The decline of the classics departments
Howard University is instituting a new policy described in this WaPo op-ed by Cornel West and Jeremy Tate:
Upon learning to read while enslaved, Frederick Douglass began his great journey of emancipation, as such journeys always begin, in the mind. Defying unjust laws, he read in secret, empowered by the wisdom of contemporaries and classics alike to think as a free man. Douglass risked mockery, abuse, beating and even death to study the likes of Socrates, Cato and Cicero.
Long after Douglass’s encounters with these ancient thinkers, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would be similarly galvanized by his reading in the classics as a young seminarian — he mentions Socrates three times in his 1963 “Letter From Birmingham Jail.”
Yet today, one of America’s greatest Black institutions, Howard University, is diminishing the light of wisdom and truth that inspired Douglass, King and countless other freedom fighters. Amid a move for educational “prioritization,” Howard University is dissolving its classics department. Tenured faculty will be dispersed to other departments, where their courses can still be taught. But the university has sent a disturbing message by abolishing the department.
Academia’s continual campaign to disregard or neglect the classics is a sign of spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness running amok in American culture. Those who commit this terrible act treat Western civilization as either irrelevant and not worthy of prioritization or as harmful and worthy only of condemnation.
Sadly, in our culture’s conception, the crimes of the West have become so central that it’s hard to keep track of the best of the West. We must be vigilant and draw the distinction between Western civilization and philosophy on the one hand, and Western crimes on the other. The crimes spring from certain philosophies and certain aspects of the civilization, not all of them.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about this op-ed is that it was written (at least in part) by Cornel West, a Harvard professor you’d hardly call a conservative. For example, from his Wiki entry:
Cornel Ronald West…is an American philosopher, political activist, social critic, and public intellectual. The grandson of a Baptist minister, West focuses on the role of race, gender, and class in American society and the means by which people act and react to their “radical conditionedness”. A radical democrat and socialist, West draws intellectual contributions from multiple traditions, including Christianity, the black church, Marxism, neopragmatism, and transcendentalism.
West is an outspoken voice in left-wing politics in the United States.
The op-ed begins with examples of how the classics inspired black civil rights leaders, and it talks about typical left-wing topics such as “crimes of the West” (the society, not the man). But it’s certainly not limited to that, because West also makes it clear that he sees intrinsic value in studying the classics.
Something about what’s going on in academia these days seems to be disturbing even to an old activist leftist such as West, who is practically a traditionalist compared to the young firebrand whippersnappers of today. The op-ed continues:
The Western canon is an extended dialogue among the crème de la crème of our civilization about the most fundamental questions. It is about asking “What kind of creatures are we?” no matter what context we find ourselves in. It is about living more intensely, more critically, more compassionately. It is about learning to attend to the things that matter and turning our attention away from what is superficial.
Howard University is not removing its classics department in isolation. This is the result of a massive failure across the nation in “schooling,” which is now nothing more than the acquisition of skills, the acquisition of labels and the acquisition of jargon. Schooling is not education. Education draws out the uniqueness of people to be all that they can be in the light of their irreducible singularity. It is the maturation and cultivation of spiritually intact and morally equipped human beings.
The removal of the classics is a sign that we, as a culture, have embraced from the youngest age utilitarian schooling at the expense of soul-forming education.
West is a Christian, and that may be part of his objection to some of what’s happening in education these days.
Howard is indicating that its classics courses may still be taught in other departments at the school. But that’s not the same as having a dedicated classics department, and my guess is that the school is on the road to a greater phase-out of such study.
In addition, we have this announcement from Princeton:
Classics majors at Princeton University will no longer be required to learn Greek or Latin. The change is part of the school’s attempt to give more students the opportunity to major in the discipline.
The school has also removed the “classics track,” which required intermediate proficiency in Greek or Latin to enter the concentration.
Director of Undergraduate Studies and Professor of Classics Josh Billings clarified that the department would offer the same variety of subjects. Students will still be encouraged to take these languages if relevant to their academic pursuits. However, these changes will provide students with greater freedom in their education.
Princeton has also approved changes in its politics and religion department. Politics has added a new track for race and identity, while religion majors can choose between a “traditions” stream and a “themes” stream.
So in the name of promoting the study of the classics, a supposedly august institution such as Princeton is watering down the requirements tremendously. Remember, we’re not talking about classes in the classics for non-majors, which have probably long been available in English and not requiring knowledge of Latin or Greek. We are talking here about the requirements for classics majors.
Absurd.
Princeton, the president of which (Eisgruber) is weak and incompetent, has thoroughly disgraced itself in this matter, along with professor Frances Lee and a race-hustling charlatan named Dan-el Padilla Peralta, who, like Eisgruber, is on an ill-conceived and completely anti-intellectual crusade against the wholly imaginary “racism” pervading this particular academic field and, more broadly, the entire university. The unwillingness of most members of the faculty (with the honorable exceptions of Joshua Katz and Sergiu Klainerman, who came to this country from Communist Romania) to condemn this flight into unreason provides yet more melancholy proof of the cowardice and the herd-mentality of much of today’s professoriate.
Princeton is going down the tubes.
Cornel West, who is a remarkably ugly man with bad teeth denoting poor self-care, and a history of many outrageous remarks, has redeemed himself mightily in my eyes, especially with the closing paragraph, which I restate:
” Sadly, in our culture’s conception, the crimes of the West have become so central that it’s hard to keep track of the best of the West. We must be vigilant and draw the distinction between Western civilization and philosophy on the one hand, and Western crimes on the other. The crimes spring from certain philosophies and certain aspects of the civilization, not all of them.”
I suppose he has (Western) slavery in mind as a crime, the Euro-rebellion of 1848, and hopefully the writings of Marx, Hitler, and the Frankfurt School. The crimes of communism in Russia and China, Arab and African slavery, do not geographically qualify as “Western”. I do not comfortably comprehend “the civilization”, which I charitably guess refers back to “Western”, and with Christianity as its driving force for two millennia, has brought the planet so very much good.
Who and what are making “the crimes of the West so central”? Please do not stop there, Mssrs. West and Tate.
Back in the day when I was looking at colleges, two of the institutions I was considering required either Greek or Latin for admission— not graduation. As Marcus Tullius himself used to say, O tempora, o mores!
“The removal of the classics is a sign that we, as a culture, have embraced from the youngest age utilitarian schooling at the expense of soul-forming education.” Cornel West
“utilitarian schooling”?
“utilitarian adjective; functional, useful, practical, plain, efficient, sensible, pragmatic”
There is nothing “utilitarian” in the social ‘studies’ as taught today and social studies is, increasingly intruding into math, medicine, engineering, etc.
Again, if Princeton had a serious board, there would be an immediate resolution passed shutting the classics department. Trustee nonfeasance is the ultimate source of all the problems in academe.
With all due respect, there is nothing “absurd” about treason.
Call it what it is or you’ve already lost.
Theyre attacking the West’s very philosophical foundations and a society’s culture rests upon its philosophical foundations.
I’m fine with getting rid of them. You know, on the basis of … “let it burn”.
One of the predicates of the classics departments was the notion or idea that there was in fact an objective and universal human nature [Zaphod was lighting a match on this fuse the other day with his link]: implying, that culturally and racially transcendent truths regarding a common human experience had been – sometimes artfully or even brilliantly – produced and accumulated, and which repaid systematic and respectful study by men free men and women wishing to avail themselves of the common wisdom of the past.
But that aim makes no sense when the only anthropological category one has to advert to, is “no essential commonality”. Diversity? Diversity of what, exactly? And how do you know in the first place that it is a coherent “what” ?
A diversity of fundamentally unlike – somethings – apparently is conceived as have a categorical claim of some kind on some basis. But it cannot. It is empty of content and empty of connotative entailments. It has all the positive membership existence of the class of no classes; or the set of no sets. And you are supposed to care about the supposed instantiations of some of them because … well, because … something.
It’s just too funny to entertain seriously. In fact the entire framework is seriously entertaining and funny when employed by someone like Ryan George during his YouTube “Pitch Meeting” episodes, where logic is replaced by a “because” with no “because” behind it.
So, whereas it might make sense to retain the notion of classics with regard to the agenda of some particular self-identified interest group, it surely does not make sense in this sociopolitical environment; any more than it would make sense to speak seriously about “empathy” or “understanding” as if they had real and objective meaning when used with reference to the obvious other.
Since these others are per self-definition diverse and unlike you – exemplified by their so-called “lived-experiences” – and thereby categorically and definitionally that very other one hears sometimes hears some of them protesting about being called, where is the logic in assuming they can be, or should be, reached by this common humanity material?
There is no common humanity left. Progressives have proved it – at least insofar as themselves.
I suppose, then, that classics majors will have a hard time furthering their study in the field–admissions to other schools’ grad programs and such–and work.
A thought that has crossed my mind now and again over the past couple of years, and especially since the advent of Everybody’s Favorite Pathogen – which led to the imposition of all of our abundantly discussed newfangled social controls, which led in turn to the rationing of schooling for the youth and gave rise to the trend of ‘podding’. On this last idea my thoughts have begun to focus as presenting a potential workaround for the increasing deficiencies and maladjustments of the prevailing schooling model, some of which I consider just circumstantial and others of which are more (if you’ll pardon the expression) systemic in nature.
But also, I’ve been starting to think that if a sort of small-scale privatized schooling model actually does take hold – I mean, it would be sort of like homeschooling, but not really, because it would involve multiple families or households across a neighborhood, unlike real homeschooling, which as I understand it is very self-contained on the household level – maybe a contribution I could make down the road would be to act as a teacher in that kind of context. I could theoretically make myself useful in my retirement years in that way. (“Will educate for food.”)
I say theoretically because I don’t know if I’d be a good teacher in a small-group setting like that with youths. My previous forays with groups of more than, say, two at a time have been less than outstanding. Now one-on-one tutoring is no problem for me – have done that in a couple of different subjects and would be very interested to try it in history or English sometime. So a ‘pod’ setting would take some adaptation and I don’t know if I could really succeed, but it would be a way for me to pay my two mites toward the great rebuilding that will probably have to come down the road.
This thing about Latin and Greek at Princeton really needs no remark from me, but it kind of reminds me of the time when I was taking a class in Christian Archaeology at university in Germany and the professor asked me once while dealing with a couple of my questions at the library whether I knew Latin and Greek. I could answer a weak affirmative on the former, had nothing in the latter at the time; and he seemed to consider this an unfortunate handicap – rightly so, considering the subject matter – how is one supposed to work with a New Testament manuscript quotation, after all, without Greek? And Princeton’s luminaries now seem to be okay with every single one of their future graduates being put in such a position as I was in then? I tell you, I’m not normally a ‘let it burn’ type, but it’s getting hard not to be.
Are there ANY colleges or universities left out there that don’t teach cultural self-loathing?
There is arguably no leftist attack, destruction, cancellation, or degradation which cuts as deeply for me personally, as the slow implosion of Classics. Most of their vile, nihilistic skullduggery either makes me laugh or makes me enraged. But this primarily makes me weep.
To answer Skilly’s question: No.
physicsguy,
Hillsdale?
DNW,
Of course there is an objective and universal human nature. Whatever the culture, whatever the form of governance, every sane human being experiences laughter, anger, desire and sadness, to name but a few. Those of course are emotion based attributes.
Intellectual beliefs, the thinking that arises from our beliefs and the emotions they initiate are derived from culture. A culture that uses reason, logic and epistemology to examine its precepts and beliefs will evolve toward a higher plane of understanding. Classical Western culture arose from Greek logic, Roman reason and Judeo-Christian precepts. Precepts that withstand classical scrutiny. A scrutiny that confirms the validity of the basic tenets of that foundation.
The Left rejects those intellectual tools and in doing so, forfeits the ability to examine its premises in the light of reason and is thus bereft of an objective feedback mechanism, necessary to self-correction. Their ship of state has no rudder, no moral compass.
Given the above its no wonder that they perceive no commonality with those who disagree with them.
The classics are thus of immense importance because, in the aggregate, they comprise the only rigorous examination of societal precepts yet undertaken.
I agree with Cicero; West, the archetypal leftist, POC public intellectual, partially redeemed himself in my eyes with this article. But, as Neo said, he is also old enough (turns 68 tomorrow) and has a very traditional academic background (the first black to attain a Ph.D in Philosophy from Princeton, according to Wikipedia), to be disturbed by some of the destruction Wokism is unleashing on academia. Whatever one thinks of his ideology, he is a genuine scholar. It is hard to imagine the likes of Ibram Kendi penning an essay like this (in style or substance).
@DNW
Hoist by my own petomane petard, I see!
Ideally an educated person would know a very great deal about the classical literature of his own civilization given that it encodes and imparts a huge amount of wisdom about human nature, what follows, hubris.. all the boilerplate stuff which our present Bugmen Elites clearly have missed out on. And history really does Rhyme.
Ideally an educated Westerner would also know a reasonable amount about the classical literature of the other great civilizations: India, China (Japan), Arabia, Persia, and perhaps a tiny smattering of the old now mostly painted over Hindu Buddhist God Kingdoms of SE Asia. Africa and pre-Columbian America not worth much. Worth getting a bit up on the Egyptians and the various *other* peoples of the Land Between the Rivers to provide a bit of leavening to provide a more realistic background to the Victor’s History we have inherited via Christianity.
A lot to be said for Compare and Contrast.
But one cannot Compare and Contrast or do much of anything else without a good foundation in one’s own history, classics and a sense of who one is. Of course the Progressive Barbarians hate the very idea of this.
St John’s College in Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM remains committed to the Great Books tradition of education. Bless ’em!
https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate
I was into Mortimer Adler and the Great Books as a high school student and considered applying to St John’s.
@GB:
Human Nature is Universal. But it is mediated by societal and cultural memes. All advanced cultures and many primitive ones grok that the Female is wildly destructive as well as generative and nurturing. And that Man is Promethean, apt to reach too far, but because of this the driver of progress. Ridiculous simplifications but you get the drift.
Dance of Kali.
Wot Krishna Said to Arjuna. Use a 5 iron, wasn’t it?
Garden of Eden.
Samson and Delilah.
Yin and Yang.
Yang Guefei and the An Lushan Rebellion.
All of these encode some of the above ideas AND ways of thinking about them and ways of channeling and directing these forces.
Universal Human Characteristics and Modes. Very culturally specific ways of processing them. I do not think that one should wax all Universal before having a good grounding in one’s own Particulars. Which is the way Education used to progress.
Why study the classics?
Buncha eeeeevil old white guys supporting the patriarchy, oppressing the brothers, and just generally not worthy of paying any attention to.
I mean, who did not see this as an inevitable outgrowth of the total disrespect of white culture???
I’ll say it yet again:
PostModern Liberalism is a social cancer.
**Literally**, not figuratively.
Its goal is the total and absolute destruction of everything that has made Western Civ successful. “The classics” are obviously right smack in the middle of that juggernaut’s path.
The sooner people figure this out — and start fucking counterattacking every single one of these useless, suicidal bastards with every weapon we have — the better the chances for survival of Western Civ.
Zaphod:
I recommend Larry Gonick’s “The Cartoon History of the Universe Vol I-III” and “The Cartoon History of the Modern World Vol I-II” for the amusing overview.
@Huxley:
Thanks for the tip. Looks like my kind of thing. Most of what I know about the classical world I cribbed from Asterix the Gaul anyway!
Looks like he does a nice line in a Japanese Phenomenon (pretty sure they got there first): Manga Guides to Calculus, Linear Algebra, Statistics, etc.
Told in Stone is one of my favourite YouTube channels right now.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqBiWcuTF8IaLH7wBqnihsQ
No ideological nonsense, just old buildings and Greek and Roman tidbits.
Zaphod:
Is Asterix worth a shot?
$289 for “The Complete Asterix” — yow! Maybe I’ll start with the videos on Amazon Prime…
@huxley:
It was the bomb in 7th grade library lunch hours. Absolute hilarity with the Gluteus Maximus jokes, etc. Probably a lot of wit that I missed back then too.
Not sure I’d be paying $289 for it — says the fella just acquired a 1985 HP-41CX with less computing power than his washing machine for slightly more than that.
I’m pretty sure this was prophesied in Closing of the American Mind…but I could be wrong.
Zaphod:
I had an HP-38SX until the ON button died a few years ago. Replaced it with the HP50G for $85. Quite satisfactory. Which is now $500 on Amazon… I guess they stopped making ’em.
Hmm. I see some sketchy character calling himself Zaphod on the case at the HP Calculator Museum:
https://www.hpmuseum.org/forum/thread-10549.html
You can have my HP RPN calculator when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.
Ok,
I see that we have a problem here with the idea of 1. the idea of “human nature” or how it is defined, and 2, what implications if any can be drawn from the various attributes that are considered the sine qua non (possibly plural) of such a being in order for it to be an authentic member of that class in a “moral” sense.
That is to say in a sense [moral] entitling such a being to be considered as fitted by nature for recognition as a like-kind and as they used to say in the Elks or the Masons or someplace like those – entitled to all the rights, privileges, and immunities appertaining thereunto.
In order to get there, you have to go a little further along the teleological road than just pointing out various limbic system similarities. You have to get into the philosophically dangerous territory that goes with an Aristotelian analysis of natural law, i.e., the law of a specific nature’s ordinary course of development and unfolding proper to that kind: And, to come to grips with whether prescriptive deductions not only can, but logically must follow from the attributes as normative conclusions from descriptive premisses.
And all the laughing and nuzzling and emoting in the world taken as supposed commonalities count for, in the final analysis … more or less nothing. As does purely instrumental reason, frankly …
The purpose of a species, he himself, i.e., “The Philosopher” said, was to reproduce itself. What is the purpose of a man as a specific kind? What powers or attributes does that being have that that necessitate certain developmental conclusions taken as prescriptive injunctions drawn from descriptive premisses?
If no teleology, if no values from facts. if no universal nature of shared development, then none of that emotion shit means a damn thing.
Ok, have to stop now with that offhand and terse comment. I’ll try and expand tomorrow if it seems worthwhile in retrospect.
I’m not even going to reread it now. gotta go.
@Huxley:
Some scumbag stole my nick!
Amazon is a bit nuts for collectibles pricing. I picked up an HP-50g for $175 off eBay not so long ago. Good calculator and really the last of the Old Breed. Wish it had a larger Enter key though.
There’s this new thing called the HP Prime which is quite the computing powerhouse… but there’s just something off about its RPN as an afterthought implementation. The Prime has an x^y key instead of y^x as the Gods intended.
@DNW:
Very interested to see where this is going. Pray continue at your leisure!
Zaphod:
It was a tiny piece of my heart when I realized the HP-50g defaults to Algebraic instead of RPN until you bang it in the head.
What happened to the 50g? Are they consolidating their calculator lines, now that every phone has one built-in?
I notice they’ve got plenty of standard financial/scientific calculators. I guess because students are allowed to use non-programmable ones during exams.
Really, the triumph of Algebraic over RPN is the same sad thing as the decline of the classics departments.
@Huxley:
50g discontinued because no colour display and the trend is toward Basic or Python rather than RPN Keystroke or RPL programming.
HP also make the 35S which is a nostalgic keystroke-programmable throwback to simpler happier times. But there’s no way to upload or download programs.
As far as I can tell, the overwhelming driver for the scientific / graphing calculator market is Edumacation. TI has the US Edumacational Market cornered. HP has a bit of the higher end of this in Europe. Casio does very well outside the US.
Different exam levels have different rules. Computer Algebra Systems are banned in nearly all tests, so there are sometimes two almost identical models, one with and one without.
Go do something like the CPA or CFA exams and there’s a very short list of allowed calculators. Which is why the HP-12C is still being manufactured to this day.
Saw a French guy from HP’s research centre in France speaking in a YouTube calculator channel. He bunged together almost all the code in the current HP Prime. He said that basically there is no calculator division in HP anymore. The factory just makes whatever is gold mastered and its continued existence gets reviewed every year by the financial people. Calculators is a pimple on the little toe of a gigantic corporate monster. The guys who work on any updates or new models are the same guys doing basic research on a bunch of other stuff such as designing even cheaper nastier more ink-hungry printers, etc… If needed, a few get hived off to whack together the next model or code fixes every half decade or so.
“Something about what’s going on in academia these days seems to be disturbing even to an old activist leftist such as West, who is practically a traditionalist compared to the young firebrand whippersnappers of today. ” – Neo
“I mean, who did not see this as an inevitable outgrowth of the total disrespect of white culture???
I’ll say it yet again: PostModern Liberalism is a social cancer.” – OBloodyHell
I’m in agreement with what I think is the sense of OBH’s comment: West & his ilk knew where the Leftist train was going, and he stayed onboard for the ride; now he doesn’t like it that he’s getting kicked off.
Harvard Delenda Est.
And Princeton as well.
Powerline Picked an essay that is totally on topic here. I draw particular attention to the embedded example of how the Left is Woking classics departments into oblivion.
https://salvomag.com/article/salvo57/canceling-western-civilization
In the K-12 schools, they would have just condemned Peralta for daring to “act white” – how many other kids who might have actually developed an interest in classics or other liberal arts never even tried?
Powerline’s Steven Hayward, right on cue.
Jaffa gave a speech that could be ripped from today’s headlines – and indeed predicted them.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/06/relevant-classic-texts-2.php
RTWT, of course; once you start excerpting Jaffa, there is no good stopping point.
NOTE * The Claremont Institute, Claremont Lincoln University, and Claremont School of Theology are not affiliated with Claremont McKenna College or The Claremont Colleges.
(For a minute there, I was worried)
Peralta would make a nice Neronian Tiki Torch.
Black Body Radiation FTW.
One often sees the comment that the inmates are in charge of the asyla….
But it would be more apt to say that the arsonists are in charge of the fire departments…(and talented arsonists they are!).
Alas, one could say the same about all too many municipal and state governments—all of them blue—as well as the chief arsonist of them all: the “Biden” administration….
(…OTOH, how is one to consolidate total power if there are no crises….?)
They don’t need a Classics department – they need remedial reading.
LeClerc hit on something regarding the remedial reading. There is another reason why Classic departments are de-emphasizing “hard” studies. There isn’t enough incoming students CAPABLE of mastering them. So to keep their jobs and department they are dumbing down the curriculum and pretending the diploma at the end is a worthy one. No worries about getting advanced degrees from other universities because they too are dumbing their curriculums down. Universities that refuse to do so will be pressured and ostracized by the “woke” classics mob. But it isn’t knowledge that is wanted. It is the degree so that the children of the newly rich can maintain their status in the structure.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/age-over-abundant-elites
https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/13/why-have-elites-abandoned-merit/
The bitter fruit of the federalization of our education system. Back in the day Newt Gingrich criticized the Detroit School System as it entered bankruptcy to the great indignation of Detroit Power Elites. When he was interviewed by Mitch Album (“Tuesdays with Morrie” fame) he said something profound.
“What is the job of the Detroit School System? Is it to pay the teachers very well? Then it has succeeded brilliantly. Is it to educate the students? Then it gets an F.”
In Baltimore they are now just passing students on in the conveyor belt of failure. The result of “woke” progressive politics. The bigotry of low expectations. But then you have this.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/there_are_good_people_out_there_resisting_critical_race_theory.html
It gives hope for the future.
Tomorrow, we are meeting as parents to oppose the imposition of CRT in our school district. The participants are the newly rich and they realize what is happening and they are not going to allow it to happen.
Remember Bernanke’s “green shoots of recovery” at the beginning of Obama’s first term in 2009? I see green shoots of self rule and self determination at the local level moving up to the higher levels of government.
The progressive high water mark was three months ago. This is the end of the beginning. Things are happening but you have to work and work hard. If you are just pounding out frustration on your keyboard then you are part of the problem. Get off your duff and join some local organization and work for change. I am.
Back in the day when I was looking at colleges, two of the institutions I was considering required either Greek or Latin for admission— not graduation.
You mean you’re 120 years old?
Higher education’s primary function is not to prepare students for jobs. Its primary function is to BE jobs; it’s a jobs program in itself.
The enormous dependence on government money has guaranteed that. (Even the ones like Harvard with huge endowments depend on government money, Harvard can’t fund its current scientific research output with its own resources.) Back in the times when they educated the clergy and the sons of gentlemen of leisure they could stay focused on liberal education and pure science.
Government money demands some kind of tangible metric. Butts in seats, degrees awarded, papers published are simple to measure. And so it’s become a self-licking ice cream cone.
I wouldn’t say it’s valueless. With that much money pumped in for so many decades it cannot help but throw off things of value, the problem is that we overpay for what we’re getting.
Until we collectively decide that it is not a jobs program it will stay the way it is.
@ Zaphod,
No, I think I shot my bolt. LOL
It appears however, that AesopFan has fortuitously – or maybe by design – linked to a retirement speech made by Harry Jaffa in 1989, as reproduced in part by Powerline.
The first half of the quoted text refers to attitudes and events which took place 20 years before and were clear precursors of today’s Critical Race Theory programs.
It is the second half of the text that interests me: as it reveals the logically self-refuting positions adopted by Critical Race Theorists as they attempt to hinge a demand for dignity and respect and an attribution of value, on the principle of a values relativism which is itself based on an anthropology which sees the human person as a simple product of cultural programming.
How does this relate to the “particularist versus the universalist” morals argument, in the context of a “human nature”?
In one way, quite obviously.
As Jaffa points out, the demand for a tolerant relativism constitutes an implicit argument that involves the proponent in an eventual antinomy. If one takes their relativist and particularist premisses seriously there is no reason for a third party to be concerned with the liberation or self-realization of those same wholly determined socio-cultural products who, or better which as in “it”, we once imagined – delusionally – were fellow souls.
But if one takes their demand for respect and dignity and tolerance as a genuine justice claim rather than a will to power threat by a morally alien being outside the circle of mutual recognition, then, in any scheme of rational interpretation, a universalism is implied which contradicts their ostensible relativism.
Not having something in-common, is not having something in common, thereby.
One thing I should note, is that as regards moral Universalism, what we are really talking about are principles of mutual recognition and justice which apply merely – in logical terms – to all members of the included class. Who gets categorized “in” and on what basis is another issue. So one could have in theory, a “universalism” that applied to all humans of every ethnicity, except say, the Sentinelese, just to use a made up example.
Particularism, is just a very narrow universalism that has abandoned traditional principles of right reason as an arbitrator, and which generally relies on conditioned tastes as an operative principle to sort it out. Once moral particularism attempts to ground any particularist preferences in a respect worthy “human nature” the problem occurs of how to analyze the status of those who are not members of the particularist culture, but who express deeply congruent and sympathetic human preferences.
[You know, if you wish to save “white people” what on the one hand do you do with the socialist Swedes (who for my money can jump or be thrown for that matter, in a volcano); and on the other hand, what do you do with regard to Chinese Christians?]
So, particularism cannot defend itself by an appeal to objective values; which, if they are more than mere preferences must be understood as “universals” or things and concepts predicable on or to the many [I’m playing very loose with the Boethian “universal” term application] here; while moral universalism has that lingering categorization problem.
At root, it amounts to the same categorization canon problem.
Anyway, the fascinating part of the Jaffa speech:
I wonder why the Italian Renaissance was marked by a sudden interest in the Classics and in rhetoric?
There was a sense of weakness in the Church because of its failures during the plague and its emerging corruption. And, after the plague–with so much grief and loss–there must have been a hunger for the larger meanings of life.
Maybe we yearn to return to a safer idolized past after we survive a crisis. But what are we returning to now if we drop the Classics?
I am happily and proudly of white European extraction. The Peraltas of Princeton would like to see me pounded into the ground, and I reciprocate the feeling.
Show us the many good, enduring things that came out of black (sub-Saharan) and brown (Incas, Aztecs, etc. in the New World) cultures of any time and place, I dare you. Going back 5000 years to Hammurabi or to the Egyptians does not count!
When I was a grad student at Michigan in the nineties, the scramble was to get students to enroll in any class in the department. The Classics department set up “distributional requirement” type classes that would: A) Fulfill humanities requirements; and B) Appeal to a broad base of undergrads. They came up with “Sport in the Ancient World,” “Food in the Ancient World,” and some other class. The three classes they came up with attracted enough students to pay the bills.
One reason they’re dumping classics is there aren’t enough students taking the classes. And college is supposed to entertain these days: climbing walls, ethnomath, food courts… “Sport in the Ancient World…” And if you can’t get enough students to take the undergraduate classes, you drop the department… Pretty soon, there will be no one studying Latin or Greek, ancient near eastern philology, history and philosophy of science, Anglo-Saxon, or any of the other abstruse majors with limited appeal and small enrollment… And there will be no where to study them.
(I was in the Near Eastern Studies Department and I joked we should have the following classes: “Beer on the Ancient Near East,” and “Sex in the Bible,” and we’d have a YUGE enrollment in them.)
@dnaxy-
“But what are we returning to now if we drop the Classics?”
An anarchic period without principles, at, or philosophy.
@DNW:
I’d probably throw Chinese Christians into the volcano too. The Taiping Rebellion is why. Memory of this is also why the CCP is so down on Falun Gong. Syncretism is inevitable and throws up all kinds of unpredictable weirdness in virgin soil.
Sounds harsh? The Taipings killed almost as many people as the CCP did. They’d be well in front if it wasn’t for the Great Leap Forward.
Regarding the rest, I’ve yet to see a Philosopher floor an Atavist. Now a Cunning Atavist with a ‘Philosophy’… you want to watch out for those.
}}} Are they consolidating their calculator lines, now that every phone has one built-in?
Other than test-taking requirements (which often don’t allow phones due to internet-cheating possibilities) there is literally zero justification for owning any calculator other than one of the printing calcs used by bookkeepers and the like.
Not only can you have a calc on your phone, there’s probably an emulator for most of those calcs out there — if not, there’s probably someone working on one for funsies.
I know it is easy to get apps that do “paper” calculator (i.e., it has a “roll” which shows previous results), there are scientific calculators that do anything those HPs do (though it may not support RPN, which I know is a selling point — I’d bet there is someone out there who has an RPN calc), as well as actual graphing calcs comparable to the TI’s.
Yup… https://play.google.com/store/search?q=caluclator%20hp%20emulator
HP 45, 67, 89, 10BA…
}}} AesopFan: Greek and Roman language and literature are intrinsically bound up with white supremacy, he teaches.
As I said. They are a social cancer, eating away a the foundational aspects of Western Civilization.
The twin pillars of Western Civ:
1 — the inheritance of Judeo-Christian Ethos and its ideas of Truth and Good
2 — Classical Greek notions of Thought and Ideal
Are the targets of literally **everything** PostModern Liberalism is about.
They WILL destroy Western Civ, if left to fester. Until everyone wakes up to this except those assholes looking to destroy it, we’ve got a major problem.
}}} A lot of the supercharged racism uber alles ideology we’re seeing right now under the general banner of “critical race theory” is not new. Most accounts place its origins in the late 1980s or 1990s, but in fact it is possible to make out the essential dynamic back in the 1960s.
Au Contraire, Pierre.
Most of this began after WWI, as the Classical Liberal, so proud, so arrogant, about what Western Civ had given to mankind, saw the results of that stupid war and turned like a spurned woman on it, and morphed it into PostModern Liberalism by the early-mid 1930s.
All the racism part was is an incremental tool to be used to beat Western Civ to death with — yet another aspect of its ideals which it fails to fully and totally support all through its existence, and thus is not worthy of consideration at all.
“Tear it down and destroy it.”
That’s the eternal goal.
@OBloodyHell:
All correct.
When I need to analyse data it’s off to JuypterLab and a bunch of very powerful tools. If I want to do symbolic math, SageMath. I won’t pay for Mathematica.
But old school HP Calculators are fun. Haptics. And knowing that you are handling an artifact which was designed by the best of the best to be the best possible tool for the job and to last.
Haptics are why I’d rather play around with a real HP-15C than an emulator app on phone which runs much faster and can print a virtual ticker or show more of the stack.
When doing self-study, there’s a lot to be said for getting away from all screens and going back to paper books and a good calculator. Fewer distractions and Dopamine Traps.
But from a purely utilitarian perspective, yes.
@OBloodyHell:
“The twin pillars of Western Civ:
1 — the inheritance of Judeo-Christian Ethos and its ideas of Truth and Good”
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=judeo-christian&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cjudeo%20-%20christian%3B%2Cc0
I’m holding a seance tonight to try to raise Sapir and Whorf to see if can get any comments.
Or is it Strauss and Jaffa I should be dialing up on my Ecto-phone?
Just in case another lunatic should peruse the scriptures and then claim to be the brother of Jesus Christ, it appears. Nip the danger in the bud so to speak.
But social discontent in China seems to be taking a much more passive stance nowadays. You can of course easily tear down churches and beat old women in order to stamp out Christianity and the notion that it is acceptable to imagine that there is a God higher than the race. And according to SerpentZA and his street videos, altruism and fellow feeling [as we understand it] have not traditionally been a weakness Chinese nationals suffer from. Though that has its humorous aspects too as many YouTube Chinese national tourists abroad videos illustrate: “Look out at the buffet table and salad bar!
But how you stamp out slacking as a form of social protest is quite the trick. Some form of culling might be necessary for the more reluctant of the potential Sino-Borg. Fortunately, the CCP is there with its social credit program; and the threat of social death for noncompliance might do it, all while preserving that virginity of the soil.
But why do these soil conservation programs always seem to wind up creating a termite heap rather than a city of men? How do you, in fact, save men, by turning them into mindless insects?
Theoretically speaking, what is this program ultimately in aid of and where does it lead, exactly …?
@DNW:
You speak as if self-knowledge and actualization are Good Things. Are you sure you want Joe Public, let alone John Chinaman introspecting? Are you really sure?
I don’t know that I’d call the Chinese Mindless Insects or Chinese Society a Borg. There’s plenty of individualism — get a Chinese outside his extended family and there’s nobody more selfish and solipsistic. Chinese domestic propaganda and censorship is mainly there to crush any Baizuo (White Left = Progressive Poz) Tendencies coming from the Edumacated classes… and also there to head off any Yellow Left paleo Maoist criticisms along the lines of ‘what happened to you know, actual Communism, eh, Comrades?’
Xi Jinping doesn’t care what you think about Blacks or Racial Differences or which school of Anthropology you subscribe to or what your position is on the Schleswig Holstein Question. He’s only going to crap on your head if you have Bad Thoughts about Xi Jinping. It’s very clear what thoughts are not OK. And the list of thoughtcrimes doesn’t retroactively vary from year to year. Can you say this with any confidence in the USA today?
As for Christianity in China…. at best it seems to devolve into a Prosperity Gospel Shtick. They love money. As well they should. There’s SFA social security net. At worst, well you get the Taipings. And that’s just the most successful mad religious sect has run amok in China in recent memory. China is fertile ground for movements which cater to spiritual longing when times are tough — like the language itself, religion has been worn smooth over the past few thousand years. So there is a void just waiting.
Bethink you that there were huge American policy failings and misunderstandings leading up to the ‘Loss of China’ because the then American elites were so easily taken in by missionary boosterism and the blandishments of nominally Christian Chinese interlocutors: The Soong family are just one to come to mind here.
I’m not saying don’t bomb China with Bibles. I’m just saying It’s Complicated.
One of the good things about a conceptual bomb-thrower and cynical iconoclast is that despite himself – or deep down maybe not “despite himself” – he addresses root questions and issues most of us would like to parry away with platitudes or displays of received wisdom.
Even on blogs and discussion boards, there are areas of politics and religion that are just better not discussed at least too deeply lest things become uncomfortable and uncivil. An attitude you are apparently at war with.
So there are a cluster of issues that are partially taboo; one of which you enjoy broaching.
Another of those issues is the package of implications that logically follow from trendy values nihilism. Much in the way that atheists shrug off propositions mooting the non-existence of a transcendent law giving authority with the irrelevant remark that “That does not mean we can’t act morally”, the broader class of moral nihilists shrugs off the implications of the zombie man: i.e., in my use, not someone who has absolutely no self-awareness of reflective consciousness, but rather one who shrugs and accepts the image of the elephant and the helpless rider as an analog to the human body and mind in a similar manner. In other words, the willfully semi-conscious man.
In both cases, those responding are pretending that the critical issue really does not by implication change things all that much because we can mindlessly continue on as usual more or less but not really; when in fact the difference changes everything, and yes, really.
Your question asks, essentially then, if in our system of moral evaluation who or what the master of our consciousness is, matters.
And, whether, once having by evolutionary accident, Divine inspiration, or clawing effort gotten one’s perceiving head above the waters of habit and genetically programmed glandular secretions, it matters in terms of “human” value, if the subject decides to just sink once again and flow along with the current.
Let that current be random organic impulses generated within by a “self” insofar as such a being would have a “self”, or by another more dominant other, “itself” motivated or impelled by equally unexamined, and barely consciously registered “drives”.
What is such a thing? What is its value?
What kind of morality has such a being?
Frankly, it is a morality equivalent to that of the drug addict, the schizophrenic, or of any other mindless organism either simply impelled by a program, or being buffeted about by forces it has never questioned or come to grips with.
Is such a thing even worth its own time much less yours?
Well, I guess that depends on whether you think that consciousness – and the self-awareness it eventually entails which even allows a question regarding its value to be mooted, is the critical difference between man, and utterly pointless matter.
And whether you think that distinction itself matters.
I don’t think that I would either. And those poor Chinese who flee to unofficial Catholic churches in search of existential meaning, or those “lie down flat” boys who are not enticed by the Social Credit Sino-Borg program of Xi Jinping, are to my mind evidence of it.
That is another good point which I cannot tell if is intended to be a simple retort or an observation which you are aware opens up the hidden core of collectivist loyalty: that it is based not on genuine altruism, but on a theory of personal gain. That is to say that the loyalty to the collective is seen by the subject as its main chance. It is not motivated by some feelings of real mutuality or [shudder] affection.
The instant you see that, the thread from Asian collectivism to modern American liberalism reveals itself as an impulse one and the same – one and unbroken.
This insight was first brought to me as I mentioned before by a Japanese national I had known for years who decided to become an American. We had never discussed anything personal. Then one day he showed up in my office and started talking.
We covered a number of points, but in response to my comments he remarked that Americans often imagined that the Japanese collective impulse was based on some fellow-feeling akin to interpersonal affection and caring. He stated forcefully that although duty once played a role in their mutual care and identification ways, “love” so-called, did not. And that the younger generation had not even that habit of duty and respect.
Surprised the hell out of me. But made things much clearer.