Saturday Links
The irony of “decolonization,” making it as a writer in New Orleans, what we know about Plato, and more.
Good morning. Eric Adler has a scathing article in The Chronicle of Higher Education critiquing efforts to “decolonize” the curriculum at universities. If decolonization were really the goal, universities wouldn’t also be cutting language courses, he writes, which offer students real access to other cultures and other ways of thinking. The fact that these courses are being cut at the same time as universities are hyping so-called “decolonization” shows that “the only required characteristic of a worldly individual” at these institutions “is a certain kind of progressive American ideology, one that boils down complex historical dynamics and cross-cultural interactions into an easily digested narrative of right and wrong.” More:
Students must be given the vague sense that the United States has treated much of the world unjustly. And that conclusion, reasonable though it may be, can be arrived at without any of the toil necessary to learn substantive things about other cultures. That approach to cosmopolitanism is distinctly parochial, an American view of the world that is not necessarily shared by peoples in other nations. Students need not trouble themselves with learning, say, Hindi, and combing through the complex history of India. Hazy nods to the legacy of oppression will do just as well — and require much less effort from students. It’s an approach to cultural difference that could be expressed in the language of American advertising: “Students: Do you want to be world-wise without all the drudgery, and without ever leaving your couch? Now you can!”
Why might American educators embrace such a desiccated view of cosmopolitanism? The answer, I fear, suggests that many professors and administrators in U.S. higher education deem the promotion of a particular ideological view of the world more important than the encouragement of genuine broadmindedness. Anyone who has expended the effort necessary to get a feel for other cultures, ancient and modern, past and present, will quickly recognize that no one ideology, no matter where it falls on the political spectrum, can fully capture human affairs in all their complexity. An education intent on inculcating a true cosmopolitanism should seek to upend such unnuanced conclusions about our world. One wonders, then, whether many American educators feel more comfortable with pat responses to cultural pluralism — provided those responses back up their own politics.
I review a new book on math and literature in the latest issue of The Washington Examiner: “No two fields seem to have less in common than mathematics and literature. The former, in Aristotle’s view, is the foundation of all the sciences and nothing if not useful. Poetry, on the other hand, ‘makes nothing happen,’ as W. H. Auden put it famously.” In Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections between Mathematics and Literature, Sarah Hart argues that the connections between math and literature are both varied and profound.
Munro Price reviews a book on the trial of Marshal Pétain, who led France’s Vichy government: “Pétain’s trial was about much more than the fate of one extremely elderly man. It was newly liberated France’s first opportunity to confront the traumas it had endured from May 1940 to August 1944: the catastrophic military defeat by Germany, the signing of the armistice, the dissolution of the Third Republic and its replacement by the authoritarian Vichy state, the deportations of Jews and the increasingly bloody civil war between the collaborationist regime and the Resistance. In his splendid book, Julian Jackson does justice to all these aspects. The central narrative of the trial grips like a thriller and the history of Vichy itself, which inevitably involves much retrospective explanation, is seamlessly woven into it without ever slowing the story’s momentum. Jackson’s vivid prose is leavened by wit and sharpened by telling details, often drawn from his rich knowledge of the French culture of the period, ranging from Les Enfants du Paradis to the writings of Céline. This is a substantial achievement by a historian at the top of his game.”
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