From Maggie's Farm, advice from Andrew
Gleeson on avoiding temporal or cultural myopia in a modern university:
What follows is advice I would offer to any student with the good fortune to study such a [Great Books] course. You enjoy a remarkable opportunity—afforded inside what Oakeshott called “the interim,” a sunny recess between the sheltered world of childhood and adolescence, and the onerous responsibilities of adulthood—to enjoy without distraction an induction into a great inheritance. It is unlikely you will get it again. I hope the thoughts I have assembled here will help you make the most of your experience. They are not exhaustive and they are not gospel. You can judge their value for yourself as you pursue your studies.
There's a radical thought! If you don't treat Western Civilization as gospel, you needn't fear contaminating your progressive purity merely by deigning to study it.
Gleeson warns that a typical modern "critical studies" approach undermines the very sense of independent critical judgment that a student should be pursuing in reading the Great Books.
One often hears the word “critical” used as an adjective to describe some fields of academic studies, e.g., “critical X studies” (as if other fields were uncritical). Too often it means merely to be against when really it should mean to be discriminating. Worse, sometimes it signals an expectation of subscribing to (and conscripting the text and reader into the service of) an ideology.
By contrast, proper attention to the great books cultivates an independence of judgment you should jealously guard.
A course of "progressive" study ought to mean approaching progressivism itself with the same skepticism its proponents advocate for a study of the Western canon.
3 comments:
Originally, the downplaying of Western Civ may have been a well-meaning effort to reveal the worthy accomplishments of those who were neglected in standard history. Though unbalanced, this perhaps was not entirely unfair.
We are now in the second phase, in which it is clear that those other groups do not have anywhere near the list of accomplishments. This knowledge must be suppressed, so Western Civ must be banished. The exception is studying its faults, which are real but no different than any other culture's: war, oppression, pettiness, cruelty, injustice.
The goal now is to obscure obvious truth, not reveal unappreciated truths.
What I've seen suggests that even when they try to look at non-Western art, they suppress inconvenient aspects of the artists' worldviews.
I have yet to see a conservative or libertarian study the faults of their civilization who also had political loyalties. To do that, warrants too much weakness in the face of the left.
People who are southern, do not publicly talk about what really went on in southern religion. They just blame it on the union or the elite leaders.
Psychologists fear me when i bring uo the biases in their own field because many of then require therapy. This is why it does not surprise or bother me when j peterson talks about himself. That is natural he was almost a sociopath with suicidal tendencies. At least he recognizes the dark spots.
The simple divine reason why westerners should study theit problems is because they identify as the west. When incest and abuse is happening in the western family, saying this is no different than what happens in other families is a type of mental suppression denial and or displacement. This is not accepting the problem and fixing it.
This is seen in abusive relationships where one spouse says the other has a problem, and the response is that the first spouse is crazy or paranoid. Gaslighting. Projection. Co dependence.
People with degrees, worthless by our standards but not by the world s , should know better. Suppressing the shadow parts of the self does as muc dmg as a nation denying itself.
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