What I really enjoyed about listening to Dr. Burns was his wealth of knowledge, which spread across several disciplines, and was also applicable to just about every area of life, especially if what Graff says is true, that all communication is argument. Whether he intended to or not (although I suspect that a teacher's goal is to always promote further thought and study into what he says), I have several more avenues of knowledge that I would like to pursue with regard to our study of composition theory. I have never read anything by Aristotle, which seems amazing since I have taken so many English classes over the past ten years, and there were several important scholars Dr. Burns mentioned that I have never even heard of (Kenneth Burke, for example). So, if I hope to be a writing instructor, especially a creative writing instructor, I feel that I have a lot more reading to do.
Another aspect of the talk that I appreciated was hearing about the other big dogs of composition that Dr. Burns has known, such as Kinneavy and Booth. Since both of these men are now deceased, it is useful to get a perspective from someone who knew them when they were alive, someone who learned from them, got advice from them and someone who has now passed that advice onto a new group of scholars. For that I am grateful. Thanks to both Dr. Souder and Dr. Burns for arranging for this opportunity.
You're on to something, Emily. Not only do we ignore intelligent people, but we're actually taught from an early age to fear and malign them. Consider the "evil genius" who is defeated by the strong and noble warrior in 99% of fantasy stories. Consider the most valuable lesson of the Socrates and Jesus stories: if you stand out from the herd and teach people to be loving and wise, you'll end up being executed for it. I've always found it interesting that the high school football team can beat the crap out of a group of nerds on any given weekend and never get into trouble for it, but if the nerds take revenge in any sort of violent manner than the entire national media jumps on the story and blames Marilyn Manson or Satan or video games, etc. No one ever said it would be easy having an IQ of 140. Most people will hate you for it, not so much because most people are "idiots," but because they've been brainwashed by the power elites to fear people who think critically.
ReplyDeleteBut why?
When you're on a sinking boat (a fine metaphor for our f'ed up planet) the first thing that the strong guy does is toss overboard anyone who argues with him. Unfortunately, when you drown all your innovators, you're left with a pretty shallow gene pool, and problems never get solved. Is it any wonder that humans have been making the same mistakes for the last 10,000 years? Is it any wonder that mass murder is what mobilizes societies the most? Just about any technological advancement you can name originated to meet the demands of warfare. It's a sad testament to Thomas Jefferson (who believed that all governments ultimately lead to tyranny) that the only thriving industry left in America is the government-subsidized arms industry, what Eisenhower referred to as the "military-industrial complex."
Sadly, many of our nation's smartest engineers and scientists work to design better tanks, missiles, and fighter jets. What else are they going to do? Jobs that actually help society aren't profitable. Death is a lucrative business, especially in America, where our arms industry accounts for 40% of the world's arms exports. Americans spend more money on "defense" than the rest of the world combined. That's an extraordinary and frightening fact, especially given that Uncle Sam must now borrow money merely to pay interest on the National Debt. Despite our bankruptcy, despite the Democrats, despite Obama (what a laugh!), the killing goes on.
Of course, people want to hear neither complaints nor solutions. Not even in Academia, a place where ideas are supposed to flourish. Smart people learn to dwell in the shadows. They learn to subvert the status quo in ways hidden from the watchful eye of authority. Whether or not this does any good isn't clear, but at least it keeps your neck off the chopping block.
At any rate, none of this may seem relevant to our current studies until one recognizes that texts are propaganda, and that most texts serve the interests of the power elite. Our own lives are texts. And so the big question is: who do we serve? How do we develop a "rhetoric of dissent" against the murder machine without being silenced (i.e. murdered)?
The murder machine has become so sophisticated that it now requires smart people to service its many gears. And so it at least gives smart people a choice before "throwing them overboard." It seems to me that the "rhetoric of dissent" must include deception, the old Marxist "means to an end," whereby smart people toss their wrenches into the gears every so often and say: "Oops!" This, of course, isn't as easy as it sounds, because it opens one up to tremendous criticism regarding ethics. Even the intellectual saboteur must remain open and honest, right? And yet, the intellectual saboteur must keep from being "disappeared" in the middle of the night. It seems an impossible paradox.