[i]Twenty-five centuries ago, when Platonic philosophy was proposed as a rejection of Sophistic rhetoric and Cynical satire, there began a long-running series of disputes over methods for deliberating moral questions.1 These debates were attenuated in Western philosophy during the seventeenth century, when ground rules for discourse were greatly redrawn, notably in influential works by Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes. In recent times yet another battleground in the struggle over moral bases of public discourse has been the curriculum of public schools, where many parties heatedly debate questions about what knowledge is of most worth.
A recurrent image in these debates is that of the marketplace. In this essay, I will discuss how this image informs certain kinds of rhetoric, which is to say the detailed construction of deliberation.2 Two contrasting rhetorical positions will be presented, each of which may be called “cynical” but with significantly different implications. Some aspects of these differences, I claim, were infused into public schooling in the West from the outset, becoming more prominent as schooling expanded during the past two centuries.
Rhetorics of Cynicism
Cynicism was first named in the works of Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope in the fourth century B.C.E. (Before Common Era).3 To him and his colleagues, collectively known as Cynics, the basis of moral deliberation was a divinely-ordained but mysterious cycle of birth and death over which human action is powerless. They recommended that humans who would avoid delusion should steadfastly tell the entire truth about their impoverished situations. Cynics, for instance, readily condoned Socrates’ bold confrontation with the Athenian jury that condemned him to die, because capitulation to avoid death would have been an abhorrence to Cynical precepts.
In Greek philosophy, particularly for the cases of Socrates and Diogenes, parrhesia was a term associated with practices of unyielding honesty in defiance of convention. Although parrhesia is often associated with voluntary self-denial such as vows of poverty taken by ascetic monks, Greek Cynics were less contrite in their ways. They actively sought to affront common moral standards by shamelessly standing in the marketplace lost in thought, dressed in tatters, living in washtubs, defecating, masturbating, or copulating in public. For such willing disregard of conventions of self-presentation, the term cynic, or “dog” was evidently first applied to parrhesiasts such as Diogenes. In turn, he regarded the deprecatory label as an ironic tribute: he wrote to his father, "Do not grieve, father, because I am called ‘Dog.’…Although the name is not suitable, it is in a sense an honorable symbol. I am called a dog of heaven, not of earth, because I resemble the former, living not according to opinion, but according to nature, free under Zeus."4
Among Greek Cynics and their successors, moral deliberations were occasions for making unflinching witness to human insufficiency and divine authority. Living out their testimonies as mendicants, Cynics sought natural lives, which is to say uncontaminated by extensive associations with fellow humans. They chose to abide like animals, aspiring to live closer to an entity called “nature” which they averred did not harbor illusions of wealth or power. Like most adherents of various kinds of asceticism, Cynics considered publication of tracts to be irreconcilable with their beliefs. Carrying their repudiation of the marketplace further than most monastics, Cynics had no sacred texts, rituals, or icons at all. They were opposed to any ideals save generalized idealizations of and overarching concept of nature. They rejected any foundations for moral deliberation, holding that nature was inscrutable and that ordinary human affairs were contemptible.
Emperor Julian the Apostate described Cynical opposition to systematic philosophy, saying circa 360 C.E. that Cynicism
has been practised in all ages…It does not need any special study, one need only hearken to the god of Delphi when he enjoins the precepts “know thyself” and "alter the currency."5
Donald Dudley further summarized that:
Cynicism was really a phenomenon which presented itself in three not inseparable aspects—a vagrant ascetic life, an assault on all established values, and a body of literary genres particularly well adapted to satire and popular philosophical propaganda.6
The rhetoric of the ancient Cynics was therefore couched in interrogations of moral worth according to two imperatives: to “know thyself,” requiring continuous self-critique and, in parallel, to “alter the currency,” involving continuous social critique. Cynical satires and sermons are caricatured in tales of a philosopher-beggar dressed in tatters, bearing a lamp in broad daylight to search for an honest man. Variations of this figure reappear in many works, notably in New Testament portrayals of Jesus Christ taunting Pharisees or driving out money changers.
In its antique denotation of a mendicant philosopher who scorns and derides civil society, the term “Cynic” meant someone who upheld high standards of goodness, “marked by an ostentatious contempt for ease, wealth, and the enjoyments of life.” More recently, the term has mutated into meaning someone "disposed to disbelieve in human sincerity or goodness."7 How did the cynical basis of moral deliberation and political critique turn from a metaphysical source, such as the oracle of Delphi, into a nihilistic one desecrating all gods? That mutation has involved a shift in the importance of the marketplace, the public space in which the Cynics first appeared and testified to a moral universe above and beyond human knowledge and material existence. Even though the gods were not public presences, it was assumed by the first Cynics that naturally immanent divinity could be made manifest amid the bustles of commerce and daily routine. Following the wide spread of Western European ideas labeled the Enlightenment, the temporal discourse of the marketplace has come to overwhelm and absorb most variants of mysticism. Without gods like Zeus as their master, modern cynics became dogs of a different kind.
In effect, the discourse of the first Cynics placed in dichotomy two versions of reality, giving philosophers status to assert that one pole, “nature,” a source of spiritual and moral truths, was superior to the other, “artifice,” or social and economic verities. By the eighteenth century, relations between spiritual and economic norms had switched, so that the marketplace acquired superior status. Materialism came to dominate moral discourse over a long duration in many intricate ways. A specific aspect of this transition is evident in a change that takes place from the rhetoric of Diogenes to that of Hobbes and Descartes, in which vastly different notions of moral action emerge, to be further transformed in such influential European works as those by Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Rather than review these changes, I propose in the next section to illustrate some of their differences.
Two Riders in a Barren Landscape
Two cynical parties to long-standing debates over moral deliberation are portrayed in Bob Dylan’s song, “All Along the Watchtower,” the lyric of which is constructed as a vicious circle so that the first lines,
“There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief.
“There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief.”
follow the last lines,
All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.
Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl.
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.
The song’s narrative line is an endless loop in which there is constant confusion with no hope of escape. In the second stanza, however, the thief replies to the joker’s exclamation of futility as follows:
“No reason to get excited,” the thief, he kindly spoke,
"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.
But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate.
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."8
Dylan’s song recounts two contrasting approaches to moral deliberation, both cynical but with very different purposes. First, there is the joker who lives on the edge of the marketplace to mock its currency. By contrast, the thief comes from outside the marketplace to take the currency. The thief is a predator engaged in a black market that is an underground double of the above-ground market. The joker is a peripheral player who never wins, the odd card in most games. A court jester with no lineage, clad in motley that parodies the garb of those in power, the joker survives by making his patrons amused but not angry. Despite his precarious position, he is loyal; in Shakespeare’s King Lear, the Fool is the last retainer of the mad King, remaining at his side even after he loses all his power and wealth, so guileless as to ask him to "keep a schoolmaster that can teach thy fool to lie. I would fain learn to lie."9
Guile is the work of the thief, who lives by raiding the marketplace and resides outside its laws. The romantic figure of a legal transgressor as spiritual transcender grew more popular together with the development of centralized industrialized nation-states. By the nineteenth century, folkloric figures such as Robin Hood or Jesse James were portrayed on mythic quests to reclaim alienated lands, labor, or justice from modern marketplaces. The joker had powerful sponsors to insulate him from the market, but the thief, the more modern cynic, had to engage with it, construct doubles to it, and so contest the claims of economic life upon individual freedom. The joker retains tendencies to the life of denial and parrhesia espoused by ancient Cynics, but the thief questions the joker’s honesty in living as a slave. Unlike Lear’s Fool, the thief knows what lying is and how to lie.
In Dylan’s song, the advice that the joker gives the thief, to “not speak falsely now” would not seem a platitude to an early Cynic, but rather is a corollary to their two imperatives. Along with knowing oneself and altering the currency, speaking the truth would be included in a cynical catechism to prescribe the most moral course of action in a world that is not controllable by moral precepts. Such a catechism could not become universal, however, without dissolving the marketplace within which the self and the currency are both defined. Cynical practices of self-criticism and social criticism therefore entail a degree of social separation which defines limits and purposes of intellectual discourses and practices. Thus, the song’s two riders are depicted as outsiders at a distance from society, symbolized by the watchtower, the marketplace, or the court.10
Rhetorics of cynicism and implied critiques are idiosyncratic reactions to social circumstances; it may very generally be said, though, that these metaphorical figures and their social arrangements are set in a barren landscape, one that is divided along a boundary laid down during the seventeenth century, when Western thinkers formally abandoned divine law as a source of authority above and beyond the actions of nature and human society. This abandonment was announced by Hobbes as the superiority of social contract over natural right. In place of the “war of all against all” of humans in their natural state, Hobbes proposed that nation-states be organized rationally, in economic terms:
The Value, or WORTH of a man, is as of all other things, his Price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his Power: and therefore is not absolute; but a thing dependent on the need and judgement of another.11
Taking a step beyond the Delphic admonitions to “know thyself” and “alter the currency,” the modern self as proclaimed by Hobbes is itself a form of currency whose worth is set by social relations that resemble patterns of material supply and demand.
According to Hobbes, cash-nexus relations replace natural law as the basis of morality. Likewise, conceptions of self and society based upon traditional authorities such as the Delphic oracle are replaced by ideas of selfhood and nation based upon the precepts of natural science and mathematics. In Hobbes’ time, in the European seventeenth century, modern Western values of self and society transformed the subjects of cynical critiques and testimonies.
The ancient Cynic sought refuge from the marketplace at its margins, turning to nature for evidence of divine ideals upon which to base critiques of self and society. The modern cynic must occupy different enclaves for moral deliberation, either buffer zones such as courts, schools, or laboratories protected by law or custom, or gaps among these institutions in which self-reflection and social reconstruction can occur.12 Nature, no longer a conceptual space reserved for gods and their prophets, becomes an annex of the marketplace. The modern landscape upon which the joker and thief ride is barren of the sanctions of absolute divinity.
As Hobbes foretold, realignments of modern values are paralleled in widespread and frequent reevaluations of currency.13 The value of metal coins, long set by the monarch whose regal figure was stamped upon them, increasingly became associated with rates of exchange set by markets for the very metals. Michel Foucault says,
Whereas the Renaissance based the two functions of coinage (measure and substitution) on the double nature of its intrinsic character (the fact that it was precious), the seventeenth century turns the analysis upside down: it is the exchanging function that serves as a foundation for the other two characters (its ability to measure and capacity to receive a price thus appearing as qualities deriving from that function).14
The emergence of mercantile, bourgeois social arrangements led to more fluid currency as well as pluralistic and contingent sets of values. Just as a new rhetoric of science was constructed to proclaim with mathematical certainty the laws of nature and society, there arrived a new rhetoric of cynicism. Rather than a voluntarily powerless outsider appealing to forces outside the marketplace, the cynic began to appear as a willfully powerful outsider overriding the limits of a marketplace. Not content to mockingly alter the currency, the modern cynic steals it.
Far from taking nature as a model of morality, the modern cynic distrusts all models, including the modernist ideals of scientific and social progress. Pushed to its extreme, modern cynicism can lead to nihilism, a state of continuous doubt about both self and currency.15 As Friedrich Nietzsche, the most nihilist of modern cynics, aphorized:
truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter as metal, only coins.16
The Cynic of ancient Greece avoided the pit of nihilism by basing moral decisions on divine revelation, especially as manifest in natural processes; the modern cynic pulls up short of the nihilistic abyss by identifying material processes as relatively stable benchmarks in a godless world. For example, the value of gold, Nietzsche notwithstanding, may fluctuate but never becomes entirely devalued. Likewise, to a modern cynic, contingencies such as processes of historical change, legal rules of a commonwealth or disciplined observations of nature, while not necessarily absolute, are nonetheless sufficient bases for moral deliberations.17
Dylan’s two riders, the joker and the thief, represent two modes of rhetoric that generally take stances outside the centers of power. Both positions for deliberating the worth of the marketplace make specific reference to human fallibility and the limitations of convention. A third common feature of these rhetorical platforms is a highlighted conception of truth, impelling the rhetor to confess the poverty of human knowledge and action. The joker and the thief share their barren landscape with others who base their moralities on ideals such as God, nature, or history, but as critics and parrhesiasts they reject any means of escaping their plight by adhering to some such ideals. They accept the contingency of their situations, asserting their dependence upon others and assuming the eventual futility of all beliefs as well as their own.
After the seventeenth century, divine indulgence was no longer necessary for critiques and satires of marketplaces and their currency, because the currencies themselves had become standards of truth: “alter the currency” had itself been changed to, “money talks.” To modern cynics, anonymous and secretive, the rules of the marketplace take precedence over limits set by faith, law, or scruple. This idiom of moral deliberation, which Alasdair MacIntyre calls “genealogy,” is a form of realism set in opposition to religious idealism, which he calls “tradition,” and secular idealism, which he calls "encyclopaedia."18
By adopting a genealogical idiom of moral deliberation, modern cynics adhere to three precepts: self-knowledge, social critique, and parrhesia. In moral deliberations informed by these rules, cynics do not escape the circularity of their situation, they reaffirm it. This idiom has some specific implications, particularly for discourses of schooling. In the following section, I present evidence of ancient and modern cynicism in the rhetoric of educators in the United States, showing how ancient tensions between nature and the marketplace were incorporated into the design and construction of mass public schooling.
Cynicism Old and New in Schools
How do rhetorics of cynicism occur in public schooling? Since the seventeenth century, modern schools have been constructed and maintained generally insulated from the marketplaces that surround them. Schools, like the monastic cloisters from which they were derived, often in revolt against clericalism, were maintained by state agencies as specialized enclaves. Secular European schools flourished with curriculums based on conceptions of the classical seven liberal arts without direct linkages to commercial or utilitarian purposes, except perhaps the law.19
In the nineteenth century, after monarchies and theocracies had been toppled throughout Europe and the United States, schooling was transformed in ways suited to new conceptions of self, currency, nation, and God. At this time, professional educators came to be called a “classless profession,” translating into school curriculums the moral values of the Protestant churches.20 The rhetoric of the “schoolmen” was thus devoted to social utility, but retained an ascetic disdain for many human pursuits. As the leading promoter of common schools for all children and normal schools in which to train their teachers, Horace Mann took this position ardently and with eloquence:
Every one, either from his own experience or from observations of others is made acquainted with the emotions of fear, hope, jealousy, anger, revenge and the explosive phraseology in which those passions are vented. Now the diction, appropriate and almost peculiar to the coarser and more animal parts of our nature, is almost as distinct as though it were a separate language, from the style, in which questions of social right and duty, questions of morals, and even philosophy, when popularly treated, are discussed.21
The common schools, Mann and others maintained, were “bulwarks of democracy,” but only if they avoided “coarser” topics and the sensational diction with which they were expressed. Educators such as Mann, in the ancient cynical tradition, set out to serve the new republics by shunning the marketplace and its modern cynics who would knowingly manipulate popular passions.
It is not as though Mann and his peers advocated complete withdrawal from worldly pursuits, but rather they upheld a Protestant ideology that associated material prosperity with attainment of certain kinds of spiritual worth. Mann asserted that human progress depends upon the kinds of intelligence best cultivated in schools set apart from the marketplace:
For the creation of wealth, then,—for the existence of a wealthy people and a wealthy nation,—intelligence is the grand condition…The greatest of all the arts in political economy is to change a consumer into a producer; and the next greatest is, to increase the producer’s producing power;—an end to be directly attained by increasing his intelligence.22
In other words, Mann’s approach to schooling follows the two precepts of Greek cynicism: know thyself through reflective deliberation and alter the currency through social amelioration. Inverting the Cynical hierarchy that ranked philosophical idealism lower than naturalistic realism, Mann proposed that the schools cultivate an individual’s capacity for abstract knowledge, reified as “intelligence.” Carrying forward a traditional ascetic revulsion for worldly matters, Mann says that both production and consumption depend upon habits of contemplation without which "an ignorant man is little better than a swine, whom he so much resembles in his appetites, and surpasses in his powers of mischief."23 Mann’s rhetoric somewhat coincides with that of the joker, in standing apart from political strife and commercial struggle, sacrificing power to maintain an unswerving commitment to truths revealed in empirical studies of nature as well as exegetical studies of doctrine. In Mann’s rhetoric, common schools in the United States were dynamos of spiritual uplift and material progress, powered by ideas of moral worth labeled "human nature."24
In a fateful conjunction of ideas, the ideas and rhetoric of common-school reformers neatly dovetailed with tenets of physiological psychology developed in European research laboratories in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. The path from the labs to the schools was not smooth: there were debates among the “new” psychologists, pitting those who would keep the science of mind “pure” of practical applications against those who would apply psychological research for purposes of ameliorating social conditions. Most psychologists in the United States spoke out for psychological theories as intellectual bases for schooling practices; one of the foremost, John Dewey, declared,
We are overwhelmed by the consequences of the very sciences into which have gone our best thought and energy for these past few hundred years. We apparently do not control them, they control us and wreak their vengeance upon us…The recourse of a courageous humanity is to press forward…until we have control of human nature comparable to our control of physical nature.25
The remedies for social ills caused by technology in the marketplace, Dewey argues, are to be offset by technologies reserved for schools. Although “new psychologists” such as Dewey defined conceptions of human nature that were compatible with Protestant ideologies and industrialized economies, they maintained crucial rhetorical distinctions older than Diogenes. Schools built along “progressive” lines would be enclaves removed from the marketplace, not to transcend it so much as to improve it and all social arrangements.
The technologies of applied psychology proposed by Dewey and other progressive educators would maintain the divisions that Mann advocated between “baser” and “higher” languages. While equipped to address social problems, schools would remain separate and distinct social institutions: if schools were, in Dewey’s famous image, social arrangements in embryo, then they would seem to require a protective shell. As he later stated,
If our public-school system merely turns out efficient industrial fodder and citizenship fodder in a state controlled by pecuniary industry…it is not helping to solve the problem of building up a distinctive American culture; it is only aggravating the problem. That which prevents the schools from doing their educational work freely is precisely the pressure—for the most part indirect, to be sure—of domination by the money-motif of our economic regime.26
Dewey’s formulation of the marketplace is, like Mann’s, within an ascetic tradition similar to that of the Greek Cynics: commerce is too close for schools to ignore, but remains too hostile to “higher” pursuits around which the curriculum should be built. Dewey was far from cynical in his indomitable optimism about prospects for improving the human condition through philosophical speculation, scientific experimentation, and democratic action, but Dewey as psychologist and philosopher would share the same rhetorical platform as the joker: know thyself, alter the currency, and do not speak falsely.
Progressive educational reforms involved formulating intelligence as an individualized entity somehow distinct from utilitarian skills required to “make a living,” that is to maintain one’s body or earn money. Simply put, public school teachers retained their authority over students but delegated their authority over children and citizens. As Thomas Popkewitz summarized, "A network of relations linked teachers’ work, pedagogy, teacher education, and educational sciences. The epistemology gave reference to a rationally planned organization of schooling based on an individualization of social affairs and a secular notion of pastoral care."27
Progressive educators, their ranks filled with men and women dedicated to education as a distinct and elevated profession, struggled over what kinds of vocational and technological knowledge were worthy of inclusion in school textbooks and professional preparation programs. Often, the terms of debate changed little if at all: for example, a concept of predestination central to Calvinist theology, similar to one that Plato advanced in The Republic, turns up intact in early proposals for tracking vocational students. More often, advocates of various liberal and technical curricula were embroiled in continual controversies, including overt resistance by aboriginal and immigrant groups, despite overwhelming tides of assimilation, expansion, and institutionalization. There is no simple summary of these contentious curriculum debates that continue up to the present; as Herbert Kliebard has stated, what passes for contemporary curriculum is "a loose, largely unarticulated and not very tidy compromise."28
One reason that curriculum compromises are untidy is that much of the educators’ discourse, using what Mann called “higher diction,” is at odds with much in the daily lives of teachers, teacher educators, and policy makers. In many curriculum theories—as well as critiques, satires, and social histories schooling is described as contested terrain where children’s bodies, popular culture, and the commercial marketplace are very actively engaged. In the words of one teacher, Garret Keizer, writing about his feelings when he hears the word “education,”
few words make me as queasy as that one. When it does not smack of the most shameless professional jingoism, it bespeaks all kinds of mediocrity, fadism and quackery; it categorizes all kinds of people who have little to do with what I do in the classroom.29
In a competition to select a Teacher of the Year, Keizer was asked to describe what he finds most difficult about his job; he says,
I am surprised that I did not answer “grading papers.” Perhaps the nature of the competition prompted me to respond, “The struggle not to be cynical.” That was not a cynical reply, however. A good part of the struggle not to be cynical is resisting the disheartenment of working in "education."30
Keizer uses two contrasting meanings of cynicism in this passage: he is true to the Greek Cynic’s devotion to honesty, but nevertheless wants to avoid the modern cynic’s tendency toward nihilism. As anyone who has spent time in a teachers’ lounge will attest, the moral idiom of everyday discussions about curriculum is closer to either version of cynicism than to any sort of idealism or pragmatism, however ingrained they may be in educational research and policy. Or, put in MacIntyre’s terms, practitioners’ curriculum deliberations more closely resemble Nietzsche’s “genealogy” than Mann’s “tradition,” or Dewey’s "encyclopaedia."31
Here the problem of circularity takes practical form. How, without a universally-accepted moral tradition, or else a proven encyclopaedia of scientific bases for morality, can educators sustain coherent moral purposes for schooling? Although claimed in principle by some philosophers, no one has been able to show in practice how deliberation, reflection, and critique can avoid turning in on themselves, like ships without compasses, lacking over-riding abstractions such as “God,” “the market,” or “nature.” Without the solaces of religion or the regulations of commerce, educational deliberation nevertheless requires a foundation, or what Richard Rorty calls “solidarity,” that is to say, "the identification with ‘humanity as such,’…an awkward attempt to secularize the idea of becoming one with God."32
In schools, millions of teachers are asked to believe, as Mann and Dewey did, that their work serves secular ideals which in turn undergird curricular deliberations and decisions. All the while, most teachers are dubious about those ideals and are inclined, like Keizer, to wonder whether values inherited from educators such as Mann or Dewey could possibly mean anything for children growing up in cultures that uphold many different and often conflicting values. As MacIntyre summarizes,
Insofar as the curriculum, both in respect of [moral] enquiry and in respect of teaching, is no longer a whole, there can be no question of providing a rational justification for the continued existence and flourishing of the whole…The emptiness and triviality of so much of the rhetoric of official academia is a symptom of a much deeper disorder.33
Despite utopian visions held forth by nineteenth century educational reformers, the moral landscape of the late twentieth century is apparently more barren than many of their heirs would readily admit. Teachers, in the guise of the joker, daily face complex moral dilemmas choosing what is best, most useful, or most palatable to offer their students. Most of them will readily admit their frustration, yet revert to traditional and official pieties when confronted by the rulers of the marketplace or their doubles, the thieves of the underworld. Teachers speak out against “cynical manipulation” of schools or students, but the antagonism may not be a simple one; perhaps instead the choice is among related versions of cynicism. The rhetorical figure of the joker reappears in debates over curriculum, familiar and unquestioned, unable to lie but also unable to escape his predicament, especially when in dialogue with the thief.
Conclusion
Debates over curriculum are permanent parts of education. Controversies between schools and marketplaces are but a part of a long, inconclusive story in which educational ideas go through cycles of wax and wane, but never go away. Without decisive victories or losses, the debates continue; as rhetoricians and Cynics asserted twenty-five centuries ago, there is no way out, no shortcut to Olympus, and maybe even no Olympus at all. There is no refuge to be found in nature, human or otherwise, devoid of oracles and revelations. Similarly, the marketplace is at best a besieged haven, because nature or society cannot be completely and permanently managed through cash-nexus transactions.
Cynicism involves recognition of cyclical interdependence in a system without closure. Cynics serve to recall the limitations of marketplaces by occupying their margins, in interstices where various kinds of criticism are possible. Philosophers, educators—and jokers or thieves—likewise depend upon marketplaces to live in, talk about, or act upon. Such mutual dependency involves distinctive distance as well as common conversation.
In other words, all versions of self, currency, or truth share interpenetrating categories of moral deliberation. According to modern ideas of social order since Hobbes, human values are negotiated in markets governed but not entirely ruled by their commonwealths. Values float within systems framed by interests; Kenneth Burke described this synergistic relation as follows:
the greater the development of the financial rationale, the greater is the “spirituality” in man’s relations to material goods, which he sees less in terms of their actual nature as goods, and more in the “ideal” terms of the future and of monetary (symbolic) profit.34
Or, as Burke summarizes, “realism plus money equals idealism.” That is to say, symbolic values are set by markets in which persons, societies, or ideas circulate.
Hence, a circular narrative circumscribes both the marketplace and the philosopher who stands at its margin. Goods, currencies, data, and ideas are all in circular flow; their values can be altered, according to the second precept of Cynicism, but cannot be ended. Unlike idealist moralities which are typically linear, directed at utopian ends, in cynical moralities there are no ultimate ends worth knowing or pursuing, thereby making immediacy a crucial value.
For educators, a cynical moral idiom for curriculum deliberation (in other words, a “genealogical” approach) has profound implications. No longer within havens of their own making, set aside from the marketplace to pursue higher ideals, educators must learn to foster open discussions involving all approaches to knowledge and action. These debates may never be resolved, but their conduct deeply concerns each individual and community. In a world instantaneously and completely linked by technology, a global network and a planetary environment are affected as well. There are no enclaves, no ivory towers in such a world, nor can the marketplace operate without heed. Both the joker and the thief must nowadays be aware of cameras following their every move.
The joker and the thief interact with each other because their differences stem from different ways that they get and spend their money, not different positions on a fixed hierarchy of values. Educational, political, and economic institutions are likewise connected by dependence as well as separated by difference. Now, more than ever, it is as if we ride together over a barren landscape; our interdependent circumstances demand reflection about our roles, honesty about our limitations, and adaptation to rapid changes. There is no way out of here; we must not speak falsely now; the hour is getting late.
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