The Pleasure of Power

We live in a time where we are deeply conflicted about the concept of power. On the one hand, we encourage the empowering of people; on the other hand, we are suspicious of people who have power (especially the so-called 1 %). On the one hand, we are thrilled when watching those who exercise power, who impose their will on others --- athletes, movie heroes and anti-heroes, even movie thugs and gangsters; on the other, we cringe when someone in real life steps up and acts in a powerful way because that's not "nice."

Where this conceptual conflict is being played out most dramatically is in schools. For 4 decades or more, we have worked at empowering students, at treating them like clients rather than like traditional students, at figuring out how to win them over and "engage" them so that they will behave reasonably well and learn a reasonable amount. Reading the State-published guidelines for public school teachers, it is obvious that it is up to the teacher to figure out ways to entice students to behave well and to study. There is almost literally nothing about the responsibility of the student to learn and not much more about the responsibility of the student to choose to behave well.

I don't have the data to support drawing a cause-and-effect line between this approach and the reality that there is now so much "bullying" going on in schools that the concern has proceeded from faculty meeting topics to district-wide policy-setting to articles in a wide variety of periodicals to beautifully produced "public service announcements" featuring famous and beautiful people coming out against "bullying." It's an epidemic and it's obvious that we don't really know how to approach it and I suspect that there is a causal relationship.

In teacher preparation classes, I would sometimes raise the question of what a teacher should do when she saw one student teasing or ridiculing or physically intimidating another student. The response I got was universally that the proper strategy for the teacher to adopt was to "model" the behavior she wanted to see in the classroom. When I asked my students whether they could imagine being more pro-active and pointing out that the hurtful behavior was wrong and telling them why and telling them that it therefore must be stopped and never happen again, they were befuddled; such a thing had never occurred to them nor had anyone ever suggested it to them.

There are a number of pedagogical, epistemological, psychological, political, and ethical assumptions at work here. The ones that I want to pursue have to do with our understanding of what power is and what it's for.

Michel Foucault famously contended that "everything is politics and all politics is power." If one understands "politics" in this context to mean the entirety of interactions and negotiations of individuals and groups with other individuals and groups, then we have to take Foucault to mean that the nature of the world is nothing except a series of power transactions in which dominance and submission are established and any further policy or practice flows inevitably from that result.

This is not an esoteric academic theory held and understood and acted on only by a small intellectual elite. It is an attitude that informs the behavior of a great many people, even some people who have managed to achieve a veneer of civilization. One of the obvious manifestations of this attitude is in imaginative products --- novels, movies, music. Characters articulate their belief that the world is completely made up of what Hobbes called "the war of all against all" and that everyone is in it for his own gain and cares nothing for anyone else and that anyone who claims otherwise is either profoundly naive or running a scam (as his version of getting from others). Such people see those who preach ethical standards as either deluded or duplicitous and highly hypocritical. The criminal version of this character often claims a kind of superiority because he's honest about what he's doing where the bourgeois version hides behind a screen of lies.

(We can see a mild version of this in the Woody Guthrie song where he contrasts those who "rob with a six gun" with those who "rob with a fountain pen." Guthrie clearly preferred those who robbed with a six gun, although I have a hard time imagining that he would have gone as far as Foucault.)

It isn't just the influence of an otherwise minor French intellectual. I don't think that we give nearly enough credit to the epistemological and psychological effects of the 20th Century generally and of World War II in particular. The horrors of World War II went far beyond the usual horrors of war, the almost unimaginable loss of life and the resultant effects on the survivors. There was a level of barbaric behavior, made even more effective by advances in technology, that brought into question the worth of the entire Western project: rationality (and especially science), Christianity, liberal politics, the rule of law, and tolerance of diversity.

There was a whole generation of academics and professionals --- the group within Western society that we could loosely call the intellectuals --- for whom those barbaric acts indicated that the Western project had been a delusion and must be left behind (which led to a wide variety of suggested alternatives). The camps, the Bomb, Dresden and Tokyo, the medical experiments, the torture, the apparently easy step into seeing the other as less than human --- all these and many more had convinced these observers that we in the West had been kidding ourselves, that it had all been an illusion. Reason was an illusion, so attempts at objectivity and disinterest were pointless at best, just another way to control others at worst. For many, the Nazis had been associated with Christianity just enough to discredit the founding religion of the West.

As with so many things, what had affected the intellectual class made its way into the general population in more and more popular forms, until now we see what people from before our own time would quickly recognize as nihilism but we take as normal and everyday forms of entertainment.

A little more than 20 years ago, I was working in a very good independent secondary school and was teaching a group of seniors. Other than the fact that they all came from wealthy families, they were a pretty diverse group: boys and girls, 5 or 6 different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, different levels of intelligence, and vastly different interests and avocations.

I wrote the following terms on the board: atheistic, materialistic, nihilistic, and cynical. Then I asked them how they would feel if I called them a bunch of atheistic, materialistic, nihilistic cynics. To their credit, they answered the question: Oh, we wouldn't like that; that would be mean.

Okay, I said, and then defined each term, without prejudice. Once they heard the definitions of the terms, they all said, "Oh, yeah, that's us." And they said it simply and authentically. To them it was matter of fact.

The thing that we don't want to face up to when discussing "bullying" is that exercising power over someone else is pleasurable and that we don't have anything to say to a pre-teen or early adolescent whose attitude is that it gives me pleasure so leave me alone.

In the late 19th Century, Lord Acton famously said that "Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." As with many other things, we have "empowered" without the understanding that the exercise of power must be principled. Without guiding principles, power becomes naked, something to use for its own sake and then we have "bullying."

"Bullying" in schools it not a discrete phenomenon. It is a manifestation of deep, complex, and long-term effects on the way we think about things. "Empowering" students without an equally powerful emphasis on the necessity of principled behavior is an effect of that process.

Teaching students that principle comes before pleasure (in this case, the exercise of power over others) is the only way to change this barbaric behavior, but we're a long way from choosing to do that.