> On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 11:24 PM, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>
> ... SNIP ...
>
> Today, in my opinion at least, there is something to this as well. An awful
> lot of people have who were only 30 years ago members of the working-class.
> When the so-called boom came along they were, for various reasons,
> convinced
> that they had joined the privileged ranks (hehehe) of the lower
> middle-class. My favourite example of this, which was not only one of the
> first steps in this direction, but seems highly pertinent today, was the
> movement under the British Thatcher government to get working-class people
> to buy their council houses - houses that today are being repossessed. A
> lot
> of people are - and this is the key to social change - going to experience
> a
> sort of cognitive dissonance. All their attempts to join the "highbrows" by
> working harder, by keeping company shares, by doing up their houses which
> they considered a nest egg, by keeping up with the Jones' by buying new
> cars
> among other things; all these things will come crashing down around them.
> I'm not saying that they'll overthrow the state, but I'd imagine in the
> next
> decade that the demands of voters among other things will undergo a drastic
> change.
>
Sooo... does your argument about pending changes percolating for 20/20+ years under the radar of the general public, and misunderstood by censors and regulators, suggest that the moralism and subjective experience of people ought to be of primary concern to folks looking to develop more robust movement on the left, or is it the subjective stances and moral outrage potentially latent in their subconscious that ought to be the focus?
My students know tons of things the undermine what they reactively "know to be, and to always have been, true"... but they've never had anyone encourage them to evaluate received knowledge on the basis of personal experience, much less strategies for developing a socially self-reflexive way of being that empowers them to live a more intentional, less manipulated, life. The first steps I take in my Intro Soc classes point towards personal empowerment - given the depth of American individualism - but, by the end of the class, I've pointed out that they also know that the kinds of social change they appreciate - whether from the left or the right - comes from social movements rather than scary charismatic demagoguery.
In short, I seek to change their subjective experience by pointing to the elements of their subjective experience that they have been taught to ignore, to change the kinds of individualistic and reactionary moralism (whether righteous or depressive) that the enter the class with into something very different. I have a feeling that this is what Carrol was talking about in his critique of starting with moralism and again when he spoke of education within movement.
>