Henry A. Giroux: The blight of rampant consumerism, unregulated finance capital and weakened communal bonds is directly related to the culture’s production of atomized, isolated and utterly privatized individuals who have lost sight of the fact that “humanity is never acquired in solitude.” This retreat into private silos has resulted in the inability of individuals to connect their personal suffering with larger public issues. Thus detached from any concept of the common good or viable vestige of the public realm, they are left to face alone a world of increasing precarity and uncertainty in which it becomes difficult to imagine anything other than how to survive. Under such circumstances, there is little room for thinking critically and acting collectively in ways that are imaginative and courageous.
Surely, the celebration and widespread prevalence of ignorance in American culture does more than merely testify “to human backwardness or stupidity”; it also “indicates human weakness and the fear that it is unbearably difficult to live beset by continuous doubts.” Yet, what is often missed in analysis of political and civic illiteracy as the new normal is the degree to which these new forms of illiteracy not only result in an unconscious flight from politics, but also produce a moral coma that supports modern systems of terror and authoritarianism. Civic illiteracy is about more than the glorification and manufacture of ignorance on an individual scale: it is producing a nationwide crisis of agency, memory and thinking itself.
[…] How else to explain the endless celebration of an unchecked self-interest, a culture that accepts cruelty toward others as a necessary survival strategy, a growing “economics of contempt” that maligns and blames the poor for their condition rather than acknowledging injustices in the social order, or the paucity of even the most rudimentary knowledge among the American public about history, politics, civil rights, the Constitution, public affairs, politics and other cultures, countries and political systems? Political ignorance now exists in the United States on a scale that seems inconceivable: for example, “only 40 percent of adults know that there are 100 Senators in the U.S. Congress,” and a significant number of Americans believe that the Constitution designated English as the country’s official language and Christianity as its official religion.
What is particularly disturbing is the way in which there has been a resurgence of a poisonous form of technical rationality in American culture, or what I call the return of data storms that uncritically amass metrics, statistics and empirical evidence at the expense of knowledge that signals the need for contextualization and interpretation in support of public values, the common good and the ethical imagination. Data storms make an appeal to a decontextualized and allegedly pure description of facts, and what Herbert Marcuse called a “misplaced concreteness,” one that was particularly “prevalent in the social sciences, a pseudo-empiricism which . . . tended to make the objectivity of the social sciences a vehicle of apologetics and defense of the status quo.”
This obsession with metrics feeds an insatiable desire for control and lives in an eternal present, removed from matters of justice and historical memory. The novelist, Anne Lamott, is right in arguing that the “headlong rush into data is overshadowing ‘everything great and exciting that someone like me would dare to call grace. What this stuff steals is our aliveness . . . Grids, spreadsheets and algorithms take away the sensory connection to our lives, where our feet are, what we’re seeing, all the raw materials of life, which by their very nature are disorganized.’ Metrics, she said, rob individuals of the sense that they can choose their own path, ‘because if you’re going by the data and the formula, there’s only one way.'” More here.