Intolerance in Academia

Author of this web page:  John Engelbrecht  San Antonio              Within my web site    

sites.google.com/site/solderandcircuits    is the sub-page    

physics-timeline                 and within that is     

sites.google.com/site/solderandcircuits/home/more-circuit-design/physics-timeline/physics-time-line-1900-1990 which has a sub-page, Intolerance in Academia

where I poke around the ideas other people have about 

2017 Nov New Oxford Review   p. 9  letter to the editor from Brian Jones concerning the Clifford Staples article, "'Critical Thinking' in the Postmodern University" in NOR Sept. 2017 

Prof. Staples taught for decades as a Marxist sociologist but came to recognize error in this line of thinking.  Changing the word order to make it clearer:  postmodern man proclaims a delusion:  truth must be what man forges for himself.  Truth must be constrained only by what man wishes for himself.  The university punishes those who dispute this delusion.  "Teachers want to expose students to [man made truth] in the hope of releasing them from...the bondage of their own [conservative] opinions.  Staples says this releases students to replace truth with opinion, to "unleash the hate and unsheathe the knives."  "In the absence of truth, all that remains is power."  

"Being open minded is so dangerous because it typically leads not to believing nothing but to a willingness to believe anything."  Tocqueville said that the temptation in liberal democracy is to set up each individual's opinion as the standard of what is true.  To John E, this sounds like Antifa.   http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/18/us/unmasking-antifa-anti-fascists-hard-left/index.html

    Another letter to the editor, from James Schall, S.J., is that modern "critical thinking" comes from Kant and the Frankfort School [JE comment, a destructive element at Columbia U].  It has become a "branch of theoretic relativism.  It is based on the proposition that truth cannot be found because it does not exist in things...no objective order is out there."  

    Staples replies to these letters to the editor.  Around 1997, he was waiting in an airport and talked with a conservative Catholic priest.  Staples said he was a lapsed Catholic and a Marxist.  Staples laughed at the priest when the priest told him, "God gave you a mind so that you could know the truth!"  "I could not take seriously the claim that man might have a transcendent origin, nature, and destiny...I didn't want to do so."  Marxists are about redeeming the world, whereas Christians are about redeeming the soul, "and by then my soul was just too ugly to look at...that young priest had spoken a truth I needed to hear."  "The last thing we want is to be forced by reason to acknowledge a reality we did not make." 

2019  from https://www.naturalism.org/philosophy/post-modernism/humanism-and-postmodernism-a-reconciliation

Excerpts from an essay that originally appeared in the Humanist, 1993, V53, #1, pp. 18-23, which is © Thomas W. Clark 1993. Comments added by John Engelbrecht June 2019 make this a critical review. Note that Thomas Clark is a proponent of postmodernism.

Comparing Humanism with Postmodernism

Humanism extolls the virtues of doing without the belief in God, spirit, the afterlife, and other standard religious assumptions...[humanists can choose any manmade alternate reality] 

We can be good without God. [    ;^) We can realize how wise Marx and the Bolsheviks were.   ]

[Or we postmodernists may go beyond humanism and say there is]

We don't need to invoke Reason or Science to justify our preferences for a democratic, tolerant [of fellow travelers], and caring [except for the undesired pre-born, and except for the racists] society, within which individuals are free to pursue their private projects.  We then can proceed immediately to the political project of defending and expanding the humanist agenda. [Jump ahead from 1993 to 2019 and observe the contradictions within the Democratic Party brought on by the youngest elected congresspersons.]

[Look at how tolerant and caring a society is when Antifa's ideas become widespread. ]

That humanism has a secure philosophical footing in rationalism and science [ is imaginary,] when in fact the situation is rather more tenuous.

Richard Rorty [died 2007], the current leader of the metaphilosophical attack, believes that the search for cognitive and ethical foundations ... "has not paid off".

...Rorty [recommends] "the abandonment of the notion of discovering the truth which is common to theology and science." ...Our choice .. becomes a matter of their relative utility for the purposes at hand. [see John Stuart Mill in 1863, Utilitarianism.  Utility as a substitute for morals is a danger, see https://sites.google.com/site/solderandcircuits/home/more-circuit-design/physics-timeline/physics-time-line-1900-present/morals-shown-in-physics-timeline/radical-individualism-autonomy]

William James, Nietzche, and Dewey [started this journey, and others such as Rorty push ahead]...Liberation from philosophy...is the logical next step for the culture that has presided over the death of God. [April 8, 1966 edition of Time magazine. See God is dead in Wikipedia.]

"We have a set of isolated monads, within each of which beliefs form without systematic constraints." [Occupy, Antifa, Black Lives Matter] Israel Scheffler as quoted by Stanley Fish in Doing What Comes Naturally (Duke University Press, 1989), p. 487.

[Are we condemned to an] arbitrary splintering of humankind into warring camps? [Is there any foundation for a] global push for democracy and human rights? [Contrast postmodernist thinking with Jesus' sermon on the mount:

Blessed are you [orthodox Christians] when people hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man.]

You can always find adherents for any set of beliefs, however crazy or counterintuitive. Christian Science is John E's favorite example.

Humanism [is left in the dust by postmodernism.  Humanism]... has rationalist leanings. It is at odds with the postmodern denial of universal, perspective-neutral Reason.

Stanley Fish: Rationalism...can be safely left behind once we see that preferences, values, [feelings] and beliefs are as deep as we can, or need, go.

Human nature and culture are whatever we decide we want them to be...There is...no destiny...[there is a ] global babble of creeds, philosophies, political systems, and moralities.  [The splintering mentioned above.]

We will expend our argumentative energies...on reaching those who already ...agree with us, instead of preaching to the unconvertible.

End of excerpt from Humanist

JE: But look to the time when a political majority favors the permanent abolition of foundations. This will be the Western version of ISIS. Just as any country experiences a culture shift when the majority becomes Muslim (and any Christians in that country see their civil rights dwindle), there will be persecution of those who cling to foundations if Stanley Fish's thinking prevails; after all, why shouldn't the progressive majority's beliefs and feelings be forcibly extended to all, especially the children of the bitter clingers? It will be for the good of all to extinguish the old thinking  ;^|

In sub-saharan Africa in the 2010s, similar forced cultural and moral shifting is seen. Wealthy, liberal, Western foundations, such as Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, make grants to African countries. But there are contingencies, strings attached. The laws of the tradition-favoring countries have to be liberalized before they can sign on for the grants.  How much is the old Western colonialism happening again?  Is it really better to force young men in villages to give up traditional goat herding and instead learn to code on solar-powered Raspberry Pis?

Note:  in 2007, Roger Scruton wrote, "Rorty was paramount among those thinkers who advance their own opinion as immune to criticism, by pretending that it is not truth but consensus that counts."

https://bluntforcetruth.com/news/antifa-is-the-resurgence-of-anti-war-movement-occupy-wall-street-black-lives-matter

Breitbart Texas Editor Brandon Darby

August 17 2017

They ... become something different every time there’s a need for it. The liberals in mainstream media provide cover for that extreme left movement.”

...the anti-war movement during the Bush years, Occupy Wall Street for the 2012 election cycle, Black Lives Matter in 2016, and Antifa now.

“It was largely the same people who were doing the same organizing... who believe that it’s okay to go and use violence and intimidation to shut down racists.”

they routinely call everyone who’s in the GOP a racist,” he added, “you have the mainstream media glorifying, deifying, justifying...they consider all of us to be racists.”

Darby explained that the larger goal of this endlessly mutating movement is to attack the very foundations of American law and culture, most especially the Constitution itself. “They’re already calling for anything with George Washington to be removed,” he noted.

https://townhall.com/columnists/dineshdsouza/2007/07/16/sta. Stanley Fish, age 81 on 2019, is not to be rejected flippantly. He has debated the atheists Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens and says they criticize Christians on points they pretend are new, whereas Christians have been thinking through the issues for centuries.