The brutal decay of communal moral character, characteristic American incivility, was brazenly displayed last week on CNN which reported on an emergency room patient who sat in an emergency room for 24 hours, finally fell off her chair to lay on the floor for over an hour and then died. During her ordeal several people witnessed her condition including 2 security guards. None did anything until finally a security guard had her checked out only to discover she was dead.
The crisis of Liberalism, beyond its destruction of political democracy, manifests in many such social symptoms of abusive interpersonal conflict, communal intolerance, criminal violence and social disintegration. At the root of this decay is the loss of local democratic social self-control and cultural self-determination to the incursions of statist bureaucrats and technocrats, professional politicians and the ideologues of therapeutic salvation. Over the past century from the Progessive Era through Reaganism, the organic communities-- held together by autochthonous traditions and customs, indigenous identities and relationships-- gave way continuously and systematically to the external mediation of the needs of modernizing capitalism. As a consequence America is becoming more and more socially and morally crude and spiritually unconsoling. Yet incivility is only the veneer of a failing Liberalist ideology of social reproduction that has lost the plot of the human condition. It reproduces the conditions of profitability and thereby destroys the life-world of the people who make it possible.
The American masses, homogenized and alienated from themselves as communal beings are “individualized.” That is, they are socially uprooted and instrumentalized as workers in industrial collectivities, abstracted from a world of belonging and placed through social engineering at the hands of industrial capital. As a result of this expropriation of autonomy, social self-responsibility and political self-determination, “civility” as such deteriorates morally and politically, and the de-socialized remainder manifests as the mass American Client Class, the disempowered masses politically at the hands of mass mediatized, pseudo-political manipulation and the cretinizing commodities and activities of the culture industry.
The brutality of culture underlying such “incivility,” as the emergency room scene on CNN illustrates, can be read ironically enough between the lines of the routinized indifference and lack of simple human concern and caring. This is not the first time such mundane barbarity has been witnessed in our country. Trust that it will not be the last. Possibly in NYC alone hundreds if not thousands lay on the street each night and day as busy Manhattanites go about their business. Normalized insensitivity leaves most unmoved by the 2.2 million homeowners who lost their homes in the mortgage crisis over the past 24 months. 42,000 killed on American highways each year, many if not most by drunk drivers or at least involving alcohol. Murder, rape, homelessness, drug addiction, drug wars at the Texas border and inner cities, etc, etc, etc. Of course each of these bureaucratically construed statistical categories has its own history and tragedy. Too much to tell here. But if their stories were told, possibly we would still go on unmoved, undaunted and forgetful, failing to see the roots of this callousness in a way of life brought into existence over the last century or so.
Yet, after all, what can we do? Why should the Security Guard at the NYC hospital do anything when those who are assigned the task of acting do not. Why should they do anything when such neglect is easily rationalized within pragmatic and utilitarian norms of American pseudo-community and culture? Why act, when every crisis, the bigger the better, is an opportunity for profit and for streamlining the bureaucratically managed welfare society? Why be concerned when the community of caring and concern is a distant memory and the integrated personality, that is the person of social integrity, is one that must narcissistically “look out for # 1.”
Taking note of this dilemma of modern American society in its incivility if not barbarity, is a professor of social policy at Johns Hopkins, P.M. Forni. He has created the Civility Project. CNN interviewed him after showing video of the emergency room patient slowly dying in the waiting room. The good professor however confidently reported that his “project” is designed to reverse this incivility, one person at a time. Yes, you read it right the first time: “one person at a time.” He and his therapeutic minions are going to teach civility. He will teach interpersonal skills using 25 rules for civil conduct. But one must “choose civility” as the title of his book conveys upfront. Maybe enough of the ugly Americans out there will read the book, see the light and change their ways by “choosing civility.” This is how we might overcome the effects of living in the society of “strangers” he says we live among. Professorially administered civility projects all over America! Can you see it now? Do you feel the inspiration? A thousand points of light! Yes, the music to America the Beautiful plays in the background as a groundswell of “choice” begins to transform America one person at a time. Drug dealers give up their evil ways. Rapists apologize to their victims. Mortagage banks forgive millions of mortagage loans to homeless “homeowners.” Not one instance of road rage is reported in America. The US military gives the Iraqi’s back their country. Universal peace and love is felt in the air. You get the satirical picture I think.
What else could be expected from this project and this book, Choosing Civility, given its ahistorical, therapeutic and moralistic model. Forni must assume that the motivation may actually exist to cause people to want to choose civility. He also assumes that the fully abstract individual—the deeply engrained fruit of the homogenizing, nation building project of Americanization-- should suddenly, voluntarily adapt the concrete characteristics of “civility” as a psychic life style. Although such characteristics arise only within concrete traditional communities where self-identity, social belonging and existential purposefulness nurture and nourish such behavior, Forni believes he can reconstitute it without the necessary pre-existing social conditions. More poltical correctness for the masses. More self-censorship and repressed rage. As Rodney King implored all of America several years back after the LAPD beat the crap out of him on an LA freeway: “Can’t we all just get along!” Professor Forni to the rescue.
Only in the intellectualistic fantasies of a New Class professor could such bureaucratically inspired welfare state rubbish be imagined. Now that sociology has failed as a discipline to realize its aspirations as the research arm of the welfare state, Social Policy gurus with invincible dreams of transforming society imagine that they can do it psychologically with new rules of conduct to inculcate a civilized psychology in a socially and culturally uncivil society. The new social theorists will redeem their discipline by engineering character traits with a user friendly technique to induce morality or at least proper manners and concernfulness. The new sociologists will be moral philosophers with skills in moral therapy and social techniques of inculcating traits of civil character in the unwashed masses. And it's a good thing Forni and his associates are morally superior to the rest of us, thus justifying their moral pontification.
If Professor Forni does not see the error of his ways and the futility of his project, I hope at least he begins his project with the professional politicians. But somehow I think the barbaric incivilities of Karl Rove and the like will not be on the list. But then who does Forni have in mind? Billy Bob and his cousin Betty Lou down thar’ in Tennessee. Or maybe those damn drug dealers who keep killing one another in the big city. Maybe he could get them to talk things out with words during their drug negotiations. Or maybe all those ignorant people on the Jerry Springer show!
I shudder to think how much tax money will be wasted on this nonsense when the Washington bureaucrats find out about Forni’s road to moral salvation. And the great thing about it is that you don’t even have to bother with poltiics and concretely change the societal structures that created such barbarism. You just change all the individuals, one or two at a time, and then the whole damned country will be changed, qualitatively magically transformed. Pay your civility forward. Interesting idea! Why didn’t I think of that? Who needs politics anyhow?
No comments:
Post a Comment