Repost-Dinesh D’Souza And Daniel Dennett at Tufts University: Nietzsche’s Prophesy

D’Souza is a Christian, and while debating Daniel Dennett at Tufts University, he brings up Nietzsche’s argument that God is dead.   From the depths of Nietzsche’s thinking, D’Souza argues he was able to see the coming crisis in Europe; that Europeans could no longer base their lives upon defunct Christian metaphysics without radically and creatively developing new thinking from the ground up.  Nietzsche also supposed that few if any would heed his call and realize the depth of this crisis, and so would likely lumber into the tremendously violent conflicts of the 20th century.

D’Souza then charges Dennett with a similarly shallow approach; over-simplyfying the metaphysical depths of Christianity from the relatively stable position of present day scientific analysis (which, as D’Souza’s argument suggests, grew out of Christianity itself).

D’Souza is a Christian, as mentioned, and Dennett not.   Nietzsche would probably have not thought much about either a 20th century man still resting upon a belief in God…nor a 20th century man analyzing such a belief from an understanding of science (as a philosopher, Dennett, with a background in science).  Nietzsche, of course, was almost entirely ignorant of science.

You might have to come up with more than that to get to Dennett.

Good debate.  Argument starts at 5:30:

See Also:  A Few Thoughts On Allan Bloom:  The Nietzsche Connection…A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”…: A Few Thoughts On The Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy Entry: Nietzsche’s Moral And Political Philosophy

From Newsweek: Henry Kissinger ‘Deployments And Diplomacy’

Full article here.

“The prevailing strategy in Afghanistan is based on the classic anti-insurrection doctrine: to build a central government, commit it to the improvement of the lives of its people, and then protect the population until that government’s own forces are able, with our training, to take over.”

But despite our efforts (we have been misallocating resources…largely due to the Iraq War ), the central government we helped to build is mired in corruption. And I suspect it isn’t just the Karzai government that’s corrupt, but the corruption is due to other more fundamental issues which our military may not be able to address.  The basic levels of national identity, economic and educational development as well as infrastructure (the ring road?) may not have been met to build a functioning government for which the worst Afghans can lay down their weapons (or be forced to by an Afghan military)

Kissinger finishes with:

“For the immediate future, it is essential to avoid another wrenching domestic division and to conduct the inevitable debate with respect for its complexity and the stark choices confronting our country.”

But our domestic political divisions include a reasonable debate about whether or not the broader goals (a viable Afghan government, or something holding Afghanistan together beyond the Taliban’s version of Islam) can be reached by the military (and those who likely have the best understanding of what’s going on on the ground).

It’s still stark…and can any sitting U.S. president allow the chance of Al-Qaeda (and even Bin Laden) to come back…?

Addition:  Pakistani troops take action in South Waziristan.

Related On This Site:  From Bloomberg: More Troops To Afghanistan? A Memo From Henry Kissinger To Gerald Ford?…From The NY Times Video: ‘A Schoolgirl’s Odyssey’…From The WSJ: Graham, Lieberman and McCain “Only Decisive Force Can Prevail In Afghanistan…From Commonweal: Andrew Bacevich “The War We Can’t Win: Afghanistan And The Limits Of American Power”

From Instapundit: Yosi Sargent Resigns From The NEA

Full post here.

He was asked to leave, for political reasons.  But then again, he reportedly brought his politics right into the job.  

Breitbart started it here (Is a minority conservative necessarily further to the right…is libertarianism flourishing, and if so, more in California?). 

Also On This Site:  From NPR: Grants To The NEA To Stimulate The Economy?…From 2 Blowhards-We Need The Arts: A Sob Story

Mark Lilla At The Chronicle Of Higher Ed Via A & L Daily: ‘Taking The Right Seriously’

Full piece here.

The University of California at Berkeley has just opened a Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements.  

It’s Berkeley, so what did you expect?

Lilla, as a professor of the humanities, hopes it will actually open a discussion, and perhaps, someday, be a place for serious intellectual inquiry (strengthening the debate away from the likes of David Horowitz):

“So, in the end, I give my ex-conservative blessing to the Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements and wish it a long life. If nothing else, it will get professors and students to discuss ideas and read books that until now have been relegated to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.”

Via the A & L Daily as well, there are a few responses, and Lilla responds back.

Related On This Site:  A Few Thoughts On Robert Nozick’s “Anarchy, State and Utopia”…Link To An Ayn Rand Paper: The Objectivist Attack On Kant

A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”…From YouTube: Leo Strauss On The Meno-More On The Fact/Value Distinction?

From Prospect: Eric Kaufmann On ‘The Meaning Of Huntington’…A Few Thoughts On Allan Bloom–The Nietzsche Connection

More Stanley Fish At The NY Times Blog: ‘What Should Colleges Teach-Part 3′

Full post here.

Perhaps it’s necessary to teach (drill?) a series of highly abstract rules that deepen a student’s understanding of his/her own language?
Fish points out:

“By all the evidence, high schools and middle schools are not teaching writing skills in an effective way, if they are teaching them at all“ 

 There’s a lot of truth to this.  Fish, of course, goes after the usual targets:  The people who have put ideology above what may be higher goals:

‘“We affirm the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language — the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style.”’  

 Yet, how do you pursue those higher goals?  Aren’t there the forces of excessive egalitarianism and individualism at work here as well?(we’re still a young, fairly uncivilized nation with a lot of open space).  

Fish’s answer is pedagogical:

“You have to start with a simple but deep understanding of the game, which for my purposes is the game of writing sentences. So it makes sense to begin with the question, What is a sentence anyway? My answer has two parts: (1) A sentence is an organization of items in the world. (2) A sentence is a structure of logical relationships.“  

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As a side note, a commenter (the 3rd comment) notes:

“Your arguments make sense, if one wants to become a secretary. But if I want to write well, then being forced to write by the rules destroys my creativity just as much if not more than what it teaches me.” 

 Yet, maybe housing creative writing in universities doesn’t help creativity much either.

See Also On This Site:  Conservative Briton Roger Scruton suggests keeping political and aesthetic judgments apart in the humanities: Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment

Fish suggested keeping politics out of academia during the Ward Churchill affair:  From The Stanley Fish Blog: Ward Churchill Redux

Does it have to be political, or is that putting the cart before the horse?  Martha Nussbaum tried to tackle the humanities problem a while back: From The Harvard Educational Review-A Review Of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.’

From The Bellevue Reporter-Walter Backstrom’s: ‘Educational Progress And The Liberal Plantation’

Full post here.

It’s notable when someone in the Seattle area stands up against “the orthodoxy”.  In this case it’s the Washington teachers’ unions and the unimpressive state of education in Washington.  There are many reasons for this, but excessive bureaucracy is certainly one:

“It reminded me of the same fights that I have had with the educational establishment. They said I wasn’t an expert in education, and that I should be quiet and stop being so negative. I remembered a teacher urging me not to write that second-graders use calculators on math tests.

That is when I really got angry.“

Seattle has some good reasons to promote diversity, namely a diverse population.  Under that banner, though, huddle many people busy ignoring their own self-interest where it can matter most:  the students themselves.    See the Discovering Math debate for a taste of the discussion.

That’s where another Seattle dynamic (somewhat political as well) plays out:  The dissenting opinions and reformers to the orthodoxy are often entrepeneuers, successful business types and business leaders whom Seattle has attracted.  

Sometimes, parents and reformers know a lot about their own disciplines (engineers, for example), but aren’t sympathetic to the problems a teacher reasonably faces.  Some of them are sympathetic  though, and it gets interesting when they are pitted against “the orthodoxy:”  the entrenched interests, union protectionists, and the true-believing bureaucrats who can, as Backstrom notes, become part of the problem.

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I don’t believe education fits under Milton Friedman’s intellectual net, nor would I want it to.  But I like seeing how he comes at the problems of scarcity of resources, students failed by the system, and entrenched educators:

From Stanley Fish At The NY Times Blog: What Should Colleges Teach?

Full post here.

Fish reminds us of a simple idea:  college writing courses ought to focus primarily on writing…:

“…the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues — racism, sexism, immigration, globalization.”

Perhaps at the cost of their writing skills.  Yet, is Fish just going after the easy targets (where political and ideological aims often take precedence) in quoting the ACTA report?:

“Thirty-five years ago there was no such thing as a gay and lesbian studies program; now you can build a major around it. For some this development is a sign that a brave new world has arrived; for others it marks the beginning of the end of civilization.”

“It probably is neither; curricular alternatives are just not that world-shaking.”

Perhaps not.  He highlights what he seems to consider the most insightful bit of wisdom the report (with its own aims) has to offer:

“An “important benefit of a coherent core curriculum is its ability to foster a ‘common conversation’ among students, connecting them more closely with faculty and with each other.”

He seems pretty pragmatic.

Addition:  Of course, as Camille Paglia points out, movies, T.V., popular music etc. arguably is the culture for a great many Americans.  Fish also feels the need to defend his justification of writing in the post.

Another Addition:  Fish responds to his critics.  If we were all held to such standards in our writing…

See Also On This Site:  Conservative Briton Roger Scruton suggests keeping political and aesthetic judgments apart in the humanities: Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment

Fish suggested keeping politics out of academia during the Ward Churchill affair:  From The Stanley Fish Blog: Ward Churchill Redux

Martha Nussbaum tried to tackle the humanities problem a while back: From The Harvard Educational Review-A Review Of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.’

From The Chronicle Of Higher Ed Via A & L Daily: “Myths Or Facts In Feminist Scholarship?

Full article here.  (Once archived, no longer free)

As the A & L daily notes, that’s Nancy K.D. Lemon vs Christina Hoff Sommers.  

Sommers started the criticism here.

I think one piece of the puzzle is Roger Scruton’s argument here, which suggests a failure to keep aesthetic judgment apart from political judgment in the humanities…:

“And since there is no cogent justification for women’s studies that does not dwell upon the subject’s ideological purpose, the entire curriculum in the humanities began to be seen in ideological terms.”

This can spill out into our politics…and we get many people on the right criticizing entire institutions of higher learning…and many on the left mixing race, gender politics and humanities into theories which clearly have ideological aims and political consequences.

Though of course, Lemon is on the faculty at Berkeley Law…

From the comments section:  

“If, in the interest of advancing her cause, she [sic, Lemon]  perpetuates fallacious reasoning, she forfeits her position as a scholar and becomes a mere advocate–something any of us can be, because there are no standards to advocacy. If she pretends to something better, she has to BE better. The same holds true for Sommers, and those who can root out fallacious reasoning on her part are right to do so.

See Also: From The Chronicle Of Higher Ed Via A & L Daily: Christina Hoff Sommers “Persistent Myths In Feminist Scholarship” Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment…Revisiting Larry Summers: What Did He Say Again?

You could just try reading Shakespeare, and go from there…

Thanks to iri5

From The Chronicle Of Higher Ed Via A & L Daily: Christina Hoff Sommers “Persistent Myths In Feminist Scholarship”

Full post here.

Sommers asks the following in her critique of a feminist textbook::

“All books have mistakes, so why pick on the feminists? My complaint with feminist research is not so much that the authors make mistakes; it is that the mistakes are impervious to reasoned criticism.”

I think she picks on the feminists because she is something of a feminist.  

See Also On This Site:   Revisiting Larry Summers: What Did He Say Again?…A Few Thoughts: Where Is Feminism Headed?

J.S. Mill

Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment

Full article here:

So what’s lacking in the humanities?  Roger Scruton has some keen insights:

“The works of Shakespeare contain important knowledge. But it is not scientific knowledge, nor could it ever be built into a theory. It is knowledge of the human heart”

So forget the recent, and rather desperate, attempts to make the humanities into a science  (however…it’s been done before with some success).  Scruton suggests it’s been a long slide for the humanities to arrive where they’ve arrived:

“In the days when the humanities involved knowledge of classical languages and an acquaintance with German scholarship, there was no doubt that they required real mental discipline, even if their point could reasonably be doubted. But once subjects like English were admitted to a central place in the curriculum, the question of their validity became urgent. And then, in the wake of English came the pseudo-humanities—women’s studies, gay studies and the like—which were based on the assumption that, if English is a discipline, so too are they.”

And now that we’re left with somewhat balkanized and politicized departments of English, these departments have become a target of the political right, dragging many people into a nasty fight that eats up political capital:

“And since there is no cogent justification for women’s studies that does not dwell upon the subject’s ideological purpose, the entire curriculum in the humanities began to be seen in ideological terms.”

So how to restore the vision? Scruton advises to restore (and not eschew) judgment:

” Of course, Shakespeare invites judgment, as do all writers of fiction. But it is not political judgment that is relevant. We judge Shakespeare plays in terms of their expressiveness, truth to life, profundity, and beauty.”

This is deep insight and I think the better part of Scruton’s thinking in the article comes when he resists his own political (anti multi-cultural, pro-conservative, pro-church of England conservatism) impulses.  Here are the last few lines:

“It will require a confrontation with the culture of youth, and an insistence that the real purpose of universities is not to flatter the tastes of those who arrive there, but to present them with a rite of passage into something better.”

One could argue that this is necessary though how to arrive there is in doubt.

Here’s a quote from George Santayana:

 ”The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.”

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On another note:  Despite the importance of beauty, the refinement of our experiences through poems and prose, the difficult work of cultivating”taste” for ourselves as well providing a rite of passage for our youth:  Aren’t we still attaching the humanities to something else?

We know the humanities will never be a science.  Politics is always in conflict with the arts.   Much philosophy is indifferent to the humanities at best.   In fact, Plato banned them from his republic (good overview here).

One target here may be somewhat political as well:  anti-social constructionism and anti-multiculturalism, though I am speculating.

Just some food for thought.

See Also On This Site:  Philosopher Of Art Denis Dutton of the Arts & Letters Daily says the arts and Darwin can be sucessfully synthesized: Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’

Martha Nussbaum says the university needs to be defend Socratic reason and still be open to diversity:  From The Harvard Educational Review-A Review Of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.’ 

Stanley Fish also says keep politics out of academia: From The Stanley Fish Blog: Ward Churchill Redux…

Scruton again has deep insight, but will Christian religious idealism have to bump heads with Islamic religious idealism?: From YouTube: Roger Scruton On Religious Freedom, Islam & Atheism 

Thanks to iri5