Coming Home after the Surge: Dissecting The Heart of the Matter Report from The American Academy of Arts & Sciences

OverviewThis brief statement is a meditation on mystification.At this moment, the United States of America is beset by crises, contradictions, and conflicts.It remains engaged in long-running undeclared wars.Voter turnout for many local, state, and national elections is abysmal.Corporations are officially recognized as legal persons with definite basic rights.Much of civil society escapes daily into the cybernetic haze of social media.The deep state has virtually everyone under some sort of surveillance.Now many members of the armed forces, once deployed overseas have been returning home after "the surge" in Iraq and Afghanistan, but remain wary of a recall to new deployments in Syria, Libya or Yemen.At this same conjuncture of events, however, an august group of academicians, artists, and activists recently joined a few other experts, while averting their eyes from these disasters, to write a national report about the declining condition of the arts and sciences that America's citizens need to assess these disastrous events in their public and private lives.Coming together as the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, they produced a substantial white paper--The Heart of the Matter: The Humanities And Social Sciences for a Vibrant, Competitive, and Secure Nation--to extoll the national need to strengthen the humanities and social sciences at all educational levels.This bold move, they assert, would brighten America's already gleaming greatness.Learning more about the work of humanists and social scientists, according to the Commission, might help American citizens better participate more "meaningfully in the democratic process--as voters, informed consumers, and productive workers" (The Heart of the Matter [hereafter HM], 2013: 10), and thereby rise above the nation's current political malaise.Yet, they ignore, at the same time, the complex social forces whose influences neutralize collective power, estrange citizens in voting, and rob the country of good jobs needed for voters to be "informed buyers" in today's purportedly liberal democratic capitalism.Mystification then is indeed flowing through many aspects of this Commission's activities.Because this report's writers appear to have, as Marx notes, "accepted its language and its laws," the market strictures of today's globalized political economy dominate the Commission's analysis, exposing how nakedly "the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion to the devaluation of the world of men" (Marx, 1978: 70, 71).Washington's inclination since 2000 to put the stability of insurance companies, money center banks, and equity markets at the heart of America's public policy matters suggests those elite institutions are valued far more than ordinary men and women.Even so, the Commission asserts more humanistic learning and social scientific research could make full amends for these troubles.In actuality, The Heart of the Matter report implicitly concurs with Marx.The more citizens participate under the influences of a false consciousness derived from nonhumanistic learning or unsocial nonscientific teaching, the Coming Home after the Surge: Dissecting The Heart of the Matter Report from The American Academy of Arts & Sciences Timothy W. Luke