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Re: Joe Bageant
"He that increases knowledge increases sorrow." Interesting stuff, Raz, but it comes too close to "ignorance is bliss" for my taste.
The fact is, Ecclesiastes words are not terribly helpful in the real world, where life is struggle.
It is not true that nothing changes. The problem is that changes in society are always mixed: some of them good, some bad, and the good often get turned into something bad, since social change is rooted in countervailing forces. The driving force of history is the struggle of ordinary people to change the world to achieve their goals against a ruling class (capitalist or communist) which strives to dominate them. Because the ruling elite have the politicians, the corporate media, and other resources at their disposal, they often manage to turn positive reforms into instruments of social control. Thus it may appear that nothing has changed, but in fact the struggle continues at a new level.
My most vivid experience of a good thing being turned into a bad came during the battle over busing in Boston. In 1974 my wife and two small children and I moved into Dorchester, a neighborhood of Boston that, along with South Boston, was the center of the anti-busing movement, and our daughter entered kindergarten there.
In that same year the Federal Court found that the Boston School Committee had intentionally segregated the Boston public schools and ordered it to desegregate. The suit had originated in 1967, when black parents sued the Boston School Committee, charging that their children were receiving an inferior education in overcrowded, often decrepit buildings, lacking such elementary supplies as textbooks. Their list of demands included many things to improve the schools for their children. One item on the list was desegregation.
To many people the Court decision for desegregation sounded like a good thing–a victory for decency and for ordinary people. But, along with thousands of other parents, I soon learned that, just as segregation can be used to divide people and undermine children’s education, so can desegregation.
While the black parents’ original demand had been for improved schools, the Court order focused on race, not education. In the first year of busing the Court-approved plan closed down 36 schools, most of them in black neighborhoods, laid off over 600 teachers, broke the power of organized parents (it’s very difficult to have much effect on your children’s schools if they are bused far from home, attend several different schools–if you have more than one child--and must change schools every year or so) and replaced once vibrant parent organizations with Court-ordered Racial Ethnic Parent Councils–officially organized into White and Black caucuses--at each school, enjoined to discuss "safety" issues but not education. The Court did nothing to improve education for the victims of segregation and much to make it worse.
In the face of this nightmare (which included black children being stoned in South Boston), ten black parents and ten white parents formed an organization that we called Better Education Together. We tried to get standing in the Court, to challenge the NAACP and the School Committee’s desegregation plans, both of which were destructive numbers games. Failing to get standing as a party to the suit, Better Education Together decided that I should run for Boston School Committee as a means of reaching out to other parents.
The BSC at the time was a big deal, a powerful citywide institution of five members. We printed campaign literature with the pictures of four black and four white parents. We said that we felt as parents that we were trapped between two bad alternatives: a Boston School Committee that had delivered segregated, inferior education to all our children, black and white, and a Federal Court that was making things worse. We felt that we as parents had to unite and fight for our children. We declared that the issue in the schools is not race but education, and we listed educational improvements for all children that should be part of any desegregation plan. In spite of the tense racial climate, we were able to go into every neighborhood in Boston–South Boston, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, Brighton, wherever–and wherever we went we were greeted by people, some with tears in their eyes, who would say, "This is so wonderful. I thought nobody felt this way but me."
We didn’t win a seat on the Committee–our family had only lived in my precinct for three months before I declared my candidacy (I registered to vote at the same time I registered as a candidate), I was not Irish and we had long since left the Catholic Church, the campaign had little money and I was not much of a speaker–but we won about 29,000 votes and in a few months grew from a campaign organization of 20 into one of 350. But we achieved our purpose. We had a dramatic effect on the citywide School Committee race, forcing the other 18 candidates to speak to education as the issue in the schools.
The Court continued to do its thing, of course, and the Boston schools were officially desegregated, though so many children left the system that the schools are as racially patterned as they ever were. The schools still lack sufficient textbooks and supplies and the classrooms are still overcrowded. The busing plan, by breaking the ties between neighborhoods and schools, undermined community cohesion and greatly weakened the power of parents to affect their children’s education. Busing also weakened the ability of teachers to have a positive effect on their students, as they or their charges were frequently transferred from school to school. All in all, desegregation–done in the way it was done–was an effective ruling class strategy to undermine the education of working class youngsters to prepare them to accept their fate in an increasingly unequal society. (After the election, I was appointed an Education Policy Fellow in the U.S. Office of Education in Washington, DC. In that position I became convinced that the destructive outcome of busing in Boston was fully intended.)
Desegregation was also used very cleverly by the rulers to rehabilitate the image of the US government. The Vietnam War had exposed the government as an organization of war criminals capable of any atrocity to maintain elite power. With nightly TV images of angry whites attacking buses full of black children, the media presented the federal government as the protector of black children against a vicious white working class. For a ruling class which had recently faced massive opposition from working class soldiers in Vietnam and workers in the factories and mines, it was a brilliant piece of stage work.
The two years that I was engaged in this battle persuaded me that we can change the world. My family had moved to Boston after I was given the boot from a college in Maine where I had been an assistant professor of English (and an outspoken anti-war activist). In Boston, with a Ph.D. and four years college teaching experience, I was getting paid chump change as an "adjunct professor" at a local university and variously driving a truck, delivering the Globe, and painting gas stations, while my wife worked as a secretary/bookkeeper. More to the point, I had come to reject Marxism and any communist alternative to capitalism. Like many other people, I had despaired of the possibility of real change in the world.
What changed my life was my experiences with the ordinary people of Boston. The white people in our neighborhood–and they were all white at the time–were many of them active anti-busers, and they had been constantly propagandized by the media and the politicians to fear black people and see them as the source of the attack on their children that busing represented. Yet these parents–most of them--rejected the racial BS and divisiveness that were being spread. The black parents were only too glad to join with us, and in people’s homes and public meetings amazed the white parents by denouncing the busing plan, which had uprooted their children and sent them to schools that had the same problems as the schools they were leaving. (In the first year of desegregation, only black children were bused.) (For a fuller description, see Why We Can Change the World.)
Reflecting on these two years I realized that these parents had a deeper sense of human decency and fair play than all the institutions that affected them–the politicians, the Church, the Boston Globe, the Court, the government. They had better values than these institutions and were a force for a better world. I began to rethink all my ideas in light of this new perception about ordinary people.
To get back to Ecclesiastes: one could certainly draw the lesson from the Boston busing experience that "the more things change, the more they remain the same." But that would be to ignore the questions of why and how they remain the same. So much is "one step forward, two steps back" because the ruling class makes it that way. The problem isn’t the people or "human nature." (In feudal times, kings claimed that their rule was by Divine Right and thus eternal. The capitalist class claim that capitalism is human nature and so cannot be changed.) The problem is the lack of democracy in society.
The ruling elite may seem impossible to defeat. In fact they have enormous tactical power but great strategic weakness. The basis of social cohesion and control in the U.S. and other countries has long been the confidence that, even if life may be difficult for us now, it will be better for our children. People no longer have that confidence. The rulers increasingly must rule by fear. That doesn’t mean, of course, that their power cannot last, but fear is not a stable basis for rule in a society where people cling to some democratic expectations, however assiduously the powerful are trying to deprive us of them.
Originally posted by Raz
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1 The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. 2 Vanity of vanities, said the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. 3 What profit has a man of all his labor which he takes under the sun? 4 One generation passes away, and another generation comes: but the earth stays for ever. 5 The sun also rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to his place where he arose. 6 The wind goes toward the south, and turns about to the north; it whirls about continually, and the wind returns again according to his circuits. 7 All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; to the place from where the rivers come, thither they return again. 8 All things are full of labor; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. 9 The thing that has been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. 10 Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it has been already of old time, which was before us. 11 There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after. 12 I the Preacher was king over Israel in Jerusalem. 13 And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven: this sore travail has God given to the sons of man to be exercised therewith. 14 I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit. 15 That which is crooked cannot be made straight: and that which is wanting cannot be numbered. 16 I communed with my own heart, saying, See, I am come to great estate, and have gotten more wisdom than all they that have been before me in Jerusalem: yes, my heart had great experience of wisdom and knowledge. 17 And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. 18 For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increases knowledge increases sorrow. | |||
The fact is, Ecclesiastes words are not terribly helpful in the real world, where life is struggle.
It is not true that nothing changes. The problem is that changes in society are always mixed: some of them good, some bad, and the good often get turned into something bad, since social change is rooted in countervailing forces. The driving force of history is the struggle of ordinary people to change the world to achieve their goals against a ruling class (capitalist or communist) which strives to dominate them. Because the ruling elite have the politicians, the corporate media, and other resources at their disposal, they often manage to turn positive reforms into instruments of social control. Thus it may appear that nothing has changed, but in fact the struggle continues at a new level.
My most vivid experience of a good thing being turned into a bad came during the battle over busing in Boston. In 1974 my wife and two small children and I moved into Dorchester, a neighborhood of Boston that, along with South Boston, was the center of the anti-busing movement, and our daughter entered kindergarten there.
In that same year the Federal Court found that the Boston School Committee had intentionally segregated the Boston public schools and ordered it to desegregate. The suit had originated in 1967, when black parents sued the Boston School Committee, charging that their children were receiving an inferior education in overcrowded, often decrepit buildings, lacking such elementary supplies as textbooks. Their list of demands included many things to improve the schools for their children. One item on the list was desegregation.
To many people the Court decision for desegregation sounded like a good thing–a victory for decency and for ordinary people. But, along with thousands of other parents, I soon learned that, just as segregation can be used to divide people and undermine children’s education, so can desegregation.
While the black parents’ original demand had been for improved schools, the Court order focused on race, not education. In the first year of busing the Court-approved plan closed down 36 schools, most of them in black neighborhoods, laid off over 600 teachers, broke the power of organized parents (it’s very difficult to have much effect on your children’s schools if they are bused far from home, attend several different schools–if you have more than one child--and must change schools every year or so) and replaced once vibrant parent organizations with Court-ordered Racial Ethnic Parent Councils–officially organized into White and Black caucuses--at each school, enjoined to discuss "safety" issues but not education. The Court did nothing to improve education for the victims of segregation and much to make it worse.
In the face of this nightmare (which included black children being stoned in South Boston), ten black parents and ten white parents formed an organization that we called Better Education Together. We tried to get standing in the Court, to challenge the NAACP and the School Committee’s desegregation plans, both of which were destructive numbers games. Failing to get standing as a party to the suit, Better Education Together decided that I should run for Boston School Committee as a means of reaching out to other parents.
The BSC at the time was a big deal, a powerful citywide institution of five members. We printed campaign literature with the pictures of four black and four white parents. We said that we felt as parents that we were trapped between two bad alternatives: a Boston School Committee that had delivered segregated, inferior education to all our children, black and white, and a Federal Court that was making things worse. We felt that we as parents had to unite and fight for our children. We declared that the issue in the schools is not race but education, and we listed educational improvements for all children that should be part of any desegregation plan. In spite of the tense racial climate, we were able to go into every neighborhood in Boston–South Boston, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, Brighton, wherever–and wherever we went we were greeted by people, some with tears in their eyes, who would say, "This is so wonderful. I thought nobody felt this way but me."
We didn’t win a seat on the Committee–our family had only lived in my precinct for three months before I declared my candidacy (I registered to vote at the same time I registered as a candidate), I was not Irish and we had long since left the Catholic Church, the campaign had little money and I was not much of a speaker–but we won about 29,000 votes and in a few months grew from a campaign organization of 20 into one of 350. But we achieved our purpose. We had a dramatic effect on the citywide School Committee race, forcing the other 18 candidates to speak to education as the issue in the schools.
The Court continued to do its thing, of course, and the Boston schools were officially desegregated, though so many children left the system that the schools are as racially patterned as they ever were. The schools still lack sufficient textbooks and supplies and the classrooms are still overcrowded. The busing plan, by breaking the ties between neighborhoods and schools, undermined community cohesion and greatly weakened the power of parents to affect their children’s education. Busing also weakened the ability of teachers to have a positive effect on their students, as they or their charges were frequently transferred from school to school. All in all, desegregation–done in the way it was done–was an effective ruling class strategy to undermine the education of working class youngsters to prepare them to accept their fate in an increasingly unequal society. (After the election, I was appointed an Education Policy Fellow in the U.S. Office of Education in Washington, DC. In that position I became convinced that the destructive outcome of busing in Boston was fully intended.)
Desegregation was also used very cleverly by the rulers to rehabilitate the image of the US government. The Vietnam War had exposed the government as an organization of war criminals capable of any atrocity to maintain elite power. With nightly TV images of angry whites attacking buses full of black children, the media presented the federal government as the protector of black children against a vicious white working class. For a ruling class which had recently faced massive opposition from working class soldiers in Vietnam and workers in the factories and mines, it was a brilliant piece of stage work.
The two years that I was engaged in this battle persuaded me that we can change the world. My family had moved to Boston after I was given the boot from a college in Maine where I had been an assistant professor of English (and an outspoken anti-war activist). In Boston, with a Ph.D. and four years college teaching experience, I was getting paid chump change as an "adjunct professor" at a local university and variously driving a truck, delivering the Globe, and painting gas stations, while my wife worked as a secretary/bookkeeper. More to the point, I had come to reject Marxism and any communist alternative to capitalism. Like many other people, I had despaired of the possibility of real change in the world.
What changed my life was my experiences with the ordinary people of Boston. The white people in our neighborhood–and they were all white at the time–were many of them active anti-busers, and they had been constantly propagandized by the media and the politicians to fear black people and see them as the source of the attack on their children that busing represented. Yet these parents–most of them--rejected the racial BS and divisiveness that were being spread. The black parents were only too glad to join with us, and in people’s homes and public meetings amazed the white parents by denouncing the busing plan, which had uprooted their children and sent them to schools that had the same problems as the schools they were leaving. (In the first year of desegregation, only black children were bused.) (For a fuller description, see Why We Can Change the World.)
Reflecting on these two years I realized that these parents had a deeper sense of human decency and fair play than all the institutions that affected them–the politicians, the Church, the Boston Globe, the Court, the government. They had better values than these institutions and were a force for a better world. I began to rethink all my ideas in light of this new perception about ordinary people.
To get back to Ecclesiastes: one could certainly draw the lesson from the Boston busing experience that "the more things change, the more they remain the same." But that would be to ignore the questions of why and how they remain the same. So much is "one step forward, two steps back" because the ruling class makes it that way. The problem isn’t the people or "human nature." (In feudal times, kings claimed that their rule was by Divine Right and thus eternal. The capitalist class claim that capitalism is human nature and so cannot be changed.) The problem is the lack of democracy in society.
The ruling elite may seem impossible to defeat. In fact they have enormous tactical power but great strategic weakness. The basis of social cohesion and control in the U.S. and other countries has long been the confidence that, even if life may be difficult for us now, it will be better for our children. People no longer have that confidence. The rulers increasingly must rule by fear. That doesn’t mean, of course, that their power cannot last, but fear is not a stable basis for rule in a society where people cling to some democratic expectations, however assiduously the powerful are trying to deprive us of them.
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