Page 140 - Šolsko polje, XXVIII, 2017, no. 3-4: Education and the American Dream, ed. Mitja Sardoč
P. 140
šolsko polje, letnik xxviii, številka 3–4
In a society of dependent jobholders, the promised reward of a
new era of national prosperity made this kind of requested cooperation
seem acceptable, since it could, along the need to satisfy the necessities
of life, easily turn out as one’s own interest. Considering that the Ameri-
can dream became popularised as a national motto only in the late 1920’s
and since its content is comprised mostly of promises of upward mobility
and economic advancement, it seems more appropriate to interpret it to-
gether with the missing component discussed above. Conditions where
a new national prosperity was entrusted to a scientific design, engineer’s
plan and methodical efficiency, which were not focused on the material
side of production, but on adjusting the human element to correspond to
its necessities, became determinative also for the belief called the Ameri-
can dream. Since this belief did never belong to those already fulfilled, but
to the masses of poor and miserable, it was never just a plain promise and
hope, but most of all a demand. If the American dream took the form of
an »explicit allegiance« (Cullen, 2003: p. 6), then it was an allegiance to
accept an already designed serving way of life.
At this point we have reached a central turn in our analysis. Referring
to Arendt’s (1996) findings that the modern phenomenon of conformism
appears to be inherent to society exactly because its specific organisational
principles exclude, by rule, the human possibility of individual spontane-
ous action and independent judgement and replace them with predictable
behaviour usually handled by external causes, we can continue by adding
one crucial remark. Since behaviour replaced action, the process of con-
forming never unfolds only one-way, as if it was solely imposed on those
supposed to be conformed. On the contrary, modern conformism appar-
ently unfolds as a cooperation, where those supposed to be conformed
participate in it and hand over themselves voluntarily to those who are
supposed to conform them. The remaining crucial issue that needs to be
clarified in the following paragraphs is how this whole process has be-
come obscured on both sides up to the point where all of its constitutive
features like order, obedience, servitude, passiveness have lost their explic-
it character and have become unrecognizable. This fatal opacity, when co-
ercing and to be coerced are embedded in someone’s way of life, enables
conformism to reach an unprecedented level of totality and perfection.
While the improvement of living conditions by means of labour
and production in the liberal tradition was still confined in the domain
of every individual, in the Progressive era it became elevated to a nation-
al purpose, as a common endeavour defining the whole nation, which
appeared to them as a gigantic collective. Consequently, Taylor’s (1947)
ground-breaking scientific management, which tries to end once and for
138
In a society of dependent jobholders, the promised reward of a
new era of national prosperity made this kind of requested cooperation
seem acceptable, since it could, along the need to satisfy the necessities
of life, easily turn out as one’s own interest. Considering that the Ameri-
can dream became popularised as a national motto only in the late 1920’s
and since its content is comprised mostly of promises of upward mobility
and economic advancement, it seems more appropriate to interpret it to-
gether with the missing component discussed above. Conditions where
a new national prosperity was entrusted to a scientific design, engineer’s
plan and methodical efficiency, which were not focused on the material
side of production, but on adjusting the human element to correspond to
its necessities, became determinative also for the belief called the Ameri-
can dream. Since this belief did never belong to those already fulfilled, but
to the masses of poor and miserable, it was never just a plain promise and
hope, but most of all a demand. If the American dream took the form of
an »explicit allegiance« (Cullen, 2003: p. 6), then it was an allegiance to
accept an already designed serving way of life.
At this point we have reached a central turn in our analysis. Referring
to Arendt’s (1996) findings that the modern phenomenon of conformism
appears to be inherent to society exactly because its specific organisational
principles exclude, by rule, the human possibility of individual spontane-
ous action and independent judgement and replace them with predictable
behaviour usually handled by external causes, we can continue by adding
one crucial remark. Since behaviour replaced action, the process of con-
forming never unfolds only one-way, as if it was solely imposed on those
supposed to be conformed. On the contrary, modern conformism appar-
ently unfolds as a cooperation, where those supposed to be conformed
participate in it and hand over themselves voluntarily to those who are
supposed to conform them. The remaining crucial issue that needs to be
clarified in the following paragraphs is how this whole process has be-
come obscured on both sides up to the point where all of its constitutive
features like order, obedience, servitude, passiveness have lost their explic-
it character and have become unrecognizable. This fatal opacity, when co-
ercing and to be coerced are embedded in someone’s way of life, enables
conformism to reach an unprecedented level of totality and perfection.
While the improvement of living conditions by means of labour
and production in the liberal tradition was still confined in the domain
of every individual, in the Progressive era it became elevated to a nation-
al purpose, as a common endeavour defining the whole nation, which
appeared to them as a gigantic collective. Consequently, Taylor’s (1947)
ground-breaking scientific management, which tries to end once and for
138
