KC Johnson visits three academic conferences in search of real debate. What he finds isn’t encouraging:  

The second recent groupthink conference occurred at Duke, where several leading members of the Group of 88 – the professors who early in the lacrosse case publicly thanked protesters who had, among other things, urged castration of the lacrosse captains – hosted an academic conference on race in contemporary America. The very same people who got things spectacularly wrong in a high-profile case in their own backyard dealing with issues of race and politics offered their insights on “how modern racial prejudice shapes policy.”

In our increasingly multicultural society, such a conference topic might have provided an opportunity to bring together people with both innovative and widely disparate insights. Instead, the conference’s seven sessions (all but one of which was chaired by a Group member) featured little more than a recitation of the race/class/gender worldview dominant in most humanities departments today. Each session, moreover, began with an admonition against taping the panellists’ remarks: Group members apparently feared the possibility that their extremist ideas would be available beyond the campus walls.

Naturally, one of the panels – ponderously titled Race, Gender and Sexuality: Intersections on Multiple Dimensions – was to be moderated by the ever-moderate Wahneema Lubiano. Readers may recall Lubiano, a tenured professor at Duke, for her underwhelming scholarship and her conviction that “knowledge factories” and “engines of dominance” [i.e. universities] should be “sabotaged” – by people much like herself. The professor’s courses in “critical studies” and “race and gender” are construed in such a way that students can be told, “once white working class people learn that corporate capitalism is using racism to manipulate them, they will want to join with racially oppressed people against capitalism.” Professor Lubiano also says things like this: “Western rationality’s hegemony marginalizes other ways of knowing about the world” – a claim that suggests the West is somehow devoid of literature, art, music and film, despite being the foremost producer and consumer of such things.

Some background on other panellists, and their “diversity,” can be found here, along with an audience member’s notes on the content of the “debates.” Readers will be thrilled by the presence of Lani Guinier, a tenured professor at Harvard Law School and advocate of “critical thinking,” who insists that standardised testing is “racist” because “talent is equally distributed among all people.”

Ophelia Benson recently aired some thoughts on the sly redefinition of “defamation” – a term now being used by those whose vanity is such they presume to take umbrage at things that are unflattering but true. I’ve touched on this subject before and noted how the language of religious supremacism is routinely couched in the rhetoric of personal injury. As when the preposterous Islamophile Yvonne Ridley declared: “My faith is my nationality and when you attack it you are being racist.”

Presumably, Ms Ridley would have us believe that it is simply wrong to dislike Islam, or any part thereof. There are, apparently, no good reasons for doing so. But this opportunist victimhood is hardly flattering or deserving of sympathy. The spread of pretentious grievance does harm to liberal culture. Those who can claim to belong to some Designated Victim Group can use political leverage to silence their critics by depicting them as oppressors who, in the interests of “fairness,” must be silenced by the state. As when the pious souls at Cambridge Mosque conjured “hate speech” and “incitement to religious and ethnic hatred” from an innocuous student cartoon, with the result that those responsible found themselves interrogated by Cambridgeshire police. But what is unfair – really unfair – is the demand for unearned deference and unilateral exemption from the testing of ideas. Those who regard hurt feelings, or claims thereof, as denoting virtue by default may see a weaker party facing unfair attack and rush to their defence. In practice, they may simply be excusing the party with the weaker argument. Political deference to such demands leads to dishonesty and unrealism on a sociological scale. In the interests of “fairness,” so conceived, judgment must be blunted. As I said in one of my very first posts,

Religious “freedom” is now presumed to entail sparing believers any hint that others do not share their beliefs, and indeed may find them ludicrous. There is, apparently, no corresponding obligation for believers to embrace ideas that are not clearly risible, monstrous or disgusting.

R Joseph Hoffmann adds some thoughts of his own and ponders the conceit that religion – and one in particular – now has “human rights” too.:

According to Pakistan’s ambassador, Zamir Akram, “Defamation of religions is the cause that leads to incitement to hatred, discrimination and violence toward their followers.” That is stuff and nonsense of course. It is like saying that impugning General Motors workmanship is the cause of a car wreck. If religions, by a stretch, are products of culture, then the fact that they are sometimes “defamed” (read: criticised) might just have something to do with quality control and less to do with the insidious intentions of their detractors. To resituate the causes of religious violence and hatred from its source to the “defamers” is a standard tactic redolent of the Victim’s Handbook available at your local Discourse and Broomsticks Bookstore.

Related: Jeff Goldstein ponders advice to mind one’s language in certain company.

Via Stephen Hicks comes another staggering artistic triumph. In the cryptically titled Join or Die, San Francisco-based artist Justine Lai depicts herself getting busy with America’s deceased presidents. The results suggest a collision of 1970s porn magazines and painting by numbers. As the series of 18 x 24” canvases is being produced in chronological order, these necrophilic entanglements currently extend only to Ulysses S Grant and his hitherto unrecorded spanking fetish. Sadly, those of you aroused by the prospect of seeing, say, George W Bush getting it on with Ms Lai – with all the profundity that entails – may have to wait a while.

There is, given the subject matter, the usual mouthing of bollocks:

I am interested in humanizing and demythologizing the Presidents by addressing their public legacies and private lives. The presidency itself is a seemingly immortal and impenetrable institution; by inserting myself in its timeline, I attempt to locate something intimate and mortal. I use this intimacy to subvert authority, but it demands that I make myself vulnerable along with the Presidents. A power lies in rendering these patriarchal figures the possible object of shame, ridicule and desire, but it is a power that is constantly negotiated… I approach the spectacle of sex and politics with a certain playfulness… One could also imagine a series preoccupied with wearing its “Fuck the Man” symbolism on its sleeve. But I wish to move beyond these things and make something playful and tender and maybe a little ambiguous, but exuberantly so. This, I feel, is the most humanizing act I can do.

Somehow, I remain unconvinced that painting long-dead American presidents doing the nasty with a young woman is “subverting authority” in any meaningful sense. Nor am I persuaded that Ms Lai has “moved beyond” the “Fuck the Man” symbolism that evidently preoccupies her. Though one might note her eagerness to “insert herself” into the project – which raises the question of whether Ms Lai’s ego has merely led her to seek out celebrity by bedding powerful men, albeit figuratively. Readers will no doubt decide for themselves whether Ms Lai’s handiwork is “playful,” “tender,” “exuberant” and “humanising.” Though in fairness she has set up any number of dubious quips about “vice presidents,” “sexual congress” and “secretaries of the interior.” 

See also: A Mighty Intervention.

Via Critical Mass, here’s a short follow-up film on the indoctrination efforts of Delaware University’s ResLife programme – described by its proponents as a “treatment” – in which students were told, “The term [racist] applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality.” The film, embedded here in two parts, is aimed primarily at trustees and alumni, but it deserves wider attention.

Part 1: Wait for the marshmallow “oppression” story around 2:05.

A discussion with Stephen Hicks.

“In politicized forms, then, postmodernists will behave like the stereotypical unscrupulous lawyer trying to win the case: truth and justice aren’t the point; instead using any rhetorical tool or trick that works is the point. Sometimes contradictory lines of argument work. Sometimes your audience’s desire to belong to the in-group can be played upon. Sometimes appearing absolutely authoritative works to camouflage a weak case. Sometimes condescension works.”

Dr Stephen Hicks is Professor of Philosophy and Executive Director of the Centre for Ethics and Entrepreneurship at Rockford College, Illinois. He is co-editor with David Kelley of Readings for Logical Analysis (W. W. Norton, 1998), and has published in academic journals as well as The Wall Street Journal, The Baltimore Sun, and Reader’s Digest. His book Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault was published in 2004 by Scholargy Publishing and is now in its eighth printing. He is the author and narrator of a DVD documentary entitled Nietzsche and the Nazis, which was published in 2006 by Ockham’s Razor Publishing. 

DT: In an exchange with Ophelia Benson, I mentioned Explaining Postmodernism and suggested one of the book’s main themes is that postmodernism marks a crisis of faith and a retreat from reality among the academic left. Is that a fair, if crude, summary?

SH: It is striking that the major postmodernists – Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Richard Rorty – are of the far left politically. And it is striking that all four are Philosophy Ph.D.s who reached deeply skeptical conclusions about our ability to come to know reality. So one of my four theses about postmodernism is that it develops from a double crisis – a crisis within philosophy about knowledge and a crisis within left politics about socialism.