The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy by Christopher Lasch

Author:Christopher Lasch
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2013-06-06T04:00:00+00:00

Mann called himself a republican (in order to signify his opposition to monarchy), but he had no appreciation of the connection between martial virtue and citizenship, which had received so much attention in the republican tradition. Even Adam Smith, whose liberal economics dealt that tradition a crippling blow, regretted the loss of armed civic virtue. “A man, incapable either of defending or of revenging himself, evidently wants one of the most essential parts of the character of a man.” It was a matter for regret, in Smith’s view, that the “general security and happiness which prevail in ages of civility and politeness” gave so “little exercise to the contempt of danger, to patience in enduring labor, hunger, and pain.” Given the growth of commerce, things could not be otherwise, according to Smith, but the disappearance of qualities so essential to manhood and therefore to citizenship was nevertheless a disturbing development. Politics and war, not commerce, served as the “great school of self-command.” If commerce was now displacing “war and faction” as the chief business of mankind (to the point where the very term “business” soon became a synonym for commerce), the educational system would have to take up the slack, sustaining values that could no longer be acquired through participation in public events.

Horace Mann, like Smith, believed that formal education could take the place of other character-forming experiences, but he had a very different conception of the kind of character he wanted to form. He shared none of Smith’s enthusiasm for war and none of his reservations about a society composed of peace-loving men and women going about their business and largely indifferent to public affairs. As we shall see, Mann’s opinion of politics was no higher than his opinion of war. His educational program did not attempt to supply the courage, patience, and fortitude formerly supplied by “war and faction.” It therefore did not occur to him that historical narratives, with their stirring accounts of exploits carried out in the line of military or political duty, might fire the imagination of the young and help to frame their own aspirations. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he distrusted any sort of appeal to the imagination. His educational philosophy was hostile to imagination as such. He preferred fact to fiction, science to mythology. He complained that young people were given a “mass of fictions,” when they needed “true stories” and “real examples of real men” (III:90–91). But his conception of the truths that could safely be entrusted to children turned out to be very limited indeed. History, he thought, “should be rewritten” so as to enable children to compare “the right with the wrong” and to give them “some option of admiring and emulating the former” (III:59–60). Mann’s objections to the kind of history children were conventionally exposed to was not only that it acclaimed military exploits but that right and wrong were confusingly mixed up together—as they are always mixed up, of course, in the real world.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.