Hegel/Deleuze

The US differs from other advanced nations in two fundamental ways.  The first is seen in Figure 1: the failure to develop beyond the concrete operational level--the criterion of modernity established by Flynn.  The second is indicated by the excerpt from Lieven.  What Lieven is describing is what Nietzsche conceptualized as Ressentiment, and what I developed in Ressentiment and the Mechanisms of Defense.  America is the only putatively advanced capitalist nation whose semiosphere is dominated not only by the politics of resentiment, but by the policies of ressentiment, most notably No Child Left Behind.  The vehemence with which America's right-wing rejects everything to do with the Enlightenment is indeed exeptional, as is its elimination of any chance of achieving formal operational competence for its "native"--that is, its black and white Christian--population.

And then there is a third phenomenon whose effects on intellectual deveopment have been reckoned with only by a few: the regressive narcissism that is the psychological correlate of mass consumer culture in the postmodern world (Steve Hall, Simon Winlow and Craig Ancrum. Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture: crime, exclusion and the new culture of narcissism).  It is interesting to speculate on the way in which this interacts with different national, regional, and local cultures.  (See Intel Finalists.)

Ressentiment and orchestrated desire: these are the two major forces undermining the Progressive praxis--or rather, Progressive hopes--that have been the hallmark of the developmental trajectory Enlightenment to New Deal.  This Progressive praxis was an expression of Bildung, a concept central to Hegel and to Finland's highly praised but barely understood educational success (barely understood because, as Pasi Sahlberg has put it, schooling is only one of several moments in the developmental process--see link).

Ressentiment and desire undermine the prospects for Bildung, Resentiment by simply waging war against science and modernity (Vincent), succeeding in lower class communities in undermining the external positive referentials that play a critical role in the internalization of models and values that promote inner discipline; and desire by undermining from within through narcissistic regression the very possiblitity of such self-discipline (Hall, Ceci).  When these two forces combine--and they are the dominant ideological performances and identificatory references for enormous subgroups of the population (see map)--development suffer a fatal wound.  Children under such powerful influences are deprived of the whole framework that is the sine qua non for development--and this has nothing to do with schooling taken in isolation from the context in which schooling occurs.

The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy brings us close to the heart of fascism.  p. 84

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.  p. 218

The United States itself has never been exempt from fascism.  Indeed, antidemocratic and xenophobic movements have flourished in America since the Native American party of 1845 and the Know-Nothing Party ofthe 1850s.  In the crisis-ridden 1930s, as in other democracies, derivative fascist movements were conspicuous in the United States.  The Protestant evangelist Gerald B. Winrod's openly pro-Hitler Defenders of the Christian Faith with their Black Legion; William Dudley Pelley's Silver Shirts (the initials "SS" were intentional) . . . .  Much more dangerious are movements that employ authentically Amerian themes in ways that resemble fascism functionally.  The Klan revived in the 1920s, took on virulent anti-Semitism, and spread to cities and the Middle West.  In the 1930s, Father Charles E. Coughlin gathered a radio audience estimated at forty million around an anticommunist, anti-Wall Street, pro-soft money, and---after 1938--anti-Semitic message broadcast from his church in the ouskirts of Detroit.  For a moment in early 1936 it looked as if his Union Party and its presidential candidate, North Dakota congressman William Lemke, might overwhelm Roosevelt. . . .  p. 201

Today a "politics of ressentment" rooted in authentic American piety and nativism sometimes leads to violence against some of the very same "internal enemies" once targeted by the Nazis, such as homosexuals and defenders of abortion rights. . . .  The languge and symbols of an authentic American fascism would, of course, have little to do with the original European models.  They would have to be as familiar and reassuring to loyal Americans as the language and symbols of the original fascisms were familiar and reassuring to many Italians and Germans, as Orwell suggested. . . . No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses.  No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the pledge of allegiance [one minute and 45 seconds into the video above right].  These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the internal enemy.  p.  202 (Emphasis added)

  

Paul Franco, Nietzsche's Enlightenment: The Free-Spirit Trilogy of the Middle Period (University Of Chicago Press, 2011)

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (University Of Chicago Press, 2012)

Christa Davis Acampora, Contesting Nietzsche (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

[Veblen] provided a strong criticism of hedonism, including marginal utility theory, satirizing its conception of man as a "lightning calculator  of pleasures and pains" and arguing that economics should look to more modern social-psychological theories of behavior based on instinct and habit. (35)

Veblen's criticisms [of neoclassical economics] took two forms; one was scientific and had to do with the requirements of a properly evolutionary science of economics; the other was political and moral and had to do with the direction in which he thought society should evolve.  First, econmics in his view was still largely pre-Darwinan in that it used utilitarian theory as its criterion of choice and clung to an outmoded hedonistic psychology; it was teleological in that it unrealistically postulated certain processes such as equilibrium as normal and taxonomic insofar as it substituted classification for causal explanation.  It erred, methodologically, in using deduction to draw conclusions from unrealistic axioms. 31

Veblen's criticism of neoclassicism also focused on its neglect of the origins of consumer tastes and preferences, its use of marginalist explanations of income distribution and, implicitly, with the static role it assigned to the state.  In his view, neoclassicists simply took consumption patterns for granted without inquiry into the origins of consumer values.  They ignored the emulatory nature of much of consuumption and, also, the role of advertising and salesmanship in whetting consumer appetites.  31-2

Math is a language of logic.  It is a disciplined, organized way of thinking.  There is a right anwer; there are rules tht must be followed.  More than any other subject, math is rigor distilled. Mastering the languge of logic helps to embed higher-order habits in kids' minds.  The ability to reason . . . to detect patterns and to make informed guesses.