BILL MOYERS:
Welcome.
A very wise teacher once told us, "If you
want to change the world, change the metaphor."
Then he gave us some of his favorite examples.
You think of language differently, he said,
if you think of "words pregnant with celestial
fire."
Or "words that weep and tears that speak."
Of course, the heart doesn't physically separate
into pieces when we lose someone we love,
but "a broken heart" conveys the depth of
loss.
And if I say you are the "apple of my eye",
you know how special you are in my sight.
In other words, metaphors cleanse the lens
of perception and give us a fresh take on
reality.
In other words.
Recently I read a book and saw a film that
opened my eyes to see differently the crisis
of our times, and the metaphor used by both
was, believe it or not, zombies.
You heard me right, zombies.
More on the film later, but this is the book:
"Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of
Casino Capitalism".
Talk about "connecting the dots" -- read this,
and the headlines of the day will, I think,
arrange themselves differently in your head
-- threading together ideas and experiences
to reveal a pattern.
The skillful weaver is Henry Giroux, a scholar,
teacher and social critic with seemingly tireless
energy and a broad range of interests.
Here are just a few of his books: "America's
Education Deficit and the War on Youth," "Twilight
of the Social," "Youth in a Suspect Society,"
"Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education."
Henry Giroux is the son of working class parents
in Rhode Island who now holds the Global TV
Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies
at McMaster University in Canada.
Henry Giroux, welcome.
HENRY GIROUX:
Pleasure.
It's great to be here.
BILL MOYERS:
There's a great urgency in your recent books
and in the essays you've been posting online,
a fierce urgency, almost as if you are writing
with the doomsday clock ticking.
What accounts for that?
HENRY GIROUX:
Well, for me democracy is too important to
allow it to be undermined in a way in which
every vital institution that matters from
the political process to the schools to the
inequalities that, to the money being put
into politics, I mean, all those things that
make a democracy viable are in crisis.
And the problem is the crisis, while we recognize
in many ways is associated increasingly with
the economic system, what we haven't gotten
yet is that it should be accompanied by a
crisis of ideas, that the stories that are
being told about democracy are really about
the swindle of fulfillment.
The swindle of fulfillment in that what the
reigning elite in all of their diversity now
tell the American people if not the rest of
the world is that democracy is an excess.
It doesn't really matter anymore, that we
don't need social provisions, we don't need
the welfare state, that the survival of the
fittest is all that matters, that in fact
society should mimic those values in ways
that suggest a new narrative.
I mean you have a consolidation of power that
is so overwhelming, not just in its ability
to control resources and drive the economy
and redistribute wealth upward, but basically
to provide the most fraudulent definition
of what a democracy should be.
I mean, the notion that profit making is the
essence of democracy, the notion that economics
is divorced from ethics, the notion that the
only obligation of citizenship is consumerism,
the notion that the welfare state is a pathology,
that any form of dependency basically is disreputable
and needs to be attacked, I mean, this is
a vicious set of assumptions.
BILL MOYERS:
Are we close to equating democracy with capitalism?
HENRY GIROUX:
Oh, I mean, I think that's the biggest lie
of all actually.
The biggest lie of all is that capitalism
is democracy.
We have no way of understanding democracy
outside of the market, just as we have no
understanding of how to understand freedom
outside of market values.
BILL MOYERS:
Explain that.
What do you mean "outside of market values?"
HENRY GIROUX:
I mean you know, when Margaret Thatcher married
Ronald Reagan--
BILL MOYERS:
Metaphorically?
HENRY GIROUX:
Metaphorically.
Two things happened.
1) There was this assumption that the government
was evil except when it regulated its power
to benefit the rich.
So it wasn't a matter of smashing the government
as Reagan seemed to suggest, it was a matter
of rearranging it and reconfiguring it so
it served the wealthy, the elites and the
corporate, of course, you know, those who
run mega corporations.
But Thatcher said something else that's particularly
interesting in this discussion.
She said there's no such thing as society.
There are only individuals and families.
And so what we begin to see is the emergence
of a kind of ethic, a survival of the fittest
ethic that legitimates the most incredible
forms of cruelty, that seems to suggest that
freedom in this discourse of getting rid of
society, getting rid of the social-- that
discourse is really only about self-interest,
that possessive individualism is now the only
virtue that matters.
So freedom, which is essential to any notion
of democracy, now becomes nothing more than
a matter of pursuing your own self interests.
No society can survive under those conditions.
BILL MOYERS:
So what is society?
When you use it as an antithesis to what Margaret
Thatcher said, what do you have in mind?
What's the metaphor for--
HENRY GIROUX:
I have in mind a society in which the wealth
is shared, in which there is a mesh of organizations
that are grounded in the social contract,
that takes seriously the mutual obligations
that people have to each other.
But more than anything else-- I'm sorry, but
I want to echo something that FDR once said,
When he said that, you know, you not only
have to have personal freedoms and political
freedoms, the right to vote the right to speak,
you have to have social freedom.
You have to have the freedom from want, the
freedom from poverty, the freedom from-- that
comes with a lack of health care.
Getting ahead cannot be the only motive that
motivates people.
You have to imagine what a good life is.
But agency, the ability to do that, to have
the capacity to basically be able to make
decisions and learn how to govern and not
just be governed--
BILL MOYERS:
As a citizen.
HENRY GIROUX:
As a citizen.
BILL MOYERS:
A citizen is a moral agent of--
HENRY GIROUX:
A citizen is a political and moral agent who
in fact has a shared sense of hope and responsibility
to others and not just to him or herself.
Under this system, democracy is basically
like the lotto.
You know, go in, you put a coin in, and if
you're lucky, you win something.
If you don't, then you become something else.
BILL MOYERS:
So then why when I talk about the urgency
in your writing, your forthcoming book opens
with this sentence, "America's descending
into madness."
Now, don't you think many people will read
that as hyperbole?
HENRY GIROUX:
Sometimes in the exaggerations there are great
truths.
And it seems to me that what's unfortunate
here is that's not an exaggeration.
BILL MOYERS:
Well, madness can mean several things.
It can mean insanity.
It can mean lunacy.
But it can also mean folly, foolishness, you
know, look at that craziness over there.
Which do you mean?
HENRY GIROUX:
I mean, it's certainly not just about foolishness.
It's about a kind of lunacy in which people
lose themselves in a sense of power and greed
and exceptionalism and nationalism in ways
that so undercut the meaning of democracy
and the meaning of justice that you have to
sit back and ask yourself how could the following,
for instance, take place?
How could people who allegedly believe in
democracy and the American Congress cut $40
billion from a food stamp program, half of
which those food stamps go to children?
And you ask yourself how could that happen?
I mean, how can you say no to a Medicaid program
which is far from radical but at the same
time offers poor people health benefits that
could save their lives?
How do you shut down public schools and say
that charter schools and private schools are
better because education is really not a right,
it's an entitlement?
How do you get a discourse governing the country
that seems to suggest that anything public,
public health, public transportation, public
values, you know, public engagement is a pathology?
BILL MOYERS:
Let me answer that from the other side.
They would say to you that we cut Medicaid
or food stamps because they create dependency.
We closed public schools because they aren't
working, they aren't teaching.
People are coming out not ready for life.
HENRY GIROUX:
No, no, that's the answer that they give.
I mean, and it's a mark of their insanity.
I mean, that's precisely an answer that in
my mind embodies a kind of psychosis that
is so divorced-- is in such denial about power
and how it works and is in such denial about
their attempt at what I call individualize
the social, in other words--
BILL MOYERS:
Individualize?
HENRY GIROUX:
Individualize the social, which means that
all problems, if they exist, rest on the shoulders
of individuals.
BILL MOYERS:
You are responsible.
HENRY GIROUX:
You are responsible.
BILL MOYERS:
If you're poor, you're responsible if you're
ignorant, you're responsible if--
HENRY GIROUX:
Exactly.
BILL MOYERS:
--you're sick?
HENRY GIROUX:
That's right, that the government-- the larger
social order, the society has no responsibility
whatsoever so that-- you often hear this,
I mean, if there--I mean, if you have an economic
crisis caused by the hedge fund crooks, you
know and millions of people are put out of
work and they're all lining up for unemployment,
what do we hear in the national media?
We hear that maybe they don't know how to
fill out unemployment forms, maybe it's about
character.
You know, maybe they're just simply lazy.
BILL MOYERS:
This line struck me, "The ideology of hardness
and cruelty runs through American culture
like an electric current..."
HENRY GIROUX:
Yeah, it sure does.
I mean, to see poor people, their benefits
being cut, to see pensions of Americans who
have worked like my father, all their lives,
and taken away, to see the rich just accumulating
more and more wealth.
I mean, it seems to me that there has to be
a point where you have to say, "No, this has
to stop."
We can't allow ourselves to be driven by those
lies anymore.
We can't allow those who are rich, who are
privileged, who are entitled, who accumulate
wealth to simply engage in a flight from social
and moral and political responsibility by
blaming the people who are victimized by those
policies as the source of those problems.
BILL MOYERS:
There's a new reality you write emerging in
America in no small part because of the media,
one that enshrines a politics of disposability
in which growing numbers of people are considered
dispensable and a drain on the body politic
and the economy, not to mention you say an
affront on the sensibilities of the rich and
the powerful.
HENRY GIROUX:
If somebody had to say to me-- ask me the
question, "What exactly is new that we haven't
seen before?"
And I think that what we haven't seen before
is an attack on the social contract, Bill,
that is so overwhelming, so dangerous in the
way in which its being deconstructed and being
disassembled that you now have as a classic
example, you have a whole generation of young
people who are now seen as disposable.
They're in debt, they're unemployed.
My friend, Zygmunt Bauman, calls them the
zero generation: zero jobs, zero hope, zero
possibilities, zero employment.
And it seems to me when a country turns its
back on its young people because they figure
in investments not long term investments,
they can't be treated as simply commodities
that are going to in some way provide an instant
payback and extend the bottom line, they represent
something more noble than that.
They represent an indication of how the future
is not going to mimic the present and what
obligations people might have, social, political,
moral and otherwise to allow that to happen,
and we've defaulted on that possibility.
BILL MOYERS:
You actually call it-- there's the title of
the book, "America's Education Deficit and
the War on Youth."
HENRY GIROUX:
Oh, this is a war.
It's a war that endlessly commercializes kids,
both as commodities and as commodifiable.
BILL MOYERS:
Example?
HENRY GIROUX:
Example being that the young people can't
turn anywhere without in some way being told
that the only obligation of citizenship is
to shop, is to be a consumer.
You can't walk on a college campus today and
walk into the student union and not see everybody
represented there from the local banks to
Disneyland to local shops, all selling things.
I mean, it's like the school has become a
mall.
It imitates the mall.
And if you walk into schools as one example,
I mean, you look at the buses, there are advertisements
on the buses.
You walk into the bathroom, there are advertisements
above the stalls.
I mean, and the curriculum is written by General
Electric.
BILL MOYERS:
We're all branded--
HENRY GIROUX:
They're branded, they're branded.
BILL MOYERS:
--everything is branded?
HENRY GIROUX:
Where are the public spaces for young people
other learn a discourse that's not commodified,
to be able to think about non-commodifiable
values like trust, justice, honesty, integrity,
caring for others, compassion.
Those things, they're just simply absent,
they're not part of those public spheres because
those spheres have been commodified.
What does it mean to go to school all day
and just be taking tests and learning how
to teach for the test?
Their minds are numb.
I mean--the expression I get from them, they
call school dead time, these kids.
Say it's dead time.
I call it their dis-imagination zones.
BILL MOYERS:
Dis-imagination?
HENRY GIROUX:
Yeah, yeah, they rob-- it's a form of learning
that robs the mind of any possibility of being
imaginative.
The arts are cut out, right, so the questions
are not being raised about what it means to
be creative.
All of those things that speak to educating
the imagination, to stretching it, the giving
kids the knowledge, a sense of the traditions,
the archives to take risks, to learn about
the world, they're disappearing.
BILL MOYERS:
I heard you respond to someone who asked you
at a public session the other evening--"What
would you do about what you've just described?"
And your first response was start debating
societies in high schools all across the country.
HENRY GIROUX:
That's right.
One of the things that I learned quickly as
a result of the internet is I started getting
a ton of letters from students who basically
were involved in these debate societies.
And they're saying like things, "We use your
work.
We love this work."
And I actually got involved with one that
was working with-- out of Brown University's
working with a high school in the inner cities
right, and I got involved with some of the
students.
But then I began to learn as a result of that
involvement that these were the most radical
kids in the country.
I mean, these were kids who embodied what
a critical public sphere meant.
They were going all over the country, different
high schools, working class kids no less,
debating major issues and getting so excited
about in many ways winning these debates but
doing it on the side of-- something they could
believe in.
And I thought to myself, "Wow, here's a space."
Here's a space where you're going to have
a whole generation of kids who could be actually
engaging in debate and dialogue.
Every working class urban school in this country
should put its resources as much as possible
into a debate team.
BILL MOYERS:
My favorite of your many books is this one,
"Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of
Casino Capitalism."
Why that metaphor, zombie politics?
HENRY GIROUX:
Because it's a politics that's informed by
the machinery of social and civil death.
BILL MOYERS:
Death?
HENRY GIROUX:
Death.
It's a death machine.
It's a death machine because in my estimation
it does everything it can to kill any vestige
of a robust democracy.
It turns people into zombies, people who basically
are so caught up with surviving that they
have no-- they become like the walking dead,
you know, they lose their sense of agency--
I mean they lose their homes, they lose their
jobs.
And so this zombie metaphor actually operated
at two levels.
I mean, at one level it spoke to people who
have no visions, who exercise a form of political
leadership that extends the politics of what
I call war and the machineries of death, whether
those machineries are at home or abroad, whether
they're about the death of civil liberties
or they're about making up horrendous lies
to actually invade a country like Iraq.
So this-- the zombie metaphor is a way to
sort of suggest that democracy is losing its
oxygen, you know, it's losing its vitality,
that we have a politics that really is about
the organization of the production of violence.
It's losing its soul.
It's losing its spirit.
It's losing its ability to speak to itself
in ways that would span the human spirit and
the human possibility for justice and equality.
BILL MOYERS:
Because we don't think of zombies as having
souls?
HENRY GIROUX:
They don't have souls.
BILL MOYERS:
Right.
You--
HENRY GIROUX:
They're driven by lust.
BILL MOYERS:
By lust?
HENRY GIROUX:
The lust for money, the lust for power.
BILL MOYERS:
Well, that's, I guess, why you mix your metaphors.
Because you talk about casino capitalists,
zombie politics, which you say in the book
shapes every aspect--
HENRY GIROUX:
Every aspect.
BILL MOYERS:
--of society .
HENRY GIROUX:
Yeah, at the current moment.
This is what--
BILL MOYERS:
How so?
HENRY GIROUX:
Well, first, let's begin with an assumption.
This casino capitalism as we talk about it,
right, one of the things that it does that
hasn't been done before, it doesn't just believe
it can control the economy.
It believes that it can govern all of social
life.
That's different.
That means it has to have its tentacles into
every aspect of everyday life.
Everything from the way schools are run to
the way prisons are outsourced to the way
the financial services are run to the way
in which people have access to health care,
it's an all-encompassing, it seems to me,
political, cultural, educational apparatus.
And it basically has nothing to do with expanding
the meaning and the substance of democracy
itself.
What it has to do is expanding-- what it means
to get--a quick return, what it means to take
advantage of a kind of casino logic in which
the only thing that drives you is to go to
that slot machine and somehow get more, just
pump the machine, put as much money in as
you can into it and walk out a rich man.
That's what it's about.
BILL MOYERS:
You say that casino capitalist, zombie politics
views competition as a form of social combat,
celebrates war as an extension of politics
and legitimates a ruthless social Darwinism.
HENRY GIROUX:
Oh, I mean, it is truly ruthless.
I mean, imagine yourself on a reality TV program
called "The Survivor", you and I, we're all
that's left.
The ideology that drives that program is only
one of us is going to win.
I don't have any respect for you.
I mean, all I'm trying to do is beat you.
I just want to be the one that's left.
I want to win the big prize.
And it seems to me that what's unfortunate
is that reality now mimics reality TV.
It is reality TV in terms of the consensus
that drives it, that the shared fears are
more important than shared responsibilities,
that the social contract is the pathology
because it basically suggests helping people
is a strength rather than a weakness.
It believes that social bonds not driven by
market values are basically bonds that we
should find despicable.
But even worse, in this ethic, the market
has colonized pleasure in such a way that
violence in many ways seems to be the only
way left that people can actually experience
pleasure whether it's in the popular medium,
whether it's in the way in which we militarize
local police to become SWAT teams that actually
will break up poker games now in full gear
or give away surplus material, equipment to
a place like Ohio State University, who got
an armored tank.
I mean, I guess-- I'm wondering what does
it mean when you're on a campus and you see
an armored tank, you know, by the university
police?
I mean, this is-- everything is a war zone.
You know, Senator Graham--when Lindsey Graham,
he said-- in talking about the terrorist laws,
you know these horrible laws that are being
put into place in which Americans can be captured,
they can be killed and, you know--the kill
list all of this, he basically says, "Everybody's
a potential terrorist."
I mean, so that what happens here is that
this notion of fear and this fear around the
notion of security that is simply about protecting
yourself, not about social security, not about
protecting the commons, not about protecting
the environment, turns everybody into a potential
enemy.
I mean, we cannot mediate our relationships
it seems any longer in this culture in ways
in which we would suggest and adhere to the
notion that justice is a matter of caring
for the other, that compassion matters.
BILL MOYERS:
So this is why you write that America's no
longer recognizable as a democracy?
HENRY GIROUX:
No.
Look, as the social state is crippled, as
the social state is in some way robbed, hollowed
out and robbed of its potential and its capacities,
what takes its place?
The punishing state takes its place.
You get this notion of incarceration, this,
what we call the governing through crime complex
where governance now has been ceded to corporations
who largely are basically about benefiting
the rich, the ultra-rich, the big corporations
and allowing the state to exercise its power
in enormously destructive and limited ways.
And those ways are about militarizing the
culture, criminalizing social--a wide swathe
of social behavior and keeping people in check.
What does it mean when you turn on the television
in the United States and you see young kids,
peaceful protestors, lying down with their
hands locked and you got a guy with, you know,
spraying them with pepper spray as if there's
something normal about that, as if that's
all it takes, that's how we solve problems?
I mean, I guess the question here is what
is it in a culture that would allow the public
to believe that with almost any problem that
arises, force is the first way to address
it.
I mean, one has to recognize that in that
kind of logic, something has happened in which
the state is no longer in the service of democracy.
BILL MOYERS:
Well, George Monbiot, who writes for "The
Guardian," wrote just the other day, "It's
business that really rules us."
And he says, "So I don't blame people for
giving up on politics ... When a state-corporate
nexus of power has bypassed democracy and
made a mockery of the voting process, when
an unreformed political funding system ensures
that parties can be bought and sold, when
politicians of the main ... parties stand
and watch as public services are divvied up
by a grubby cabal of privateers, what is left
of the system that inspires us to participate?"
HENRY GIROUX:
I mean, the real question is why aren't we
more outraged?
HENRY GIROUX:
Why aren't we in the streets?
HENRY GIROUX:
I mean, that's the central question for the
American public.
I mean, and I think that question has to address
something fundamental and that is what we
have, while we have an economic system that
in fact has caused a crisis in democracy.
What we haven't addressed is the underlying
consensus that informs that crisis.
What you have is basically a transgression
against the very basic ideals of democracy.
We have lost what it means to be connected
to democracy.
And I think that's coupled with a cultural
apparatus, a culture, an educative culture,
a mode of politics in which people now have
gone through this for so long that it's become
normalized.
I mean, it's hard to imagine life beyond capitalism.
You know, it's easier to imagine the death
of the planet than it is to imagine the death
of capitalism.
I mean-- and so it seems to me--
BILL MOYERS:
Well, don't you think people want to be capitalist?
Don't you think people want capitalism?
They want money?
HENRY GIROUX:
I'm not sure if they want those things.
I mean, I think when you--when you read all
the surveys about what's important to people's
lives, Bill, actually the things that they
focus on are not about, you know, "I want
to be about the Kardashian sisters," God forbid,
right?
I mean, I think that what--they the same way
we want--we need a decent education for our
kids, we want, you know, real health care.
I mean, we want the sense of equality in the
country.
We want to be able to control the political
process so that we're not simply nameless
and invisible and disposable.
I mean, they basically--they want women to
be able to have the right to have some control
over their own reproductive rights.
I mean, they're talking about gay rights being
a legitimate pursuit of justice.
And I think that what is missing from all
of this are the basic, are those alternative
public spheres, those cultural formations,
what I call a formative culture that can bring
people together and give those ideas, embody
them in both a sense of hope, of vision and
the organizations and strategies that would
be necessary at the very least to start a
third party, at the very least.
I mean, to start a party that is not part
of this establishment, to reconstruct a sense
of where politics can go.
BILL MOYERS:
Well, you write that the liberal center has
failed us and for all of its discourse of
helping the poor, of addressing inequality,
it always ends up on the side of bankers and
finance capital, right.
HENRY GIROUX:
Are you talking about Obama?
BILL MOYERS:
I'm talking about what you say.
HENRY GIROUX:
I know, I know.
I'm--
BILL MOYERS:
But you do, I must be fair and say that you
go on in that same chapter of one of these
books to say isn't it time we forget trying
to pressure Obama to do the right thing?
HENRY GIROUX:
Obama to me is symptomatic to me of the liberal
center.
But the issue is much greater than him.
I mean, the issue is in a system that is entirely
broken.
It's broken.
Elections are bought by big money.
The political process is not in the hands
of the people.
It's in the hands of very few people.
And it seems to me we have to ask ourselves
what kind of formative culture needs to be
put in place in which education becomes central
to politics, in which politics can be used
to help people to be able to see things differently,
to get beyond this system that is so closed,
so powerfully normalized.
I mean, the right since the 1970s has created
a massive cultural apparatus, a slew of anti-public
intellectuals.
They've invaded the universities with think
tanks.
They have foundations.
They have all kinds of money.
And you know, it's interesting, the war they
wage is a war on the mind.
The war on what it means to be able to dissent,
the war on the possibility of alternative
visions.
And the left really has-- and progressives
and liberals, we have nothing like that.
I mean, we always seem to believe that all
you have to do is tell the truth.
BILL MOYERS:
You shall know the truth, the truth will set
you free.
HENRY GIROUX:
Yeah, and the truth will set you free.
But I'm sorry, it doesn't work that way.
BILL MOYERS:
Which brings me to the book you're now finishing
and will be published next spring.
You call it "The Violence of Organized Forgetting."
What are we forgetting?
HENRY GIROUX:
We're forgetting the past.
We're forgetting all those struggles that
in fact offered a different story about the
United States.
BILL MOYERS:
How is it organized, this forgetting?
HENRY GIROUX:
It's organized because it's systemic.
It's organized because you have people controlling
schools who are deleting those histories and
making sure that they don't appear.
In Tucson, Arizona they banished ethnic studies
from the curriculum.
This is the dis-imagination machine.
That's the hardcore element.
BILL MOYERS:
The suffocation of imagination?
HENRY GIROUX:
The suffocation of imagination.
And we kill the imagination by suggesting
that the only kind of rationality that matters,
the only kind of learning that matters is
utterly instrumental, pragmatist.
So what we do is we collapse education into
training, and we end up suggesting that not
knowing much is somehow a virtue.
And I'll and I think what's so disturbing
about this is not only do you see it in the
popular culture with the lowest common denominator
now drives that culture, but you also see
it coming from politicians who actually say
things that suggest something about the policies
they'd like to implement.
I mean, I know Rick Santorum is not-- is kind
of a, you know, an obvious figure.
But when he stands up in front of a body of
Republicans and he says, the last thing we
need in the Republican party are intellectuals.
And I think it's kind of a template for the
sort of idiocy that increasingly now dominates
our culture.
BILL MOYERS:
What is an intellectual, by the way?
The atmosphere has been so poisoned, as you
know, by what you've been describing, that
many people bridle when they hear the term
intellectual pursuit.
HENRY GIROUX:
I mean, yeah, I think intellectuals are--
there are two ways we can describe intellectuals.
In the most general sense, we can say, "Intellectuals
are people who take pride in ideas.
They work with ideas."
I mean, they believe that ideas matter.
They believe that there's no such thing as
common sense, good sense or bad sense, but
reflective sense.
That ideas offer the framework for gives us
agency, what allows us to read the world critically,
what allows us to be literate.
What allows us to be civic literacy may be
in some ways the high point of what it means
to be an intellectual--
BILL MOYERS:
Because?
HENRY GIROUX:
Because it suggests that how we learn what
we learn and what we do with the knowledge
that we have is not just for ourselves.
It's for the way in which we can expand and
deepen the very processes of democracy in
general, and address those problems and anti-democratic
forces that work against it.
Now some people make a living as a result
of being intellectuals.
But there are people who are intellectuals
who don't function in that capacity.
They're truck drivers.
They're workers.
I grew up in a working class neighborhood.
The smartest people I have ever met were in
that neighborhood.
We read books.
We went to the library together.
We drank on Friday nights.
We talked about Gramsci.
We drove to Boston--
BILL MOYERS:
Gramsci being the Italian philosopher.
HENRY GIROUX:
The Italian philosopher.
I mean--
BILL MOYERS:
The pessimism of the--
HENRY GIROUX:
Of the intellect, and optimism of the will.
BILL MOYERS:
Right.
HENRY GIROUX:
Right?
I mean, we--
BILL MOYERS:
You see the world as it is, but then you act
as if you can change the world.
HENRY GIROUX:
Exactly.
I mean, we tried to find ways to both enliven
the neighborhoods we lived in.
But at the same time, we knew that that wasn't
enough.
That one-- that there was a world beyond our
neighborhood, and that world had all kinds
of things for us to learn.
And we were excited about that.
I mean, we drank, danced and talked.
That's what we did.
BILL MOYERS:
And I assume there were some other more private
activities.
HENRY GIROUX:
And there was more private activity.
BILL MOYERS:
You know, you are a buoyant man.
And yet you describe what you call a shift
away from the hope that accompanies the living,
to a politics of cynicism and despair.
HENRY GIROUX:
Yeah.
BILL MOYERS:
What leads you to this?
HENRY GIROUX:
What leads me to this is something that we
mentioned earlier, and that is when you see
policies being enacted today that are so cruel
and so savage, wiping out a generation of
young people, trying to eliminate public schools,
eliminating health care, putting endless percentage
of black and brown people in jail, destroying
the environment and there's no public outrage.
There aren't people in the streets.
You know, you have to ask yourself, "Has this
market mentality, is it so powerful and that
it's become so normalized, so taken for granted
that the imagination, the collective imagination
has been so stunted that it becomes difficult
to challenge it anymore?"
And I think that leads me to despair somewhat.
But I've always felt that in the face of the
worst tyrannies, people resist.
They're resisting now all over the world.
And it seems to me history is open.
I believe history is open.
I don't believe that we have reached the finality
of a system that is so destructive that all
we have to do is look at the clock and say,
"One minute left."
I don't believe in those kinds of metaphors.
We have to acknowledge the realities that
bear down on us, but it seems to me that if
we really want to live in a world and be alive
with compassion and justice, then we need
educated hope.
We need a hope that recognizes the problems
and doesn't romanticize them, and also recognizes
the need for vision, for social organizations,
for strategies.
We need institutions that provide the formative
culture that give voice to those visions and
those ideas.
BILL MOYERS:
You've talked elsewhere or written elsewhere
about the need for a militant, far-reaching,
social movement to challenge the false claims
that equate democracy and capitalism.
Now, what do you mean "Militant and Far Reaching
Social Movement?"
HENRY GIROUX:
I mean, what we do know, we know this.
We know that there are people working in local
communities all over the United States around
particular kinds of issues, whether it be
gay rights, whether it be the environment,
whether it be, you know the Occupy movement,
helping people with Hurricane Sandy.
We have a lot of fragmented movements.
And I think we probably have a lot more than
we realize, because the press gives them no
visibility, as you know.
So, we don't really have a sense of the degree
to which these-- how pronounced these really
are.
I think the real issue here is, you know,
what would it mean to begin to do at least
two things?
To say the very least, one is to develop cultural
apparatuses that can offer a new vocabulary
for people, where questions of freedom and
justice and the problems that we're facing
can be analyzed in ways that reach mass audiences
in accessible language.
We have to build a formative culture.
We have to do that.
Secondly, we've got to overcome the fractured
nature of these movements.
I mean the thing that plagues me about progressives
in the left and liberals is they are all sort
of ensconced in these fragmented movements
that seem to suggest those movements constitute
the totality of the system of oppression that
we are facing.
And they don't.
Look, we have technologies in place now in
which students all over the world are beginning
to communicate with each other because they're
realizing that the punishing logic of austerity
has a certain kind of semblance that a certain
normality that, in common ground, that is
affecting students in Greece, students in
Spain, students in France.
BILL MOYERS:
And in this country?
HENRY GIROUX:
And in this country.
And it seems to me that while I may be too
old to in any way begin to participate in
this, I really believe that young people have
recognized that they've been written out of
the discourse of democracy.
That they're in the grip of something so oppressive
it will take away their future, their hopes,
their possibilities and their sense of the
future will be one that is less than what
their parents had imagined.
And there's no going back.
I mean, this has to be addressed.
And it'll take time.
They'll build the organizations.
They'll get-- they'll work with the new technologies.
And hopefully they'll have our generation
to be able to assist in that, but it's not
going to happen tomorrow.
And it's not going to happen in a year.
It's going to as you have to plant seeds.
You have to believe that seeds matter.
But you need a different vocabulary and a
different understanding of politics.
Look, the right has one thing going for it
that nobody wants to talk about.
Power is global.
And politics is local.
They float.
They have no allegiance to anyone.
They don't care about the social contract,
because if workers in the United States don't
want to compromise, they'll get them in Mexico.
So the notion of political concessions has
died for this class.
They don't care about it anymore.
There are no political concessions.
BILL MOYERS:
The financial class.
HENRY GIROUX:
The financial class.
BILL MOYERS:
The one percent.
HENRY GIROUX:
The one percent.
That's why they're so savage.
They're so savage because there's nothing
to give up.
They don't have to compromise.
The power is so arrogant, so over the top,
so unlike anything we have seen in terms of
its anti-democratic practices, policies, modes
of governance and ideology.
That at some point, you know they feel they
don't have to legitimate this anymore.
I mean, it's because the contradictions are
becoming so great, that I think all of a sudden
a lot of young people are recognizing this
language, this whole language, doesn't work.
The language of liberalism doesn't work anymore.
No, let's just reform the system.
Let's work within it.
Let's just run people for office.
My argument would be, you have one foot in
and you have one foot out.
I'm not willing to give up the school board.
I'm not willing to give up all forms of electoral
politics.
But it seems to me at the local level we can
do some of that thing, that people can get
elected.
They can make moderate changes.
But the real changes are not going to come
there.
The real changes are going to come in creating
movements that are longstanding, that are
organized, that basically take questions of
governance and policy seriously and begin
to spread out and become international.
That is going to have to happen.
BILL MOYERS:
But here's the contradiction I hear in what
you're saying.
That if you write about a turning toward despair
and cynicism in politics.
Can you get movements out of despair and cynicism?
Can you get people who will take on the system
when they have been told that the system is
so powerful and so overwhelming that they've
lost their, as you call it, moral and political
agency?
HENRY GIROUX:
Well let me put it this way.
What we often find is we often find people
who take for granted the systems that they
live in.
They take for granted the savagery-- the sort
of things that you talked about.
And it produces two kinds of rage.
It produces an inner rage in which people
blame themselves.
It's so disturbing to me to see working class,
middle class people blaming themselves when
these bankers have actually caused the crisis.
That's the first issue.
Then you have another expression of that rage,
and that rage blames blacks.
It blames immigrants.
It blames young people.
It says, "They're not--" it says about youth,
it says, "Youth is not in trouble.
They're the problem."
And so, all of a sudden that rage gets displaced.
The question is not what do we-- the question
is not just where's the outrage.
The question is how do you mobilize the rage
in ways in which it's not self-defeating,
and in ways in which it doesn't basically
scape-- be used to scapegoat other people.
That's an educational issue.
That should be at the center of any politics
that matters.
BILL MOYERS:
One of your intellectual mentors, the philosopher
Ernst Bloch, said, "We must believe in the
principle of hope."
And you've written often about the language
of hope.
What does that mean, the principle of hope
and the language of hope, and why are they
important as you see it in creating this new
paradigm, metaphor that you talk about?
HENRY GIROUX:
Yeah, I mean, hope to me is a metaphor that
speaks to the power of the imagination.
I don't believe that anyone should be involved
in politics in a progressive way if they can't
understand that to act otherwise, you have
to imagine otherwise.
What hope is predicated on is the assumption
that life can be different than it is now.
But to be different than it is now, rather
than romanticizing hope and turning it into
something Disney-like, right, it really has
to involve the hard work of A) recognizing
the structures of domination that we have
to face, B)
organizing collectively and somehow to change
those, and C) believing it can be done, that
it's worth the struggle.
That if the struggles are not believed in,
if people don't have the faith to engage in
these struggles, and that's the issue.
I mean, that working class neighborhood that
I talked to you about in the beginning of
the program, I mean, it just resonates with
such a sense of joy for me, the sense of solidarity,
sociality.
And I think all the institutions that are
being constructed under this market tyranny,
this casino capitals is just the opposite.
It's like that image of all these people at
the bus stop, right.
And they're all-- they're together, but they're
alone.
They're alone.
BILL MOYERS:
If we have zombied politics, if we have as
you say, metaphorically, zombies in the high
levels of government, zombies in banks and
financial centers and zombies in the military,
can't you have a zombie population?
I mean, you say the stories that are being
told through the commercial corporate entertainment
media are all the more powerful because they
seem to defy the public's desire for rigorous
accountability, critical interrogation and
openness.
Now if that's what the public wants, why isn't
the market providing them?
Isn't that what the market's supposed to do?
Provide what people want?
HENRY GIROUX:
The market doesn't want that at all.
I mean, the market wants the people, the apostles
of this market logic, I mean, they actually
the first rule of the market is make sure
you have power that's unaccountable.
That's what they want.
And I think that, I mean, what we see for
the first time in history is a war on the
ability to produce meanings that hold power
accountable.
A war on the possibility of an education that
enables people to think critically, a war
on cultural apparatuses that entertain by
simply engaging in this spectacle of violence
and not producing programs that really are
controversial, that make people think, that
make people alive through the possibilities
of, you know, the imagination itself.
I mean, my argument is the formative culture
that produces those kinds of intellectual
and creative and imaginative abilities has
been under assault since the 1980s in a very
systemic way.
So that the formative culture that takes its
place is a business culture.
It's a culture run by accountants, not by
visionaries.
It's a culture run by the financial services.
It's a culture run by people who believe that
data is more important than knowledge.
BILL MOYERS:
You paint a very grim picture of the state
of democracy, and yet you don't seem contaminated
by cynicism yourself.
HENRY GIROUX:
No, I'm not.
BILL MOYERS:
How do we understand that?
HENRY GIROUX:
Because I refuse to become a part of it.
Become I refuse to become complicitous.
I refuse to say--I refuse to be alive and
to watch institutions being handed over to
right wing zealots.
I refuse to be alive and watch the planet
be destroyed.
I mean, when you mentioned-- you talk about
the collective imagination, you know, I mean
that imagination emerges when people find
strength in collective organizations, when
they find strength in each other.
Believing that we can work together to produce
commons in which we can share that raises
everybody up and not just some people, that
contributes to the world in a way that-- and
I really don't mean to be romanticizing here,
but a world that is we recognize is never
just enough.
Justice is never done.
It's an endless struggle.
And that there's joy in that struggle, because
there's a sense of solidarity that brings
us together around the most basic, most elemental
and the most important of democratic values.
BILL MOYERS:
Henry Giroux, thank you, very much for talking
to me.
HENRY GIROUX:
Thank you, Bill.
