Page 153 - Šolsko polje, XXVIII, 2017, no. 3-4: Education and the American Dream, ed. Mitja Sardoč
P. 153
d. štrajn ■ perversion of the american dream
the same time as it preached the importance of spiritual, or spiritually ex-
pansive living, by which it meant living close to nature – a nature where
God’s moral law could be intuited by divinely receptive man – rather
than submitting to religious dogma (Cardullo, 2004: pp. 153–154).
Only a few hints about the more or less sophisticated part of Amer-
ican culture do not suffice for a claim that due to such foundation the
American Dream still contains some emancipative potential. Beside one,
indeed very important, current of philosophy and mainstream cinema,
which I mentioned as good examples, many reflections of the American
Dream in literature, painting, theatre and especially in the radical art of
the 1960s etc., should be taken into account, which was actually done by
several scholars and journalists many times over. I only tried to sketch
some points, which should not be forgotten, especially when we are facing
new political and cultural realities in the context of the transformations
of American society, in which the neoliberal ideology keeps prevailing.
Social Criticism
A figure of public intellectual, comparable to the European and notably
French culture and politics, never really took root in the USA. With some
exceptions in a brief period of the 1960s students’ rebellions, the Ameri-
can social criticism was mostly confined to academia. However, Ameri-
can social sciences did not ignore social realities in spite of the fact that
many scientists (in the fields of economy, empirical sociology, behaviour-
ist psychology and some applied studies) served the dominant ideology
quite well. Many authors from the period after the 1960s until the pres-
ent manifestly build their critical argument around various versions of
the “equal opportunities” premise, according to which “/…/ the Ameri-
can Dream is a vision of a life in which one’s status at birth does not de-
termine one’s station in the rest of one’s life. Instead, one’s own ability,
god-given talent, and hard work determine what kind of life one gets to
live” (Ghosh, 2013: p. 28). Nevertheless, the criticism within many schol-
arly observations – from distinctly sociological to interdisciplinary ones
– deepened the view upon American society by analysing a range of phe-
nomena, which become visible only through a complex analysis based on
psychoanalysis, or on anthropological insights, or on the feminist versions
of the “gaze of the other”.
The cultural criticism of Christopher Lasch, especially his seminal
book The Culture of Narcissism, first published in 1979, decisively de-
termined the learned social perceptions of American society in the after-
math of the 1960s revolution for the decades to come. A time of neoliber-
151
the same time as it preached the importance of spiritual, or spiritually ex-
pansive living, by which it meant living close to nature – a nature where
God’s moral law could be intuited by divinely receptive man – rather
than submitting to religious dogma (Cardullo, 2004: pp. 153–154).
Only a few hints about the more or less sophisticated part of Amer-
ican culture do not suffice for a claim that due to such foundation the
American Dream still contains some emancipative potential. Beside one,
indeed very important, current of philosophy and mainstream cinema,
which I mentioned as good examples, many reflections of the American
Dream in literature, painting, theatre and especially in the radical art of
the 1960s etc., should be taken into account, which was actually done by
several scholars and journalists many times over. I only tried to sketch
some points, which should not be forgotten, especially when we are facing
new political and cultural realities in the context of the transformations
of American society, in which the neoliberal ideology keeps prevailing.
Social Criticism
A figure of public intellectual, comparable to the European and notably
French culture and politics, never really took root in the USA. With some
exceptions in a brief period of the 1960s students’ rebellions, the Ameri-
can social criticism was mostly confined to academia. However, Ameri-
can social sciences did not ignore social realities in spite of the fact that
many scientists (in the fields of economy, empirical sociology, behaviour-
ist psychology and some applied studies) served the dominant ideology
quite well. Many authors from the period after the 1960s until the pres-
ent manifestly build their critical argument around various versions of
the “equal opportunities” premise, according to which “/…/ the Ameri-
can Dream is a vision of a life in which one’s status at birth does not de-
termine one’s station in the rest of one’s life. Instead, one’s own ability,
god-given talent, and hard work determine what kind of life one gets to
live” (Ghosh, 2013: p. 28). Nevertheless, the criticism within many schol-
arly observations – from distinctly sociological to interdisciplinary ones
– deepened the view upon American society by analysing a range of phe-
nomena, which become visible only through a complex analysis based on
psychoanalysis, or on anthropological insights, or on the feminist versions
of the “gaze of the other”.
The cultural criticism of Christopher Lasch, especially his seminal
book The Culture of Narcissism, first published in 1979, decisively de-
termined the learned social perceptions of American society in the after-
math of the 1960s revolution for the decades to come. A time of neoliber-
151
