http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
Chapter 16 : A conspiracy against ourselves
A lower middle class which has received secondary or even
university education without being given any corresponding outlet for
its trained abilities was the backbone of the twentieth century
Fascist Party in Italy and the National Socialist Party in Germany.
The demoniac driving force which carried Mussolini and Hitler to power
was generated out of this intellectual proletariat’s exasperation at
finding its painful efforts at self-improvement were not sufficient
— Arnold Toynbee, MA Study of History
Two Social Revolutions Become One
Solve this problem and school will heal itself: children know that
schooling is not fair, not honest, not driven by integrity. They know
they are devalued in classes and grades,1 that the institution is
indifferent to them as individuals. The rhetoric of caring contradicts
what school procedure and content say, that many children have no
tolerable future and most have a sharply proscribed one. The problem
is structural. School has been built to serve a society of
associations: corporations, institutions, and agencies. Kids know this
instinctively. How should they feel about it? How should we?
As soon as you break free of the orbit of received wisdom you have
little trouble figuring out why, in the nature of things, government
schools and those private schools which imitate the government model
have to make most children dumb, allowing only a few to escape the
trap. The problem stems from the structure of our economy and social
organization. When you start with such pyramid-shaped givens and then
ask yourself what kind of schooling they would require to maintain
themselves, any mystery dissipates—these things are inhuman
conspiracies all right, but not conspiracies of people against people,
although circumstances make them appear so. School is a conflict
pitting the needs of social machinery against the needs of the human
spirit. It is a war of mechanism against flesh and blood, self-
maintaining social mechanisms that only require human architects to
get launched.
I’ll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately
subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for
hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical
thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of
confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon
folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people
can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type
economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great
fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened
the world’s most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It
insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than
the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its
requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite
well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to
robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate
outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters,
farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers,
whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human
enterprises—no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the
periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way,
you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to
control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be
safely tolerated by a centralized command system.
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own
children or your principles against the assault of blind social
machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting
to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its
nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what
institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its
handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human
values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the
schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way
they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die
there.
Schools got the way they were at the start of the twentieth century as
part of a vast, intensely engineered social revolution in which all
major institutions were overhauled to work together in harmonious
managerial efficiency. Ours was to be an improvement on the British
system, which once depended on a shared upper-class culture for its
coherence. Ours would be subject to a rational framework of science,
law, instruction, and mathematically derived merit. When Morgan
reorganized the American marketplace into a world of cooperating
trusts at the end of the nineteenth century, he created a business and
financial subsystem to interlink with the subsystem of government, the
subsystem of schooling, and other subsystems to regulate every other
aspect of national life. None of this was conspiratorial. Each
increment was rationally defensible. But the net effect was the
destruction of small-town, small-government America, strong families,
individual liberty, and a lot of other things people weren’t aware
they were trading for a regular corporate paycheck.
A huge price had to be paid for business and government efficiency, a
price we still pay in the quality of our existence. Part of what kids
gave up was the prospect of being able to read very well, a historic
part of the American genius. Instead, school had to train them for
their role in the new overarching social system. But spare yourself
the agony of thinking of this as a conspiracy. It was and is a fully
rational transaction, the very epitome of rationalization engendered
by a group of honorable men, all honorable men—but with decisive help
from ordinary citizens, from almost all of us as we gradually lost
touch with the fact that being followers instead of leaders, becoming
consumers in place of producers, rendered us incompletely human. It
was a naturally occurring conspiracy, one which required no criminal
genius. The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty
for the promise of automatic security, we became like children in a
conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire against their
own children, consigning them over and over to the denaturing vats of
compulsory state factory schooling.
1The labels, themselves, are an affront to decency. Who besides a
degraded rabble would voluntarily present itself to be graded and
classified like meat? No wonder school is compulsory.
The Fear Of Common Intelligence
The fear of common people learning too much is a recurrent theme in
state records around the world. The founder of the Chinese state, the
Emperor Ts’in She Hwang-ti, burned the work of the philosophers for
fear their ideas would poison his own plans. The Caliph Ùmar of Syria
wrote instructions to destroy the perhaps apocryphal library at
Alexandria, using this airtight syllogism:
If these writings of the Greeks agree with the Book of God they
are useless and need not be preserved; if they disagree they are
pernicious and ought to be destroyed.*
Literary bonfires in Nazi Germany are often invoked as a vivid symbol
of the deepest barbarism of the twentieth century, but extensive press
coverage ended the book burning by stirring public uneasiness
worldwide. Much more effective have been those silent blast furnaces
used by public library systems and great American universities to
dispose of 3 million excess books annually because of a shortage of
shelf space. Why aren’t they given to schools?
There are other ways to burn books without matches. Consider the great
leap forward undertaken in the modern Turkish state under Kemal
Ataturk. Unlike Hitler, who burned only some of the past, Ataturk
burned it all without fire by radically changing the Turkish national
alphabet so that all the vital writings of the past were entombed in
an obsolete symbol system. Not a single Turk voted to have this done,
yet all accepted it.
From 1929 on, all books and newspapers were printed in the new
alphabet. All documents were composed in it. All schoolchildren were
instructed in it and no other. The classics of Persia, Arabia, and
Turkey vanished without a trace for the next generation. Obliterate
the national memory bound up in history and literature, sift carefully
what can be translated, and you open a gulf between old and young,
past and present, which can’t be bridged, rendering children
vulnerable to any form of synthetic lore authorities deem advisable.
Turkish experimentation is echoed today in mainland China where a
fifth of the population of the planet is cut off from the long past of
Chinese literature and philosophy, one of the very few significant
bodies of thought on the human record. The method being used is a
radical simplification of the characters of the language which will
have, in the fullness of time, the same effect as burning books,
putting them effectively out of reach. Lord Lindsay of Birker, a
professor at Yenching University outside Beijing where I recently went
to see for myself the effects of Westernization on the young Chinese
elite, says the generation educated entirely in simplified characters
will have difficulty reading anything published in China before the
late 1950s.
First, said Plato, wipe the slate clean.
There are many ways to burn books without a match. You can order the
reading of childish books to be substituted for serious ones, as we
have done. You can simplify the language you allow in school books to
the point that students become disgusted with reading because it
demeans them, being thinner gruel than their spoken speech. We have
done that, too. One subtle and very effective strategy is to fill
books with pictures and lively graphics so they trivialize words in
the same fashion the worst tabloid newspapers do—forcing pictures and
graphs into space where readers should be building pictures of their
own, preempting space into which personal intellect should be
expanding. In this we are the world’s master.
Samuel Johnson entered a note into his diary several hundred years ago
about the powerful effect reading Hamlet was having upon him. He was
nine at the time. Abraham Cowley wrote of his "infinite delight" with
Spenser’s Faerie Queen—an epic poem that treats moral values
allegorically in nine-line stanzas that never existed before Spenser
(and hardly since). He spoke of his pleasure with its "Stories of
Knights and Giants and Monsters and Brave Houses." Cowley was twelve
at the time. It couldn’t have been an easy read in 1630 for anyone,
and it’s beyond the reach of many elite college graduates today. What
happened? The answer is that Dick and Jane happened. "Frank had a dog.
His name was Spot." That happened.
*This quotation is from John Draper’s History of the Conflict Between
Science and Religion. Draper, an excellent scholar, took the story
from one Abulpharagius, a writer composing his story six stories after
the burning of Alexandria’s library. But no earlier writers confirm
Abulpharagius’ account and the known character of Umar (of Medina, not
Syria!) is quite liberal—for instance, he opened the holy places of
Jerusalem to all sects, Hebrew, Christian, or whatever—and
inconsistent with such a statement. Furthermore, the reverence for
learning in early Islam would all by itself bring this alleged
statement by the head of the Muslim empire into question. So, while
the anti-rationalist logic is still flawless, it might be well to
consider what group(s) had something to gain by spinning history this
way. Official history seems to be saturated with such machinations,
hence the need for underground histories…of everything!
The Cult Of Forced Schooling
The most candid account of the changeover from old-style American free
market schooling to the laboratory variety we have under the close eye
of society’s managers is a book long out of print. But the author was
famous enough in his day that a yearly lecture at Harvard is named
after him, so with a bit of effort on your part, and perhaps a kind
word to your local librarian, in due time you should be able to find a
hair-raising account of the school transformation written by one of
the insiders. The book in question bears the soporific title
Principles of Secondary Education. Published in 1918 near the end of
the great school revolution, Principles offers a unique account of the
project written through the eyes of an important revolutionary. Any
lingering doubts you may have about the purposes of government
schooling should be put to rest by Alexander Inglis. The principal
purpose of the vast enterprise was to place control of the new social
and economic machinery out of reach of the mob.2
The great social engineers were confronted by the formidable challenge
of working their magic in a democracy, least efficient and most
unpredictable of political forms. School was designed to neutralize as
much as possible any risk of being blind-sided by the democratic will.
Nelson W. Aldrich Jr., writing of his grandfather Senator Aldrich, one
of the principal architects of the Federal Reserve System which had
come into being while Inglis’ cohort built the schools—and whose
intent was much the same, to remove economic machinery from public
interference—caught the attitude of the builders perfectly in his book
Old Money. Grandfather, he writes, believed that history, evolution,
and a saving grace found their best advocates in him and in men like
him, in his family and in families like his, down to the close of
time. But the price of his privilege, the senator knew, "was vigilance—
vigilance, above all, against the resentment of those who never could
emerge." Once in Paris, Senator Aldrich saw two men "of the middle or
lower class," as he described them, drinking absinthe in a café. That
evening back at his hotel he wrote these words: "As I looked upon
their dull wild stupor I wondered what dreams were evolved from the
depths of the bitter glass. Multiply that scene and you have the
possibility of the wildest revolution or the most terrible outrages."
Alexander Inglis, author of Principles of Secondary Education, was of
Aldrich’s class. He wrote that the new schools were being expressly
created to serve a command economy and command society, one in which
the controlling coalition would be drawn from important institutional
stakeholders in the future. According to Inglis, the first function of
schooling is adjustive, establishing fixed habits of reaction to
authority. This prepares the young to accept whatever management
dictates when they are grown. Second is the diagnostic function.
School determines each student’s "proper" social role, logging it
mathematically on cumulative records to justify the next function,
sorting . Individuals are to be trained only so far as their likely
destination in the social machine, not one step beyond. Conformity is
the fourth function. Kids are to be made alike, not from any passion
for egalitarianism, but so future behavior will be predictable, in
service to market and political research. Next is the hygienic
function. This has nothing to do with individual health, only the
health of the "race." This is polite code for saying that school
should accelerate Darwinian natural selection by tagging the unfit so
clearly they drop from the reproduction sweepstakes. And last is the
propaedutic function, a fancy word meaning that a small fraction of
kids will slowly be trained to take over management of the system,
guardians of a population deliberately dumbed down and rendered
childlike in order that government and economic life can be managed
with a minimum of hassle. And there you have the formula: adjustment,
diagnosis, sorting, conformity, racial hygiene, and continuity. This
is the man for whom an honor lecture in education at Harvard is named.
According to James Bryant Conant, another progressive aristocrat from
whom I first learned of Inglis in a perfectly frightening book called
The Child, The Parent, and the State (1949), the school transformation
had been ordered by "certain industrialists and the innovative who
were altering the nature of the industrial process."
Conant is a school name that resonates through the central third of
the twentieth century. He was president of Harvard from 1933 to 1953.
His book The American High School Today (1959), was one of the
important springs that pushed secondary schools to gigantic size in
the 1960s and forced consolidation of many small school districts into
larger ones. He began his career as a poison gas specialist in WWI, a
task assigned only to young men whose family lineage could be trusted.
Other notable way stations on his path being that of an inner circle
executive in the top secret atomic bomb project during WWII, and a
stint as U.S. High Commissioner for Germany during the military
occupation after 1945. From Lewisite gas to nuclear explosions (or
high schools), Conant delivered.
In his book Conant brusquely acknowledges that conversion of old-style
American education into Prussian-style schooling was done as a coup de
main, but his greater motive in 1959 was to speak directly to men and
women of his own class who were beginning to believe the new school
procedure might be unsuited to human needs, that experience dictated a
return to older institutional pluralistic ways. No, Conant fairly
shouts, the clock cannot be turned back! "Clearly, the total process
is irreversible." Severe consequences would certainly follow the break-
up of this carefully contrived behavioral-training machine: "A
successful counterrevolution...would require reorientation of a
complex social pattern. Only a person bereft of reason would undertake
[it]."
Reading Conant is like overhearing a private conversation not meant
for you yet fraught with the greatest personal significance. To
Conant, school was a triumph of Anglo/Germanic pragmatism, a pinnacle
of the social technocrat’s problem-solving art. One task it performed
with brilliance was to sharply curtail the American entrepreneurial
spirit, a mission undertaken on perfectly sensible grounds, at least
from a management perspective. As long as capital investments were at
the mercy of millions of self-reliant, resourceful young entrepreneurs
running about with a gleam in their eye, who would commit the huge
flows of capital needed to continually tool and retool the commercial/
industrial/financial machine? As long as the entire population could
become producers, young people were loose cannon crashing around a
storm-tossed deck, threatening to destroy the corporate ship.
Confined, however, to employee status, they became suitable ballast
upon which a dependable domestic market could be erected.
How to mute competition in the generation of tomorrow? That was the
cutting-edge question. In his take-no-prisoners style acquired mixing
poison gas and building atomic bombs, Conant tells us candidly the
answer "was in the process of formulation" as early as the 1890s. By
1905 the nation obeyed this clarion call coast to coast: "Keep all
youth in school full time through grade twelve." All youth, including
those most unwilling to be there and those certain to take vengeance
on their jailers.
President Conant was quick to acknowledge that "practical-minded" kids
paid a heavy price from enforced confinement. But there it was—nothing
could be done. It was a worthy trade-off. I suspect he was being
disingenuous. Any mind sophisticated enough to calculate a way to
short-circuit entrepreneurial energy, and ideology-driven enough to be
willing to do that in service to a corporate takeover of the economy,
must also be shrewd enough to foresee the destructive side effects of
having an angry and tough-minded band of student-captives remain in
school with the docile. The net effect was to nearly eradicate the
intellectual possibilities of school instruction.
Did Conant understand the catastrophe he helped induce? I think he
did. He would dispute my judgment, of course, that it was a
catastrophe. One of his close friends was another highly placed
schoolman, Ellwood P. Cubberley, the Stanford Education dean.
Cubberley had himself written about the blow to serious classwork
caused by early experiments in forcing universal school attendance. So
it wasn’t as if the destruction of academic integrity came as any
surprise to insiders. Cubberley’s house history of American education
refers directly to this episode, although in somewhat elliptical
prose. First published in 1919, it was republished in 1934, the same
year Conant took office at Harvard. The two men talked and wrote to
one another. Both knew the score. Yet for all his candor, it isn’t
hard to understand Conant’s reticence about discussing this procedure.
It’s one thing to announce that children have to do involuntary duty
for the state, quite another to describe the why and how of the matter
in explicit detail.
Another prominent Harvard professor, Robert Ulich, wrote in his own
book, Philosophy of Education (1961): "[We are producing] more and
more people who will be dissatisfied because the artificially
prolonged time of formal schooling will arouse in them hopes which
society cannot fulfill.... These men and women will form the avant-
garde of the disgruntled. It is no exaggeration to say [people like
these] were responsible for World War II." Although Ulich is parroting
Toynbee here, whose Study of History was a standard reference of
speculative history for decades, the idea that serious intellectual
schooling of a universal nature would be a sword pointed at the
established order, has been an idea common in the West since at least
the Tudors, and one openly discussed from 1890 onwards.
Thus I was less surprised than I might have been to open Walter
Kotschnig’s Unemployment in the Learned Professions (1937), which I
purchased for fifty cents off a blanket on the street in front of
Columbia University from a college graduate down on his luck, to find
myself listening to an argument attributing the rise of Nazism
directly to the expansion of German university enrollment after WWI.
For Germany, this had been a short-term solution to postwar
unemployment, like the G.I. Bill, but according to Kotschnig, the
policy created a mob of well-educated people with a chip on their
shoulder because there was no work—a situation which led swiftly
downhill for the Weimar republic.
A whole new way to look at schooling from this management perspective
emerges, a perspective which is the furthest thing from cynical. Of
course there are implications for our contemporary situation. Much of
our own 50 to 60 percent post-secondary college enrollment should be
seen as a temporary solution to the otherwise awesome reality that two-
thirds of all work in the United States is now part-time or short-term
employment. In a highly centralized corporate workplace that’s
becoming ever more so with no end in sight, all jobs are sucked like
debris in a tornado into four hierarchical funnels of vast
proportions: corporate, governmental, institutional, and professional.
Once work is preempted in this monopoly fashion, fear of too many
smart people is legitimate, hard to exaggerate. If you let people
learn too much, they might kill you. Or so history and Senator Aldrich
would have us believe.
Once privy to ideas like those entertained by Inglis, Conant, Ulich,
and Kotschnig, most contemporary public school debate becomes
nonsense. If we do not address philosophies and policies which
sentence the largest portion of our people to lives devoid of meaning,
then we might be better off not discussing school at all. A Trilateral
Commission Report of 1974, Crisis of Democracy, offered with some
urgency this advice: "A program is necessary to lower the job
expectations of those who receive a college education." (emphasis
added) During the quarter-century separating this managerial
proposition from the Millennium, such a program was launched—for
reasons we now turn to the historian Arnold Toynbee to illuminate.
2A Harvard professor with a Teachers College Ph.D., Inglis descended
from a long line of famous Anglicans. One of his ancestors, assistant
Rector of Trinity Church when the Revolution began, in 1777 fled the
onrushing Republic; another wrote a refutation of Tom Paine’s Common
Sense, that one was made the first Bishop of Nova Scotia in 1787; and
a third, Sir John Inglis, commanded the British forces at Lucknow
during the famous siege by the Sepoy mutineers in 1857. Is the Inglis
bloodline germane to his work as a school pioneer? You’ll have to
decide that for yourself.
Disinherited Men And Women
In the chapter "Schism in the Body Social" from his monumental Study
of History, Toynbee calls our attention to some dynamics of Western
imperial success over the past four centuries which have important
implications for the way state schooling is conducted. As major
victories were registered, he tells us, "many diverse contingents of
disinherited men and women" were subjected to "the ordeal of being
enrolled in the Western internal proletariat." Between 1850 and 1950
"the manpower of no less than ten disintegrating civilizations [was]
conscripted into the Western body social" and underwent "a process of
standardization" which blurred or wiped out "the characteristic
features by which these heterogeneous masses were once distinguished
from one another."
Under his mannerly academic diction runs a river of insight explaining
the paradox of forced schooling. It can allow no pilgrim way because
it aims at leveling the turbulent singularity of youth, by a process
of standardization, into featureless components of a universal mass
mind and character. Nor, says Toynbee, has the victorious Western
political state been content to prey upon its own kind:
It has also rounded up almost all the surviving primitive
societies; and while some of these, like the Tasmanians and most of
the North American Indian tribes have died of shock, others, like the
Negroes of Tropical Africa, have managed to survive and set the Niger
flowing into the Hudson and the Congo into the Mississippi—just as
other activities of the same Western monster have set the Yangtse
flowing into the Straits of Malaca.
Not only have Darwin’s "disfavored" races been so manhandled, but the
free domestic populations of these countries have also been "uprooted
from the countryside and chevied into the towns" in preparation for a
strategic replacement of small-scale mixed farming by mass production
specialized agriculture whose crops are produced by the modern
analogue of "plantation slavery."
Serving The Imperial Virus
Toynbee thought he could calculate Britain’s jeopardy if it allowed
the masses dreams of independence by a comparison with the Soviet
Russia where revolutionary dreaming once dictated social arrangements:
In Marxian Communism we have a notorious example in our midst of
a modern Western philosophy which changed in a lifetime quite out of
recognition into a proletarian religion, taking the path of violence
and carving its New Jerusalem with the sword on the plains of Russia.
The working-class proletariat conceived by Toynbee is in a permanent
childlike state, one that requires constant management. Because of
this ongoing necessity, a second proletariat must be created, "a
special social class" which represents a professionalized proletariat,
"often quite abruptly and artificially" gathered by the national
leadership to aid in managing the lumpish mass of ordinary folk.
The size this bureaucratic cohort will reach depends upon the
circumstances which call it into being. If the dominant minority
decides to wage war, for instance, a vast enlargement of noncoms and
line officers will occur; if it decides to concentrate public
attention on charitable benevolence, a mushrooming of social work
positions will ensue; if the public is to be kept fearfully amused and
titillated by the spectacle of crime and law enforcement, a new horde
of police and detectives will be trained and commissioned. The social
management of public attention is a vital aspect of modern states. To
the extent that schools, together with commercial entertainment,
control an important share of the imagination of the young, they must
be heavily involved in such a project. There is no possibility they
can be allowed to opt out. Social management of public attention
through schooling can be seen as very similar to management of public
attention by corporate advertising and by public relations
initiatives. Mass production demands psychological interventions
intended to create wants that otherwise wouldn’t exist. Among its
other roles, school is an important agent of this initiative.
Quill-Driving Babus
A servant to the imperial virus! Here is a whole new take on what I
was hired to do with my adult life. It helps to explain why I
encountered such violent reactions from administrators as I innocently
deviated further and further from my function in an effort to be
useful to kids. While straining to find ways to be helpful, I
constantly ran afoul of this hidden directive forced schooling was
created to serve, about which I had previously not the tiniest clue
except that gleaned through intuition.
Professional associations of proles expand or contract according to
the schedule of the political state for absorbing fringe groups and
outsiders for retraining in new habits and attitudes. If a great
social project is underway, bureaucracy grows. When no compelling
agenda is afoot it shrinks. As populations learn to discipline
themselves, the need for expensive professional assistance to do it
for them diminishes.
For instance, if the managerial promise of computer workstations is
realized—hooking children into automatized learning systems which have
been centrally engineered—then great numbers of schoolteachers and
school administrators who were hired for a computerless moment now
passed will melt away like ice in spring to be reabsorbed into the
leveled and featureless common proletariat. My guess is that this
process is already well underway. Low-level school administrators are
a class facing imminent extinction if I read entrails correctly.
Indeed, the bureaucratic giantism we have endured since the end of
WWII has clearly lost momentum. Whether or not we should consider that
a cause for celebration is dubious. A retreating bureaucracy is a sign
the dominant minority considers the proletariat tamed, its own danger
past; the bureaucratic buffer becomes superfluous. It marks a time
when people can be trusted to control themselves. Woe to us all if
that is so.
There is a catch, however, to the wonderful elasticity of bureaucracy.
It is found in the degree of violent backlash occasioned by
bureaucratic shrinkage, or downsizing as it has come to be known. This
dangerous reaction Toynbee refers to as "the bitterness of the
intelligentsia."
Indeed, grounds for bitterness are formed in the very scheme for
training civil servants. They surrender any prospect of developing
full humanity in order to remain employed. Private judgment, for
example, is an inevitable early casualty, personal courage is totally
out of order. Bureaucrats often regard themselves privately as less
than whole men and women, not totally insensitive to the devil’s
bargain aspect in what they do. For Toynbee:
This liaison-class suffers from the congenital unhappiness of the
hybrid who is an outcast from both the families that have combined to
beget him. An intelligentsia is hated and despised by its own people.
He continues:
And while the intelligentsia thus has no love lost on it at home,
it also has no honor paid to it in the [workplace] whose manners and
tricks it has so laboriously and ingeniously mastered. In the earlier
days of the historic association between India and England, the Hindu
intelligentsia, which the British Raj had fostered for its own
administrative convenience, was a common subject of English ridicule.
Servants of state and corporation, like schoolteachers, lawyers, and
social workers, are inherently untrustworthy because of the stress and
insult they constantly endure living and working suspended between two
worlds. They must be carefully watched during training and subjected
to spiritually deficient education to measure their dependability for
the work ahead. If they swallow it, they get hired.
This hothouse situation creates fault lines deep in the breed which
begin to crack open when employment is cut back. Because what these
men and women do can, in fact, be done by almost anyone, they live in
constant peril of being excessed even when a shrinkage isn’t underway.
Toynbee again:
A Peter the Great wants so many Russian chinovniks or an East
India Company so many clerks, or a Mehmed Ali so many Egyptian
shipwrights.... Potters in human clay set about to produce them, but
the process of manufacturing an intelligentsia is more difficult to
stop than to start; for the contempt in which the liaison class is
held by those who profit by its services is offset by its prestige in
the eyes of those eligible for enrollment in it. (emphasis added)
The applicability of this principle to your own boy or girl in school,
embedded painfully in one of the many bogus gifted and talented
classes of recent years, or graduating from a watered-down college
program set up to accommodate more than half of all young men and
women, is this:
Candidates increase out of all proportion to the opportunities
for employing them and the original nucleus of the employed
intelligentsia becomes swamped by an intellectual proletariat which is
idle and destitute as well as outcast.
Now you have a proper frame in which to fit the armies of graduate
students enduring a long extended childhood in prospect of a sinecure
not likely to be there for most. In Toynbee’s eye-opening language,
this "handful of chinovniks is reenforced by a legion of nihilists,
the handful of quill-driving babus by a legion of failed B.A.s." Be
careful not to smirk; that quill-driving babu you see every morning in
the mirror is likely to be you.
Nor have you heard the worst: an intelligentsia’s unhappiness builds
geometrically—an underemployed chinovnik or babu becomes angrier and
more cynical with the passage of years. Sometimes this rage discharges
itself quickly, as when postal employees shoot up the joint; sometimes
it takes centuries. For an example of the latter, Toynbee offers us:
1. The Russian intelligentsia, dating from the close of the
seventeenth century, which "discharged its accumulated spite in the
shattering Bolshevik Revolution of 1917"
2. The Bengali intelligentsia, dating from the latter part of the
eighteenth century, which began in 1946 to display "a vein of
revolutionary violence which is not yet seen in other parts of British
India where local intelligentsia did not come into existence till
fifty or a hundred years later." [Shortly after those lines were
written, the intelligentsias brought British India down.]
I hope this helps you understand why, from a policymaker’s standpoint,
the decision to muzzle intellectual development through schooling has
been in a bull market since the end of WWII despite the anomaly of the
G.I. Bill. The larger the pool of educated but underemployed men and
women, the louder the time-bomb ticks. It ought to be clear by now
that the promises of schooling cannot be kept for a majority of
Americans in an economy structured this way; only by plundering the
planet can they be kept even temporarily for the critical majority
that is necessary to keep the lid on things.
In the society just ahead, one profession has astonishingly good
prospects. I’m referring to the various specialties associated with
policing the angry, the disaffected, and the embittered. Because
school promises are mathematically impossible to keep, they were, from
the beginning, a Ponzi scheme like Social Security. The creative
minority who unleashed this well-schooled whirlwind a hundred years
ago seems to have finally exhausted its imaginative power as it
transmuted slowly into a dominant minority without much creative
energy. Dr. Toynbee points to such a transition as an unmistakable
sign of society in decline. Another ominous sign for Toynbee: the
increasing use of police and armies to protect private interests.
In 1939, on the eve of war, the defense budget of the United States
was $11 billion (translated into a constant dollar, year-2000
equivalent). We were at peace. Today, at peace again, without a
visible enemy on the horizon, the defense budget is twenty-four times
higher. The appearance of a permanent military force in peacetime,
which claims a huge share of society’s total expenditure, can’t be
explained by saying we live in a dangerous time. When wasn’t that
true? It is our own leadership which lives dangerously, dwelling in a
Darwinian world in which its own people are suspect, their danger so
far contained by ensnaring the managed population through schooling
into a conspiracy against itself.
We meet every day in school a reflection of the national leadership
class displaying every indication it has abandoned its fundamental
American obligation to raise ordinary people up, becoming instead an
overseas transmitter of the original mother ideas of England.
The professional proletariats created to do this important task and
others like it can be seen, says Toynbee, to be "a special class of
liaison officer" between the governing minorities and the masses. This
English way of seeing middle classes clears some of the fog away.
Consider the real- life effect of an abstract rule of first allegiance
to management on those schoolteachers who work too intimately with
parents, or struggle in children’s interests too resolutely—inevitably
they become marked for punishment. Good teachers from the human
perspective are natural system-wreckers. They don’t fit comfortably
into a service class designed to assist governing elites to manage.
Their hearts aren’t in it.
Toynbee is brutally candid about where loyal pedagogues fit: "As the
[imperial] virus works deeper into the social life of the society
which is in the process of being permeated and assimilated, the
intelligentsia develops its most characteristic types: the
schoolmaster... the civil servant... the lawyer...."
England was first to commodify agricultural products so intensely,
"uprooting its own free peasantry for the economic profit of an
oligarchy by turning plowland into pasture and common land into
enclosures." This state-driven push away from the independent farms of
yeomen reduced that class to "white trash" (in Toynbee’s colorful
idiom), and this disquieting social initiative was powerfully
augmented by a pull from the urban industrial revolution also being
engineered at the same time. Handicrafts were replaced by output from
coal-driven machines. During the agonizing transition, owners of the
new mechanical technology created another new technology of social
control through abundant use of police, spies, sabotage, propaganda,
and legislation to hasten the passing of the old ways of moral
relationship.
Try hard to visualize through all this milling grief of "beaten
peoples" and "disinherited men and women," not their agony but the
perplexity of the corporate state. What is a modern scientific state,
having transcended the principles of Christian life, to do with its
masses once they have been "degraded to the ranks of a proletariat,"
like so much detritus, and then further rendered superfluous by a
stream of inventions? Even more today than yesterday, this is
America’s problem.
The question is all too real. It raises the grim spectre of revolution
which public policy seeks to push away through schooling. What can
anyone do with human flotsam in a crowded world that scorns their
labor and scorns their companionship? Set them to watching television?
From a scientific perspective, people management isn’t all that
different from dealing with industrial waste. At bottom, moral
principle has little to do with it. Dispositions are mainly matters of
possibility and technique. Here is the secret of scientific life which
refuses to stay hidden amidst the hollow moral rhetoric of scientific
schooling.
Toynbee’s observation that most inhabitants of a modern state are in a
condition of disinheritance, and hence dangerous, calls for what he
terms "creative solutions." One creative solution is to establish work
for some of the dangerous classes by setting them to guard the rest.
This guardian class is then privileged a little to compensate it for
playing the dirty kapo role against the others.
Toynbee is eloquent about the function of bureaucrats in serving the
creative minorities which manage society. Creative minorities always
manage complex societies, according to Toynbee, but the dominant
minorities which comprise modern social leadership are the degenerate
descendants of this originally creative group. Dominant minorities
manage the rest by conscription of all into a massive two-tier
proletariat. The guiding protection is a mechanism to ensure these
proletariats don’t learn much lest they become "demoniac." This is the
unsuspected function which school tolerance of bad behavior serves—in
both school and society. The great majority of proles are kept away
from what history refers to as education. This can be done
inexpensively by leading children from ambitious exercises in reading,
writing, declamation, self-discipline, and from significant practical
experience in making things work. It really is that simple, and it
needn’t be done forever. Even a few years of control at the beginning
of childhood will often suffice to set a lifetime stamp.
Toynbee, and by extension the entire cultivated leadership class he
represented, was unable to see any other alternative to this
stupefaction course because, as he hastened to assure us, "the
religion of the masses" is violence. There is no other choice possible
to responsible governors who accept the melancholy conclusion that
peasants are indeed revolting. The only proles Toynbee could find in
the historical record who managed to extricate themselves from a fatal
coarseness did so by escaping their proletarian circumstances first.
But if this were allowed for all, who would clean toilets?
You might expect such an observation would lead inevitably to some
profound consideration of the astounding crimes of conquest and
domination which create uprooted, landless classes in the first place—
England’s crimes against Ireland, India, China, and any number of
other places being good examples. But a greater principle intervenes.
According to certain sophisticated theory, you can’t operate a modern
economy without an underclass to control wage inflation; in spite of
bell- curve theory, a mass doesn’t subordinate itself without some
judicious assistance.
In his glorious Republic, which may have started it all, Plato causes
Socrates to inform Glaucon and Adeimantus, twenty-four hundred years
ago, that they can’t loll on couches eating grapes while others sweat
to provide those grapes without first creating a fearsome security
state to protect themselves from the commonality. It would appear that
long ago some people realized that a substantial moral trade-off would
be required to create ease for a fraction of the whole, while the
balance of the whole, served that ease. Once that kind of privilege
became the goal of Toynbee’s creative minority, once high culture was
defined as a sanctuary against evolutionary reversion, certain horrors
institutionalized themselves.
The clearest escape route from tidal recurrence of caste madness is a
society bred to argue, one trained to challenge. A mentally active
people might be expected to recognize that the prizes of massification—
freedom from labors like toilet cleaning, a life of endless
consumption (and reflection upon future consumption)—aren’t really
worth very much. The fashioning of mass society isn’t any chemical
precondition of human progress. It’s just as likely to be a signal
that the last act of history is underway.
The Release From Tutelage
What kind of schools do we need to extricate ourselves from the
conspiracy to be much less than we really are? Why, enlightened
schools, of course, in the sense Immanuel Kant wrote about them.
"Man’s release from a tutelage," said Kant, "is enlightenment. His
tutelage is his inability to make use of his understanding without
guidance from another." Tutelage is the oppressor we must overthrow,
not conspiracy. Eva Brann of St. John’s College saw the matter this
way: the proper work of a real self, she said, is to be active in
gathering and presenting, comparing and distinguishing, subjecting
things to rules, judging. The very notion of America is a place where
argument and self-reliance are demanded from all if we are to remain
America. Annoying as it often is, our duty is to endure argument and
encourage it. "Would the world be more beautiful were all our faces
alike?" wrote Jefferson. "The Creator has made no two faces alike, so
no two minds, and probably no two creeds."
The first Enlightenment was a false one. It merely transferred the
right to direct our lives from a corporate Church and a hereditary
nobility to a pack of experts whose minds were (and are) for sale to
anyone with a checkbook. In the second Enlightenment we need to
correct our mistakes, using what schools we decide upon to help us
strive for full consciousness, for self-assertion, mental
independence, and personal sovereignty—for a release from tutelage for
everybody. Only in this way can we make use of our understanding
without guidance from strangers who work for a corporate state system,
increasingly impatient with human beings.
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