Another excellent, incredibly prescient quote from the 1996 book, The Opening of the American Mind, by UC Berkeley professor of history, Lawrence Levine: “It is exactly this understanding of how things do *not* happen that the leading critics of the contemporary university lack…
Thus they freely spin their facile theories of how the survivors of the New Left lost the political wars but won their ultimate triumph by capturing the university and transforming it from an institution of culture and learning to a high-handed and inflexible purveyor of...
Political Correctness. The problem with such notions––aside from the fact that they are promulgated, to borrow Carl Becker's memorable phrase, without fear and without research––is that they are telling examples of how things do not happen. Universities in the United States...
are not transformed by small cabals of political and social radicals who somehow (the process is never revealed) capture venerable private and public institutions of higher learning, convert them to their own agendas, overwhelm and silence the vast majority of their colleagues...
while boards of regents and trustees benignly look on, and mislead generations of gullible and passive college youth who are robbed of their true heritage and thus compelled to stumble forth into the larger world as undereducated and uncultured dupes...
mouthing the platitudes taught them by the band of radical mesmerists posing as college professors... It should not take a great deal of reflection to realize that neither college students nor college faculties...
nor college administrations operate in the manner posited by the apocalyptic and conspiratorial views of the contemporary university."
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Reading about the history of reactionary criticisms of the left a la Pluckrose & Lindsay, Douglas Murray, etc. A mentor from undergrad recommended a book responding to Allan Bloom, “The Opening of the American Mind,” by his PhD supervisor, Lawrence Levine.
Sub “woke” for “PC.”
@mccormick_ted you history folks are always lurking with your prescience.
Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind” (1987) seems to be the Bible of this anti-woke movement. The force of his central argument seems to rely on an analogy between rising PC culture and the Nazis. Jordan Peterson has clearly devoured this one.
Here goes another one of my signature threads on the incredibly bulletproof #AntiWoke online echo chambers can be, focusing again on @wokal_distance. And before you remind me I have better things to do, remind yourself I am fully aware of this fact; I simply have no self-respect.
Tweet 3 is on the right track but misses the point. A metanarrative, as conceptualized by Lyotard, is a grand, totalizing, theory of everything: a theory that ends the infinite regress of epistemic justification. Lyotard's examples include Hegelian and Marxist theories of history
Re 4: Rather, postmodernism does not believe in the truth of any metanarrative.
And no, no, no, rejecting metanarratives does NOT mean denying the existence of absolute truth, and it does not necessarily lead to relativism, though it can suggest a banal sort of constructivism.
Alrighty folxxx, you asked for it. Here’s my thread on @Hpluckrose’s instant classic, “How French ‘Intellectuals’ Ruined the West: Postmodernism & Its Impact.” Originally published at Areo, lucky enough to get the coveted @NewDiscourses placement. [1/n]
Right off the bat, opening paragraph suggests any worldview “which denies a stable reality or reliable knowledge to exist” is thereby inconsistent. Why? No explanation. Moving on! [2/n]
Postmodernism involves a “rejection of the concept of the unified and coherent individual” as well as “philosophy which valued ethics, reason and clarity”—these are parochial (western, middle-class, male). How does one do philosophy without reason? No answer, no citations. [3/n]
I just watched this video. In short: I agree that this popular style of diversity education/workshops/training, whether in the workplace or the academy, is generally unhelpful; at worst, it's counterproductive.
But Casey Peterson has absolutely no idea what he's talking about.
Peterson identifies the target of his criticism as critical race theory (CRT), and he cites a portion of @DrTJC's definition for Britannica, which you can find here in full: britannica.com/topic/critical…
CRT is "un-American," he argues, because it contradicts the order of our justice system: it assumes every white person is racist "until absolved of [their] racism by a person of color."
His thesis: "CRT breeds nothing but unjustified fear, guilt, anger, victimhood, & hatred.”
Here’s my thread responding to @HPluckrose’s responses to my review. I engaged with some of her responses already, especially on their reading of Fricker. She hasn’t replied to the most recent tweet, linked here.
The next point of contention concerns their treatment of Kristie Dotson—specifically, whether they attribute to Dotson any beliefs about the epistemic value of witchcraft. See our interaction on this issue here: