Let’s start a meta-cyber-rant. Let’s evoke a cyber-rage rant against the ranters.
We are losing touch with reality. Traumatised by change, cynical of authority and pressurised by the pace of life, we are embracing myths and misconceptions: we increasingly rely on personal anecdote rather than on expert opinion to inform our view of the world and we are more likely to view statistics as an attempt to lobby rather than an indicator of reality.
This skewed view of the world is not just a curious aberration, one of the hiccups of society in transition. The flight from reality is gathering momentum. It is feeding on itself; myth, repeated enough, becomes part of the community’s pool of knowledge; misconceptions, held with enough passion, set the agenda for society.
As the polls of perceptions divert further from the grounding of sense, logic, statistics, research, considered opinion, analysis and expertise, society is becoming more vulnerable to manipulation by political groups and vested interests.
More importantly, myth is receiving the imprimatur of authority as the most powerful institution - politics - is forced to respond to perceptions of reality rather than actual causes of concerns. The list of legislation crafted to quell misplaced fears grows annually
The most constantly recurring myth, maybe since early Greco-Roman history, has been the lament of the aged and the conservative about the ‘decline in standards’ in the young being perpetrated by dreadful, ‘soft, touchy, feely’ contemporary society ‘revolutionaries’ accused of lacking the disciplined rigour of our predecessors – standards of dress, manners, self-discipline and the like.
To say this is not to deny the absolute legitimacy, indeed the utter imperative, of the ever-recurring concerns throughout history for maintaining and increasing the standards of conduct of young people within a world of ever rapidly changing and demanding contexts.
And it does not matter where you dip into history, you will find thunderous roars of utter conviction that standards are ‘now’ palpably worse than they were a generation ago. The 1990s Jeremiahs hearken back to the 1950s. It is necessary, however, to apply an informed historical perspective to untrammelled cries of gloom and doom. For example, if you go back to the newspapers of the so-called ‘good old days’ of the 1950s you will find identical lamentations for contemporary disasters, and calls for a return to the presumed halcyon days of the 1930s. Ah, but how the right wing media pontificators and so many talk-back radio disc jockeys love to hark back to the mythical ‘good old days’ when, they assume, everything was wonderful.
Invariably associated with the standards crisis syndrome are the cries of those who pursue their own exclusivist nostrums for solution and who fiercely oppose the claims of any other theoretical positions. I am moved to describe as ‘intellectual terrorists” those who fiercely adhere to their own narrow remedies and who refuse to consider the claims of other theoretical approaches - irrespective of the variegated nature of standards and those who are expected to uphold these standards.
The discourse seems persistently soured by what the great philosopher Soren Kierekegaard called the either/or heresy. So often we have witnessed the erection and dismantling of straw person caricatures of points of view other than one’s own or of the particular ideological cultural or political empire being built by acolytes of some guru of the moment - often according to principles that would be anathema to the founding inspiration. George Bernard Shaw once wrote, melancholically, that Christianity could never be said to have failed because it could never be said to have been properly tried.
We need to resist, as far as possible, empire building and destructive infighting within and between opposing ‘camps’. We need to identify and resist those false either/or dichotomies and ideological entrenchments often predicated upon straw-person arguments and sometimes even ‘the cult of personality’. We should be on our critical guard to identify and contest theory that becomes dogma; critical enquiry which becomes worship; leaders who become gurus; bridges that become barricades; concepts that become articles of faith; followers who become acolytes; approaches which become religions; and dissent which becomes heresy, irrespective of the various intellectual or professional cultures from which they may come.
We must always be, to quote from W.H. Auden’s fine poem September 1, 1939, “ironic points of light” - idealists but armed with a healthy and informed scepticism of all preachers of orthodoxies.
The notion of informed, critical, eclecticism is central to my beliefs. There is a wealth of splendid insights and scholarship to draw upon. While some are either/or, mutually exclusive positions, many are not. We have so much to learn about reading from philology, psychology, philosophy, science etc, etc, etc. and far too frequently people in positions of power make grandiose assertions of future transformations - either to assuage contemporary critics or to cover over up failings of current policies and practices in some halcyon glow of a utopian future.
In a world where citizens who are fortunate enough to be in meaningful employment are experiencing ever-increasing flexibility and, for many, instability of employment; where they are becoming increasingly intolerant of shoddiness within the established professions; and where they are increasingly being assessed on the quality of their own performance and outcomes – society as a whole must be for more demanding of all.
Perhaps the aphorism “who guards the guardians” may never have been more apposite than it is today - and will be tomorrow - as we deal with the paradoxical realities of the intensively consolidated, transnational, corporate ownership and control of media entertainment and knowledge on the one hand. And the extraordinary diversification of possibilities for freedom and autonomy of participation in, and the creation of, new territories of knowledge and experience opened up for us by the digitised convergences of knowledge, information and entertainment, on the other.
Go you cyber-ranters, go. Find something significant to rant about and stop the drama-queening hissy-fitting poopery.
