Contesting Empire, Globalizing Dissent by Norman K. Denzin Michael D. Giardina

Author:Norman K. Denzin, Michael D. Giardina [Norman K. Denzin, Michael D. Giardina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317262077
Google: xDgeCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-12-03T02:51:11+00:00

Ethics and Morality as Emancipatory Ideals

There is no question, as Paulo Freire (1993, 1996, 1998) repeatedly argued, that ethics must occupy an increasingly significant role in our pedagogy and our scholarship. As critical educators and community activists committed to democratic principles of everyday life, ethics must be understood as a political question—that in the final analysis constitutes a moral question. For without morality, as Terry Eagleton (2003) reminds us, politics becomes an instrument of oppression. Here, we must not mistake morality for moralism. Instead, being moral means exploring deeply the texture and quality of human behavior, ideas, and practices, which cannot be done by abstracting men and women from our social surrounding, from our culture, from our histories of survival. This requires “the interwovenness of the moral and political, of power and the personal … [for] ethics is about excelling at being human, and nobody can do this in isolation” (pp. 144, 142).

Along the same vein, the pernicious legacy of racisms—the multiplicity of ideologies, policies, and practices that result in the racialization of populations— must be understood in the context of everyday struggles and the conditioning of student identities. Here, identities are often well conditioned by a capitalist-inspired curriculum, fueled by fabricated consumer sensibilities of gendered, racialized, homophobic, and nationalist patriotic notions of “the good life.” Moreover, it is this core ideological process that sustains the ravages of globalization and that must be challenged and dismantled, if poverty and human suffering are to be eradicated.

In light of this, critical educators and community activists must come to terms with the fact that injustice, as Sam Gindin (2002) argues, “is not an unfortunate aberration of capitalism, but an inescapable outcome and an essential condition of its successful economic functioning. Capitalism is—and this is surely as clear today as it ever was—a social system based on class and competition” (p. 3). Capitalism functions as a globalized system, which requires as its prerequisite, the deep impoverishment and exclusion of three-quarters of the world’s population.

Given this reality, it is unfortunate that the theories and practices adopted by many educators and scholars in this country function conveniently to deaden and annul opposition to the capitalist order, while existing social controls are conserved, even in the wake of increasing impoverishment and incarceration. Meanwhile, the marketplace continues to move people away from few, modest needs to the creation of many false needs, through the use of advertising and the belief that consumption equals happiness (Brosio 1994). Such an ideology results in the deceptive belief that money is everything, capital rules, and that all aspects of life are open for the making of profit.

Additionally, capitalism disembodies and alienates our daily existence. As our consciousness becomes more and more abstracted, we become more and more detached from our bodies. For this reason, it is absolutely imperative that critical educators and scholars acknowledge that the origin of emancipatory possibility and human solidarity resides in our bodies. For it is “the moral, fragile, suffering, ecstatic, needy, dependent, desirous, compassionate, body which furnishes the basis for all moral thought” (Eagleton 2003, 55).

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