Beyond Market Theology: Reply to Barrett and Woodhouse

Abstract

I am pleased to be given the opportunity to respond to Richard Barren's and Howard Woodhouse's stimulating replies to my article "Education and the Mattet Model" in the most recent issue of Paideusis1 Because Woodhouse's paper introduces a problem which is instantiated by Barren's reply, I will deal with it first. It consists of two main steps. First, it briefly explains the general pattern of my case, with whose argument it essentially agrees. Then it provides a revealing illustration of a main claim of my article's argument-namely, that the academic community itself has so internalized the currently dominant ideology of the "free market" that its members are sometimes unable to rationally entertain criticism of it. The case Woodhouse reports is that of two senior York University professors of philosophy, Joseph Agassi and Ian Jarvie, who replied to an earlier article of mine2 Woodhouse points out that while Agassi and Jarvie categorically deny there is any conflict whatever between market and educational goals and methods, they do not think it anywhere necessary to provide any reason or argument against the contradictions clearly identified in the article. Since the contradictions specified in the article would, Woodhouse argues, be perfectly evident to the members of a first-year philosophy class, and since, moreover, it is a normal requirement of reason to provide some justification for what you categorically deny, he concludes that Agassi and Jarvie's reply presents us with a paradigm case where "rationality has been abandoned" by unconditional adherence to market doctrine. Woodhouse suggests that in this unreasoned presupposition of a dominant form of social life we are able to see the depth of the market model's hold on the current academic mind. Are we now facing a kind of deep-structural social indoctrination where it is no longer thought conceivable to doubt the ruling ideology of the day? We might think of the problem here as akin to that of the mediaeval schoolmen in their presupposition of theological dogma. Given principles of belief are simply assumed as the ultimate ordering structure of our thoughts and our lives, even by those whose post-medieval business it is to question such conditioned certitudes.