Awakening the Liberal Muggle
In that essay, I argued that since neo-cons could not convince the political elite and the scientists, they resorted to a backdoor strategy - to mobilize the masses (especially parents) to apply pressure from below on school boards.
While writing this essay and teaching my "Nationalism and pop culture course," my students and I discovered the existence of an entire world that had previously escaped our notice. Just as Harry Potter discovered the world of magic, my students and I realized that we having been living as liberal muggles - confident in the security and realness in our world and blissfully unaware of the parallel universe, replete with its own rules, standards and institutions, that were being erected right under our noses.
Attempting to use the Penguin film to legitimize neo-con science is merely the tip of the iceberg. While reading film reviews, I discovered that neo-cons have come up with their own standard for rating films -wholesomeness index and morality rating .
By this index, only a couple of films (Narnia, Passion of Christ) attained decent ratings. Then, there were Fox news, Rush Limbaugh's talk radio, a host of television programs (Joan of Acadia, Seventh Heaven, Touched by an Angel) and even magazines for Christian girls like Brio and Breakaway .
The more my students and I looked at what was on television, radio and film, the more it occurred to us that there was a subtle but unmistakable transformation in the strategy of the Christian right in America from evangelism to populism, i.e., from winning converts to changing the commonsense of the entire society. A student of mine actually wrote a research paper about how programs like Joan of Acadia made it less un-cool for high school and college students to be spiritual and possibly religious.
The emergence and built-up of a parallel universe and institutions - like the creation of their own ministry, hospitals and international sports competition by wizard folks - usually do not pose a problem; after all, isn't that the tolerant, multiculturalism model?
However, the Christian Right's universe presents a problem to ("liberal" according the Right) mainstream institutions insofar as it also draws upon the discourse of science, objectivity and truth, which are supposed to transcend ideology. What I am concerned about is not that science and neutrality has been hijacked by the Right - after all, this would simply be another episode in how science has regularly serve political goals (e.g., colonialism) and there is hardly a contemporary group (feminist, gay, environmental) that does not use science to make its argument.
What concerns me is the science takes on different shapes in the hands of scientists - open, falsifiable, infinitely dialogic - than in the hands of politicians, where hypothesizes becomes ossified as facts and where the scientific method is touted to support claims truth, objectivity and neutrality.
In other words, science is used to legitimize and give authority, rather than to challenge, test and debate. As a discipline, science is remarkably democratic and non-monopolistic. In the realm of politics, it is used prove why one particular way of perceiving the world is the correct way and why there is a right answer to every question.
Let me returning to the problem of the clash of the two monopolistic worlds. Using the Harry Potter analogy, this would be tantamount to us muggles discovering that everything we have worked hard for and believed in is actually arbitrary (I am also reminded of the two movies, Pleasantville and Harry Truman).
Just as magic folks may claim that our institutions (including God) are mere fictions, so too can neo-cons claim intelligent design to be more correct than evolution. What is vital here is not simply the construction of an alternative universe, but its challenge to the credibility and reliability of existing institutions, which, if extended over periods of time, erodes the "taken-for-granted-ness" or realness of existing institutions. The result will be that science will merely be another perspective, news merely another story.
Personally, I think there is a certain honesty in this impending meltdown of science and reason as we know it. No one is truly neutral and it makes sense to come out of our professional closets to reflect on how our professional standards might be partisan.
What is problematic is how liberal muggles are responding to the situation. Rather than share the monopoly over science and objectivity (and thus surrender claims to truth) and accept the inevitability of voice, liberal muggles (e.g., CBS) often try to reclaim their hold on neutrality and professionalism. In a way, the "liberal" establishment is trapped in a modernist understanding of the world where professionalism is pegged to objectivity and neutrality.
But we no longer live in such a world. Especially with the emergence of media like al-Jazeera and Fox and regional media (like Channel News Asia, Chinese Central TV) that claims professionalism and particularity of voice, the age of universalism seems to be drawing to a close.
By foregrounding the issue of identity and voice, these media makes it impossible for any media to claim to have no voice, to claim to speak for everyone and to everyone. In a post-universalism age, claims of universalism and neutrality can only be regarded ironically, never credibly. E.g., it is impossible to talk about universal human rights without asking, "universal according to whom?"
The door between the world of the muggles and the world of the magic folks has been cracked open, at least for me and my students, and we veer between rescuing and shoring up the legitimacy of existing institutions such as film ratings, objective news (because we don't know how else to organize our world) on the one hand, and on the other hand, cheering the neo-cons to speed up the demolition of the authoritative façade of science, reason and objectivity.
How should liberal muggles respond? Should muggles pretend the other world doesn't exist, like the way Rumsfeld denies the validity of al-Jazeera's version of reality or the way academics and mainstream news media dismiss Fox as unprofessional?
Should the muggles invade or persecute the magic folks and try to cure them of their queerness with a dose of good scientific medicine? Is co-existence (without the fear of being eradicated) even an option? The door between the two worlds have opened, it remains to be seen whether muggles will declare war, ignore the situation and risk becoming irrelevant, or learn to coexist.
The biggest question is perhaps whether we can even imagine a world that is post-reason, post-truth and post-modern, where institutions openly admit their subjectivity and ideological underpinnings and make no more claims to being neutrality, credible and professional, a world where differences cannot be resolved by running to a higher or more expert authority because there is no more such authority. Can we, in other words, imagine a radically democratic world? This challenge is more than the identification of a set of ethics for adversaries; it is also a call to intellectuals and professionals on all fronts to radically and creatively re-envision social institutions (e.g., civil society, science, journalism aesthetics) in an age of post-reason.(SF/EU)
* Soek Fang is Assistant Professor in International Studies in Macalester College, USA. This essay was first published in Macalester Weekly