The GRE and the Dominant Ideology
I write about what I think about when I’m not writing. Right now I’m (still) studying for the GRE while reading through Zizek’s The Desert of the Real. So I’ll attempt a Zizekian critique of the discourse operative in a segment of the exam.
Here is a brief quote from some of my prep material. One of the prompts exam-takers respond to “will state an argument for which one or more counter-arguments could be constructed. While the issue will be one upon which reasonable people could disagree, it will not bring up an emotionally charged religious or social issue.” Having looked at some of these prompts (all of which are available from ETS’ website) the result of this approach is that the examinee ends up defending or attacking a position in which they are not genuinely interested in defending or attacking. The result is an act of sophistry committed for the sake of an adequate GRE score.
What is more interesting, however, is that the methodology adopted in manufacturing GRE prompts is symptomatic of questionable presumptions that are widespread in our culture. Why, for example, not ask people to write about an issue they are deeply invested in? One reason, I suspect, is that “emotionally charged religious and social issues” need not be rationally explicable according to the dominant discourse.
Do you support abortion? O.K., whatever your answer is that is enough, you do not need a reason, this is the sort of religio-social commitment that is beyond the realm of human inter-personal reasoning according to the dominant ideology. It’s none of my business why you think what you think about this. I’ll vote my way, you vote your’s, and to the victor will go the legislative spoils (especially that tyranny specific to a democracy in which the ruling party is expected to disregard their fellow country-persons’ interests). The religous fanatic running around telling everyone to believe is a popularized fanatic. It doesn’t happen. Rather, we all run around and tell each other to believe that we shouldn’t tell each other what to believe.
Many issues are understood to operate in this sort of Kiekegaardian realm of the unreasonable. My favorite example is, during a televised panel interview some months back, Melissa Ethridge’s badgering of the U.S. democratic presedential candidates concerning whether or not they “believe” that science suggests that homosexuality is a “choice” or a biogically-assigned trait (the implicit correct answer, of course, being that science proves homosexuality to be biologically assigned). Would Melissa consider it wrong, I wonder, If I were to choose to be gay even though it has not been biologically assigned to me? What if the technology evolves such that I can choose to biologically-assign myself the homosexual gene combination? Oh shit, we just blew up her carefully constructed ideological hiding place. Science has not replaced “faith,” it has blinded us to it (or perhaps we have blinded ourselves to faith with science as the blind-fold).
This is why it would be inappropriate for examinees to write about something they actually care about, because everything worth talking about is precisely what we’re not allowed to talk about (i.e. “emotionally charged religious and social issues”). Isn’t this the key to the success of people like Zizek and Milbank, they show us that at the end of the day, everything is an emotionally charged religious and social issue. We are trained not to see this, “Go argue about false alternatives that don’t matter.” An example of this order we all obey is the contemporary “debate” about Iraq. Obama wants to pull the troops out, is this as admirable as it sounds, a real alternative to the policies of Bush? For Obama and the Democrats, is the problem that we invaded Iraq or is the problem that Iraq was an especially stupid application of America’s post-WWII foreign policy of world domination in the interest of American “vital interests”? The latter is the real problem, but no one who is allowed to speak to everyone is allowed to make that point. What is the Democrat’s main criticism of the Iraq War? Not that is was wrong, the criticism is that it did not work (the country is in chaos, Iran is stronger, etc. …).
Indeed, the existence and dominance of something like the GRE (i.e. an excercize in utterly insubstantial knowledge) is perhaps the most acute testimony to the reality that we are only allowed to think about things that are ultimately not worth thinking about.
