1
Why I Write
The most successful ideological effects are those which have no need of words, and ask no more than complicitous silence.
Attributed to Vladimir Lenin, in Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice
In his short essay Why I Write, first published in 1946, George Orwell identified âfour great motivesâ for writing that were found in all serious writers, albeit in different degrees and sometimes varying in proportion according to individual circumstances such as family background and life experiences. Those motives were 1) âsheer egoism,â 2) âaesthetic enthusiasm,â 3) âhistorical impulse,â and 4) âpolitical purpose.â Sheer egoism involved the wish to be remembered coupled with a determination âto live their own lives to the endâ while avoiding the drudgery of over-conformity. 1 In todayâs academic language, we would perhaps say they were determined to have their own voices and make original contributions to society or to their fields of endeavor. Musicians and artists especially will identify with the motive of aesthetic enthusiasm, which Orwell described in terms of the perception of beauty but also âin words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story,â and in the desire to share ideas the writer thought important. 2 Historical impulse referred to the âdesire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.â 3 Last, but not least, was political purpose. Orwell regarded this as especially important to the quality of oneâs writing because intimately concerned with matters of meaning, truth, and justice. âWhen I sit down to write a book,â he stated,
I do not say to myself, âI am going to write a work of art.â I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. 4
Political purpose, however, did not require that the writer abnegate aesthetic enthusiasm. âI could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience.â 5 But when lacking an explicit political purpose, âI wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives, and humbug generally.â 6 In any event, writing was inevitably a political act because shaped by oneâs political biases. The challenge for writers was to become conscious of them so they could âact politically without sacrificing ⌠aesthetic and intellectual integrity.â 7
This essay and Orwellâs other journalistic writings and novels appeal to me for a variety of reasons, among them his determination to confront deceit and other distortions of truth that, left uncontested, might warp the publicâs perception of truth and reality. I also share with him a commitment to social democracy and a recognition of the importance of knowing history. All four of the above motives articulated by him certainly apply to me and my own writing. Posterity matters, and I labor intensively over my own research and quality of writing to convey information and ideas as accurately, clearly, and directly as possible, although I do not regard myself as an artist. In Chapter 5, readers will see that I do not think enough undergraduates realize the many challenges of trying to think and write well, any more than they realize the importance of having intellectual sparks and political interests of their own as essential motivating forces for their work.
In too many cases, intellectual curiosity and political interests are extinguished in schools and universities because those institutions portray themselves as technological, politically neutral, and socially abstract and thus value-free when nothing can be further from the truth! Although often regarded as having a democratic purposeâif they are thought to have any political purpose at allâthey now serve primarily capitalist interests. University administrators pay lip service to the arts and humanities but, as is explained in chapter five, are often in collusion with business in confusing job training with education. 8 In my own field of music education, for example, curricula emphasize skill development, pedagogical methods, the acquisition of knowledge, national standards, and degree outcomes instead of teaching students how to research and develop arguments so they can think more critically about what they read, are told, see, hear, or do. Critical thinking is similarly reduced to politically neutral and thus socially abstract and purportedly value-free technical skills, which is also a distortion of truth because it favors the political status quo. Missing from current mainstream definitions of critical thinking is much, if any, recognition of the history of the concept as involving political and moral agency and as important to the pursuit of the good life, as opposed to a life of consumer goods. Music education and other undergraduates are seldom encouraged to seriously question or otherwise challenge the existing political system. Rather the opposite. Undergraduates are generally not expected to make conscious and critically examine their political beliefs and assumptions, let alone explore how their chosen profession has always been shaped through history by all manner of people and events and is thus inherently political!
This lack of critical thinking and demand for truth is as much a societal as an educational problem that philosopher John Dewey presciently warned of in the mid-1920s when he prophesized that the United States was moving toward an oligarchy of the rich that distrusted the judgment of the public unless âweighted down by heavy prejudice.â 9 Critical thinking as he conceived it was never really tolerated in American schools because it was perceived as a threat to conservatives and the religious right. Dewey might just as easily have been describing American politics today with its preponderance of political spin doctors whose purpose is to shape the publicâs perceptions of truth and reality. He employed the term âindoctrinationâ to describe how citizens were inducted uncritically into their educational or other beliefs. The popular television series The Newsroom starring Jeff Daniels as a curmudgeonly anchorman illustrated this problem of indoctrination of the American public in its inaugural program in 2012 when, in a college debate, Danielâs character Will McEvoy was goaded into addressing the question âwhat makes America the greatest country in the world?â The audience of university students and professors was taken abackâshockedâwhen he launched into âan almighty (factually accurate, statistically) rant about why America is NOT the worldâs greatest country.â 10 The belief held by probably most Americans that their country is the greatest in the world was revealed to be based on what Cornell West describes as a naĂŻve innocence and careless disregard for truth and historical realities. 11
McEvoyâs harangue, which was in two parts, made for riveting television. Probably most viewers regarded the first part as the more powerful of the two because it utilized strident and contentious language devoid of music or other distractions. The second half of the speech, however, illustrates how music and the arts are often implicated in indoctrination by masking myths, lies, or half-truths so they can more readily penetrate peopleâs intellectual defenses. Following a brief cadence and pause in McEvoyâs harangue at the end of part one, he begins to romanticize Americaâs past to the accompaniment of a reflective and poignant music that signals a change in emotional tone in preparation for the sentimental statement that America was once great. âWe sure used to be ⌠We waged wars on poverty, not poor people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors, we put our money where our mouths are, and we never beat our chest.â 12 Several of McEvoyâs claims with respect to Americaâs former greatness, but by no means all, are eviscerated in Chapters 6 and 7. As media critic Neil Postman similarly complained with respect to the encroachment of music into the news (see Chapter 6), the music in the latter part of McEvoyâs rant set the tone for what followed, signaling to viewers how they should feel and reassuring them of their countryâs essential greatness by sentimentalizing the past. Whereas in the first part of his harangue, McEvoy exposed patriotic rhetoric as factually inaccurate, the latter part camouflaged it with music intended to appeal to viewersâ emotions, just as McEvoyâs words drew on the myth of American exceptionalism to confirm them in their belief.
Numerous similar examples and testimony to musicâs power in influencing peopleâs political or other beliefs, and in often subtle ways operating beneath their conscious awareness, are presented throughout this book. These examples are intended for curricular use in schools and music teacher education programs where the hope is they will inspire students to go beyond surface appearances and rhetoric to unearth the underlying ideological beliefs, assumptions, motives, and intentions of those who would use music or the other arts for their own ends. Orwellâs warning that âthought corrupts languageâ and vice versa applies equally to music and art and, as explained in the latter part of this book, is particularly relevant in this age of virtuality when young peopleâs perceptions of reality and truth are increasingly shaped by music and art saturated social and other media. 13
Chapter 4, for example, excavates former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harperâs motives for disparaging so-called elite musicians and artists while employing popular music performance as a Machiavellian tool for currying favor amongst the masses. The chapter historicizes Harperâs disdain for those musicians and artists, many of whom were social progressives, by locating it within the context of the rise and spread of American neoconservatism and an attendant aestheticization of politics that provided an intellectual foundation for a populist politics in which the arts became sites for moral reprobation. Harper and his conservatives were in power from 2006 through most of 2015, when they were replaced by the liberal government of Justin Trudeau.
One of the challenges of researching and writing a book such as this one that attempts to draw on philosophy, political science, sociology, media studies, economics, and history (among other things) to analyze contemporary and/or recent politics affecting education is that things change, and sometimes unpredictably and quickly. Few, for example, would have predicted the success of the Eurosceptics in the Brexit referendum of 2016 that led to British Prime Minister David Cameronâs resignation, or Donald Trumpâs success to the initial dismay of neoconservative policy elites in co-opting the Republican Party. 14 As addressed in Chapters 7 and 8, we might well be on the cusp of a change in public sentiment in certain quarters as Trump and other political leaders continue to harness the dissatisfaction of older white males and others in neoliberal globalization, free trade, and immigration patterns to effect changes in government and public policy. Although possibly appalled by Trumpâs attacks on the nationâs institutions and constitutional rights, many music or other teachers may find some of his ideas about education appealing because of potentially allowing more space for the arts in the school curriculum, just as his criticisms of free trade may provoke needed changes in economic policy. Indeed, even the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), one of the key supranational institutions driving neoliberal globalization and free trade for the past several decades, now admits the need for a more inclusive and equitable economic model that better redistributes the wealth to ensure a decent living standard for those marginalized or excluded from the economy by the outsourcing of manufacturing and, as is explained shortly, the burgeoning of ever-more sophisticated and ubiquitous technologies. There is now general recognition that something must be done to better redress economic disparities lest they provoke increasing social unrest and instability. As readers will learn in this book, music and arts education can play important roles in assuaging social instability through the fostering of democratic citizenship and by contributing to social and cultural well-being.
A surveillance culture in education
Global politics since the Great Recession of 2008 have been stormy, but the aforementioned dissatisfaction of many voters in neoliberalism and the subsequent economic and military disruption and instability experienced in many parts of the world of late might afford arts and humanities teachersâ opportunities to better secure the future of their school and university programs. If they are to accomplish that goal, however, they will need to publicly champion, and in the case of music educators also enlarge, their own vision of education as important not just to the economy but also to the life well-lived. More than ever before, they will need to screw up their courage to publicly engage in politics, ...