Relativism swings right
Mar. 24th, 2005 10:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusA thread on I Love Everything entitled "Welcome to the cultural revolution" draws my attention to a news story from The Independent Florida Alligator. "Capitol bill aims to control ‘leftist’ profs," says the headline. "The law could let students sue for untolerated beliefs." These "untolerated beliefs" turn out to include the idea that God created the world in seven days and that Darwin's theory of evolution is just an opinion. "Tolerate and, in fact, teach my whacky right wing views or I'll sue you, authoritarian liberal professors!" is the gist of the bill Republican senator Dennis Baxley is trying to make law: The Academic Freedom Bill of Rights.
"While promoting the bill Tuesday," continues the newspaper, "Baxley said a university education should be more than “one biased view by the professor, who as a dictator controls the classroom,” as part of “a misuse of their platform to indoctrinate the next generation with their own views.” The bill sets a statewide standard that students cannot be punished for professing beliefs with which their professors disagree. Professors would also be advised to teach alternative “serious academic theories” that may disagree with their personal views."
“Some professors say, ‘Evolution is a fact. I don’t want to hear about Intelligent Design (a creationist theory), and if you don’t like it, there’s the door,’” Baxley said, citing one example when he thought a student should sue. Rep. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach, warned of lawsuits from students enrolled in Holocaust history courses who believe the Holocaust never happened. Similar suits could be filed by students who don’t believe astronauts landed on the moon, who believe teaching birth control is a sin or even by Shands medical students who refuse to perform blood transfusions and believe prayer is the only way to heal the body, Gelber added."
Drew Daniel (yes, the one in Matmos and Soft Pink Truth) comments on the thread: "I guess this backs up that argument that rightwingers have been successfully appropriating traditionally leftist argumentative tactics -- what's so weird is that pomo leftists in the high-theory 80s used relativist arguments to destabilize the foundationalist objectivity of science to further deconstructive critical ends -- and now we have conservatives using dumbed down versions of the same moves (science isn't fact, it's just theory . . . . therefore claim X is "just as true as" claim Y)."
At the end of last year I advanced the idea that the current American right has belatedly embraced postmodernism. In The US Becomes Situated I wrote:
"A postmodern national identity happens when you see yourself as The Other. Before it saw itself as The Other, the US saw itself as The Universal. The Universal is invisible, the Other is visible. The Universal claims to be impartial, the Other admits its self-interest. The Universal is adult, the Other is childish. The Universal is level-headed, the Other impetuous, prone to tantrums and whining... It may seem strange to think of the current Republican Party as a product of the postmodern identity politics of the 60s and 70s -- the struggle for recognition by radical identity-based communities like blacks, women and gays. It makes more sense, though, when you see identity politics as a sort of narcissism, a way of seeing oneself as The Other in order not to think, any longer, of one's responsibility to others."
Drew Daniel draws an interesting historical parallel. "It's like we're living in the Anglican England of the 1630s," he says, "and there's this minority of very vocal Puritans who are denouncing all and sundry, and struggling to radicalize the country as a whole so that they can further their narrowly-understood religious views, and even as they advocate for deeply absolutist doctrines they exploit the rhetoric of persecution as they wait to get the upper hand and they're already publically licking their chops as they foresee their imminent chance to viciously persecute those who don't share their agenda... oh wait, our country was founded and created by those people."
Two of the core ideas of pomo relativism have become tools in the hands of the new right:
1. The idea that being a victim allows you to act as unreasonably as you like, and
2. The idea that having a culture (in other words, being situated) means never having to say you're sorry.
Terry Eagleton wrote an essay for the New Statesman last year entitled Big Ideas: Rediscover A Common Culture or Die in which he described how "culture has descended from the macro to the micro -- from whole societies to a range of interest groups within them. It is more about Hell's Angels than Hellenic Greece. This naturally raises the question of how micro you can get. Do the two teachers in the village school constitute a culture? What about Posh and Becks?" He went on to describe how culture is valued in a society where form and style dominate over content, where local uniqueness is a globally saleable commodity, and where something that's seen as a culture can't be questioned: "Neither a work of art nor a way of life can be said to be "right" or "wrong", as one might say of a political strategy or a code of ethics. It would be like saying that the Romanian language was a mistake".
Eagleton goes on to show just how the idea of "culture" has moved from an idea that benefits the left to one that helps the right:
"Over the past three or four decades, the most resourceful movements on the left have been ones in which culture plays a vital role. Feminism, ethnic militancy, revolutionary nationalism: for all three of these political currents, culture in the broad sense of language, identity, symbol, tradition and community are a huge part of what is politically at stake. Far from being agreeable extras, they provide the very terms of political argument. And this has an interesting implication. It means that culture has shifted before our eyes from being part of the solution to being part of the problem."
The trouble is, Eagleton concludes, that the main problems facing the world today are universal ones which require common action based on shared understandings of, and responsibilities for, shared problems:
"Most of the champions of culture today are distinctly coy of phrases such as "common humanity". When they hear them, they reach for their differences with Pavlovian precision. Yet they do so in a world in which humanity has never been so forcibly united in the face of the same military, political and ecological threats. There is nothing in the least abstract about this kind of universality. It is a curious abstraction that could blow us all to kingdom come."
"While promoting the bill Tuesday," continues the newspaper, "Baxley said a university education should be more than “one biased view by the professor, who as a dictator controls the classroom,” as part of “a misuse of their platform to indoctrinate the next generation with their own views.” The bill sets a statewide standard that students cannot be punished for professing beliefs with which their professors disagree. Professors would also be advised to teach alternative “serious academic theories” that may disagree with their personal views."
“Some professors say, ‘Evolution is a fact. I don’t want to hear about Intelligent Design (a creationist theory), and if you don’t like it, there’s the door,’” Baxley said, citing one example when he thought a student should sue. Rep. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach, warned of lawsuits from students enrolled in Holocaust history courses who believe the Holocaust never happened. Similar suits could be filed by students who don’t believe astronauts landed on the moon, who believe teaching birth control is a sin or even by Shands medical students who refuse to perform blood transfusions and believe prayer is the only way to heal the body, Gelber added."
Drew Daniel (yes, the one in Matmos and Soft Pink Truth) comments on the thread: "I guess this backs up that argument that rightwingers have been successfully appropriating traditionally leftist argumentative tactics -- what's so weird is that pomo leftists in the high-theory 80s used relativist arguments to destabilize the foundationalist objectivity of science to further deconstructive critical ends -- and now we have conservatives using dumbed down versions of the same moves (science isn't fact, it's just theory . . . . therefore claim X is "just as true as" claim Y)."
At the end of last year I advanced the idea that the current American right has belatedly embraced postmodernism. In The US Becomes Situated I wrote:
"A postmodern national identity happens when you see yourself as The Other. Before it saw itself as The Other, the US saw itself as The Universal. The Universal is invisible, the Other is visible. The Universal claims to be impartial, the Other admits its self-interest. The Universal is adult, the Other is childish. The Universal is level-headed, the Other impetuous, prone to tantrums and whining... It may seem strange to think of the current Republican Party as a product of the postmodern identity politics of the 60s and 70s -- the struggle for recognition by radical identity-based communities like blacks, women and gays. It makes more sense, though, when you see identity politics as a sort of narcissism, a way of seeing oneself as The Other in order not to think, any longer, of one's responsibility to others."
Drew Daniel draws an interesting historical parallel. "It's like we're living in the Anglican England of the 1630s," he says, "and there's this minority of very vocal Puritans who are denouncing all and sundry, and struggling to radicalize the country as a whole so that they can further their narrowly-understood religious views, and even as they advocate for deeply absolutist doctrines they exploit the rhetoric of persecution as they wait to get the upper hand and they're already publically licking their chops as they foresee their imminent chance to viciously persecute those who don't share their agenda... oh wait, our country was founded and created by those people."
Two of the core ideas of pomo relativism have become tools in the hands of the new right:
1. The idea that being a victim allows you to act as unreasonably as you like, and
2. The idea that having a culture (in other words, being situated) means never having to say you're sorry.
Terry Eagleton wrote an essay for the New Statesman last year entitled Big Ideas: Rediscover A Common Culture or Die in which he described how "culture has descended from the macro to the micro -- from whole societies to a range of interest groups within them. It is more about Hell's Angels than Hellenic Greece. This naturally raises the question of how micro you can get. Do the two teachers in the village school constitute a culture? What about Posh and Becks?" He went on to describe how culture is valued in a society where form and style dominate over content, where local uniqueness is a globally saleable commodity, and where something that's seen as a culture can't be questioned: "Neither a work of art nor a way of life can be said to be "right" or "wrong", as one might say of a political strategy or a code of ethics. It would be like saying that the Romanian language was a mistake".
Eagleton goes on to show just how the idea of "culture" has moved from an idea that benefits the left to one that helps the right:
"Over the past three or four decades, the most resourceful movements on the left have been ones in which culture plays a vital role. Feminism, ethnic militancy, revolutionary nationalism: for all three of these political currents, culture in the broad sense of language, identity, symbol, tradition and community are a huge part of what is politically at stake. Far from being agreeable extras, they provide the very terms of political argument. And this has an interesting implication. It means that culture has shifted before our eyes from being part of the solution to being part of the problem."
The trouble is, Eagleton concludes, that the main problems facing the world today are universal ones which require common action based on shared understandings of, and responsibilities for, shared problems:
"Most of the champions of culture today are distinctly coy of phrases such as "common humanity". When they hear them, they reach for their differences with Pavlovian precision. Yet they do so in a world in which humanity has never been so forcibly united in the face of the same military, political and ecological threats. There is nothing in the least abstract about this kind of universality. It is a curious abstraction that could blow us all to kingdom come."
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Different (Vinegar) Strokes
Date: 2005-03-24 10:25 am (UTC)My experience is that junior academics are censored by their 'betters' long before the students get to have a pop, which renders the status of the PhD as 'an original contribution to knowledge' highly questionable.
There are a great many lecturers working in Arts faculties the world over striving for Emeritus status in Total Fluff, diligently grinding out their 3 and a half papers a year. You can spot them by the formal conceit of their paper titles - the template is statement, colon: list of three.
I would quibble slightly with your assertion that the power asymmetry of Self and Other is being reversed by current US dogma. I think it is more akin to 'Otherising' the Self via hegemony ~ the self still remains blissfully underdefined, defined by what it is not, while the other is incorporated, consentingly, and is thus politically neutralised. Bush's rhetoric of Us and Them is still posited along classical lines. The dominant have simply styled themselves as more 'special' in a 'special bus' type way...
Re: Different (Vinegar) Strokes
Date: 2005-03-24 11:22 am (UTC)"We inherit the idea of the intellectual from the 18th-century Enlightenment, which valued truth, universality and objectivity - all highly suspect notions in a postmodern age. As Furedi points out, these ideas used to be savaged by the political right, as they undercut appeals to prejudice, hierarchy and custom. Nowadays, in a choice historical irony, they are under assault from the cultural left."
He goes on to say that an intellectual, in the 18th century sense, is someone concerned with universalist commentary, not specialised knowledge of just one field. The leaders of societies like the UK and US mistrust thought that isn't professionalised, applied, specialised.
"A society obsessed with the knowledge economy, Furedi argues, is oddly wary of knowledge. This is because truth is no longer precious for its own sake. Indeed, the idea of doing something just for the hell of it has always put the wind up philistine utilitarians, from Charles Dickens's Mr Gradgrind to our own Mr Blair. At an earlier stage of capitalism, knowledge was not so vital for economic production; once it becomes so, it turns into a commodity, while critical intellectuals turn into submissive social engineers. Now, knowledge is valuable only when it can be used as an instrument for something else: social cohesion, political control, economic production. In a brilliant insight, Furedi claims that this instrumental downgrading of knowledge is just the flip side of postmodern irrationalism. The mystical and the managerial are secretly in cahoots."
The meddling relativism built into the Academic Freedom Bill of Rights is also explained:
"Once society is considered too complex to be known as a whole, however, the idea of truth yields to both specialism and relativism. Because you can now know only your own neck of the woods, the general critique as launched by the conventional intellectual collapses. There is no longer any big picture, a fact for which our rulers are profoundly grateful. And given that anyone's view is now as good as anyone else's, the authority which underpinned that critique is downsized along with it. To suggest that your anti-racist convictions are somehow superior to my anti-Semitic ones comes to sound intolerably elitist. To claim that institutions of culture and learning should enjoy a degree of autonomy is derided as ivory-towerism. Yet autonomy means space for criticism as well as space for irresponsibility. A privileged distance from everyday life can also be a productive one. Literary academics are more likely than insurance brokers to be left-wingers."
Re: Different (Vinegar) Strokes
Date: 2005-03-24 11:35 am (UTC)Re: Different (Vinegar) Strokes
Date: 2005-03-24 11:49 am (UTC)How one can quantify learning, creativity or knowledge is beyond me, but it seems to involve PFI funding of a great many 'workshop' and 'think-tank' initiatives, conducted by individuals with no expertise in these fields, paid £200 per head to spout dubious cobblers about, among others, 'learning styles', 'differentiation', and 'thinking skills'. Millions of pounds of the UK's school education budget are pumped into this industry every year. Meanwhile, clever kids get bored, thick kids get more disturbed and teachers go crazy.
The most twisted aspect of all this is that these initiatives masquerade as precisely the kinds of work that teachers would like to be doing...
Re: Different (Vinegar) Strokes
Date: 2005-03-24 12:05 pm (UTC)I'm particularly suspicious of Furedi since he was a leading light in the RCP, notoriously the nastiest, most authoritarian, and most cult-like of all the groups on the left at that time. His more recent analyses strike me as often very superficial & designed more to generate publicity than to make a genuine point.
Certainly there is a lot of waffle coming out of academia. What else is new? If the people who could be agitating for social change are instead wasting their time muttering about the waffle coming out of academia, setting up straw men and knocking them down, we aren't going to get anywhere.
Re: Different (Vinegar) Strokes
Date: 2005-03-24 12:30 pm (UTC)Re: Different (Vinegar) Strokes
Date: 2005-03-24 01:40 pm (UTC)