The question that I found most interesting in the Cool Pose assignment was 'should we blame the people that make bad choices, or try to give them new choices?'
I personally think (as I almost always do) that this is a much more complex issue than meets the eye. Typically, however, I feel that people are being too absolute in their thinking with too little evidence to support it; while on this issue I believe that the base human decision making mechanisms aren't really enough to consider all the factors at play here.
Let's say someone has committed a crime. Let's say they killed someone. What now?
One typical view is that when someone does something wrong they should be punished. When people are asked why they think this they will probably answer that the person needs to understand what they've done, or that they just plain deserve it. The other side will point out that the criminal is just the product of their society, and what they really need is to be re-educated and given more opportunities, so that they can become a better person.
So let's say we go with the more thought out of the two, and try to change them. And it might work, they might decide that what they did was wrong and try to make up their debt to society (or something like that). But it might not. They might not just be a product of their society, they might be a made-to-order assembly line part. To them, these losers trying to change them are funny. What now?
So, you go to the source. You try to start with the youth, you give them better opportunities, and fund their schools and afterschool specials, and bring in important people to tell them they should go to college. But when they go home their parents beat them for wanting to spend the extra money, and less important but more famous people on TV and the radio and billboards tell them that they should be proud of being part of a subculture where people aren't given opportunities. You've changed the landscape, but the map is still the same, and that's what they'd rather follow. What now?
What now?
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Excellent essay.
ReplyDeleteTo adddress your question - I think a helpful lens for us might be to see our culture as in the midst of multiple related collapses and transformations.
Perhaps we could simplify and say that our culture has reached a new stage of a long and bewildering progression of relationships with ourselves & the planet & consciousness.
1. Gatherer-hunters in cooling savannas
2. Gatherer-hunters with tools and increasing symbolic consciousness (bands of 20)
3. Gardeners & gatherers (villages of 50)
4. Peasant farmers & soldiers (small towns of 800 but occasional big trade center towns of hundreds of thousands)
5. 1st industrial revolution (hydro and windpower) Factory workers and soldiers (cities of thousands and trade towns of millions)
6. 2nd Industrial Revolution (fossil fuels) massive population explosion and consumption explosion
7. Imperialist globalization and hypermedia
The morals and stories we tell (and the maps we use) include contradictions from each of our historic stages as well as this current (and ephemeral, is my guess) one. I think that the "cool pose" makes a lot of sense in the current hypermedia situation.
Marx says that our consciousness is produced by the (especially economic) relations in our society, not vice-versa. So, I agree, that "re-education" won't cut it - when the rest of the person's life experience teaches the opposite.
Btw - I think you can easily see evidence of the last point (the near irrelevance of education that contradicts personal experience) in your own section - consider -
ReplyDeletehttp://amberm93.blogspot.com/2009/12/hw-30_20.html