"Students are being taught by these postmodern professors that there is no truth, that science and empirical facts are tools of oppression by the white patriarchy, and that nearly everyone in America is racist and bigoted, including their own professors, most of whom are liberals or progressives devoted to fighting these social ills."
What's the source for this? Why should I take this article more seriously than a random screed on social media?
Post-modernism is an actual thing, but in these kinds of attacks on the academy it's mostly just a post-Cold War replacement for the Communist boogeyman that doesn't have any firm connection to reality.
The first part of that statement is the basis of postmodernism. No truth, no (valid) science, no reality. That means that everything, including science, computers, ... is only there for $reason_of_some_other_ideology. Usually some outlandish far-fetched stupidity.
E.g. did you know math only serves to oppress muslims ? Computer science has only one function : make black people slaves again ?
And the second part of the given statement is a very popular ideology on campus. Together, let's call it "applied postmodernism", because, well ... that's what it is.
That postmodernism means science isn't valid, a view unlikely to be well-considered by most postmodernists in America and on campus, isn't too surprising since the search for truth and the standards of truth in science are themselves ideological. And the ones we use are very much part of the Greek-Christian "Western Civilization" ideology and it's evolution over time. It is very much not a popular viewpoint. The evolution of most, if not all sciences, very much happened within Western Civilization, Christianity and after 2000 years of that, odds are that half of postmodernism is kind of true : that the Christian worldview is part of most sciences and that most or all other ideologies and religious viewpoints are rejected very fundamentally.
But if you look at history, Christianity is pretty unique in that it never fully exterminated science in it's world. Note: this happened despite trying repeatedly to extuinguish it, but every time other Christians saved and "re-booted" it (you could go further and point out that while plenty of countries and even international movements tried to snuff out science, the Vatican never did, and always managed to protect itself and it's archives and teachers, so you could even say that Christianity protected science). Most or all civlizations advanced in science, but it never lasted. In most or all other civilizations science was snuffed out, usually either to make a revolution happen or to protect entrenched interests. In a few, external military invasion destroyed it.
While this singular event obviously falls short of proving anti science attitudes fully prevailed, it is generally agreed that "the Islamic world" in 1900 had less scientific knowledge compared to in 1200, when the majority of their citizens weren't even Muslims. As the ideology permeated more and more of life science (ie. Books and courses) retreated and were rewritten again and again to fit the ideology better. Everytime something was lost. Over time a lot was lost.
Even though Islamic did not quite destroy science it certainly destroyed the essential part: where science and religion conflicted, there was no additional investigation, no reconsilliation, no compromise. They chose for the utter dominance of their ideology, and anything even threatening a contradiction was destroyed, if necessary including the people behind it.
This is in fact not weird but rather the common choice of societies. The Vatican is unique in the fact that it paid considerable numbers of people to find and study things contradicting Canon, for centuries. It should be said that their attitude to contradictions outside of their institutions was very different. The theory may have been that with enough research the contradiction would be revealed not to exist. Many say this is the result of the classical Greek heritage of the church.
Exactly. The article starts out fairly well-supported, citing other works and building an argument. Then it all unravels with that outlandish, unsupported statement.
I find myself thinking how much technology has had an influence on polarisation of viewpoints, particularly political ones (conservative vs liberal).
There is a correlation between young adults coming of age in the era of "Recommended for you" playlists and "People who bought this also bought" recommendations. I feel that these algorithms followed for long enough cause you to end up in one extreme or another.
We have young students who are exposed to a single viewpoint for such a long time that it becomes part of their identity. Either for the right or the left.
Now at university these two sides sometimes clash. Neither side is willing to hear the other argument as listening to them will invalidate a core part of their identity.
This all seems to be a side effect of technology companies trying to maximise profit. The longer a user stays on the site the more money they make (ads, products, etc).
As techies, how can we be socially responsible while also profiting? Is it possible as a public company?
Eh, conservatives have been making this complaint for ages. It’s really not new. Take the Vietnam war and civil rights protests of the 60s and 70s for example. Tech has changed some dynamics, but in this case, it hasn’t introduced something completely new.
I think, but don't know for sure, they are arguing that "elite, progressive professors are indoctrinating our kids." Limbaugh has been making this claim since '89 at least when I first heard it.
Richard Spencer held a rally at UF last week, and they had to arrest 3 of his supporters for firing shots at protesters. I don’t have much sympathy for this “college kids are overreacting” argument these days.
Lol. “I heard some progressives support preemptive self defense so I should be allowed to fire into any crowd of people I think may be progressives”. I hope that is their defense.
"In response, an angry mob of 50 students disrupted his biology class, surrounded him, called him a racist and insisted that he resign."
Students have been doing that for thousands of years. This isn't about racism or post-modernism. This is about longstanding mob dynamics. Communists in pre-revolution Russia and asia. Religious zealots in Scotland. Romans in their ancient senate. This is simply a group of young people storming an office to shout down an established member of an older generation. Once discovered, this power feeds upon itself. It may be how revolutions start but more often than not the young people get older/bored or things burn out as the movement grows and internal power structures destroy themselves. You cannot stop the movement by arguing its politics because those politics are beside the point. You stop them by redirecting their energy towards something new, something more cool than yesterday's politics.
This is why we have to ban welfare for anyone with any sort of post-secondary education. Nothing deradicalizes someone like a job and nothing radicalizes someone like too much free time.
This is a fine opinion piece but for learning anything substantive on this subject it’s absolutely devoid of any facts or sourcing for any of its claims. Also seems woefully, out of touch given recent profiles on Milo Yiannopoulos and the arrest of three white supremacists on attempted murder charges for firing guns on student protesters following a campus speech.
It’s possible the situation is slightly more nuanced then “college students hate facts/white people”.
The author should tread carefully... I think the crisis of irreproducibility and the publishing bubble extends to the heart of scientific disciplines as well.
Like a lot of things in life, reality is probably more complex than the postmodern humanities scholars or the realist scientific scholars would suggest. There is some level of reality underlying discourse, but it's also filtered through social processes at every step.
> Students are being taught by these postmodern professors that there is no truth, that science and empirical facts are tools of oppression by the white patriarchy
Oh brother. Here we go again with another rant that cherry-picks a few instances and pads them out with Orwell quotes and shrill claims like this. I'm a current college student, and compared to my experience and the experiences of my peers, the author is describing another reality. Very "kids these days, get off my lawn".
I think they do those exact things when up against fascists. The people they’re fighting are those who espouse racial superiorities and commit acts of cultural and physical violence to intimidate the populations of people they’ve chosen to see as inferior.
Appeals to the centrist middle are only meaningful insofar as that same center is willing to act to protect the people being targeted by hate speech. If the center is frozen by its own obsolete sense of propriety in the face of this socially destabilizing hatred then I think it is not unreasonable to see a small group take the call to action on themselves.
There are two levels to answering questions like this. The purely mechanical is that enough HN members clicked the "flag" link to cross the "[flagged]" tag threshold. The second level answer is to speculate why those members chose to click "flag". That's tougher, though in my experience one of the reasons is because some members observe that unfortunately some topics are difficult to constructively discuss on HN, regardless of the importance of the topic. I think the current discussion is a pretty good example of that, in generating more heat than light. Note that this doesn't mean these topics shouldn't be discussed, just that there are likely better places (both online and off) to do so.
Ok but... While reading that, did you at any point wonder the ethnicity, gender and approximate age of the author? Because I was less than surprised when I saw him at the end of the article.
I didn't say to ignore his "valid points." I intentionally didn't mention the content. I was trying to point out that, if, as you read the piece, you correctly inferred metadata about the author, (a) it's funny because (b) it means there might be more to the theories he is dissmissing out of hand.
Because when someone makes the argument that "ok now discrimination has gotten out of hand" it usually is implied "... Now that I'm the target!" Which would imply the author isn't used to being the target of discrimination, which would imply middle aged white male.
The point I was trying to jokingly bring up is a valid one, I think. How much of what we do leaks identity-related metadata? How much are of the responses we get are responses to that inferred metadata?
Reversing injustice is still injustice. And why care about the motivation for someone to be against discrimination? I don't think Frederik Douglass was any less legitimate of an abolitionist because he was self-interested in destroying slavery.
The dissident right holds that this is a good thing - we can't get segregation and a very comprehensive freedom of association from Constitutional conservatives, but progressive leftists are more than happy to do the legwork to erode protections around the 'protected classes'.
But it's something we see playing out across the anglo world - left learning "right thinkers" break down some boundry and hand the keys to people who lean right. Obama took the imperial Presidency to new heights and now Trump gets to reap the rewards. Trump really wouldn't have been possible without Obama.
The sad irony is that leftists need the rule of law and impartial justice much more than right wingers.
What's the source for this? Why should I take this article more seriously than a random screed on social media?