Quote:
Originally Posted by PepsiFree
It is a funny charicature though. A little sad that some people on the right are so easily spoon fed this stuff as though it's real. The line "if it's on the internet it must be true!" is actually only funny if you're in on the joke, not the inspiration behind it.
|
You're not familiar with post-modernism? It was the most influential philosophy to emerge in Western academia the late 20th century. There absolutely are schools of thought in the humanities and social sciences that hold logic and science to be social constructs employed to maintain the patriarchal hegemony.
In the prelude to their mob attack on sociologist Charles Murray, the students at Middlebury College in Vermont declared:
“Science has always been used to legitimize racism, sexism, classism, transphobia, ableism, and homophobia, all veiled as rational and fact, and supported by the government and state. In this world today, there is little that is true ‘fact.’”
This, it seems to me, gets to the heart of the question — not that the students shut down a speech, but why they did. I do not doubt their good intentions. But, in a strange echo of the Trumpian right, they are insisting on the superiority of their orthodoxy to “facts.” They are hostile, like all fundamentalists, to science, because it might counter doctrine. And they shut down the event because intersectionality rejects the entire idea of free debate, science, or truth independent of white male power...
At a later moment, the students start clapping in unison, and you can feel the hysteria rising, as the chants grow louder. “Your message is hatred. We will not tolerate it!” The final climactic chant is “Shut it down! Shut it down!” It feels like something out of The Crucible. Most of the students have never read a word of Murray’s — and many professors who supported the shutdown admitted as much. But the intersectional zeal is so great he must be banished — even to the point of physical violence.
This matters, it seems to me, because reason and empirical debate are essential to the functioning of a liberal democracy. We need a common discourse to deliberate. We need facts independent of anyone’s ideology or political side, if we are to survive as a free and democratic society. Trump has surely shown us this. And if a university cannot allow these facts and arguments to be freely engaged, then nowhere is safe. Universities are the sanctuary cities of reason. If reason must be subordinate to ideology even there, our experiment in self-government is over.
-
Is Intersectionality a Religion? - Andrew Sullivan