Adorno claims that he has exaggerated (though justifiably) and that democracy in Germany is improving, but - he claims - improvement is only good enough in an isolated world. The battles against atrocities and catastrophes are always around, and Germany has still failed to work through its past and its totalitarianism. He cites parents who, embarrassed by questions from their children about Nazism, try to make it sound better (to justify their involvement in it?, 14). He, therefore, turns to social education, claiming that - although education might only appeal to those who are open to it and thus not prone to Fascism - the educated will form small groups (Adorno uses a military term: "cadres") to affect the underlying opinion (15). He avoids answering the question of "how far it is advisable to go into the past when attempting to raise public awareness, and whether precisely the insistence on it does not provoke a defiant resistance and produce the opposite of what it intends" (15). But, he does argue that making people aware could never be as bad as leaving them unaware (!!!), such that questions about how to best do social education (what he calls "re-education") becomes more important than questions about Being (snap!). This move will be opposed by anti-Semites because it involves self-reflection, whereas anti-Semitism rests on unresponsiveness (15-6). Even if an anti-Semite meets Jews (or learns about their plight), her unresponsiveness, her unwillingness to think about what she believes will leave her an anti-Semite still. Adorno's example is of a woman who, when watching a dramatization of The Diary of Anne Frank said, "Yes, but that girl at least should have been allowed to live" (16). (The play, notes Adorno, is an improvement (it increases awareness), but it does not itself solve the problem of anti-Semitism, and it is also "repugnant...and...seem[s] to be a profanation of the dignity of the dead" (16).) Anti-Semitism has, in fact, nothing to do with Jews. It is only a form of the above nationalistic, un-self-critical views (an attack against something different) and is a necessary element in such views (that there be something different to attack). Thus, it does not make sense to combat anti-Semitism by facts about the Jews. Anti-semites "should be made aware of the mechanisms that cause racial prejudice within them" and also "the knowledge of the few durable propaganda tricks that are attuned exactly to those psychological dispositions we must assume are present in human beings" (17). Yet, even this social education (leading to social enlightenment) is not enough. If fascism begins to appeal once more to people (is linked up to their interests), they must be shown that it does not in fact link up with their interests. That it leads to "war, suffering, and privation under a coercive system, and, in the end, probably the Russian domination of Europe" (17). This argument is much more appealing than an appeal to the suffering of others, which we stop thinking about relatively quickly (18). In the end, the only way to work through the past is to remove the roots of it, and thus - because these roots still remain - the past remains captivating.

The second relevant point in regards to my thesis is a bit of a thorn. Adorno claims that, "one of the most important goals of education is the debarbarization of the countryside" (24). He makes this point based on evidence that most of the tormenters in the concentration camps were from the countryside, which leads him to the conclusion that barbarism - because "probably debarbarism has been less successful in the open country than anyplace else" (24) - is one of conditions for Auschwitz and thus that culture, the thesis to barbarism's antithesis, is a major good standing in the way of Auschwitz. (We see this made more explicit in the last sentence of this paragraph: "one must also consider the impact of modern mass media on a stage of consciousness that has not yet come anywhere close to the state of bourgeois liberal culture of the nineteenth century" (24), where 'the bourgeois liberal culture' is then the opposide of the barbaracy of the countryside, that is, the direction that rural people need to go.) What a far cry from "Cultural Criticism and Society," where nineteenth century bourgeois culture is complicit, is - by being objectified - failing to take us away from Auschwitz, is leading us towards it, has itself become barbaric. What would prompt this change from Adorno? Is there a way of reconciling these two positions? If not, how can I - in my thesis - account for this change? I can always claims, "I am interested in the imperative set forth in 'Cultural Criticism and Society,' and although Adorno later rethinks his position on culture, it is the position in this essay only that interests me." But, that is sidestepping an important issue for thinking about Adorno, what pushes him to make the claims he makes. It is also an issue that will likely shed light on Adorno's claim in Negative Dialectics that he might have been wrong to claim that poetry after Auschwitz is impossible - especially because he goes on to make, as he puts it, a "less cultural" claim about living in general, which is a personal shift, just as the shift to education is a personal shift. So, these questions remain open: what prompted this shift? Is it a logical shift to make, a necessary shift if we follow Adorno's method?

(One final interesting quote, regarding love as a potential for the opposite of the technological coldness of our society (but one that cannot be forced, because forced love is still cold): "Love is something immediate and in essence condtradicts mediated relationships" (31). This isn't really relevant to my thesis, at least not as far as I can see right now, but it sheds some light on Adorno. He is not a post-modernist; he believes that there is something we can experience unmediated. Lacan would be very unhappy with Adorno right now.)

There is a distinction in ethics between externalism and internalism. Externalist ethics strives for universal claims - claims that apply to every person at every time. It is, thus, forced to also distinguish between the "truth" and "acceptance" conditions of behavior. It may be true that I should never lie, but my reason for not lying might have nothing to do with a universal imperative. (In fact, knowledge of certain universal imperatives - like the consequentialist "greatest good for the greatest number" - might cause me to do things which oppose it - mispredict what will be good for myself and others.) Internalist ethics, on the other hand, claims that an imperative only has truth insofar as it applies to situations in people's lives. It is an anti-theoretical approach to ethics. Now, Bernstein argues that this distinction is not a formal distinction - one in which the different types of ethics cover different terrains - but a contentual distinction - one about the attitude that they represent in the world. In internalist ethics, a person's motivations can contain patterns (of thought, of attachment, etc.), that is, motivations that lots of people have, and internalist ethics does not preclude the claim that "education, training, experience, imagination, and reflection" all contribute to our motivations (13), such that pretty much any originally externalist truth can be incorporated into an internalist explanation of motivations. The difference between the two ethics is that behind externalist ethics is "the experience of disenchantment" (14). Arguments against externalist ethics argue that this ethics fails to take into account - it "is indifferent to, squandes, and distorts" - "individual ethical experience" (15). It is an attempt to return the individual into a form of ethics - like the disenchantment of science/commerce above - that has quantified the individual. Bernstein claims that this objection comes from a standpoint of "hurt" (15), which is part of what Adorno means by a "damaged life" (see, __Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life__) - that is, the person who objects to theories is objecting from a personal worry, not indifferent philosophical curiosity. The objections do not let up, not only because they are strong objections, but because the objectors are unwilling to stop objecting. It is through this hurt, in fact, that internalism and externalism become opposing ethics. When people are uncomfortable with externalist ethics, they are uncomfortable with the disenchantment of externalization, not with its claims. Adorno argues on similar grounds; he claims that the systematic distinction between specific and universal (between internal and external) is created by the disenchantment of rationalization/intellectualization. (This is not to say that specificity and unversality are not distinct, but that the distinction we make is caused by our disenchantment, so it is an example of the problem it is also trying to express.) To place specificity and universality into a binary affects the way we think about both concepts. It "distorts" them (18). In other words, as soon as we articulate the problem that we face, we are already falling into that problem, such that our articulation (and the concepts that we use in it) are aleady distorted. It is for this reason that Adorno claims that our problem is a "deficit of rationality" (18) - what it means for something to be rational is itself part of our problem. This problem is important because - if we believe it - "we have nothing approaching a normative account explaining how a wholly secular form of life can be rationally compelling and intrinsically motivating" (18). But, if we do not have such an account, then any rational work attempting to describe a wholly secular form of life (like Adorno's work and Bernstein's) is necessarily non-objective and partial. Responses to this problem are common, and in fact many attitudes in the world can be considered (at least partly) a response to disenchantment (see pages 19-20 for a list). In fact, it is at least hypothetically possible that all attitudes, all claims, reflect a position or hurt or flight from rationality (skepticism, cynicism, etc).