Brazilian President Attacks Humanities and Humanity

Right-wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro sounds a lot like some South Dakota Republicans in his disdain for higher education. He’s threatening to yank state support for philosophy and sociology courses and prioritize funding for job training:

“The Minister of Education, Abraham Weintraub, is studying how to decentralize investment in philosophy and sociology at universities. Students who have already enrolled will not be affected. The objective is to focus on areas that generate an immediate return to the taxpayer, such as: veterinary, engineering, and medicine,” the president wrote on Twitter Friday.

He also said the role of the government is to respect taxpayer’s money and the way to do is to teach them job skills “that generate income for the person and well-being of the family, which improves the society around them” [“Bolsonaro to Defund Philosophy, Sociology to Tackle ‘Leftist Takeover’ of Education,” Telesur, 2019.04.29].

This strictly utilitarian approach to higher education is really a fascist attack on intellect, which thugs like Bolsonaro, Trump, and Noem rightly see as a threat to their anti-democratic agenda:

President Bolsonaro implies in his remarks that public funding should flow exclusively to professional schools. These are certainly important programs. However, a democratic society depends not only on its commercial productive output, but also on its social institutions, its understanding of their foundations and governing principles, as well as its understanding of how these policies and institutions affect its population. Research in social sciences and humanities, and especially Philosophy and Sociology, is vital to such an understanding. The contribution of academics to public debates is also of crucial importance to a well functioning democracy.

Students taking courses in these areas learn to think critically about their conditions, and the broader condition of the society and the world around them. But also the wider public and Brazilian society benefit from the intellectual expertise from philosophers and sociologists.

Thus an attack on Philosophy and Sociology, as well as the humanities and social sciences more generally, is an attack on the very fabric of a democratic society [Sergio Tenenbaum, Alice Pinheiro Walla, and Catarina Dulith Novaes, “Open Letter Regarding President Bolsonaro’s Recent Pronouncements on Defunding Philosophy and Sociology,” Daily Nous, 2019.04.30].

Sociology and philosophy are subjects which seem to their enemies to produce nothing but querulous unemployables fluent in sophistry and subversion. (Mr Bolsonaro has thundered about the need to “combat Marxist rubbish” in educational institutions.) Authoritarians promote a rigid society in which there is room for only a few guides and philosophers at the top. They need to know what there is to know about humanity and society, but everyone else need only know their place. This was certainly the model against which the great 19th- and 20th-century movements for workers’ emancipation rebelled. There is a strong democratic tradition of self-improvement for moral purposes running through socialism and some forms of Christianity before it. All these people understood philosophy and clear thought more generally as a threat to the pretensions of authority and a tool for a more just and better society.

…The principles of liberal democracy are threatened by thuggery, but also by some forms of intellectual assault. If they are to be defended, and their practice improved, we need more philosophers and sociologists. It is the subjects of least obvious use that may prove of ultimate value [editorial, “The Guardian View on Higher Education: Humans Need the Humanities,” The Guardian, 2019.04.30].

Denigrating the humanities is typical of right-wingers who loathe humanity:

Jason Stanley, the Jacob Urowsky Prof of Philosophy at Yale University and author of the book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (Penguin Random House, 2018), wrote on Twitter that it represents “the culmination of a campaign that has focused on a supposed leftist takeover of the education system.” Sean Carroll, a physicist at California Institute of Technology, tweeted, “Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, has many deplorable policies, but targeting philosophy and sociology in universities kind of sums them up. An antipathy towards deep knowledge is characteristic of a certain kind of right-wing populism” [Elizabeth Redden, “Brazil’s Bolsonaro Takes on Philosophy, Sociology,” Inside Higher Ed, 2019.04.29].

Herding young people into jobs and focusing their attention on money is a way to keep them from thinking about the values that make them human, the values their oppressors are taking away. In fulfilling our obligation to educate our young people, we must teach them to think, not just to do.