Santorum’s Gift
by zunguzungu
On the surface, Rick Santorum’s diatribe against college education is weird: why would the effort to make a college education available to any and all — presuming that’s what Obama is actually doing — be considered the desire of a “snob”? Shouldn’t it be the reverse? Shouldn’t the “snob” be a person who wants to distinguish between people who are and aren’t gifted, as in this little excursis into the Booker T. Washington playbook from Santorum:
“Not all folks are gifted the same way. Some people have incredible gifts with their hands.”
Now, that reads to me like a plain and simple expression of class-fitness: some people are suited for intellectual labor and some are suited for using their hands. Some people are suited to be hewers of wood, drawers of water; others are suited to be their managers and masters. Or do I say that because I’m a snob? Because I’m a member of the coastal elite and look down on people who work with their hands? And so forth?
When he was questioned on the point by George Stephanopoulos on Saturday, Santorum tried to limit himself to emphasizing the honor and dignity of labor that does not require a degree:
STEPHANOPOULOS: Now getting to college has been part of the American dream for generations, Senator. Why does articulating an aspiration make the president a snob?
SANTORUM: I think because there are lot of people in this country that have no desire or no aspiration to go to college, because they have a different set of skills and desires and dreams that don’t include college. And to sort of lay out there that somehow this is — this is — should be everybody’s goal, I think, devalues the tremendous work that people who, frankly, don’t go to college and don’t want to go to college because they have a lot of other talents and skills that, frankly, college, you know, four-year colleges may not be able to assist them.
And there are other — there’s technical schools, there’s additional training, vocational training. There’s skills and apprenticeships. There’s all sorts of things that people can do to upgrade their skills to be very productive and and build their community.
And this is a pitch with a much more general appeal; in talking about “skills and desires and dreams” he’s emphasizing the broad diversity of human life that standardizing the four year degree might constrain and diminish. He’s working on valorizing a kind of blue-collar pride in labor, full stop, and he has the virtue of actually having a point: to make “4 year degree” a normative standard devalues, quite literally, the work done by people who don’t have a degree.
But the change in rhetoric from the original speech is worth noting. In conversation with Stephanopoulos (on TV), he wants to be seen as fighting back against liberal indoctrination, speaking for a religious blue collar moral majority against a secular liberal elite that disdains its accomplishment and desires, as complaining that they do not represent us (but they hold us to their standards). As such, it’s actually kind of a liberal complaint, if only in the classical sense: a rigid hierarchy is stifling the individual will and a political system is operating in an unrepresentative manner. But to get to this point, he’s backtracked so far that what he’s saying is almost indistinguishable from Obama’s own stated position: while Stephanopoulos points out that Obama simply said that he wanted “every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training,” Santorum calls for “technical schools…additional training, vocational training…skills and apprenticeships” (and as TPM notes, Santorum is attributing to Obama a position that Santorum has also advocated).
But Santorum’s hypocrisy is boring. What’s interesting to me is the fundamental shift in philosophy he has to make between the two rhetorical moments, between a speech in front of Tea Party types in Michigan and a conversation with a Democratic talk show guy in Washington. For example, in phrases like “Not all folks are gifted the same way” and “Some people have incredible gifts with their hands” he’s calling on a specific kind of Christian discourse, one that indexes a quite non-liberal vision of the human. It’s not explicit, but it’s there: in contrast with the secular language of individual accomplishment and self-determination that he uses with Stephanopoulos (e.g. “skills and desires and dreams”), talking about “gifts” takes us to something like the parable of the talents, and to the moral responsibility that gifts bring to use them to the ends which the Giver intends.
To put it simply: your “gifts” are not yours to use (or neglect) in whatever way you want. You did not earn them, do not deserve them, and you have them only because of the grace of the giver. As a result, your “gifts” are to be used in accordance with something other than your “desires and dreams.” This is why the Bible is filled with examples of people whose “desires and dreams” (or what they take them to be) distract them from God’s true purpose: Jonah getting swallowed by a whale because he won’t heed God’s instructions to preach to the Ninevites, for the example, or the guy who buries his talents in a hole and is rebuked for it. Insofar as Christianity is a project of harmonizing your will with God’s desire for you — and that’s very far — a deep archive of scriptural doctrine frames the implicit and explicit conflict between the two and instructs you on you job as a Christian to overcome the former in favor of the latter. When you need to use what God has given you, to the ends which God intends, your dreams and desires register, primarily, as the thing you have to be wary of.
Now, we shouldn’t oversimplify “Christianity” here; what I’m really talking about is the particular consequence of this particular metaphor (and the ways in which it gets used). But the difference is worth tracking, because while the quote from his chat with Stephanopoulos is a complaint against constraints on self-determination, his speech in Michigan gives us the raw and uncut Santorum, the language of obligation that makes his heart swell proudly: against a secular world that wants to liberate and free us to do as we desire, he wants to re-focus our efforts, as workers, back onto the obligations of God’s plan. The problem is no longer that we are being indoctrinated (and remember, the problem with “indoctrination,” traditionally, is that it runs against the liberal notion of education, that instead of teaching us to be free, it enslaves us). In Michigan, the problem Santorum is complaining about is precisely this, that we are being un-indoctrinated, taught or permitted to do as we please. The secular world is the false god of a permissive society; literally, a society that permits us to be misled by our desires, rather than one which enforces legal strictures on morality.
This is not hyperbole, by the way; via IHE, let’s enjoy this bit of rhetoric from a speech about why Satan is destroying America by starting with academia:
The place where [Satan] was, in my mind, the most successful and first — first successful was in academia. He understood pride of smart people. He attacked them at their weakest. They were in fact smarter than everybody else and could come up with something new and different — pursue new truths, deny the existence of truth, play with it because they’re smart. And so academia a long time ago fell.
You say, well, what could be the impact of academia falling? Well, I would make the argument that the other structures that I’m going to talk about here had the root of their destruction because of academia. Because what academia does is educate the elites in our society, educates the leaders of our society, particularly at the college level. And they were the first to fall. And so what we saw, this domino effect, once the colleges fell and those who were being educated in our institutions.
Obama is a “snob,” therefore, in the same way Faust was a snob: he thought he could make his own truth, believed he could “pursue new truths, deny the existence of truth, play with it because they’re smart.” It’s a little bit about class, maybe, but it’s much more about religious piety, about the kind of pride that goeth before a fall because modernity makes us too free. His jab at Obama, then, is that Obama is this kind of Faust: the phrase “he wants to remake you into his image” has to be heard through Genesis 1:26 (“Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness). But this shot at Obama is not only that Obama is a false god and false father — though it is this — but also that he represents, as such, a permissive society’s too-modern sense of the parent and authority, in which the purpose of higher education is not to make you a better worker, but precisely to free the individual from social obligations, and in which parents enable their children to be led astray by the kind of self-gratification (and self-determination) that will lead them to hell. Too much freedom.
When liberation is the problem — and when a “permissive society” becomes a bad thing — indoctrination ceases to be the problem, and becomes the solution. The problem with Obama is that his is the wrong indoctrination: since state-run education takes the power to shape and educate away from parents, Santorum’s solution is for parents to take their power back, and this leads him to argue — quite distinctly — that it should be parents who (metaphorically) play God with their children: “I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image not his.” The idea of people making themselves in the image of their own dreams and desires is not — and cannot be — on the agenda. New truths will get in the way of The Truth.
I’m afraid we may be giving Santorum too much credit here.
It’s code. When he says “What a snob!” I think what he really means is, “What an uppity negro!”
[…] and to failing to realize when they are being manipulated and pandered to.zunguzungu: “Santorum’s Gift”This shot at Obama is not only that Obama is a false god and false father — though it is […]
I have a slightly different take on the earlier Santorum speech, which may just look at it from a different angle. What is problematic with academia/liberalism/urbanism is not that it tries to “create new truths,” bend the truth, etc. The freedom is not a problem. It is the way academics and others revel in that freedom that leads them to create new, perverse, and incomprehensible social forms: homosexuality, postmodernism, and women’s rights. In Santorum’s ideal world, people would be “free” to do the right thing and fill their allotted spot in society.
From this point of view, the danger of liberalism is that it makes people and society into something it shouldn’t be. The man who is good with his hands is encouraged to be a graphic designer. The docile potential housewife is encouraged by bullying feminists to become a lesbian (or at least sexually assertive). At a social level, America leaves its christian, white roots and becomes a secular, socialist, multicultural nation.
The irony is that capitalism in its modern form embraces, enables, and profits from these new forms. This puts the modern cultural conservative in a bind (anti-new/procapitalist) that is most easily solved by villainizing certain companies (advertisers, Hollywood) and tying them to liberalism. Of course, cultural liberals have the opposite set of issues with capitalism: they enjoy its individualism and newness, but recognize homogenizing and commercializing tendencies.
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Not that I disagree at all with the general thrust of this article, but that’s not particularly sound exegesis, mon frer.
The slave who buries his talent is hardly burying it because it’s his hope and dream to bury it, but because he hasn’t gone out into the world to do something. To allude elsewhere, are you really saying that it was Moses’ dearest desire to herd sheep in the desert, and that he’d much rather not have participated in the redemption of Israel from slavery?
So to, I suspect, with Jonah. He was sent there to fulfill his prophetic role and call for a return to god. Aren’t you at all struck by the fact that god’s plan was the redeem the city even though his chosen and (seemingly) righteous agent was actually the stick in the mud?
With the servant, I suspect it’s meant to demonstrate someone who is afraid of pursuing something with her/his talents (fiduciary and personal). With Jonah, again, it’s important for god to show him that his grace goes even to those who seem wicked and awful, and the person who is part of the religious institution is actually preventing god from fulfilling a wider redemption.
Again, the article as a whole is solid. I, as might Garry Wills, find Santorum terrifying, too. The Christian cultural empire needs to end, especially its Frances Schaeffer type zeal for legislating morality.
Keep up the good work; I hope to see you at Occupy Oakland some time.