Abstract
Dennis Loo reflects on the existence of society. He argues that academics must become public intellectuals and that sociologists, in particular, are well-positioned to reaffirm that we are first and foremost social beings.
All of us have lived through the revenge against the 1960s. Orchestrated by politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the rise of the Right (more precisely, the ascension of neoliberalism) replaced “Power to the People” with “Power to the Market.” The spirit of the ‘80s was cemented when Thatcher told a reporter, “I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. They’re casting their problem on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women, and there are families.”
By the turn of the millennium, market-driven values had become the norm in even those domains intended to serve the public good, such as medicine and social services. Even academia is not immune. In recent years, administrative positions in public universities have increased by as much as 84 percent while the faculty numbers drop; administrators make more than twice as much as the average professor, but characterize their job as “cutting the fat” from education. In cost-efficiency terms, this can only mean eliminating more faculty and consolidating classes. When asked by a student activist what could be done about the draconian budget cuts at my own university, the president responded, “Privatization. It’s the only way.”
We are, first and foremost, social beings who become human together.
Throughout society we see crumbling infrastructure. Union members and teachers are disparaged as “takers, not makers.” And record-setting gaps separate the rich from the rest, with such luxuries as pensions and public services now reserved for the ”one percent”… and, since the Supreme Court decided they’re “people” too, behemoth corporations.
Banks that were carrying risky financial derivatives of $183 trillion (13 times the size of the American economy) just before the collapse of Lehman Brothers now carry $248 trillion. And the criminals who brought us this disaster have not been punished. Instead, they have been richly rewarded. As University of Missouri economist L. Randall Wray put it in describing the sources of the 2008 financial crisis, “Fraud became rampant as normal business practice. …In the end, the U.S. financial system (and perhaps many others) became nothing but a massive criminal conspiracy to defraud borrowers.”
While the branches of government tasked with monitoring fraud are looking the other way, we the people are being watched. We’re all suspects, and 9/11 has simply been used to justify practices that predate that horrid day. Even the hope-and-change president has overridden due process and assumed the right to act as prosecutor, judge, and jury for those designated terrorists—including U.S. citizens—who are punished with everything from “preventive detention” to assassination.
The ruinous economic policies and the perilous security state of the last forty years are the direct products of neoliberalism. It’s a paradigm shift, and as the new normal, it cannot be contested in a piecemeal fashion. An entirely different paradigm is needed if we are to vie against it. I suggest this alternative paradigm must emphasize society and connections.
While civil libertarians decry the disappearance of civil liberties, what gets overlooked are the connections between the economy and the war on civil and political rights and liberties. As intellectuals and teachers, we must address this connection. We’re losing on both fronts, but research might identify what can be done about it.
Neoliberalism advances its own reality by manipulating public opinion, creating false dichotomies, and asserting fictions as fact. Academia has a duty to expose these lies by upholding the value of empirical data, systematic investigation, skepticism, and the lessons of history. We must combat the literal textualism, whether from religious fundamentalists or politicians who believe, as a senior Bush II White House official told New York Times reporter Ron Suskind, “We’re an Empire now and we make our own reality.” Academics must become public intellectuals, reclaiming the debate so that neoliberalism and its faith-based advocates do not succeed in their audacious aim for total control.
Despite Thatcher’s claim, society exists, and it’s the core of our discipline. Sociologists are particularly well-positioned to reaffirm that we are first and foremost social beings who become human together; we only survive because of social groups, social connections, and social dynamics. Denying the primacy of society (not to mention its very existence) leads directly to elevating individual and private interests above the community and public interest. The future of society and the planet rests upon the outcome of the battle between the acolytes of the market and the defenders of public interest and public goods.