In these threatening times, illiteracy is a political tool designed primarily to wage war on language, meaning, thinking, and the capacity for critical thought. Chris Hedges is right in stating that “the emptiness of language is a gift to demagogues and the corporations that saturate the landscape with manipulated images and the idiom of mass culture. Words such as love, trust, freedom, responsibility, and choice have been deformed by a market logic that narrows, their meaning to either a relationship to a commodity or a reductive notion of self-interest. We don’t love each other, we love our new car. Instead of loving with courage and compassion, and desiring a more just society, we love owning commodities.
At the same time, illiteracy bonds people and offers the pretense of community forged in hate, fear, and insecurity. Mark Slouka is instructive here. He writes:
What we need to talk about, what someone needs to talk about, particularly now, is our ever-deepening ignorance (of politics, of foreign languages, of history, of science, of current affairs, of pretty much everything) and not just our ignorance but our complacency in the face of it, our growing fondness for it. A generation ago the proof of our foolishness, held up to our faces, might still have elicited some redeeming twinge of shame—no longer. Today, across vast swaths of the republic, it amuses and comforts us. We’re deeply loyal to it. Ignorance gives us a sense of community; it confers citizenship; our representatives either share it or bow down to it or risk our wrath.
Clearly, attacks on reason, evidence, science, and critical thought have reached perilous anti-democratic proportions in the United States. A number of political, economic, social, and technological forces now work to distort reality and keep people passive, unthinking, and unable to act in a critically engaged manner. Politicians, right-wing pundits, and large tracts of the American public embrace positions that support Creationism, capital punishment, torture, and the denial of human-preventable climate change.
In such situations, literacy disappears not just as the practice of learning skills, but also as the foundation for taking informed action. Divorced from any sense of critical understanding and agency, the meaning of literacy is narrowed to completing basic reading, writing, and numeracy tasks assigned in schools. Literacy education is similarly reduced to strictly methodological considerations and standardized assessment, rooted in test taking and deadening forms of literacy that would impart an ability to raise questions about historical and social context. While critical literacy in and of itself guarantees nothing, it is an essential step toward democratic agency, the ability to narrate on behalf of oneself and others, and the ethical and social capacity to challenge authority. Civic literacy is the bedrock of any democratic society and its decline suggests that the prospect of totalitarianism is becoming the crisis of our time.
In summary, the increasing atomization of society, the commodification of thought, the rise of the surveillance state, the transformation of schools into dead zones of the imagination, the war of communities of color and immigrants—all of these anti-democratic tendencies in American society point to a social order in which tyranny destroys everything that makes civil society possible. ~ America At War With Itself
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