SIX

      THE VIOLENCE OF FORGETTING

      When ignorance and power join forces, history itself can be erased.

      How do we develop the necessary educational practices to challenge the problem of violence in our times? How might we differentiate between competing pedagogies of violence and hope? And what lessons might be learned so that we can build collective futures? The political and cultural theorist Henry A. Giroux has been at the forefront of these debates with his impassioned call to take the power of education seriously. Education is always a political form of intervention, Giroux maintains. This discussion begins from the very real presence of violence in the United States as witnessed in repeated mass killings and what this means for cultural memory and civic engagement. Confronting the raw realities of suffering, Giroux then directly addresses the politics of ignorance and the intellectual conditions that give rise to systems of oppression. Finally, he identifies the challenges and difficulties faced by the modern university when teaching students about violence.

      Brad Evans interviews Henry A. Giroux

      June 20, 2016

      Henry A. Giroux is a professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. A leading public intellectual and critical pedagogue, his latest books include America at War with Itself, American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism, and The Terror of the Unforeseen.

       Brad Evans: Throughout your work you have dealt with the dangers of ignorance and what you have called the violence of “organized forgetting.” Can you explain what you mean by this and why we need to be attentive to intellectual forms of violence?

      Henry Giroux: Unfortunately, we live at a moment in which ignorance appears to be one of the defining features of American political and cultural life. Ignorance has become a form of weaponized refusal to acknowledge the violence of the past and revels in a culture of media spectacles in which public concerns are translated into private obsessions, consumerism, and fatuous entertainment. As James Baldwin rightly warned, “Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”

      The warning signs from history are all too clear. Failure to learn from the past has disastrous political consequences. Such ignorance is not simply about the absence of information. It has its own political and pedagogical categories whose formative cultures threaten both critical agency and democracy itself.

      What I have called the violence of organized forgetting signals how contemporary politics are those in which emotion triumphs over reason, and spectacle over truth, thereby erasing history by producing an endless flow of fragmented and disingenuous knowledge. At a time in which figures like Donald Trump are able to gain a platform by promoting values of “greatness” that serve to cleanse the memory of social and political progress achieved in the name of equality and basic human decency, history and thought itself are under attack.

      Once ignorance is weaponized, violence seems to be a tragic inevitability. The mass shooting in Orlando is yet another example of an emerging global political and cultural climate of violence fed by hate and mass hysteria. Such violence legitimates not only a kind of inflammatory rhetoric and ideological fundamentalism that views violence as the only solution to addressing social issues, it also provokes further irrational acts of violence against others. Spurned on by a complete disrespect for those who affirm different ways of living, this massacre points to a growing climate of hate and bigotry that is unapologetic in its political nihilism.

      It would be easy to dismiss such an act as another senseless example of radical Islamic terrorism. That is too easy. Another set of questions needs to be asked. What are the deeper political, educational, and social conditions that allow a climate of hate, racism, and bigotry to become the dominant discourse of a society or worldview? What role do politicians with their racist and aggressive discourses play in the emerging landscapes of violence? How can we use education, among other resources, to prevent politics from being transformed into a pathology? And how might we counter these tragic and terrifying conditions without retreating into security or military mindsets?

       You insist that education is crucial to any viable critique of oppression and violence. Why?

      I begin with the assumption that education is fundamental to democracy. No democratic society can survive without a formative culture, which includes but is not limited to schools capable of producing citizens who are critical, self-reflective, knowledgeable, and willing to make moral judgments and act in a socially inclusive and responsible way. This is contrary to forms of education that reduce learning to an instrumental logic that too often and too easily can be perverted to violent ends.

      So we need to remember that education can be both a basis for critical thought and a site for repression that destroys thinking and leads to violence. Michel Foucault wrote that knowledge and truth not only “belong to the register of order and peace” but can also be found on the “side of violence, disorder, and war.” What matters is the type of education a person is encouraged to pursue.

      It’s not just schools that are a site of this struggle. “Education” in this regard not only includes public and higher education but also a range of cultural apparatuses and media that produce, distribute and legitimate specific forms of knowledge, ideas, values, and social relations. Just think of the ways in which politics and violence now inform each other and dominate media culture. First-person shooter video games top the video-game market while Hollywood films ratchet up representations of extreme violence and reinforce a culture of fear, aggression, and militarization. Similar spectacles now drive powerful media conglomerates like 21st Century Fox, which includes both news and entertainment subsidiaries.

      As public values wither along with the public spheres that produce them, repressive modes of education gain popularity, and it becomes easier to incarcerate people than to educate them, to model schools after prisons, to reduce the obligations of citizenship to mere consumption, and to remove any notion of social responsibility from society’s moral registers and ethical commitments.

       Considering Hannah Arendt’s warning that the forces of domination and exploitation require “thoughtlessness”