While I do agree that we essentially have a 'junk' culture and the population at large has a 'here today, gone later today" attitude, I find Habermas' and the Modernist's attitudes infuriating. Entertainment, to them, seems out of the question--there goes most music, comic books, paperbacks, and the like. Anything that produced that doesn't force one think or work to understand it is worthless in the public sphere. While I agree that the masses need to be educated and/or be more politically aware and active, I really think that Modernists and Habermas need to get blue collar jobs, just to see how taxing manual labor can be and know at the end of a back-breaking, demoralizing day how a working class person just wants to have a beer and a laugh, because they don't have much time or energy for much else.
I also want to take a crack at Habermas, because he's all for media owners pushing their opinions on the outlets they own and the grounds that 'the point of the public sphere is for competing voices to come together presenting different positions, expressing their own private thoughts' and again ignoring the burden of inequality due to the fact that the most major media outlets are owned by people with money, and so they get to use their money to buy a huge voice in the public sphere, stomping the majority who are the working class and have been worked into apathy (at least in the US--I've heard there are magical lands where citizens not only get health care, but they also get more time off to tend to their families and more vacation time than the US working class do) or are just too busy working to keep the roof over their head and food on their plate (79). Furthermore, if he wants the working classes to be educated so much, then why can't he convince governments (especially the US) to make it easier for bright working class kids to obtain a formal college education? My guess is that Habermas was/is disgusted with the US because we seem to be the worst offenders of junk culture consumption and one of the least educated populations in the industrialized/modern world, and so has given up on us (though, I would have loved to see him tear the Bush Administration a new one).
Also, if the governments should be in charge of the arts or other elements of 'culture,' you might end up with this:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
You forget that the hard-working, focused individual can get into many helpful programs throughout K-12, with tutoring and after-school programs offered everywhere. Sure, it's not easy, but a focused kid from a working-class family (like me) can graduate from high school and qualify for pell grants, cal grants, bog waiver fees, EOP, and many other scholarships. If you add ethnicity to the mix, there are scholarships everywhere. So I disagree that the government should hold the hands of every working-class child throughout their education--they already are offered numerous programs.
Post a Comment