Ross James Swanston wrote:
>
> The following article from The Guardian certainly seems to show that it is
> threatening the very freedoms it claims to be defending. The application
> of advanced technology for surveillance in the form utilised in Afghanistan
> has frightening implications. Where do the boundaries lie between clamping
> down on terrorism and legitimate dissent as a hard fought human right?
[snip]
> As Michel Foucault foresaw when he was writing in the 1960s and 70s, are
> we are being engineered towards a conformity of belief and action - a new
> fundamentalism - since anything more radical might be interpreted as
> 'defending terrorism'?
[snip]
> The paradox of the Enlightenment is that the universalist project is
> brokered by individualism. The universality of human rights, in other words,
> can be defended only by the diversity of opinion. Most of the liberties
> which permit us to demand the equitable treatment of the human community -
> privacy, the freedom of speech, belief and movement - imply a dissociation
> from coherent community.
There are some voices, such as Stephen Toulmin, in his fine
little book: _Cosmopolis: The hidden agenda of modernity_, who
have argued that the Enlightenment took place at a fork in the
road. The path taken was Cartesian abstract/objectivfistic reason;
the path not taken was a humanistic reasonableness espoused by
persons like Erasmus and Rabelais.
One real "paradox", it seems to me, is that the individual is
not possible except as a product of certain kinds of community.
How much tension between the creative individual and his or her
social matrix is unavoidable is surely an open question. But
a modernity/postmodernity which almost ubiquitously lacks focal
awareness
of the community that it implicitly must be in order to
exist, and believes that "the individual" is best nurtured
by Capitalism and competition, equally surely tells us
nothing about that variable's "lower bound".
[snip]
> Some of those who, in defiance of this dispensation, write their own logos
> on their T-shirts are now being persecuted by the state. The pettiness of
> its attentions, combined with its ability to scrutinize every detail of our
> lives, suggest that we could be about to encounter a new form of political
> control, swollen with success, unchecked by dissent. Nothing has threatened
> the survival of "western values" as much as the triumph of the west.
It seems to me that a social world in which employees
are lasrgely powerless over the conditions of their work
or their very ability to earn a living at all,
and students are perhaps even more helpless vis-a-vis their
[tor-]mentors, is not exactly "the triumph of the west".
Progress, probably. But if it is a triumph, it is
a triumph of the still only partly enlightened system
geographically existing in "the west"
that earlier threatened Galileo with the instruments of torture.
Coming down to earth from the heavens of theory and rhetoric,
it seems to me that some deeper appreciation for
the process of dialogical conversation by the persons
being graduate-trained to become scientists, engineers
and computer professionals would help. This would
need to be in some form other than a course in "discourse"
ethics" with a [grotesquely undialogical!] term paper
and mid-term and final exams.
Engineering ethics probably can be taught as a graded
course, and surely such a course needs to be part
of every scientist, engineer and computer professional's
training/schooling.
But, somehow, students and workers and teachers and
managers need to attend thematically to cultivating
[what Hans-Georg Gadamer called:] "the conversation we
are".
"The West" triumphs only to the extent that
persons shape their conditions of life thru
conversation -- and not just the [alienated] conversation of
their "representatives", but the conversation(s)
they and the persons around them live their
daily life in.
I think one good, small first step is for liberal arts teachers
to try to teach their students that learning about
the liberal arts does not by itself have anything
to do with actualizing what the liberal arts are about.
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCrmick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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