Abstract
This paper examines Theodor W. Adorno’s notion of democratic pedagogy and the role of emotions in re-educating and democratizing a society, particularly in light of the current political situation in many countries around the world in which right-wing extremism is on the rise. The paper revisits Adorno’s educational thought on critical self-reflection, focusing on his views on educating emotions and the tensions between democratic pedagogy and a schooling of the emotions. It is argued that Adorno’s contribution to discussions of the role of emotion in education and his suggestions about how to resist and counteract fascism and right-wing extremism are not only illuminating today, but also provide remarkable clarity and force of argumentation in educational efforts to create critical spaces in the classroom in which moral and political learning does not end up a form of sentimental manipulation.
Keywords
Introduction
The thought that after this war life could continue on ‘normally’, or indeed that culture could be ‘reconstructed’ – as if the reconstruction of culture alone were not already the negation of such – is idiotic. Millions of Jews have been murdered, and this is supposed to be only the intermission and not the catastrophe itself. What exactly is this culture waiting for anyway? (Adorno, 1951/2002: 55) [O]ne might refer to the fascist movements as the wounds, the scars of a democracy that, to this day, has not yet lived up to its own concept. (Adorno, 1967/2020: 9) The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again. […] Every debate about the ideals of education is trivial and inconsequential compared to this single ideal: never again Auschwitz. It was the barbarism all education strives against […] and barbarism continues as long as the fundamental conditions that favored that relapse continue largely unchanged. That is the whole horror. (1969/1998a: 191)
Turning to Adorno’s various writings on education throughout this period until his death in 1969, a central idea was that ‘democratic pedagogy’ would cultivate the capacity to a younger generation for critical self-reflection, and ultimately, social change (Mariotti, 2014). He claimed that democratic pedagogy must enable students to think for themselves and to break free of the authority of teachers, parents and other adults (Snir, 2017). What would emerge from this, according to Adorno, is that students would eventually be turned away from the affective ethos of ‘ressentiment’ – which was prevalent in the period during National Socialism as well as afterwards – toward self-reflection and autonomy of thinking (Cho, 2009). What is remarkable about Adorno’s educational thought – especially in light of a 1967 lecture that was recently published in print for the first time in German in 2019, followed up by an English translation in 2020 (see Adorno, 1967/2020) in which he provided the model for a type of education against right-wing extremism that was on the rise then in West Germany (Dahms, 2020) – is how his ideas are relevant today ‘as the contemporary moment has seen the return of Auschwitz in such places as Darfur, East Timor, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, the former Yugoslavia’ (Cho, 2009: 75) and the list goes on and on.
The premise on which this essay rests – i.e. that Adorno’s concept of an education against Auschwitz has resonance today – is not new; that premise is not the most important contribution of this essay. The more important contribution is the analysis of the connection between pedagogy and affect in Adorno’s educational thought to draw pedagogical insights for resisting contemporary right-wing extremism. 2 Critical thinking is often understood as a cognitive activity; yet, revisiting Adorno’s thought on an education toward critical self-reflection, it is shown that critical self-reflection is an intensely affective experience, an idea that has gained growing attention within education in recent years (Danvers, 2016; Zembylas, 2013, 2014). 3 In his democratic pedagogy, Adorno suggests that a crucial aspect of confronting fascism is the key role emotions play in the configuration and interpretation of socio-political aspects of a community (Parkinson, 2017). The German population’s lack of emotional connections to the tenets of democracy during and after the Holocaust raises, according to Adorno, important issues about politics as a form of public pedagogy (see Giroux, 2004) that educates the population’s emotions (see Parkinson, 2014).
Although previous scholarship on Adorno’s work has explored his philosophy on thinking, social critique and the role of education (e.g. Cho, 2009; Giroux, 2004; Heins, 2012; Lewis, 2006; Mariotti, 2014; Snir, 2017), it has paid little attention to his views on an education of the emotions in the work of ‘coming to terms with the past’. 4 Hence, this paper is interested in examining Adorno’s democratic pedagogy and the role of emotions in re-educating and democratizing a society, particularly in light of the current political situation in many countries around the world in which right-wing extremism is on the rise. 5 The following questions are at the heart of this paper (cf. Parkinson, 2017): How does Adorno’s democratic pedagogy envision a young generation or a population to be ‘taught’ to feel and act differently? What kinds of critical spaces are needed in schools to create learning opportunities conducive to democratic political subjectivity? And, finally, what are the tensions and possibilities emerging from a moral and political learning in education that aims to combat fascism and right-wing extremism and to invoke embodied democratic values, feelings and behaviours?
The essay begins with revisiting Adorno’s thought on education; the aim of this section is to situate my analysis in the broader oeuvre of Adorno’s work. The second section focuses in particular on Adorno’s concept of democratic pedagogy and discusses his vision of how to turn the young generation away from the ‘wounds’ of the past toward a democratic alternative. The third section turns to Adorno’s thoughts on educating emotions and the tensions between democratic pedagogy and a schooling of the emotions. Last, the essay examines the pedagogical insights emerging from Adorno’s democratic pedagogy and the education of emotions, particularly in light of his recently printed lecture on ‘the new right-wing extremism’. It is argued that Adorno’s contribution to discussions of the role of emotion in education and his suggestions about how to resist and counteract fascism and right-wing extremism are not only illuminating today, but provide remarkable clarity and force of argumentation in educational efforts to create critical spaces in the classroom in which moral and political learning does not end up a form of sentimental manipulation.
Adorno’s educational thought
Throughout his various public lectures and writings on education, Adorno was preoccupied by the conditions that led to Auschwitz and which were still present in post-war West Germany, as he repeatedly pointed out. As he tells us in Minima Moralia (1951/2002) – he also made a similar point in several of his speeches (e.g. see Adorno, 1998c) – hierarchical structures in schools were specifically taken advantage of by National Socialism to cultivate authoritarianism and violence: in particular, there was hierarchy founded on intellect, achievement and grades, and hierarchy founded in physical strength. The violence enacted in the social hierarchy of the playground was recalled by Adorno in his own childhood as an example that demonstrated the connectedness between violence at the micro- and macro-level. It is worth quoting Adorno at length here: In a real sense, I ought to be able to deduce Fascism from the memories of my childhood. As a conqueror dispatches envoys to the remotest provinces, Fascism had sent its advance guard there long before it marched in: my schoolfellows. […] The outbreak of the Third Reich did, it is true, surprise my political judgment, but not my unconscious fear. So closely had all the motifs of permanent catastrophe brushed me, so deeply were the warning signs of the German awakening burned into me, that I recognized them all in the features of Hitler's dictatorship: and it often seemed to my foolish terror as if the total State had been invented expressly against me, to inflict on me after all those things from which, in my childhood, its primeval form, I had been temporarily dispensed. The five patriots who set upon a single schoolfellow, thrashed him and, when he complained to the teacher, defamed him a traitor to the class – are they not the same as those who tortured prisoners to refute claims by foreigners that prisoners were tortured? They whose hallooing knew no end when the top boy blundered – did they not stand grinning and sheepish round the Jewish detainee, poking fun at his maladroit attempt to hang himself? (2002: 192–193)
Adorno emphasized that dismantling the psychological, intellectual and social conditions that made the Holocaust possible required a different mode of thinking, feeling and acting, namely, a different model of education as a critical practice that could provide the means for disconnecting learning from fascist ideology and its manifestations of violence. A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen. When we want to find reasons for it, this imperative is as refractory as the given one of Kant once upon a time. (1966/1995: 365) When I speak of education after Auschwitz, then, I mean two areas: first children’s education, especially in early childhood; then general enlightenment that provides the intellectual, cultural, and social climate in which a recurrence would no longer be possible, a climate, therefore, in which the motives that led to the horror would become relatively conscious. (1998a: 194) In the attempt to prevent the repetition of Auschwitz it seems essential to me first of all to gain some clarity about the conditions under which the manipulative character arises, and then, by altering these conditions, to prevent as far as possible its emergence. (1998a: 199)
At the core of Adorno’s educational approach against manipulation and toward critical self-reflection there were two issues of highly affective relevance: hardness (indifference towards pain) and coldness (indifference towards others). Both were bred through the German educational system, and so they must be unlearned through critical self-reflection (Schick, 2009). For example, Adorno explained how hardness disallowed the expression of emotions, creating a toxic cycle of indifference towards others’ pain: ‘Whoever is hard with himself earns the right to be hard with others as well and avenges himself for the pain whose manifestations he was not allowed to show and had to repress’ (1998a: 198). Also, coldness as a profound indifference towards those with whom there were no close ties was another psychological condition linked to the Holocaust. The result was the manipulative consciousness of the fascist that was characterized by ‘a rage for organization, by the inability to have any immediate human experiences at all, by a certain lack of emotion’ (1998a: 198). As Adorno wrote further: ‘[i]f coldness were not a fundamental trait of anthropology, that is, the constitution of people as they in fact exist in our society […] then Auschwitz would not have been possible, people would not have accepted it’ (1998a: 201). A few paragraphs later, he emphasized that, ‘If anything can help against coldness as the condition for disaster, then it is the insight into the conditions that determine it and the attempt to combat those conditions, initially in the domain of the individual’ (1998a: 202). 6
Importantly, Adorno did not believe that education as an act of critical self-reflection alone could dismantle the institutional structures of society and culture; however, he acknowledged that changing the powerful complex of economic and social forces began with education (Giroux, 2004). Yet, Adorno understood education as more than social engineering, explains Giroux; he imagined education as a democratic public space in which changes could be carried out through individual and collective forms of resistance. As Cho (2009) also points out, in advocating critical self-reflection, Adorno’s aim was to make possible the investigation of social context; that is, to expose how individual and collective identities are shaped, desired, felt, and experienced within social formations. On this account, Adorno’s understanding of critical education can play a crucial role in a democracy by turning our attention to ways that can prevent fascist ideologies from eliminating the possibility of reflective thought and engaged social action.
In sum, Adorno’s educational thought offers important insights for addressing how critical education might prevent or challenge the conditions for fascist political ideology – in its militarized or patriotic forms – to take root in conscious or unconscious ways (Lewis, 2006). Contemporary education is, of course, different from the pre-war German education system or its post-war manifestations, yet Adorno’s claim that an education for critical self-reflection offers the strongest barrier to the recurrence of Auschwitz remains as compelling as ever, especially in light of new forms of right-wing extremism and related forms of populism that spring up nowadays. The next part of the essay focuses more specifically on Adorno’s concept of democratic pedagogy and discusses his vision of how to turn the young generation away from the ‘wounds’ of the past toward a democratic alternative.
Democratic pedagogy
As noted so far, Adorno’s main concern was that social institutions and norms, such as schooling, especially under conditions of capitalist and/or fascist regimes, work to cultivate an unthinking and passive citizenry; hence, the question for him was how to foster a more critical and democratic practice of citizenship without simply offering a new regime of authority or doing it through indoctrination and manipulation (Mariotti, 2014). Adorno’s project of ‘democratic pedagogy’, explains Mariotti, grappled with this tension; his response was that the systematic cultivation of critical self-reflection would make social change possible. As he wrote: We are neither simply spectators of world history, free to frolic more or less at will within its grand chambers, nor does world history, whose rhythm increasingly approaches that of the catastrophe, appear to allow its subjects the time in which everything would improve on its own. This bears directly on democratic pedagogy. (Adorno, 1998b: 99)
In particular, Adorno’s project of democratic pedagogy suggested that any viable educational project that wishes to promote democratic enlightenment would have to recognize how capitalist, fascist or other oppressive and authoritarian regimes not only damage democratic institutions, but also the ability of people to identify with democratic social formations, invest in public good, and feel compassion for those who suffer (Giroux, 2004). As Giroux explains: Adorno understood that critical knowledge alone could not adequately address the deformations of mind and character put into place by the subjective mechanisms of capitalism. Instead, he argued that critical knowledge had to be reproduced and democratic social experiences put into place through shared values, beliefs, and practices that created inclusive and compassionate communities that make democratic politics possible and safeguard the autonomous subject through the creation of emancipatory needs. (2004: 804)
In fact, in several of his writings and radio broadcasts, Adorno gave examples of how democratic pedagogy could transform the spirit of people; for instance, he mentioned how films, magazines and television programs could be presented, analysed and critiqued so that citizens would understand how their inner desires and needs were exploited. In this sense, teachers would create pedagogical sites that extend the range of democratic politics, and students would learn how to resist the seductions of capitalist and/or fascist ideologies (Giroux, 2004). The aim of democratic pedagogy would be to cultivate the capacity for critique and reflection as a social and political practice rather than an individual cognitive skill. So that, to begin with, all we try to do is simply open people’s minds to the fact that they are constantly being deceived, because the mechanism of tutelage has been raised to the status of a universal mundus vult decepti: the world wants to be deceived. Making everyone aware of these connections could perhaps be achieved in the spirit of an immanent critique, because there can be no normal democracy which could afford to be explicitly against an enlightenment of this kind. (Adorno and Becker, 1999: 31)
Importantly, there are two crucial insights that distinguish Adorno’s idea of democratic pedagogy from other manifestations of critical pedagogy, making Adorno’s analysis especially relevant to current political conditions. First, Adorno did not believe in forcing the Germans into shame and guilt simply by telling them the facts of what happened under the Nazi regime. As he rightfully says, ‘As far as wanting to combat anti-Semitism in individual subjects is concerned, one should not expect too much from the recourse to facts, which anti-Semites most often will either not admit or will neutralize by treating them as exceptions’ (1998b: 102). In this sense, it is not sufficient to simply teach what happened in the Holocaust, but to demonstrate the connection between fascist ideology and the mechanisms of destruction of society. The goal of a democratic pedagogy inspired by Adorno’s ideas, then, is to instil a sense of mindfulness of the destructive potential of modern society and a habit of compassion (Heins, 2012) rather than imposing a morality of guilt and shame. I have also argued elsewhere (Zembylas, 2019) that it is not productive for a democratic pedagogy that aims to cultivate compassion and shared responsibility to focus on blame, guilt or fault, but rather it needs to encourage students to interrogate the social conditions under which they are responsive and responsible to others. In other words, it is more productive to engage in an affirmative praxis (e.g. compassion) rather than getting stuck in a moralistic framework of guilt and shame.
Second, a democratic pedagogy grounded in Adorno’s ideas takes into account its own complicity with genocide and thus constantly transforms and re-invents itself on the level of form rather than ameliorative content (Lewis, 2006). This is precisely why Adorno’s message for educators was to avoid teaching methods which were akin to those used by the Nazis such as endorsing coldness and hardness or repressing the emotions. Emotional indoctrination, for example, even if it is for ‘noble’ purposes, such as teaching about/for democratic citizenship, is deeply problematic, because pedagogy becomes complicit to forms of violence. Democratic pedagogy as a form of anti-complicity pedagogy creates pedagogical sites in which students are encouraged to take actions that actively resist social harm in everyday life, yet not in a manner that forces them to do so (Zembylas, 2020). For this to happen, it is necessary that educators navigate students through the affective and political dynamics of complicity in both critical and strategic ways. As Heins (2012) explains, A recurring motif in Adorno’s writings is the educational ideal of making the young generation willing and able to face the horrors of the recent past without taking recourse to metaphysical consolations and secular theodicies. He wanted students to grow emotionally and intellectually sensitive […] to be able to take in, absorb and communicate the traumatic rendering of the barbarous crimes of Nazi Germany. (71–72)
Democratic pedagogy and the schooling of emotions
Although emotion is often referred to in passing by Adorno in his writings, speeches and radio talks, and while Freudian psychoanalysis dominates his efforts to explain and restructure the psychological makeup of the Germans, ‘affect remains, by and large, undertheorized by Adorno himself’ (Parkinson, 2014: 48). As Parkinson explains, the role of emotion in Adorno’s writings is not granted a theoretical or conceptual framework, which might explain partly ‘why emotion remains marginal in the reception of Adorno’s body of thought’ (2014: 48). However, more recent scholarship – for example, by Parkinson (2014, 2017) and others (e.g. Macdonald, 2011; Thiem, 2009) – attempts to shed more light on the centrality of affect in Adorno’s post-war work and demonstrate how his understanding of pedagogy emphasizes the necessary relationship between reason and affect in achieving critical self-reflection and autonomy, yet without running into the risk of ‘kitsch sentimentality’ (Adorno, 1997).
As noted earlier in the paper, Adorno suggests that a democratic pedagogy that cultivates critical self-reflection – through educational institutions and families – is essential to turn German citizens away from the enduring form of Nazi ideology in structures of logic and emotion (Parkinson, 2014). If Auschwitz is going to be prevented in the future, ‘education as guidance into the world of emotive intellect, experience, and reflective thought through otherness or difference becomes imperative for Adorno,’ points out Parkinson (2014: 52). In the context of Adorno’s efforts for re-education, this requires ‘understanding emotions as part of a larger repertoire of behaviors of embodied subjects’ and ‘underscores the centrality of the spatial dimension of geo-political context’ (Parkinson, 2017: 98). In other words, Germans in post-war Germany should cultivate critical and affective communities that are conducive to democratic sentiments, in part by altering their affective and spatial relations.
The coldness and hardness that predominated among Germans during Nazi Germany through the reign of cold rationalism undoubtedly played an important part in making Auschwitz possible. As Adorno said about affect and its relation to irrationality: … if they [people] have more affects and more passions, they will have less prejudices [sic]. I would like to say, if they allow themselves more of their affects and passions, if they do not once again repeat in themselves the pressure society exerts upon them, they will be far less evil, far less sadistic, and far less malicious than they sometimes are today. (1998d: 299–300)
The schooling of emotion, then, forms an integral part of education toward critical self-reflection, maturity and autonomy (Parkinson, 2014, 2017). It takes many forms ranging from recognizing the role of emotion in developing self-critical awareness and combating irrationality to re-educating the next generation of students and teachers so that emotions are embraced in the classroom as a way out of the emotional coldness and hardness. Without ever extensively addressing the role of emotion and affect in educational efforts in post-war Germany, Adorno emphasized that re-education necessarily included an education of the emotions that entailed the cultivation of different feelings and affective relations than those during the Nazi regime. Undoubtedly there is much that is neurotic in the relation to the past: defensive postures where one is not attacked, intense affects where they are hardly warranted by the situation, an absence of affect in the face of the gravest matters, not seldom simply a repression of what is known or half-known. (Adorno, 1998b: 90) Adorno encouraged the emergence of a different palette of feelings than the fascist, militant idealization of hardness or the repression of anxiety […]. Adorno underscored that German citizens would only become democratic subjects if, through experience and practice, they developed the capacity to tolerate a full spectrum of ambivalent, competing emotional responses – in short the capability of tolerating feelings without resorting to defensive rage or hatred. (99) Democracy has not become naturalized to the point where people truly experience it as their own and see themselves as subjects of the political process. Democracy is perceived as one system among others, as though one could choose from a menu between communism, democracy, fascism, and monarchy: but democracy is not identified with the people themselves as the expression of their political maturity. (1998b: 93)
Second, Adorno (1997) alerts us that salvaging the role of emotionality in critical thinking and education is not an endeavour without difficulties (Thiem, 2009). One of the most important risks is that this endeavour might end up cultivating ‘kitsch sentimentality’, namely, the situation in which ‘emotionality becomes exhausted, arrested, and neutralized in how it is circulated and rendered hermetic against transformations and self-criticism’ (Thiem, 2009: 600). For example, if democratic pedagogy moralizes the affective responses of students about the Holocaust insofar as it advocates that being emotionally touched by this horrific event is the epitome of our moral goodness and that such feelings are or should be representative of everyone, then students’ emotional investments become kitsch sentimentality. Such generalizations that proceed affectively through the emotionality of critical thinking, suggests Thiem (2009), ‘are problematic because they are complicit in the unnoticed violence against the visibly excluded’ (603). In other words, if emotionality fails to take into consideration the differences in human conditions – e.g. the Holocaust is a unique event and yet, at the same time, there are numerous other manifestations of human suffering – then the generalization of the Holocaust as the epitome of evil will gloss over the social, economic, and cultural differences between the students, who are all presumed to be moved in the same way. In the last part of the essay, I discuss the pedagogical insights emerging from Adorno’s democratic pedagogy and the education of emotions, particularly in light of his recently printed lecture on ‘the new right-wing extremism’.
Adorno’s insights on how to resist right-wing extremism
It is remarkable to realize the accuracy of Adorno’s (1967/2020) diagnosis of new right-wing extremism in Germany, especially today in the context of a growing number of right-wing movements around the world. The point is not to compare right-wing extremism nowadays to Adorno’s analysis half a century ago, although as Dahms (2020) says, what may be most striking is not so much that his effort was directed at illuminating right-wing trends that are virulent again today, but that he did so with astonishing clarity, efficiency and accuracy so many years ago, while difficulties remain today to conceive of effective strategies to contain or prevent the destructive potential of right-wing movements and politics. (130)
A productive reading of Adorno’s 1967 lecture on right-wing extremism needs to be situated in the historical and political context of electoral successes of the National Democratic Party of Germany, a neo-Nazi party in West Germany. What was new about this form of right-wing extremism, suggests Dahms (2020), was that this party promoted ideas and approaches that although they were not identical with, in many ways they were inspired by, the National Socialists. Adorno had already raised his concerns about the propagation of Nazis’ ideas in German society years earlier in his lecture on ‘coming to terms with the past’: I consider the survival of National Socialism within democracy to be potentially more menacing than the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy […] That fascism lives on, that the oft-invoked working through of the past has to this day been unsuccessful and has degenerated into its own caricature, an empty and cold forgetting, is due to the fact that the objective conditions of society that engendered fascism continue to exist. (1963/1998b: 90, 98)
The point of departure for Adorno’s lecture on right-wing extremism is the theme he addressed in his lecture on ‘coming to terms with the past’. As he said, ‘the thesis that the reason for right-wing extremism, or the potential for such a right-wing extremism, which was not yet truly visible at the time, is that the social conditions for fascism continue to exist’ (1967/2020: 1). These social conditions, Adorno explained, were related to economics, and especially to emotions of fear under conditions of capitalism and globalization (e.g. threat of impoverishment and unemployment), as well as threats to one’s established national identity. As he wrote: ‘in both socio-psychological and real terms, there is a very widespread fear of being absorbed by these blocs [U.S.A and U.S.S.R.] and, in the process, being severely impaired in one’s material existence’ (1967/2020: 4). Adorno pointed out that the fear of loss of identity and the fear emerging from capitalism and globalization made fascism attractive not only to previously Nazi sympathizers but also to younger generations, as they felt threatened by Germany’s collapse. These fears were taken advantage of by right-wing movements to spread propaganda, just as it happened with the Nazis. The ingenuity of the propaganda used by these parties and movements is that it balances out the […] unquestionable difference between the real interests and the fraudulent aims they espouse. It is the very substance of the matter, just as it was with the Nazis. When the means increasingly become substitutes for aims, one can almost say that, in these extreme right-wing movements, propaganda actually constitutes the substance of politics. (1967/2020: 13)
After his diagnosis of the roots and expressions of right-wing extremism, Adorno provided a range of strategies and tactics of how to resist this movement. As Dahms (2020: 149–150) correctly points out, Adorno’s numerous suggestions reiterate his call for critical self-reflection made in other lectures and writings – a call that emphasizes the importance of democratic pedagogy in social institutions, especially schools educating the younger generation. As he advised: [O]ne of the most crucial aspects of how to resist this movement – the only thing that really strikes me as effective is to warn the potential followers of right-wing extremism about its own consequences, to convey to them that this politics will inevitably lead its own followers to their doom too, and that this doom was part of it from the outset, just as Hitler started saying, at an early stage, ‘Then I’d rather put a bullet in my head,’ and then repeated the claim at every opportunity. So if one is serious about opposing these things, one must refer to the central interests of those who are targeted by the propaganda. This applies especially to young people, whom one must warn about every kind of drill, about the restriction of their privacy and their lifestyle. (1967/2020: 17)
Second, another pedagogical insight emerging from Adorno’s analysis of right-wing extremism is that Adorno advocated a very specific and increasingly important kind of democratic pedagogy that creates spaces for critical self-reflection. These spaces acknowledge how and why different young people articulate themselves affectively in certain ways and what can be done to respond productively to those affective investments in the micropolitical settings in which they live (e.g. schools, families). Consequently, Adorno’s approach inspires questions such as: How can democratic pedagogy refocus attention on how critical self-reflection feels, ‘rather than simply what it is and what it is for’ (Danvers, 2016: 284)? What are the affects and emotions of becoming ‘critical’ toward right-wing extremism? How are these affects and emotions entangled with critical self-reflection, and in which ways can educational institutions and practices cultivate affects and emotions of critical self-reflection without leading students to kitsch sentimentality? Such questions move beyond what critical self-reflection is, focusing instead on what it does in educational efforts to cultivate certain emotions (e.g. empathy, compassion, solidarity) as antidotes to growing fascist tendencies around the world.
Concluding remarks
Trying to assess the continuing relevance of Adorno’s educational thoughts in the present context, it is important to avoid superficial comparisons and generalizations regarding the extent to which his ideas can be implemented as such half a century after his death. That’s clearly not the point. Adorno’s lasting relevance should be understood in light of his acute conceptualization of the possibility that manipulation and social engineering is possible – either by fascists or even by those who claim to have ‘good intentions’ in the name of ‘noble causes’ (e.g. democracy, social justice). Adorno realized that the process of democratization cannot happen unless people, especially young ones, are (re)educated to behave and feel differently. Yet this process entails dangers that emerge from demanding an ‘education to feel differently’, as the line between indoctrination and re-education is often blurry and contentious. The success of democratization may be measured by the extent of a population’s critical reflection on and resistance to right-wing extremist and fascist ideas, yet it is important to keep in mind that the meaning and process of re-education are ‘ambivalent’, to say the least. As Parkinson rightly points out in her discussion on re-education in post-war Germany: [F]eeling differently might not always have meant reproducing behaviors outlined in programs of democratization by the reeducation. Rather, this very resistance of the Germans to these imposed ideological forms aimed at changing their life world in post-Nazi Germany might well indicate the stirrings of engagement, the reconstitution of altered intimate geographies to include political and broader social self-determination, which is part and parcel of a successful democratic habitus. In short, the agonistic, contradictory aspects of a democratic habitus do not accrue spontaneously to a society with democracy as its formal mode of political governance, but are part of an ongoing practice of vigilance and effort to maintain the spaces conducive to democratic intimate geographies. (2017: 101–102)
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
