I am amazed when the Bible is used to justify oppression of masses of people. The expression The poor you will have with you always. is often brought up in this context.
One way of interpreting this expression is to realize that oppression goes back a long way. It seems that it already was a given in the time if the stories told in the Bible. One view of this kind of acceptance of oppressor/oppressed relations has been examined thoroughly by the Brazilian author Paulo Freire. His book Pedagogy of the Oppressed was recommended to me by my grandaughter who just finished her Masters Degree in Social Work. It is good to know that such writing was part of her education. I am ashamed to have not run across it earlier, but better late than never.
Freire, proposes a pedagogy with a new relationship between teacher, student, and society. It was first published in Portuguese in 1968, and was translated by Myra Ramos into English and published in 1970. The book is considered one of the foundational texts of critical pedagogy.
Dedicated to what is called "the oppressed" and based on his own experience helping Brazilian adults to read and write, Freire includes a detailed Marxist class analysis in his exploration of the relationship between what he calls "the colonizer" and "the colonized".
In the book Freire calls traditional pedagogy the "banking model" because it treats the student as an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge, like a piggy bank. However, he argues for pedagogy to treat the learner as a co-creator of knowledge.
The book has sold over 750,000 copies worldwide
As is often true the summary in Wikipedia is somewhat sterile in my judgement. Read on below and I'll tell you why.
Further down on the page Wiki gets closer to the heart of the matter:
The work was strongly influenced by Frantz Fanon and Karl Marx. One of Freire's dictums is that: "there neither is, nor has ever been, an educational practice in zero space-time—neutral in the sense of being committed only to preponderantly abstract, intangible ideas."
According to Donaldo Macedo, a former colleague of Freire and University of Massachusetts Amherst professor, Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a revolutionary text, and people in totalitarian states risk punishment reading it. During the South African anti-apartheid struggle, ad-hoc copies of Pedagogy of the Oppressed were distributed underground as part of the "ideological weaponry" of various revolutionary groups like the Black Consciousness Movement. In the 1970s and 1980s the book was banned and kept clandestine.
This is not intended to be a book review. I want to focus on a central idea that is introduced in the first chapter. Freire discusses a kind of order that humans have been practicing for a long time as my introduction to this diary suggests. That we still practice this order today is obvious.
The first chapter explores how oppression has been justified and how it is overcome through a mutual process between the "oppressor" and the "oppressed" (oppressors–oppressed distinction). Examining how the balance of power between the colonizer and the colonized remains relatively stable, Freire admits that the powerless in society can be frightened of freedom. He writes, "Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion". According to Freire, freedom will be the result of praxis — informed action — when a balance between theory and practice is achieved.
Again this sterile summary does not get to the heart of Freire's analysis which is strikingly good systems theory. Let me try to explain his point in that context for it is something we see every day in our country as well as the rest of the world. It certainly goes beyond the colonial times used as an example.
Like Fannon, who Freire quotes and follows, the system of oppression has to have two parts, the oppressed and the oppressor. This seemingly simple truism is actually a very deep concept as Freire explains. There is a yin-yang quality here where the whole is far more than the mere sum of its parts. That is manifest in a variety of very complex relationships all of which give further meaning to the system. Let us examine a few to get the gist of this idea.
First comes the identity or self awareness of the two groups. The world model the oppressor has constructed is one in which the relationship to the oppressed is justified because being "human" is defined in terms of the oppressor and therefore the oppressed is something other than human. There is a dynamic here that is very powerful and here is where pedagogy comes in. The oppressed are also taught this world model and tend to use it even if they seek to find freedom from the relationship. That means that the goal defined for them by this system is to become like the oppressor.
Hence they are in a situation where escaping one bad identity is defined in terms of taking on other. Why is this system so harmful? The answer lies in the effect of the relationship on the oppressor. The oppressor, by the very nature of what he does, is no more human than the oppressed. Not only that but the blindness to his own condition is at least as harmful as that experienced by the oppressed.
We see this so clearly as we watch the oligarchy and its counterparts in the rest of the world continue to suicide as they accumulate more at the expense of the very planet that sustains them. Their relationship with reality is made clear as we watch the new Senate appointments, for example.
We spend a lot of time here mocking and making fun of the oppressor mentality. It is so out of touch with reality that it is often humorous in a sick kind of way. Meanwhile their knowledge of how to control and use power is breathtaking.
When you step outside the system and watch its interacting parts you see a very curious thing for even the critics and mockers are part of the system and inadvertently help stabilize it.
An alien from another planet might look at these diaries in just that way. Writing accounts again and again of the way the system manifests itself with little effect on it other than to make it more stable.
Freire's point is crucial for until we see a new model for all these relationships we are not solving problems. To try to fix things in the context of this model insures that things will only change in form with no change in the fundamental relationships.
Complex reality, especially in the realm of human social systems, is a very stable system and the false pedagogy it generates insures that stability.
From that perspective, unless we change our world model and create a new system, the poor will always be with us.