| Friday, May 30, 2008 |
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Blogger Problems
By Diana Hsieh @ 6:48 PM   
*grumble*
I've been having terrible problems with Blogger lately, but particularly today. As a result, some of my comment scripts aren't working correctly. Those scripts depend on information in the files that Blogger produces, but Blogger hasn't been reliably producing the files with that information. Plus, Blogger's upload of the files to my server has been hit-or-miss -- and mostly miss.
I hope that the problems will be wholly sorted out in the next few days. In the meantime, I'll create work-arounds as best I can. However, you'll just have to be patient, as even those are difficult to implement due to Blogger's problems.
Hopefully, this post will publish in some reasonable amount of time. I won't hold my breath, though!Labels: NoodleFood
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"Personhood" Advocates are Going for the Gold
By Gina Liggett @ 11:00 AM
A new threat to a woman's life, liberty and pursuit of happiness has arrived out here in the West. And it's going straight for the jugular. Groups in Colorado and Montana believe they're on a mission from God: to get voters to pass state Constitutional amendments defining "personhood" as beginning with fertilization. Under these amendments, full rights and equal protection under the law would be granted--not to a human being from the moment of birth--but to a fertilized egg. But the country shouldn't dismiss this lunacy as a bunch of "wild west hooey." While similar efforts since 2005 in Georgia, Oregon, Michigan, Wisconsin and Mississippi have fizzled, advocates vow to not give up on redefining "personhood" in their image. This utter perversion of the "right to life" is a mockery of the principle of liberty established by our Founding Fathers. It will create an inherent and irreconcilable conflict between the individual rights of a living person and a single-celled product of conception. Groups pursuing "personhood" amendments use a simplistic combination of religious belief and scientific fact to advance their agenda. The Thomas More Law Center, which provides legal support for these organizations, calls itself "the sword and shield for people of (Christian) faith" to fight for Christian values, which it claims is the foundation of our nation. Kristi Burton, the founder of Colorado's group (which just succeeded in being first in the country to get the proposal on the November ballot), was quoted as "....we have God. And he is all we need." A religious supporter of Montana's initiative finds her "proof" in Psalm 139:13, "For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb." These groups conveniently usurp the facts of human embryology in making their case for "personhood." But the biological reality that life begins developing at conception is totally irrelevant in terms of rights. Our Constitutional rights as citizens apply only once we are born as separate entities. To quote Ayn Rand, a 20th century novelist and philosopher, "Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn)." If a barbaric "personhood" amendment passes in some state, whose rights will prevail when a woman has a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy? Will a girl who's been raped be compelled against her will to carry a pregnancy resulting from that brutality? Will lawyers defending fertilized eggs argue that a miscarriage is a violation of an embryo's right to life, making a woman and her physician legally negligent? Our hard-fought scientific and political achievements in controlling fertility will revert back to the horse-and-buggy era. Many reliable birth control methods would have to be outlawed because they interfere with implantation of a fertilized egg. Couples unable to conceive would be forbidden to try in-vitro fertilization because some of the lab-created fertilized eggs are not used. "Personhood" advocates brag about going for the gold: the outright overturn of Roe v Wade. They think they are being clever by passing in just one state a "personhood" amendment that will ultimately challenge the "loophole" in the 1973 majority opinion of Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun. He wrote: "If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant's case, of course, collapses, for the fetus' right to life would then be guaranteed..." Traditional religious-right groups have tried for decades to outlaw abortion by the piecemeal evisceration of that fundamental right. But if a tyrannical majority of voters in Colorado or Montana approves a Constitutional amendment redefining the human being according to particular religious beliefs, it will be a milestone in tearing down the wall of separation between church and state. Our freedoms, based fundamentally on the right to life, mean that we as individuals have the right to pursue life-sustaining goals--including decisions about pregnancy. But the particular freedom of religion does not mean the right to pass laws forcing citizens to live by biblical values. "Personhood" advocates have corrupted the principle, "right to life," and they're exploiting their freedom of religion do it. Constitutional rights protect all of our liberties from the moment we're born as separate individuals. And this is what we must zealously fight to preserve. Labels: Abortion, Politics, Religion
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New NoodleFoodler: Gina Liggett
By Diana Hsieh @ 9:00 AM
I'm delighted to announce the addition of yet another guest blogger to the illustrious ranks of NoodleFood: Gina Liggett.
 Gina Liggett is a nurse and freelance writer in Denver, Colorado. She's studied Objectivism for more than 20 years and contributes to Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine (FIRM) and Front Range Objectivism. In addition to philosophy, she's interested in religion, politics, individual rights, international affairs, health care policy, science, and fitness. She dances ballet, jazz, and salsa, plays golf, and speaks French and Spanish. Gina can be reached at GLiggett@comcast.net.
I've been very impressed with Gina's contributions to FIRM over the past year and a half. She stepped up to the plate, in a big way. I hope to contribute to her opposition to the proposed "personhood" amendment to the Colorado Constitution. (That's the subject of her first post, to be published shortly.) And, of course, I'm enthused to see what she writes for NoodleFood!Labels: NoodleFood
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Check Your Premises
By Diana Hsieh @ 12:16 AM
In a lengthy post entitled Dissecting Epistemology, Monica challenges the objectivity of many of our supposedly scientific beliefs about the world. She writes,
Apart from the obvious idea that much of science is ideologically driven, many scientists - irrespective of any underlying, driving ideology - have deliberately cooked data and managed to get it published in scientific journals for no other reason than the fact that they are second-handed and they want to be right. And of course, scientific history is also rife with examples of new ideas taking time to become established in the mainstream due to a lack of objectivity in the scientific community. Just take that "quacky" idea that bacteria might cause ulcers!! We scientists "know" that bacteria can't inhabit stomach acid!? Right?? Most commonly of all, in my opinion, is not intellectual dishonesty but the fact that shoddy science is done all the time and people just fail to fully and objectively evaluate that research. Sometimes, those claims then end up becoming part of the "objective scientific consensus" that persists for 50 years. To say, "I've not studied the issue, so I just don't know," is often the most objective, the most self-aware, and the most honest reply possible to an inquiry. Sometimes, it's also the hardest reply.
In my judgment, even though I'm an ardent advocate of evolutionary theory, Ayn Rand exhibited exactly that kind of objectivity in her statement on evolution in her essay "The Missing Link" in Philosophy: Who Needs It. She wrote, "I am not a student of the theory of evolution and, therefore, I am neither its supporter nor its opponent." I've seen that statement harshly criticized in some corners of the internet, as if Ayn Rand were obliged to swallow the standard scientific account of man's origins -- without any study of the facts of the matter. That's completely wrong: it's a demand to accept a theory on faith, just because it's endorsed by a sufficiently large number of supposed authorities. Ayn Rand refused to be that kind of epistemic second-hander. Instead, she formed her own judgments based on her actual knowledge. As a result of that method, she effectively challenged two millennia of altruism in ethics. That's the kind of insight that scrupulous objectivity -- not to mention a large helping genius -- makes possible.Labels: Epistemology, Science
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Farming with Mules
By Diana Hsieh @ 11:18 AM
This news story -- High gas prices drive farmer to switch to mules -- is straight out of Atlas Shrugged:
MCMINNVILLE, Tenn. - High gas prices have driven a Warren County farmer and his sons to hitch a tractor rake to a pair of mules to gather hay from their fields. T.R. Raymond bought Dolly and Molly at the Dixon mule sale last year. Son Danny Raymond trained them and also modified the tractor rake so the mules could pull it.
T.R. Raymond says the mules are slower than a petroleum-powered tractor, but there are benefits.
"This fuel's so high, you can't afford it," he said. "We can feed these mules cheaper than we can buy fuel. That's the truth."
And Danny Raymond says he just likes using the mules around the farm. "We've been using them quite a bit," he said.
Brother Robert Raymond added, "It's the way of the future."
What could better concretize the damaging economic effects of government regulations strangling energy production than this return to mule power? If such exists, I can't think of it!
For a brief sketch of just some of those government regulations restricting the supply of oil, see Alex Epstein's recently-published op-ed on Investigate Big Congress, Not Big Oil.
(Hat tip: Robbservations.)Labels: Business, Politics
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| Wednesday, May 28, 2008 |
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Abortion Debates in Great Britain
By Paul Hsieh @ 5:35 PM
Americans are used to abortion as being a hot button issue in politics. Hence, I found this article from The Economist to be an interesting contrast object of how the issues could play out politically in a system without quite such a strong religious undercurrent. In the case, the issue was a proposed law to change the cutoff point for a legal abortion from 24 weeks gestation to 22 weeks. Here are a few excerpts:BRITONS, thankfully, have been spared America's abortion wars. Political candidates' positions on the matter are of little interest to the electorate. More Conservatives are "pro-life" and more Labour MPs "pro-choice", but allegiances are rarely, if ever, based on this single issue. This is partly because Britain is less religious than America, but also because abortion laws are made in Parliament, where shades of grey can be debated, not in the courts, where black or white usually prevails.
...By precedent, votes on abortion are "free": MPs may vote according to their consciences rather than a party directive. They still divided along party lines. Most Labour MPs—including the prime minister, Gordon Brown—voted against all the amendments, although three Catholic cabinet ministers supported a cut to 12 weeks. Most of the shadow cabinet voted for some reduction, and the Conservative leader, David Cameron, backed lowering the limit to either 22 or 20 weeks.
...The day before that, MPs had voted on two other amendments. The first would have prohibited experiments involving "chimera" embryos created by placing human DNA inside empty eggs from other mammals. The second sought to rule out creating "saviour siblings": screening embryos created by IVF in order to select a match for an existing sick child whose life could be saved by cord blood or bone marrow from a suitable brother or sister.
All three issues went the government's way, even though Mr Brown had to allow his party a free vote after a campaign by Catholic bishops made it clear that he risked losing three ministers if he did not. Clearly, religion still has some influence in the debates, although not as strong as in the US. The interesting question will be whether this influence increases or decreases over the next several years.Labels: Politics, Religion
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Why the New Atheists Can’t Even Beat D’Souza: Science vs. Miracles
By Greg Perkins @ 12:39 AM
(Previous in the series: The Best and Worst in Human History.)
Taking on "New Atheists" such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, Dinesh D'Souza explains that he wants to strip away a kind of pose: atheists, he says, present themselves as men of data and evidence, merely following where it leads, when in reality they are faith-filled dogmatists who only assume that there are no gods and that miracles are not possible. In his debate with Hitchens, he drove this home by asking his opponent to name just one scientific law which he knows has no exceptions. Hitchens admitted he couldn't and had to stand there sheepishly while D'Souza crowed that he was leaving room for miracles even while denying them without investigation—that the atheist stance for science and against miracles is only based on faith in certain "metaphysical assumptions." In his view, the real difference between scientists and theologians is that religious people have enough integrity to admit their beliefs are rooted in faith.
D'Souza's effectiveness in exposing confusion and sowing skepticism illustrates how the New Atheists and most scientists lack an objective philosophical foundation. With a little training in the actual relationship between philosophy and science, they could explain how science is not perched atop blind faith in "metaphysical assumptions," and they could articulate exactly why miracles should not be dismissed as merely improbable, or even as inherently unverifiable, but as outright incoherent. In fact, they would know the issue is as stark as this: if miracles are possible, then science isn't.
To see why, let's begin by looking at what a miracle has to be. We are not talking about just any improbable happening, and not even something which violates our current understanding of the world as expressed in scientific laws, like D'Souza tries to argue. The entire point of miracles is to provide evidence of divine intervention, and surprises which may only reveal a current lack of understanding can't accomplish that: by that measure, even the tricks of magicians would count as miracles. Indeed, much of what we enjoy in our modern world would have been considered miraculous in previous times, from vaccines and medications, to cars, and the Internet and on and on. Yet none of these prove or even suggest a possibility that there is a God. No, a meaningful miracle is not merely something which would violate the laws of nature as we currently understand them, but something which would be a violation of any such law we could ever discover. That is, it would have to be a violation of lawfulness itself. That's a tall order.
Causality and Identity
When we talk about how things act and what they do and why, we are talking about causality. As Aristotle observed some 2500 years ago, things act according to their natures (their identities). They act the way they do because of what they are—balls roll when pushed, and piles of dirt don’t. Eggs break when dropped because that is an expression of their identity as things with a brittle shell and goo inside, crashing against a hard floor. Action is an expression of identity, and to understand why and how things act the way they do, we seek to understand what those things are. We seek to understand their identities. So if an egg broke into song instead of a messy puddle, it wouldn't be a normal egg—it would have to be something else. Because identities include capacities for action, we know and classify things by what they do, too.
The crucial thing to keep in mind about action being an expression of identity is that everything has identity merely in virtue of existing, not because of any dictate. Think of this as a law of existence, something true of Being itself. As Ayn Rand observed some 50 years ago: to be, is to be something—to be something particular, to be this and not that, to be capable of these actions and reactions and transformations, and not those. Or from the opposite perspective: to not be anything particular, is to simply not be. And this is not any article of faith or merely a "metaphysical assumption." This is a philosophical axiom reaching below any will to the bedrock of existence itself, a self-evident truth that lies at the base of all truths and all thinking, a fact so absolute and inescapable that it is actually reaffirmed by any attempt to deny it.
It is this ironclad law of existence that tells us there are scientific laws to pursue in the first place. It is how we can have absolute confidence that we are in a position to plumb the depths of the world, that we can seek to understand the identities of the things which are acting and interacting in nature, and that it is worth working to understand it all in terms of ever broader and deeper principles. The fruitfulness of this pursuit can't be denied: just look around and marvel at how our striving for a rational, scientific understanding of the world has improved our lives in countless ways.
And it is this very same law of existence that also guarantees there can be no miracles for us to pursue. If we were to somehow experience an "egg miracle," it isn’t that we would have found something we thought was a regular egg that surprised us and needs more study. No, the very idea of miracles requires violating causality. It requires that a normal egg break into song. Or picking something from the Christian tradition: it requires a normal loaf of bread to break into 1000 servings. In short, a genuine miracle requires a thing to act against its own identity—to have a contradictory identity—to literally not be what it is, which is incoherent. Everything is what it is, and contradictions can only exist inside peoples' confused thinking.
Either-Or
That is why it is one or the other, science or miracles. Accepting the possibility of miracles means rejecting the very basis of science; accepting the basis of science means rejecting any possibility of miracles. Indeed, to the degree that scientists entertain the possibility of miracles, they tragically undercut their own psychological motive and ability to pursue such knowledge: there is no point in looking for the laws of nature when existence isn't actually lawful and there is no real understanding to be found. Even if scientists think they can be "practical" and approach the world as being "almost always lawful," they are still fatally compromised because every surprise they meet could be a clue that an idea is in need of refinement or correction—or it could be an inexplicable miracle from the arbitrary will of God. The harder and more important the puzzle, the harder it will be to resist that nihilistic pull to simply throw up their hands and give up being a scientist to blindly assert that it must be an arbitrary intervention.
All of those potential advances lost to scientists giving up on science are a tragedy—and any effort spent repelling that call to give up is a waste. At the dawn of science, Francis Bacon said that "nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." Knowledge is power precisely because existence is in fact lawful, and every advance we've achieved up through the wonders of modern civilization is a brilliant testament to this simple truth.
(Upcoming in the series: The Gap in Religious Thought and Morality and Life.)Labels: Atheism, Objectivism, Philosophy, Religion
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| Tuesday, May 27, 2008 |
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John Lewis on Islamic Totalitarianism
By Diana Hsieh @ 4:24 PM
John Lewis has an excellent post on the rise of fundamentalist Islam in Turkey on Principles in Practice, highlighting the actual commands of the Koran that "an agency of the Turkish government [the "Presidency of Religious Affairs and the Religious Charitable Foundation"] will use as its basic guide for the next century." It's not good, as you might imagine.
Also, for my Israeli readers, Dr. Lewis will be speaking at Tel Aviv University on June 2nd. He writes:
I will be speaking at Tel Aviv University, Israel. on June 2, 2008, 18:00-20:00, Room 133 Gilman Building. The talk is sponsored by the Moshe Dayan Center. Thanks to Boaz Arad for arranging the invitation, and to the Ayn Rand Institute for logistical support.
Mr. Arad has translated my article 'No Substitute for Victory': The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism into Hebrew, for the journal Nativ [20.3, May-June, 2007]. [The Hebrew translation is here.] He has also translated my article 'Gifts from Heaven': The Meaning of the American Defeat of Japan, 1945 for the website Anochi. [The Hebrew translation is here.] Mr. Arad also translated an article by Yaron Brook and Alex Epstein entitled 'Just War Theory' vs. American Self-Defense, also from The Objective Standard.
Abstract of the talk: "The Inner Jihad and Islamic Totalitarianism."
This talk confronts and repudiates claims that jihad is not war, but rather a benign "inner struggle." These claims are ahistorical, and run contrary to the energetic statements of those waging war for Islam today. The purpose of such claims is to obfuscate the goal of imposing Islamic law by force. The outward manifestation of such obfuscation is the censorship and propaganda that exists in the Middle East today. This lecture will consider the relationship between this intellectual corruption and the rise of totalitarian Islam, a foe that must be confronted intellectually and defeated militarily. I'd love to hear that talk!
Finally, I should note that Dr. Lewis' article "'No Substitute for Victory': The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism" has also been translated into Italian by Dr. Paolo Valerio Mantelli.Labels: Announcements, Religion
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Turning Off the Lights of the World
By Paula Hall @ 1:40 AM
Ayn Rand's masterpiece Atlas Shrugged ends when the lights go out in the world:
The plane was above the peaks of the skyscrapers when suddenly, with the abruptness of a shudder, as if the ground had parted to engulf it, the city disappeared from the face of the earth. It took them a moment to realize that the panic had reached the power stations---and that the lights of New York had gone out. . . .
She remembered the story Francisco had told her: "He had quit the Twentieth Century. He was living in a garret in a slum neighborhood. He stepped to the window and pointed at the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done." In the novel, the lights go out as a result of willful evasion -- the refusal of the world's leaders to acknowledge that it is the power of the mind to reform nature in its own image that keeps the world alight. Evil enough, as far as it goes.
Now it's worse. Now there are people actively looking for the world's light switch and positively salivating at the prospect of flipping it off.
Many commentators, not just at NoodleFood, have identified the man-hating irrationality in the leadership of the environmental movement. (For example, see NoodleFood here; see The Ayn Rand Institute here and here.) But I speak of a new horror: the advent of lawsuits charging specific companies with responsibility for global warming and demanding compensation for damages. This phenomenon unites an unholy trinity of destructive factions: the acolytes of the environmental movement; fear-ridden and pandering lawmakers; and those prepared to cash in on the regulatory scheme resulting from the self-reinforcing lunacy of the first two -- the plaintiff's bar.
Kivalina is an Inupiat Eskimo village in Alaska. As of the 2000 U.S. Census, over one-quarter of Kivalina's residents lived below the poverty line. In 2006 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers described Kivalina as follows:
Kivalina is home to 402 residents, who live in very overcrowded conditions in just over 70 homes. The community is predominately Alaska Native, and residents depend on subsistence activities for a majority of their caloric intake. The community does not have a piped water or sewer system, except for running/piped water in its school and washeteria. Residents rely on self-haul water and on honey buckets for human waste. 
The village is experiencing catastrophic coastal erosion; ice which used to prevent shore damage from fall and winter storms has been melting. Unsurprising, given its location, shown above (New Orleans, anyone?). To continue its existence, the village must relocate. The U.S. Army Corps of engineers estimates it will cost anywhere between $150 - $250 million.
Kivalina is suing energy companies for $400 million.
Two non-profits, the Native American Rights Fund (NARF) and The Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment have filed suit on behalf of Kivalina against 24 energy companies. The nonprofits have teamed up with -- wait for it -- attorneys who successfully sued big tobacco companies. If the suit is succesful, the attorneys' fees will be about 30% to 40% of the recovery. Meaning that what's left for the plaintiffs will be pretty much the amount the U.S. Army thinks it will cost to relocate the village. Pretty neat how that works out, eh?
The Atlantic Monthly writes:
[T]he suit also accuses eight of the firms (American Electric Power, BP America, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Duke Energy, ExxonMobil, Peabody Energy, and Southern Company) of conspiring to cover up the threat of man-made climate change, in much the same way the tobacco industry tried to conceal the risks of smoking—by using a series of think tanks and other organizations to falsely sow public doubt in an emerging scientific consensus. In other words, attorneys plan to throw the tobacco playbook at rich energy companies. The message the case wishes to convey is that energy companies knowingly caused global warming and must pay for the damage they've wrought by selling the fossil fuels that provide the world with energy.
There is no scientific consensus on the extent or causation of global warming (putting it charitably). But that is not the biggest problem with the lawsuit. The real problem is that to the extent the lawsuit is successful, it brings mankind closer to the squalid standard of living of the population of Kivalina.
The ability to use fossil fuels for our own benefit is the predominant reason humans enjoy the standard of living that we do. And it's not like this is a big secret: witness developing nations' persistent objections to global emissions policies on the grounds that their priority is economic development.
So here we have the spectacle of million-dollar attorneys . . .
. . . driving their fossil-fueled cars to work
. . . where they'll work well into the night in offices brightly lit using energy provided by the companies they're suing
. . . after which they'll go home to luxurious houses made comfortable through the use of energy to warm and cool their environment
. . . and enjoy a quality of life that would not exist but for the energy companies their lawsuits could put out of business.
There is a terrific irony here. The residents of Kivalina have a subsistence economy. The difference between a subsistence economy and the standard of living most Americans take for granted is based on the use and technology of energy. It takes energy to create factories that manufacture plumbing pipes and pre-packaged food, and it would take energy to transport these conveniences of modern life all the way up to Alaska by air, sea and land. But after lawsuits like this one have destroyed energy companies by wringing billions of dollars out of them on the grounds they've covered up evidence that does not exist, we may all end up living like the residents of Kivalina.Labels: Environmentalism, Law
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| Monday, May 26, 2008 |
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Memorial Day
By Diana Hsieh @ 10:34 PM
On this Memorial Day, I would like to honor the three men of the American Civil War who understood the terrible need for total war: President Abraham Lincoln, General Ulysses S. Grant, and General William T. Sherman. Their vigorous prosecution of the war preserved the Union, the very first nation founded on the principles of individual rights -- and, at the time, the only such nation. In so doing, they ended the most loathsome violation of rights ever known to man: chattel slavery. Without them, without the brave Union soldiers who fought under them, America would not exist today.*
So thank you, Mssrs. Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman. We are forever in your debt.
* For the details, I strongly recommend reading James McPherson's stellar history of the Civil War, Battle Cry of Freedom.Labels: History
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| Friday, May 23, 2008 |
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Creationist Science Teachers
By Paul Hsieh @ 5:41 PM
According to New Scientist, 16% of US science teachers are creationists. The following data is from a 2007 random survey of nearly 2000 US high school science teachers:When Berkman's team asked about the teachers' personal beliefs, about the same number, 16% of the total, said they believed human beings had been created by God within the last 10,000 years. And what do science teachers actually teach in the classroom?Despite a court-ordered ban on the teaching of creationism in US schools, about one in eight high-school biology teachers still teach it as valid science, a survey reveals. And, although almost all teachers also taught evolution, those with less training in science – and especially evolutionary biology – tend to devote less class time to Darwinian principles.
...[A] quarter of the teachers also reported spending at least some time teaching about creationism or intelligent design. Of these, 48% – about 12.5% of the total survey – said they taught it as a "valid, scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species". I find it deeply disturbing that an American child's only formal exposure to one of the fundamental principle of modern biological science may come from a government school teacher who is willing to let his own personal religious beliefs bias his portrayal of the facts.
As some have correctly noted, "intelligent design" is just religion in disguise. This is yet another reason that parents should oppose mandatory government schooling for their children.Labels: Education, Religion
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Swallow My Postmodernist Propaganda Whole -- Or Else!
By Diana Hsieh @ 12:19 AM
This story of a Dartmoth English professor threatening to sue her students for challenging her postmodernist views is beyond mind-bloggling. I can't help but quote the whole article, as the insanity just never ends:
Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world. The latest spectacle is an Ivy League professor threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their "anti-intellectualism" violated her civil rights.
Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of "French narrative theory" that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional expos&e, which she promises will "name names."
The trauma was so intense that in March Ms. Venkatesan quit Dartmouth and decamped for Northwestern. She declined to comment for this piece, pointing instead to the multiple interviews she conducted with the campus press.
Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument. "My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful," she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review. "They'd argue with your ideas." This caused "subversiveness," a principle English professors usually favor.
Ms. Venkatesan's scholarly specialty is "science studies," which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, "teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth." She continues: "Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct."The agenda of Ms. Venkatesan's seminar, then, was to "problematize" technology and the life sciences. Students told me that most of the "problems" owed to her impenetrable lectures and various eruptions when students indicated skepticism of literary theory. She counters that such skepticism was "intolerant of ideas" and "questioned my knowledge in very inappropriate ways." Ms. Venkatesan, who is of South Asian descent, also alleges that critics were motivated by racism, though it is unclear why.
After a winter of discontent, the snapping point came while Ms. Venkatesan was lecturing on "ecofeminism," which holds, in part, that scientific advancements benefit the patriarchy but leave women out. One student took issue, and reasonably so – actually, empirically so. But "these weren't thoughtful statements," Ms. Venkatesan protests. "They were irrational." The class thought otherwise. Following what she calls the student's "diatribe," several of his classmates applauded.
Ms. Venkatesan informed her pupils that their behavior was "fascist demagoguery." Then, after consulting a physician about "intellectual distress," she cancelled classes for a week. Thus the pending litigation.
Such conduct is hardly representative of the professoriate at Dartmouth, my alma mater. Faculty members tend to be professional. They also tend to be sane.
That said, even at -- or especially at -- putatively superior schools, students are spoiled for choice when it comes to professors who share ideologies like Ms. Venkatesan's. The main result is to make coursework pathetically easy. Like filling in a Mad Libs, just patch something together about "interrogating heteronormativity," or whatever, and wait for the returns to start rolling in.
I once wrote a term paper for a lit-crit course where I "deconstructed" the MTV program "Pimp My Ride." A typical passage: "Each episode is a text of inescapable complexity . . . Our received notions of what constitutes a ride are constantly subverted and undermined." It received an A.
Where the standards are always minimum, most kids simply float along with the academic drafts, avoid as much work as possible and accept the inflated grade. Why not? It's effortless, and there are better ways to spend time than thinking deeply about ecofeminism.
The remarkable thing about the Venkatesan affair, to me, is that her students cared enough to argue. Normally they would express their boredom with the material by answering emails on their laptops or falling asleep. But here they staged a rebellion, a French Counter-Revolution against Professor Defarge. Maybe, despite the professor's best efforts, there's life in American colleges yet. That's absolutely abominable behavior for a professor. It's good that students question what they're taught in college, rather than simply swallowing it, regurgitating it for the exams and papers, and then forgetting about it. Students have every right to be skeptical of some pet theory of a professor -- and to express objections to it in class. The professor should make the best arguments he can, then move on, accepting that students will make up their own minds about the material. Certainly, despite my strong views on various subjects, that's always what I strive to do in my own teaching.
In contrast, Priya Venkatesan thinks that she's entitled to agreement from her students. As an interview with her makes clear, she's so completely immersed in postmodernism that she cannot even grasp the meaning of any criticism thereof. Sadly, from what I know of English Departments, she was likely encouraged in that attitude -- and shielded from any non-postmodernist views or anti-postmodernist criticism -- in graduate school.
Thankfully, this kind of intellectual authoritarianism is pretty rare in philosophy departments today. Philosophers are generally willing to entertain a wide variety of views, so long as they're defended with arguments. In fact, at least some of the philosophy professors at Boulder are pretty thoroughly appalled by the dogmatic teaching of postmodernist crap in some other humanities departments.
(Notably, Christiana Hoff Sommers said as much about philosophy departments in a lecture on the problem of lefist bias at universities given at CU Boulder a few years ago. In fact, if memory serves, I asked her about philosophy departments, and she made some positive remarks on their willingness to consider a wide variety of views due to their focus on arguments.)
Of course, philosophy departments have their own slew of problems, some quite serious. Yet they also have many virtues, particularly relative to other humanities departments. So... two cheers for philosophy departments!Labels: Academia
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