85. Three
Most Significant Books: The Underground History of American Education by John
Taylor Gatto from archive.org
85. Three
Most Significant Books
The
three most influential books ever published in North America, setting aside the
Bible and The New England Primer, were
all published in the years of the Utopian
transformation of America which gave us government schooling: Uncle Tom
's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly
(1852), a book which testifies to the
ancient obsession of English- speaking elites with the salvation of the
under- classes; Ben-Hur (1880), a book illustrating the Christian belief that Jews
can eventually be made to see the light of reason and converted; and the last a pure Utopia,
Looking Backwards (1888), still in print more
than one hundred years later, translated into thirty languages.'
In
1944, three American intellectuals, Charles Beard, John Dewey, and Edward
Weeks, interviewed separately,
proclaimed Edward Bellamy's Looking Backwards second only to Marx's Das Kapital as the most influential
book of modern times. Within three years
of its publication, 165 "Bellamy Clubs" sprouted up. In the
next twelve years, no less than
forty-six other Utopian novels became best sellers.
Was it Civil War, chaos, decades of mass
immigration, or a frightening series of bloody
national labor strikes shattering our class-free myths that made the
public ready for stories of a better
tomorrow? Whatever the cause or causes, the flowering communities of actual American utopianism took on real shape
in the nineteenth century, from famous
ones like Owenite communities and Fourienan phalansteres or
Perfectionist sexual stews like Oneida,
right down to little-known oddities, like Mordecai Noah's "Ararat,"
city of refuge for Jews. First they
happened, then they were echoed in print, not the reverse. Nothing in the human social record matches
the outburst of purely American longing for
something better in community life, the account recorded in deeds and
words in the first full century of our
nationhood.
What Bellamy's book uncovered in
middle-class/upper-middle-class consciousness was revealing — the society he describes is a
totally organized society, all means of production are in the hands of State parent-surrogates.
The conditions of well-behaved, middle-class
childhood are recreated on a corporate scale in these early Utopias.
Society in Bellamy's ideal future has
eliminated the reality of democracy, citizens are answerable to commands of industrial officers, little room
remains for self-initiative. The State
regulates all public activities, owns the means of production,
individuals are transformed into a unit
directed by bureaucrats.
Erich Fromm thought Bellamy had missed the
strong similarities between corporate
socialism and corporate capitalism — that both converge eventually in
goals of industrialization, that both
are societies run by a managerial class and professional politicians, both thoroughly materialistic in
outlook; both organize human masses into a
centralized system; into large, hierarchically arranged employment-pods,
into mass political parties. In both,
alienated corporate man — well-fed, well-clothed, well- entertained — is governed by bureaucrats.
Governing has no goals beyond this. At the end
of history men are not slaves, but robots. This is the vision of Utopia
seen complete.
6.
Economist Donald Hodges' book, America's New Economic Order, traces the
intellectual history of professionalism
in management (John Kenneth Galbraith's corporate "Technostructure"
in The New Industrial State) to Looking Backwards which described an emerging public economy
similar to what actually happened. Hodges shows how various theorists of the
Utopian transition like John Dewey and
Frederick Taylor shaped the regime of professional managers we live under. No Place To Hide
No comments:
Post a Comment