Education after Auschwitz, A dialog
posted by karina on September 2nd, 2012 at 9:18AM

Adorno wrote Education after Auschwitz in 1967, not long time after the atrocities that had left the world perplex. His main point is to understand why common people with no particular training to be a torturer were able to do such things and also why society in general did nothing about it.   At the time he and others from the Frankfurt school were very influenced by Freud, so in order to have a better glance at his text is important to know what Freud’s theory about civilization and also Adorno’s idea of education and love.
Adorno is convinced that there is something psychoanalyse can do in order to preclude Auschwitz from happening again, he believes that there is something within human nature that explains what happened. Adorno is trying to avoid the idea that evil can not be understood and hence ignored or naturalized. Evil is rational and once understood can be avoid, that is his hope.
He uses Freud’s theory of civilization and its discontents to understand why people leaving in the farms were more predisposed to work with the Nazis as tortures even if they were neighbours, friends, of those being tortured. Freud says that humans have certain instincts that are immutable: desire for sex and predisposition to violent aggressions towards authority figures and towards sexual competitors. Civilization is the oppressive entity that demands conformity and instinctual repression, and by always demanding repression it creates discontent citizens.
Adorno uses this notion to explain why people living in the farms were more predisposed to torture, because they were somehow less exposed to civilization and hence the "primitive" feelings usually repressed by civilization were actually less repressed. This could be discussed until today, with Internet available to almost everyone would Auschwitz still happen?   The answer is yes, we just need to remember what happened to Rwanda, Bosnia, not so long time ago.
The solution he proposes is education and love. An education that is based on freedom and love, an education that provides the tools for the individual to be free and active, an active thinker capable of reflecting about society and about oneself. And love. Love would be the answer. The capability of feeling connexion to one another, being able to have compassion, but he also says that perhaps this kind of love does not exist. Perhaps we are not able to love but those close of us, otherwise Rwanda and Bosnia would never had happen.
I really like this libertarian education idea, the same that was develop years latter by Paulo Freire and expanded to the feminism realm by Bell Hooks. Adorno believes that if we understand what happened and why it happened we could prevent it form happening again. Education would be a tool to give people consciousness, since love is not something that can be taught, enlightenment would be the answer, awareness, so Auschwitz would not happen again.
I still believe it.

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Tease. I want my money back.
posted by dennisn on August 7th, 2012 at 5:36PM

The only hint of a concrete solution that Theodor offers us, despite kindof teasing us with more in the title, is some kind of "mobile convoy of volunteer [teachers]." One that somehow (he doesn't explain how) would spread enlightenment about people's inner and external motivations -- a "critical self-reflection" as he calls it. A kind of intervention-education. Especially to the far reaches of isolated barbaric rural settlements. I suppose the internet is just such a contemporary "mobile convoy". To that, I would also add that our best hope with such an intervention (and it is indeed a tiny tiny hope) is with our closest family and friends. If we can't teach them (and, from personal experience, I have so far failed completely in all my attempts), then our chances are even worse with strangers. As Molyneux mentions, most adult brains are traumatized from early childhood, and are unopen to reason and evidence.

He also hints at "modifying mass media", which is a bit anachronistic in today's internet age, where everyone is the locus of their very own mass media. Although, at the time he wrote this essay (mid '90s?), I think that was a futile and dirty proposal. Futile, because it should be pretty obvious that the obsolete TV/print/radio media is entirely owned by powerful fascistic business interests, and dirty because it necessarily means compromising many principles, for the utilitarian promise of a wider audience.

He does tell us there are certain things we shouldn't bother doing. "I do not believe it would help much to appeal to eternal values [ethics], at which the very people who are prone to commit such atrocities would merely shrug their shoulders." I think this is a big mistake. Humans are moral animals -- we actually have little tolerance for doing evil. (I dare you to name me one person who enjoys evil.) The problem with the German National Socialists wasn't that they were evil monsters -- in fact, it was that the vast majority of them did not know they were committing evil. They were either brainwashed into thinking Jews were sub-human or evil themselves, or they were simply completely oblivious to what was going on. Either way, I think discussing and reinforcing evidence and ethics, in some kind of voluntary interventionist way, is the best solution.

He tells us we shouldn't bother spreading the message of love, since those who need it most are incapable of appreciating it. However, I think if instead love was spread by action and example, rather than merely as a cognitive message, it would be very effective.

I do like his state-socialism/collectivism bashing that is peppered throughout the essay. He urges us not to blindly cooperate with norms, external authorities and collectivization; not to place "the right of the state over that of its members"; not to treat others "as an amorphous mass." He describes the current modern (social-democratic) culture as an "administered world" that is "claustrophobic of humanity" -- a "feeling of being incarcerated in a thoroughly societalized, closely woven, netlike environment." Even the good intentions of state-socialism, he bashes: "the exhortation to love is itself part of the ideology coldness perpetutates. It bears the compulsive, oppressive quality that counteracts the ability to love."

I like his commentary on the dangers of repression, and how it played a key role in the development of Auschwitz.

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posted by jenni on July 29th, 2012 at 8:38PM

Do we punish each other if we are late?

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