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Ночь живых DWEM

Ночь живых DWEM

5 минут
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18 мая 2016 г.

1.       WE DEMAND the hiring of at least 10 additional tenure-track ethnic studies professors and a commitment to the retention of these professors, prioritizing underrepresented groups within the ethnic studies programs….

2.       WE DEMAND the development of a recurring and comprehensive identity and cultural humility training to be instated as a requirement for all faculty in all departments….

Stanford stanforddailycred

These are among a list of “demands” recently issued by the Who’s Teaching Us Coalition, a student group at Stanford University. Demand #1 would require that the new ethnic studies professors bypass normal promotion and tenure standards. Demand #2 would require all faculty, in all of Stanford’s Nobel-Prize-stuffed departments, to spend time practicing how to avoid stepping on racial and ethnic toes.

WTU also wants the Stanford speech code to include “a dedicated, responsive platform for reporting and tracking microaggressions from faculty,” with a requirement that these accusations be used in promotion and tenure decisions. It wants the next-appointed president and provost to be non-white and either female or transgender. It wants Stanford to require all students to take two courses “that address diversity as it relates to issues of power, privilege, and systems of oppression.”

The list goes on, but you get the idea. Egalitarian activists on other campuses have issued similar manifestos, especially in connection with incidents like the protests at the University of Missouri and at Yale last fall.

THE WESTERN CIV CONNECTION

But the Stanford case is significant because of the circumstance. WTU issued its statement not in response to a racial incident, as at Mizzou, but to a petition for reinstating a Western Civilization requirement.

The petition came from The Stanford Review, an independent, conservative-leaning magazine, which published a lengthy case for why students should learn the Western sources of “values like free speech, due process, skepticism of authority, rationalism, and equality under the law.” The petition attracted enough signatures to be put to a straw vote by students (a straw vote only: the curriculum is set by faculty and administration). It lost six to one. The campus newspaper warned that accepting the proposal would mean centering Stanford education on “upholding white supremacy, capitalism and colonialism, and all other oppressive systems that flow from Western civilizations.” WTU was of course vehemently opposed and engaged in some obstruction.

Louis Agassiz Statue

In one sense, the opposition is hardly surprising. Many egalitarians on the left are proponents of postmodernism, multiculturalism and a race/class/gender approach to all issues, and thus have a hostile attitude toward Western Civ. In the late 1980s, Stanford was the locus of another such critique in a previous cycle of political correctness. The university had long had a Western Civ requirement, like Columbia, the University of Chicago, and many other top institutions, but it had been watered down to a sequence on Western Culture, which included readings from the Hebrew Bible and Homer to Marx and Freud. Even so, it was too much for the left. Noted intellectual historian Jesse Jackson led a cast of hundreds chanting “Hey, hey, ho, ho! Western culture's got to go.”

In that previous cycle, one of the dominant complaints was that the canon of works in courses on civilization, literature, philosophy, and other fields consisted mainly of writings by Dead White European Males. Bill King, president of the Black Student Union at the time, complained that Stanford is

denying the freshmen and women a chance to broaden their perspective to accept both Hume and Imhotep [27th century BC Egyptian vizier, sage, architect, astrologer, and chief minister to the pharaoh Djoser], Machiavelli and Al Malgili [15th century Algerian Islamic scholar and activist], Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft [18th century English writer, philosopher, and advocate of women’s rights]. . . . The Western culture program as it is presently structured around a core list and an outdated philosophy of the West being Greece, Europe, and Euro-America is wrong, and worse, it hurts people mentally and emotionally in ways that are not even recognized.

Ancient Egyptian and Islamic civilizations are certainly worth studying in a proper cross-cultural education, but they are not the sources of the student activists’ outlook. That outlook comes from the same category of Dead White European Males the students don’t want to study.

Many conservatives advocate courses in Western civilization as the source of Enlightenment ideas: reason, science, and progress; individualism, the pursuit of happiness, and individual rights; freedom, including free markets and free speech, limited government, and the rule of law. These were indeed the achievements of modern European and American thought. They were advances in human civilization though their value lies not in their Western origins but in their truth about the good society as such, and they have been adopted in many other cultures.

THE WESTERN ANTI-MODERNS

At the same time, however, the anti-modern Counter-Enlightenment that arose in the late 18th century and still dominates many disciplines opposed these themes. The European thinkers of this era are the sources of the most common student claims.

Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), for example, claimed that civilization had destroyed what he thought was the equality among primitive men by introducing differences in wealth, status, and achievement. Rousseau denounced “moral or political inequality, the different privileges, which some men enjoy to the prejudice of others; such as that of being more rich, more honored, more powerful or even in a position to exact obedience.” Note the premises: inequality is odious; standards are conventional, not objective; and one person’s gain is another’s loss. All of those premises animate contemporary egalitarianism. In addition, Rousseau elevated emotion over reason, dwelling on the hurtfulness of the invidious comparisons that inequality brings—a first step toward the touchy obsession with “microaggressions” on campuses today.

The primary source of campus egalitarianism, however, is Karl Marx (1818-1883). His theory of class conflict between capitalists and workers has been extended to other classes: race, sex, ethnicity, sexual preference, and sexual identity, doubtless with fragmentations yet to be devolved. But Marx’s conceptual framework is unchanged:

  • Individuals are socially constituted by their class identity; not by individual character, choice, or achievement.
  • Class conflict is asymmetrical. On every dimension, one class is dominant, the other subordinate—the conceptual scheme is that of oppressors and oppressed, exploiters and victims. Hence the many references in campus manifestoes to “marginalized” people who have grievances.
  • The subordinate, oppressed, victim class has the moral high ground against its opposite.

The asymmetry is a fixture of campus activism. The black woman at Yale who felt aggrieved by the possibility that a Halloween costume might slight her racial identity felt entitled to scream obscenities at a white male professor.

karl marx wikimedia commons

In the same vein, those who see themselves as disadvantaged because of their ethnicity complain of “cultural appropriation” when others adopt the symbols, language, dress, or other tokens of the ethnic heritage they identify with—like the Latina soccer player at Oberlin College who fumed when a white Anglo teammate used the term “futbol.” in a friendly email. But no white Yankee would even think of complaining that much of the world has “appropriated”—i.e., seen the value of and embraced—ideas and values that first arose in the West.

The postmodern movement of the late 20th century, finally, sought to undermine all objective standards of beauty, truth, and value, leaving only the differing attitudes and standards accepted by convention among fragmented classes, with language not a medium for discussion but an instrument of power—as the very terms presuppose. “Aggression” means launching an unprovoked attack; “appropriation” means taking something away from someone. Even language that is clearly rude does neither.

These strands in Western thought are the real sources of identity politics on campus. Students who want to understand, defend, and perhaps question their assumptions should be the first to sign up for Western Civ. Opposing such courses will not change the fact that they are dwelling in the night of the living DWEMs.

Посетите сайт

Stephen Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

Roger Donway, “The Postmodern Assault on Reason.

Bradford P. Wilson, “Looking into the (Ed School) Abyss.

Дэвид Келли

ОБ АВТОРЕ:

Дэвид Келли

Дэвид Келли - основатель "Общества Атласа". Профессиональный философ, преподаватель и автор бестселлеров, он является ведущим сторонником объективизма уже более 25 лет.

Доктор Дэвид Келли
About the author:
Доктор Дэвид Келли

David Kelley fundó The Atlas Society (TAS) en 1990 y se desempeñó como director ejecutivo hasta 2016. Además, como director intelectual, era responsable de supervisar el contenido producido por la organización: artículos, vídeos, charlas en conferencias, etc. Se retiró del TAS en 2018, permanece activo en los proyectos del TAS y continúa formando parte del Consejo Directivo.

Kelley es filósofa, profesora y escritora profesional. Tras obtener un doctorado en filosofía en la Universidad de Princeton en 1975, se incorporó al departamento de filosofía del Vassar College, donde impartió una amplia variedad de cursos en todos los niveles. También ha enseñado filosofía en la Universidad de Brandeis y ha dado conferencias con frecuencia en otros campus.

Los escritos filosóficos de Kelley incluyen obras originales sobre ética, epistemología y política, muchas de las cuales desarrollan ideas objetivistas con nueva profundidad y nuevas direcciones. Es el autor de La evidencia de los sentidos, un tratado de epistemología; Verdad y tolerancia en el objetivismo, sobre temas del movimiento objetivista; Individualismo desenfrenado: la base egoísta de la benevolencia; y El arte de razonar, un libro de texto ampliamente utilizado para la introducción a la lógica, ahora en su quinta edición.

Kelley ha dado conferencias y ha publicado sobre una amplia gama de temas políticos y culturales. Sus artículos sobre temas sociales y políticas públicas han aparecido en Harpers, The Sciences, Reason, Harvard Business Review, The Freeman, On Principle, y en otros lugares. Durante la década de 1980, escribió con frecuencia para Revista financiera y empresarial Barrons en temas como el igualitarismo, la inmigración, las leyes de salario mínimo y la Seguridad Social.

Su libro Una vida propia: derechos individuales y estado de bienestar es una crítica de las premisas morales del estado de bienestar y la defensa de las alternativas privadas que preservan la autonomía, la responsabilidad y la dignidad individuales. Su aparición en el especial de ABC y TV de John Stossel «Greed» en 1998 provocó un debate nacional sobre la ética del capitalismo.

Un experto en objetivismo reconocido internacionalmente, ha dado numerosas conferencias sobre Ayn Rand, sus ideas y sus obras. Fue consultor en la adaptación cinematográfica de La rebelión de Atlas, y editor de La rebelión de Atlas: la novela, las películas, la filosofía.

 

Obra principal (seleccionada):

»Conceptos y naturalezas: un comentario sobre El giro realista (de Douglas B. Rasmussen y Douglas J. Den Uyl)», Reason Papers 42, núm. 1, (verano de 2021); esta reseña de un libro reciente incluye una inmersión profunda en la ontología y la epistemología de los conceptos.

Los fundamentos del conocimiento. Seis conferencias sobre la epistemología objetivista.

»La primacía de la existencia» y»La epistemología de la percepción», The Jefferson School, San Diego, julio de 1985

»Universales e inducción», dos conferencias en las conferencias de GKRH, Dallas y Ann Arbor, marzo de 1989

»Escepticismo», Universidad de York, Toronto, 1987

»La naturaleza del libre albedrío», dos conferencias en el Instituto de Portland, octubre de 1986

»El Partido de la Modernidad», Informe sobre políticas de Cato, mayo/junio de 2003; y Navegante, noviembre de 2003; un artículo ampliamente citado sobre las divisiones culturales entre los puntos de vista premodernos, modernos (Ilustración) y posmodernos.

«No tengo que hacerlo«(Diario IOS, volumen 6, número 1, abril de 1996) y»Puedo y lo haré» (El nuevo individualista, otoño/invierno 2011); artículos complementarios sobre cómo hacer realidad el control que tenemos sobre nuestras vidas como individuos.

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