We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families
Journalist points insistently, but nothing happens
Postliberalism, as I conceive of it, is not a project of looking backwards–or to less developed countries–for illiberal models of government in order to circumvent recent left and liberal cultural trends, like feminism, LGBT visibility, civil rights, etc: it isn’t about “rejecting modernity,” technology, atomization, etc. Postliberalism, to me, is a project that understands that Enlightenment Liberalism has been a stunning success, but it still contains major problems, problems that will require moving beyond liberalism and democracy to solve.
One of these problems is the undifferentiated notion of the individual: that is, that all individuals are, ultimately, equal. Of course, in terms of personhood—in terms of dignity and rights, in terms of worthiness of love and understanding—yes, of course, all people are equal. But, there are ways—important ways—that people are unequal. I say this not as a crypto-Nazi or incendiary white supremacist, but as a person with a masters degree in secondary education.
One of the key concepts in special education is differentiation: the process of changing or modifying assignments based on students’ “preparedness,” which reads roughly as ability or intelligence, but isn’t always. What this means is that in a classroom of 20 kids, with, say, five of them “identified” and on a special education teacher’s caseload–because they have dyslexia or ADHD or intellectual disabilities or very low IQs or social-emotional issues, etc.–the classroom teacher and the special education teacher create differentiated versions of assignments: if the rest of the class is writing a five paragraph essay, some of these “identified” kids might be writing a two paragraph essay; the identified kids might get special graphic organizers or other “scaffolding,” such as definitions of important vocabulary words, programs that reduce the lexile of the text or read the text out loud, and so on.
Sometimes, these strategies work. For reasons that are beyond the scope of this review to discuss, often they do not. So, while “there is a lot of work to do,” it also means there is a huge variety of “preparedness” among people even in an arguably overly-developed country like the United States. Therefore, I’m not sure why this concept of differentiated experience of school doesn’t extrapolate to society: that is, if we understand that some people, especially those with very low IQs, need one-on-one help to read or write even a few sentences (or to “express themselves appropriately,” etc.), how would we expect people like this to behave in a society, whose fundamental value system assumes education? A hard reality is that there are 10s of millions of people in our country for whom liberal and Enlightenment ideas–the freedom to choose from a number of byzantine moral frameworks, the freedom to own and dispose of private property at will, the freedom to contest statements made government officials, etc.–are “inaccessible.” If you spend a lot of time among very capable and educated people, my guess is you don’t fully understand the extent of this problem.
The other thing to keep in mind is that there are millions of people who appear to be thriving within this system, but really are not; they are mostly just mimicking those around them.
This is especially true, if I am not making too many assumptions, in a country like Rwanda, where the level of development, of education, of nutrition, and so on, in 1994 and earlier was significantly below those of the United States and Western Europe. Of course, Rwandan society didn’t make the same assumptions about autonomous individualism that American and European societies did and do. But, author Philip Gourevitch seems to.
Gourevitch is–understandably–angry about genocide, and more than once, he refers to his own family’s experience with the shoah perpetrated by Nazis against European Jews. He wants to hold people accountable–and not just a passive “international community” that sat on its hands during the 100 day massacre and not just the French, who apparently supported–even militarily–the Francophone Hutus even when it was clear that they were facilitating a demonic mania of murder and rape. He wants to hold the genocidaires, the Interahamwe Hutu killers and others, accountable.
Before I can make a moral decision here, I’d like to see a discussion of what the genocide looked like from the position of a 50-IQ Hutu peasant, who showed up to work one day and was ordered–by his boss, by the country’s military and government, and by the people who spoke over the radio–to slaughter Tutsi families in the area. To what extent was a person like this able to resist system-wide immorality? It’s hard, maybe impossible, to measure moral agency; still, I’d have appreciated an attempt at capturing qualitative elements of the massacre not just from the perspective of the victims, but from the perspective of the probably thousands of genocidaires whom we in the United States would likely classify as being intellectually disabled, but people who, in Rwanda, were basically just below average. I say this not as a person interested in qualifying genocide or making excuses for right wing populist groups, but as a person interested in this question: to what extent does liberal democracy actually work if you take considerations of IQ seriously? To what extent are people incapable of serious and deep thought conditioned by society and media and government to act? The answer to this question is important because the idea of liberal democracy basically hinges on the assumption that all adults are capable of making important decisions for themselves.
Almost certainly, this is not true.
Since this is not true, the question becomes, How do we differentiate our society in such a way as to (a.) make things more comfortable for those who, for one reason or a thousand others, simply do not or cannot understand basic realities and to make sure these people to retain rights and dignity appropriate to their personhood (in the Catholic sense) while at the same time (b.) allowing more capable people to develop their own abilities to the highest and best extents without worrying about those less capable people, who can often have egregiously incomplete understandings of the world—or worse, understandings of the world that have been mostly just implanted by school or the news or a leader within the ethnic group or a social media personality or whatever.
I’m convinced there is a way to upgrade from our current binary conception of politics—free vs unfree—to something more sophisticated.