From "My University Sacrificed Ideas for Ideology. So Today I Quit. The more I spoke out against the illiberalism that has swallowed Portland State University, the more retaliation I faced" by Peter Boghossian (at Bari Weiss's Substack).
ADDED: The Wikipedia article on Boghossian is interesting. Excerpt:
Street epistemology (often abbreviated to SE) is a term coined by Boghossian in his book A Manual for Creating Atheists. This is a set of non-confrontation conversational techniques concerning a strongly held belief, designed to promote thoughtful reflection and open-mindedness in a participant regarding the belief. Boghossian outlined the method and its application in helping religious believers to reflect on the reliability of faith as an epistemology. However, it has also found effective use in many other contexts, and Boghossian later co-authored How to Have Impossible Conversations with James Lindsay, which describes the application of street epistemology to an examination of a wider range of beliefs.
Boghossian has called all faith-based beliefs 'delusions.'... He advocates using the Socratic method to dissuade religious believers, though he recommends focusing on the problems of faith as a way of knowing (he calls it an 'unreliable epistemology'), rather than the outward trappings of religious communities.
BONUS:In a 2015 interview with Dave Rubin, Boghossian described himself as a classical liberal who has never voted for a Republican candidate, but is "not a fan" of the Democrats... He has repeatedly stated that cultural relativism and egalitarianism are contradictory values.
"Hitchens says the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. I think it's essential to stand up to bullies It's not like I did anything particularly heroic. I just wasn't having any of it." -- @peterboghossian on today's episode of @thehonestlypod https://t.co/PvJpHapTZD
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) September 11, 2021
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46 comments:
Cf. "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" by Alan Sokal, published in Social Text in 1996. Basically argues that physics is a social construct.
"The problem is not people being uneducated. The problem is that people are educated just enough to believe what they have been taught, and not educated enough to question anything from what they have been taught."
Thank Gaia this infidel has FINALLY been put down!
Only though crimestop can these thoughtcrimes be ended. doublethink is doubleplusgood!
War is Peace, Freedom is slavery, and most plusgood of all: Ignorance is strength
1984 it's a Cookbook!
Universities were historic repositories of dogma. Briefly, from about 1920 to about 1990, they supported open inquiry and free speech. Now, they are back to curating dogma--and what dogma it is! They are full of people who actually think that XX chromosomes and XY chromosomes don't mean anything fundamental and profound.
Well, tell it to the birds and the bees...
Any true practitioner of the Socratic method better be prepared to drink the Hemlock. Indeed, the charges are almost identical over the ages: encouraging impiety to the state approved religion and corrupting the youth. Same as it ever was.
Many people at universities, faculty and administrators, hate the society that supports them. How long can that go on?
Remember, NeverTrump and LLR's are in complete agreement with CRT/Marxist identity politics.
David French calls Woke Thought and activist action a "blessing of liberty".
But then again, he is paid well by his lefty masters to write things like that.
So any unlabeled satire is an improper "experiment on human subjects"? Will Twitter, YouTube and Facebook also take action?
And now comes the fall.
Any clues about what he is doing now? Because my first thought is that this is a loss for the good guys. They've driven him out, which is exactly what they wanted to do.
Even a lot of Biden supporters are going to be glad that this scheme to dissolve our Republic will fail.
They will never admit they were wrong though.
In the midst of huge social change, it is always a good idea to go back and read the texts that actually have mattered to you personally over time. Even Little Women. You actually respond to them, thinking "No, I wouldn't think that now" or "And I'm not giving that up." Henry IV part 1 and 2. Falstaff makes me so angry now. A Christmas Carol. You see that problems existing now existed before and you see what a humane, liberal outlook is on a social problem. Euclid. You take a course on Euclid and you actually experience rational thought leading to new conclusions. But the new thing I see is how rich and varied the books of the past are. The Death of Socrates. I actually see that the present teaching is very thin gruel - based on one or two articles that became books and that held one or two ideas and the rest is endless repetition. Oliver Twist. CRT is an example. It's only a very few ideas easily covered in a short seminar. Its power lies in that fact that afterward you understand that you're playing musical chairs and someone is going to be standing up with the racist tag on them when the music stops. You start fighting everyone around you, furtively, sneakily. Darkness at Noon. How is that society? It's like skepticism - it isn't thought but it is disruption of thought. You can fly a plane that you can't land - what's the point? You can destroy when you can't build. The River War. Winston Churchill.
The answer, partly, is to reread the stuff they won't teach any more. The European canon (with addenda). It's a rich, abundant experience like barbecued ribs and corn. Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation. Please sir, can I have some more in a plain brown wrapper.
I don't get this quitting part >>> if he sticks in their craw why not continue sticking and twist in their craw some more
amadeus 48: Universities were historic repositories of dogma. Briefly, from about 1920 to about 1990, they supported open inquiry and free speech.
Interesting observation. That time period also saw the flowering of a culture of humor, plays and movies, visual and architectural art that was dedicated to disenchanting American and Western European people, to deconstructing the religious and civic values of the pre and post- Enlightenment Age.
A certain number of the intellectual and creatives like this professor thought this was a continuation of the Enlightenment Project, a liberal search for Truth, an end in itself. But as he now begins to see, for most of his peers all that deconstruction was a mere means, to clear the way for a new civic religion in which gender and tribal identities are surveilled and policed in the same way primitive villages have ever enforced conformity.
There’s a lot to admire in the feisty liberal like Boghosian and Lindsay, and Pluckrose (great name!) and other Sokal squared/substack warriors, also OG indies like Althouse of course—the rear guard of a dead or fast dying tribe once dominant in their institutions. One by one they exit the academy, retiring or going DIY or more often joining NGO funded efforts to be the rear guard in establishments not yet totally overrun by woke barbarism. Quixotic and romantic, if not exactly encouraging.
"I never once believed — nor do I now — that the purpose of instruction was to lead my students to a particular conclusion ..
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does not compute for the plain meaning of the word =>>> instruction
has he never put together anything that he bought as a kit to be put together?
though I can now imagine his students must be writing assembly insturctions ~??
"I was found guilty of not receiving approval to experiment on human subjects" by the university that does social experiments on their students.
wildswan--amen.
"And professors were accused of bigotry for assigning canonical texts written by philosophers who happened to have been European and male."
I can see where this would be a real problem for a philosophy professor because if you can't assign work from anyone who is European and/or male then I'm not sure which philosophers you are left with? I can see where this will also be a burden for other disciplines, especially in the Humanities.
I recently started watching "The Chair" with Sandra Oh. It's on Netflix. So far it's pretty good. There's a funny Title IX scene for example. I'll see how it holds up though.
Replying to commenter Scot at first comment:
"In 1996, Sokal was curious to see whether the then-non-peer-reviewed postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text (published by Duke University Press) would publish a submission which "flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions". Sokal submitted a grand-sounding but completely nonsensical paper titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.""
Wikipedia
The last decent human being in Portland just left. I hope he remembered to turn out the lights.
You'd think the editors would balk at being equated to white rats. Although the rat I used in Skinnerian lab work was actually quite bright. Good-natured, too.
Fun to read about Sokal Squared.
Driving along some time ago, metaphorically spinning the radio dial, heard some worried conversation about rape at dog parks. Looked. Oh, it's NPR. Whatevs. Keptspinning.
Some time later I found out about the hoax and the stern custodians of scientific truth who would let no unproven thesis deface their pages.
As I’ve said here before, Boghossian’s a fraud who only complained about cancel culture when it came for him. His research is about trying to de-program people from certain religious faiths (Christianity) and trying to spring serious felons from prisons by teaching them “the Socratic method.” Nice: Socrates for violent sociopaths.
He has landed cushily at the Soros-funded empty-the-prisons organization where he has worked for years. And now naifs on the right are falling for him as some sort of hero. He was silent through years of purges of others.
He knew all along about what Portland State was and chose specifically to be there because of its notorious hard-left commitment to putting the worst felons back into society among us. He though getting rapists-murderers off would protect him from the leftist mob. It didn’t. Don’t believe he’s an ally — or a victim.
Street epistemology (often abbreviated to SE) is a term coined by Boghossian in his book A Manual for Creating Atheists. This is a set of non-confrontation conversational techniques concerning a strongly held belief, designed to promote thoughtful reflection and open-mindedness in a participant regarding the belief. Boghossian outlined the method and its application in helping religious believers to reflect on the reliability of faith as an epistemology. However, it has also found effective use in many other contexts,
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so did he ever dare try it on his colleagues or students + on himself ~standing facing mirror~
I wonder if any of Prof. Boghossian's students ever called him Prof. Boss-Hog-ian out of malice or simple confusion. Then again, maybe none of them know anything about the characters on The Dukes of Hazzard. (Not that I've ever watched it, but the name "Boss Hog" has long been known to me, by osmosis or something.)
Prof has de-P'ed Boghossian's name in the tags--how emasculating!
The modern, i.e. scientific and research university, is one of the happier American borrowings from Germany in the 19th C. That model led to unprecedented success in many areas, but like all large institutions they get stupid and/or crazy with age, more concerned with enforcing orthodoxy than exposing it to challenge.
One of my lunchtime hobbies in the university library was keeping up with the small-circulation academic periodicals, Radical This Quarterly, Journal of Revolutionary That, Marxist Other Thing--usually the product of some second- or third-tier state school's younger and brasher faculty. Most often, they lasted about two or three years and were heard from no more.
I recall one article in particular, complaining that modern Western math was disrespectful of other authentic traditions--ceremonial and spiritual mathematics being a thing, apparently. This would have been about the late 90s, and was no hoax--or, it was a hoax embedded in a system of hokum.
My in-laws live in a condo adjacent to the Portland State campus.
You have cannot imagine the collection of fucktards. It's not education. It's baby-sitting. It's Evergreen State South.
I know many deeply religions and very intelligent people. These are people who are leaders in their various fields that encompass medicine, law, business, the hard sciences (engineering, chemistry, geology, physics). These people would give everything up for their faith.
Boghossian, like many atheists, don't recognize that it takes just as much faith to believe there is no god than it does to believe there is one. Atheists feel the need to convince others of their "faith" as much as religious believers do, too.
The logical extension of "unauthorized experiments on human subjects" would mean getting formal approval before any educational based interaction with anyone.
Imagine what Orwell or Hitchens would have said about today's wokeness.
Patrick Henry said...
Boghossian, like many atheists, don't recognize that it takes just as much faith to believe there is no god than it does to believe there is one. Atheists feel the need to convince others of their "faith" as much as religious believers do, too.
Yep. Atheism is an unprovable belief about the Devine. Which is to say: It's a religion.
He should have been using Street epistemology in his classes. And if he failed to get any of his students to wake up from their left wing religion, he'd know it still needed work
Scot,
"Cf. "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" by Alan Sokal....Basically argues that physics is a social construct."
A classic. I can't resist adding a line from the piece he published explaining the hoax:
"Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor)."
JPS. I suspect Newton would be blamed as a white supremacist or something.
Boghossian may or may not be somebody's hero. The point is the pubs which ran his stuff. The lesson would be the same if a linotype machine got frisky with some AI about two in the morning and sent this stuff out.
"Atheists feel the need to convince others of their 'faith' as much as religious believers do, too."
Wrong. I'm living proof.
"Atheism is an unprovable belief about the Devine."
Wrong. Atheism is a lack of belief in God/s. It's "divine" by the way.
He’s not wrong about religion offering an unreliable epistemology, he just sounds like he’s a bit of an asshole about it, although he’s come across well in the lay informal writing of his that I’ve encountered. I wonder, though, after a century+ of epistemological inquiry coming to dominate academic philosophy, just what the hell he thinks is a reliable epistemology?
JPS said...
"Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor)."
Throw out a sheet of paper and a typewriter and see if they fall equally fast. Galileo was wrong. We're just brainwashed about "science." I bring this up now and then when people are talking about "following the science." Just to see.
After retiring and moving to the Portland area, I enrolled at Portland State to get a just-for-fun degree in Spanish. This was in the year 2000. One time I entered the men's room in the building where I had classes to overhear one of my Spanish profs (an American) muttering audibly to hmself, "Fucking conservatives!" He had worked himself into a lather over something or other.
This was before cancel culture so it was easy to risk his ire by suggesting in a paper I wrote that it was better that Franco won the Spanish Civil war. I forget what reasoning I used but it didn't cost me a lower grade. If someone tried that today, they'd be defenestrated.
In my hospice work, I have watched people take their last breath. Reason tells me, that's all, there is nothing more. Faith tells me, there is more, life beyond this life. Maybe it's delusional. I prefer to think of it as hopeful.
Professor B has my gratitude and respect. However, he doesn't seem to understand that the forces of coercion are now arrayed against all forms of independent thought, whether secular or religious. Time to hop into the sack with some strange bedfellows.
Blogger Narr said...
"Atheism is an unprovable belief about the Devine."
Wrong. Atheism is a lack of belief in God/s. It's "divine" by the way.
No, Atheism is the belief that you know that God/s don't exist.
Since you can't prove that, it's an unprovable belief.
Agnosticism is the belief that one does not know whether or not there is / are God/s. Generally joined with the belief that therefore one isn't going to worship such beings.
Two very different things
Blogger wildswan said...
Throw out a sheet of paper and a typewriter and see if they fall equally fast. Galileo was wrong. We're just brainwashed about "science." I bring this up now and then when people are talking about "following the science." Just to see.
That would be why Galileo used different sized (lead, I believe) spheres: to try to eliminate the effects of wind resistance.
Since a 1 pound and 10 pound sphere fall at the same rate within the measuring abilities of his time, he came up with the correct answer.
As would be pointed out to you by anyone who had any sort of actual education in physics
No, Greg. Atheism has many shades of meaning, and the one that applies to me is that I don't -have the belief- that God/s exist. I have no theory or belief to replace that void, unless you count my confidence in my own reasoning abilities.
I like the rough-and-ready definition to be found in some 19th C state constitutions: an Atheist is one who denies 1) the existence of a personal God and 2) a future state of rewards and punishments.
There's also the practical one: an Atheist is one who lives and acts as if there is no God.
That's me.
Narr said...
I like the rough-and-ready definition to be found in some 19th C state constitutions: an Atheist is one who denies 1) the existence of a personal God and 2) a future state of rewards and punishments.
And since you can't know either of those thing, merely have faith that they're true, that' "an unprovable belief about the Divine."
There's also the practical one: an Atheist is one who lives and acts as if there is no God.
Nope, that could be an atheist or an agnostic.
Words have meaning. You don't get to rewrite those meanings according to your own personal whim
So, I might be an atheist, because I act as if there is no God.
Works for me. Have I offended your sense of True Atheism?
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