Learning to Be Modern

One of the characteristics of modern societies is that power is often sublimated, diffused through social structures and institutions to the degree that its effects seem all but effaced. The paradoxical nature of power in modern societies suggests that power—to be effective—must seem non-coercive, invisible as it were. This concealment of power gives rise to yet another irony. As modern societies define themselves in historically progressive stages, moments of self-consciously enlightened attitudes of human (and humane) considerations rather than murky myths centered on the divine, knowledge must be represented as furthering the interests of freedom against arbitrary power, the rights of the individual against the idols of tribe or even of marketplace. And yet, modern societies have also harnessed and deployed power with an unprecedented level of skill, as Michel Foucault and others have pointed out, through the use of highly advanced forms of knowledge. They reach a near totalitarian type of social control that premodern societies could only have dreamed about. This modern dilemma-knowledge as freedom versus knowledge as social constraint, or “the rights of man” and “the rights of citizen” as the French declared it—flits about the surface of Byron K. Marshall's remarkable study on politics and education in modern Japan

Dilemma · Epistemology · Irony · Law and economics · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · Tribe · Global Education and Multiculturalism · Law · Philosophy · Religious Education and Schools