Category: Culture
Anti-Intellectualism
We are living in a time when being intellectual or being perceived as an intellectual is a negative. Shows like, “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader” celebrates and laughs at the general lack of knowledge that permeates our culture. There is a need for “common sense,” but at times this too is not common nor sensical. If our denomination, or Christianity for that matter, is to lift the gospel message of reconciliation and social responsibility(1) to a level of prominence in our culture again, it is necessary to require a broad education of those that serve in ordained ministry and encourage them to be the public theologians that speak truth to power as well as marry, bury, and baptize. It is necessary, it is an obligation to bring education to the laity. Education that requires risk and questions rather than watering down the gospel message to bumper stickers, power point slides, or praise cheers.
This lengthy article on Truthout is a starting point for a conversation in our culture about education, intellectualism, and our need for serious people that want to solve our problems, and have the expertise to do so, because that is what the social contract of democracy asks of its citizens. It’s not about money, seizing power or keeping power. It is what made our nation great and why we feel nostalgic about the WWII generation. Below is my favorite paragraph from the article.
On Pop Clarity: Public Intellectuals and the Crisis of Language
by Henry A. Giroux | March 24, 2010
I think it is fair to say that a different notion of reading and literacy, along with the institutions that supported it, dominated the first half of the 20th century. The notion of the public intellectual was not marginalized, and such writers engaged in ongoing public conversations about political and cultural issues that were of great social importance. These intellectuals spoke to more than one type of audience and were able to comment critically and broadly on a number of issues. To be a public intellectual, you had to be a particularly attentive student of society and the problems it faced and you had to take risks by intervening in ongoing public conversations that disrupted the powerful interests that shape common sense in efforts to change the nature of the debate. Such intellectuals exemplified a mode of writing and political literacy that refused the instinctive knee-jerk reflex of privileging plain speak over complexity. Clarity today too often legitimates not only simplistic writing, but an absence of rigorous analytic thought. Clarity, with its appeal to simplicity and common sense has become an excuse for abusing language as a marker of the educated mind. Public intellectuals in the past achieved complexity and accessibility in their writing for nonacademic audiences – crafting a language that was intelligible, but did not sacrifice its theoretical rigor – while insisting on the value of providing readers with the opportunities to struggle with matters of language and meaning rather than imposing a slick authoritarian style in the name of “unadorned truth.” As we move into the 21st century, Twitter-like clarity has replaced accessibility and has grown more pernicious as it aligns itself with an array of new corporate and military institutions, a dumbed-down cultural apparatus, school systems that miseducate and a growing network of films, talk radio and television shows in which language is emptied of content and thought only creates obstacles to the desire for thrill-seeking entertainment. In an age in which the acceleration of time is perfectly suited to the eradication of thoughtfulness, pop clarity and its notion of frictionless, spontaneous truth now governs the conditions for all modes of intelligibility.
Note
1. Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.
An Open Letter from Uganda
Disciples are doing significant work all over the world. I am fortunate to know DOC folks in many Regions. Reprinted below is a letter from some people I don’t know that are, if the British Airways strike is over, either back in the states or nearly back. It recounts their time in Uganda and highlights what Christians could, should, ought to be doing in the name of social justice by living out the social gospel of Jesus of Nazareth. It is something we could, should, ought to be doing in these United States for the common good of us all.
March 17, Friday, An open letter to people everywhere. Uganda does not need more missionaries, itinerant or otherwise. It has plenty. It has plenty of churches. In Costa Rica, every village has a school and a soccer field. In Uganda, every village has two or more churches, empty when it is not Saturday or Sunday. Uganda needs engineers, sanitation workers, landfills, garbage pick up, covered drainage ditches, paved roads, sewage, water systems, trained technicians, well designed electrical grid. Roads paved. Maintenance. Traffic laws. Enforced. Textbooks written after 1970. If you must send missionaries equip them to build and repair with local resources. There are enough Bibles. There is not enough malaria medication, not to mention antibiotics, birth control, decent maternity care, well child care, funding for orphan care, Jobs. although there is no lack of need for the work that would provide jobs. 75% of the population is under 25. Talk about a baby boom. I told a group of high school students, yesterday, they will change Uganda. I did not tell them it would be with strikes and marches and crime. I was ready to come home Monday. My work here is ceremonial, documentary, and laundry. Hervey's work is fixing, fixing, fixing, and calmly fielding unending requests for school fees, money to fix latrines, staff quarters, shoes, lunch money, teacher's guides, soccer balls ... . Walking to the taxi stage after visiting a school, we passed the school where H fixed their borehole, two latrines, and gave the children soccer, net, and volleyballs. He heard the children say "muzungu" (white people). The official he works with here laughed. H asked what they said. He told him they shouted, "our muzungu." This morning, my last in Hoima, I sat outside the hotel wall and watched the street just before sunrise. Few cars or motorbikes. Many bikes and walkers. People going to open their shops. Carrying supplies. Guards carrying rifles. A man in shirt and tie on a bike. Children going to school. Two tiny girls dressed in pink checked skirts and pink veils came up to me and greeted me and I them. The tiniest chattered to me. I asked if they were going to school. I think the older girl knew some English. She nodded, kept the veil over her mouth. Beautiful girls. Enormous brown eyes, Sweet dispositions, which is the national disposition.