Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [114]
Are Stephen and his fellow worshippers of the free-market right? Should colleges and universities be geared as businesses, their ultimate or primary aim being neither to teach the next generation nor to produce new knowledge, but to generate profits for shareholders? Borrowing from a certain analysis offered by Socrates, I argue that privatizing colleges and universities, throwing them into the arena of free-market capitalism, and thus turning them into for-profit corporations, dramatically alters their primary aim. This in turn alters their very nature.
As Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and other ancient Greek philosophers would tell you, altering the nature of a thing is as good as destroying it. So, by altering the natures of our colleges and universities we destroy them. This will be my main argument against Stephen (and the far-right). Along the way, I critically poke here and there at Stephen’s view of the free market, showing how it not only looks to be internally inconsistent in places, but is the source of his (mis)understanding of the nature of knowledge and, more importantly, the nature of higher education
There are two Stephen Colberts. First is the real guy: Mr. Colbert the entertainer—the guy who went to college, who is married, who pays taxes, and so on. Second is the persona we see nightly on The Colbert Report—the egomaniacal talk show host I refer to in the previous paragraph. Mr. Colbert satirizes the political right, which I think is his critique of the right; Stephen, as I shall refer to him, the second Colbert, embodies the political right. He is the satirical vehicle through which Mr. Colbert brings his audience to see the extremism of the political right. What follows focuses on Stephen—the Stephen that embodies the right.
The Marketplace: Free or Freest?
It’s inevitable that at some point in a heated conversation with Stephen, he will invoke the free market. Since his view of the free market is central to his worldview, it will be helpful in getting some sense of it before dealing with his view on higher education. “The free market,” Stephen says, “is not just some economic theory we can abandon when things get rough—it requires faith.” The connection to the religious concept of faith is not an accident. In a segment called “The WØRD,” Stephen tells us that “The market is all around us … the market guides us with an invisible hand … [and] if we have faith in it, the free market is the answer to all our problems, but if we doubt it, it will withhold its precious gifts.” In a debate with himself (in a segment called “Formidable Opponent”), he tells himself that “The free market can do anything—it can self regulate; it can self correct; it tiptoes into nurseries at night and puts dreams into the minds of sleeping children.” The recent Wall Street bailout is urgently needed, he says. Why? As he matter-of-factly puts it, if we don’t act, “God will die.”
A quick example of the central role that the market plays for Stephen comes to light in his talking about global warming during season two of The Colbert Report. Stephen admits, “I’m no fan of science,” adding, “gravity … just a theory.” In the exchange with his guest, Stephen was quick to note, “President Bush refuses to say whether global warming exists until all the science is in … is all the science in, Sir?” Yet, by mid-third season, Stephen professes that global warming is real. Why? Because Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, made some scratch at the box office. As Stephen put it, “The market has spoken.” So, science wasn’t enough to persuade Stephen of the reality of global warming, but the market was.
In attributing to the free market this kind of power, Stephen is simply expressing the views of certain economists, politicians, entrepreneurs, big business and Wall Street corporate types, and even those who play such on TV (like “the Donald”), who have from time immemorial appealed to the free market as a cure to all that ails the Western world. Well, not from time immemorial,