia 35 Dictionary of the Bible (James Hastings) 196 discipline 189 disease-care system see healthcare system disillusion 109 curriculum theorizing 111 knowledge/information explosion 111 social networking 110

218

INDEX

distractedness 80 ‘distraction’ 35–6, 191 divinity 43 Donin, Hayim H. 37, 206 Dooling, D. M. 47, 206 Drahos, Peter 175, 206 Drury, Shadia B. 123, 206 Dussel, Enrique 85, 119, 137, 141, 206

Euro-American grand narrative 150 Euro-American tradition 146, 172–3 Eurocentric imagination 121 European modernity 141 European monoculture 151 European philosophy 195 evil understanding 80 exoteric writing 129

early Gnostic Christianity 33 eclecticism 2–3 ecology theory 133–4 economic hit men (EHMs) 99 purpose and strategy 24, 100 Economy and Society (Max Weber) 66 education 143, 150, 160, 162, 165, 198 development 62–3 economy and 64 globalization and 61 and market 59–60 publications 62 public education policy 61 realm of education, idea 71 vigilance 63–4 ego 40 Eliade, Mircea 49, 114, 206 emptiness 33 End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, An (David Frum) 113 Enemy at the Gates (Hollywood movie) 19 Engdahl, F. William 5, 17, 206 Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism, The (David Harvey) 25, 192 epistemological poverty 157 ‘equipoise’ 79 Erlendson, Rick 8, 75, 206 esoteric writing 129

‘fatal ability’ 197 fear 56 Ferrari, Michel 77, 206 ‘fetishism’ 25 fideism 181 Fisher, Michael 19, 55, 192, 206 foreign policy 124 ‘forgetful of Being’ 35 Frank, Andre Gunder 122, 206 Freire, Paulo 1, 2, 3, 11, 13, 206 French theory 195 Friswell, J. Hain 41 fullness of Being 34 ‘Full-Spectrum Dominance’ theory 5, 17 generational wars 137 Genesis 43 Gintis, Herbert 164, 204 global crisis 174–5 globalization 21, 159, 174 and knowledge 61 paradigm of economic 31 global media networks 139 global warming 155 Globe and Mail, The (newspaper) 31, 156 Gluttony (self-pleasure) 91 ‘God beyond all knowing, the’ 200–1 ‘God-hypothesis’ 68 Great Transformation, The (Karl Polanyi) 64

219

INDEX

Greek orthodox tradition 190 Gulf of Tonkin incident 98 Gyatso, Tenzin 79, 208

Hume, David 59, 209 Huntingdon, Samuel P. 121, 209 Husserl, Edmund 182, 209 Hwame, Munyaradzi 18, 209

Habermas, Jurgen 121, 148, 183, 185, 208 Halper, Stefan 120, 137, 208 Hanh, Thich Nhat 37, 48, 208 ‘Happy Fault, The’ 49–50 Hardimon, Michael O. 64, 208 Hardon, John A. 80, 208 Harvey, David 18, 25, 27, 73, 103, 192, 208 Hayek, F. A. 9, 16, 21, 22, 61, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 80, 208, 216 healthcare system 187 Heidegger, Martin 36, 125, 182, 183, 192, 196, 208 Heilbroner, Robert L. 55, 64, 208 Henricks, Robert G. 26, 208 Herbert, A. 42, 208 hermeneutics 179–80 hesychasm 93 hiddenness of things 83 historico-critical method 84 historico-critical vision 134 Hitchings, Henry 133, 208 Hitchins, Christopher 200, 208 Hobson, John M. 122, 208 Hochschild, Arlie 21, 160, 209 ‘homocentric fallacy’ 56 homo sapiens 155 h’sin 35, 91 ‘human capital’ for global market 16, 31 human control and manipulation 76 human generosity and altruism, Becker’s view 29–30 humanity 43 human labour 170 human stillness 81 Huerta-Charles, Luis 147, 213

ignorance (avidya) 40 illness, mental 19 Illyricus, Matthias Flacius 180, 209 imperialism 74 imperial war 137–8 ‘impersonal compulsion’ 22 Inconvenient Truth, An (Al Gore) 200 Independence Day (Hollywood movie) 19 individualism 30 inherent nihilism 120 inherent tension 166 internal relations 164–6 internal vulnerability 122 International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies (IAACS) 195 interpretation 177, 181–2 Iraq war 124 iron law of capital accumulation 156 ‘islamofascism’ 17 Japanese capitalism 27 Jardine, David W. 135, 209 Jaspers, Karl 6, 196, 209 Jordan-Smith, Paul 47, 206 Judaism 30 Junzi (good person) 46–7 Kachinas (Dorothy Eggan) 115 Kadarkay, Arpad 65, 209 kallipolis 128 Kant, Immanuel 83, 84, 124, 126, 127, 180, 182, 183, 209 Katz, Barry 65, 209

220

INDEX

Kaufmann, Walter 68, 209 Kavula 115 Kennedy, David 98, 137, 209 ‘knowledge revolution’ 26 Knudsen, Jonathan B. 64, 209 Kornfield, Jack 77, 209 Kovel, Joel 117, 210 Kristof, Nicholas 31, 210 Ku-Shan 89–94 Kuttner, Robert 21, 210 Kwiatkowski, Karen 107, 108, 210

Macarov, David 23, 67, 210 MacDonald, Elizabeth 77, 210 Mahajan, Rahul 72, 210 Mahayana Buddhism 33 Makreel, Rudolph 180, 182, 210 Marcuse, Herbert 65, 210 market Buddhist social theorist Loy’s view about 60 global, collapse of 58 Market Logic 22–3 China and 86–7 collapse 55 in eighteenth century 57 historical opinions 64–76 human nature and 60 market’s collapse 73 new products and services 68–9 social practices 71 undisciplined nationalism 114 vulnerabilities 26–30 market relations 171 Marxism in education 153 Marxist educational theory 163–4 masculocentrism 43 maturity and spiritual path 45–6 Mayer, Arno J. 104, 211 McChesney, Robert W. 101, 139, 211 McLaren, Peter (work) clericalism 149 Deweyan critical pragmatism 147 Dirty Thirty 146 fast-frozen relations 172 labor-power creation 163 labour–capital relation 160, 162 market freedom 152 Marxism in education 153 ‘Marxist humanism’ 148 monocultural systems, inability 151 multiculturalist movements 151 nihilism 149 political strategies 152

labour–capital relation 168 ‘labour’ concept 31 Leggo, Carl 188, 210 Levin, David Michael 131, 210 Lewis, Patrick 198, 210 l’hitpalel 37–8 liabilities 20 liberal democracy 134, 139, 155 tradition 127 liberal tradition 124, 157 life stories 193 life truths 37 Buddhist philosophies about 57–8 Life Writing 190, 193 Life Writing and Literary Metissage (Leggo et al.) 188 Life Writing and the Heart of Wisdom (Cynthia Chambers) 188 linear theory of causality 183 ‘logic of question and answer’ 184 Logos 28, 38–9 London Review of Books 106 Loy, David 39, 56, 60, 94, 133, 135, 210 Lure of Transcendence, The (Dwayne Huebner) 196 Lust (valorization of desire) 91 Lyotard, Jean-François 111, 149, 150, 210

221

INDEX

politics of horror 168 postmodernism and multiculturalism 148 postmodern theory 152 rebellion 149 respiratory infections 162–3 sharia law 151 slave culture 154 structural inequality 160 Teaching Peter McLaren 147 McMurtry, John 9, 20, 22, 23, 72, 135, 139, 143, 163, 168, 211 Mearsheimer, John 106, 107, 211 meditation 37, 79 Mellyn, Kevin 55, 211 mental illness 187 Merchants of Cool (documentary film) 74–5 Merton, Thomas 79, 93, 211 metaphysical philosophy 183 Middle Ages, spirituality 29–30 military technology 139 Mill, John Stuart 29, 211 Miller, John P. 77, 211 Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought, The (Jerry Z. Muller) 21 ‘mindfulness’ 191 and epistemology 153 Mindful Teacher, The (MacDonald and Shirley) 77 Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation, The (Thich Nhat Hanh) 37 Mishnah 38 Mittelstaedt, Martin 20, 211 modernity 119 Moodle course management systems 25 Morck, Robert 57, 211 moronization 65 Mosaic experience of divinity 79

Mosaic law 125–6, 131 Mugabeism 18 Muller, Jerry Z. 22, 30, 59, 60, 64, 66, 69, 70, 86, 211 mythos 77 Naess, Arne 133, 211 Nandy, Ashis 81, 137, 211 NATO-led revolt 23 Natural Right and History (Strauss) 125 Neng, Hui 29, 37, 212 neo-Confucian renaissance in China 46 neoconservatism 16, 121 agenda 130 failures 17 movement 124 political charge 18 ‘zero tolerance’ 50 neoliberalism 16, 159 economic philosophy 18 end of legitimacy for 69 failures 17 Thatcher/Reagan solution 61 ‘zero tolerance’ 50 neo-Marxist critical theory 148 New England Journal of Medicine (Marcia Angell) 132, 187 new knowledge economy 26, 61 Nicholson, Adam 99, 212 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 9, 16, 22, 42, 68, 149, 150, 152 nihilism 180–1 No Child Left Behind policy 61–2 nonreducibility 33 nous 35 now-untrue methods 140 obscuration 35–6 Occupy Movement 21 ‘Ocean of Dharma’ 34 On Luxury (essay) 58

222

INDEX

Padoux, Andre 54, 212 Palmer, G. E. H. 10, 35, 188, 191, 212 Pandita, Sayadaw U. 45, 212 Pasha, Mustapha Kamal 55, 212 Patel, Raj 29, 212 ‘Peak Oil’ 103–4 pedagogic relation 167 Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Paulo Freire) 167 peril 178 Perkins, John 23, 99, 212 Persecution and the Art of Writing (Strauss) 129 Peters, Michael A. 61, 174, 212 Petras, James 72, 105, 212 Phaedrus 178 Philokalia 35, 187–8 philosophy 136 Philosophy of Money, The (Georg Simmel) 65 phronesis (concept) 77 Piagetian-based stage theory 135 Pinar, William 195, 196, 212 Podhoretz, Norman 17, 212 Polanyi, Karl 20, 64, 212 political action 140 political economy 152, 155 political theory 196 pomo 150 postindependence population movements 151 postmodern theory 152 prajna 32–3 see also consciousness praxis 170 prayer (orare) 30 Hebrew tradition 37 prelapsarian (before the lapse) 50 Pride (self-esteem) 91 Principles of Scientific Management (Frederick Taylor) 112

Project for a New American Century, The 17 ‘Promised Land’ 30–1 prophecy 196–7, 199 Protestant Christianity 30 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The (Max Weber) 31 Protestant Reformation 180 Pruyn, Marc 147, 213 public education 139–40 pure tolerance principle 131 quantum theory 133–4 Rabkin, Yakov M. 106, 213 Ratzinger, Joseph 121, 208 Republic 128 Ridgeway, James 187, 213 Rikowski, Glen 32, 150, 152, 153, 158, 162, 163, 164, 167, 168, 171, 213 resentment 22 respiratory infections 162–3 responsibilities 198 Road to Serfdom, The (Friedrich von Hayek) 69 Roman Catholic tradition 180 Rouse, Philip 4, 216 Ruppert, Michael C. 107, 161, 213 Sabrosky, Alan 108, 213 Samatar, Ahmed I. 55, 212 Sand, Shlomo 106, 213 Scaff, Lawrence 66, 213 Scherman, Nosson 38, 213 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 181, 182, 213 Schooling in Capitalist America (Bowles and Gintis) 164 Schopenhauer, Arthur 42, 213 Schumpeter, Joseph A. 9, 67, 68, 69, 70, 86, 156, 213

223

INDEX

Scott, Peter Dale 43, 97, 98, 213 Seidel, Jackie 85, 214 self-consciousness 33 self-enclosure of human subjectivity 84 self-forgetfulness 32 September 11 attacks 102 Seven Deadly Sins (SDS) 58, 91 sharia law 151 Sherrard, Philip 10, 35, 188, 191, 212 Shirley, Dennis 77, 210 slave culture 154 Sloth (leisure) 91 Smith, Adam 59, 214 Smith, David 22, 48, 141, 142, 214 Smith, Steven 126, 127, 130, 214 Sniegoski, Stephen J. 108, 214 social and cultural collapse 140 social reform 185 social relation 163, 171 socio-economic relations 166 Solomatin, Yuru 139, 215 Stiglitz, Joseph 103, 204 Strauss, Leo 119–43, 215 struggle 189 stupefaction 65 Sumara, Dennis 133, 205 Suzuki, David 56, 215 Swanson, Darlene M. 27, 215

terrorism amount of indebtedness 103 global financial crisis 103 global struggle 104 and invasions 102 Theravada tradition 86 Thompson, Della 132, 168, 169, 215 Thompson, William 200, 215 ‘three waves of modernity’ 124 time, chronometric and kairotic 50–1, 81–2 totalitarianism 65 traditional values, bankruptcy 149 Trungpa, Chögyam 37, 43, 79, 216 Tupper, Jennifer198, 210 ‘20/20 Problem’ 103–4 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism (Ha-Joon Chang) 24 ultimate consciousness 33 understanding 184 ‘Unhu/Ubuntu’ 27, 77 universal freedom principles of 126 universalist/totalitarian solutions 136 universal reason 126 University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) 145–6 unselfconsciousness 32 U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) 24

tallit 38 Taoism 33, 79, 90 Tao-te-ching 92 Tarpley, Webster 99, 215 Taubman, Peter 169, 170, 215 Tawney, Richard H. 30, 215 Taylor, Frederick 112, 215 Teaching Peter McLaren (Pruyn and Huerta-Charles) 147 Teaching without Hope (Peter Taubman) 169

Value Wars: The Global Economy Versus the Life Economy (John McMurtry) 22 Veltmeyer, Henry 72, 212 Vietnam War 137 von Hayek, Friedrich 61, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 80, 216

224

INDEX

waqf 33 ‘War on Terror’ 18–19, 42, 72, 95, 100–1 frames 102–9 war policies 192 Wa Thiongo, Ngugi 23, 216 Waley, Arthur 81, 216 Walt, Stephen 106, 107, 211 Ware, Kallistos 10, 35, 212 Warmington, Eric 4, 216 ‘Ways’ 32–3, 92–3 Weber, Max 30, 31, 66, 216 wen 81 West 29–30 biblical tradition 43 Western ‘civilization’ 35, 122 Western conception of Reason 28 Western economies public services in 159 recession in 159 Western ideology of development 142 Western language theory 89 Western modernity 142 Western phenomenon 27 Western philosophy 180 Western tradition 32, 121, 126–7, 137, 157, 177, 179 What the Market Does to People: Privatization, Globalization, and Poverty (David Macarov) 23 White Supremacist character 23

Whitaker, Robert 8, 19, 74, 216 Wilde, Sandra 85, 216 Wile, Anthony 23, 103, 216 Willis, Paul 171, 216 Willis-Bund, John William 41, 216 wisdom 193 Buddha’s teaching 78 civilization 76–7 commonalities 47 and discoveries of science 78 Greek translation 43 Hebrew tradition 77–9 literature 42–4 with Logos 43 primary vision 55 teachers and 43 teaching 45 themes 48–54 theoretical and practical 32 traditions 40–1 Wolff, Kurt 65, 216 ‘wordless prayer’ 79–80 work (labore) 30 Worldling, The (Voltaire) 58 World of Warcraft (video games) 19 Wu, Zongjie 46, 216 yin/yang 36 Zionist inspiration 106 Zwicker, Barrie 98, 216

225