The PC Brigades Must be Stopped: Conservatives Aren’t the Only Voices Silenced by Academia’s Intellectual Orthodoxy

Political correctness and the “grievance studies” are anti-intellectualism dressed up as postmodern intellectualism.

The truth is the current “post-colonial,” racial, gender obsession (in some circles) is a religion for the dim. A salve for the bright, but not the brightest. 

I’m sorry if you don’t understand why The Great Books are great, or worse if you think the wisdom and knowledge of Western Civilization should be tossed aside in the name of reductionist politically correct dogma.

The college PC brigades, like the Red Guard in China 40 years before (and I am not totally equating the “diversity” authoritarians with Mao’s Red Guard) were wrong. Horribly and tragically wrong. And reality ultimately, painfully, proved this.

Long live knowledge. Long live Western Civilization. Long live wisdom, and inquiry, and the scientific method. Long live REALITY.

Down with simple minded political correctness.

(From Quillette)

This revolution has been political. Entire disciplines—Literature, Anthropology, Sociology, and the various interdisciplinary programs that end in the word “Studies” – have all become more strongly associated with a particular species of left-wing interpretation that now influences the broader discourse in journalism and on social media. In some departments, the social categories of analysis—race, class, and gender—have attained complete hegemony. The most recent convention of the Modern Language Association, the most prominent organization associated with the study of language and literature, hosted three times as many panels on post-colonialism as it did on Shakespeare. Like so many other areas of study, a consensus has been reached in English and Comparative Literature that the aims of one’s research should be about more than a body of knowledge or a disciplinary canon. Critique, as it is understood, is ultimately a criticism of the society (not the author) that produced a given text; all literary criticism reduces to social criticism. The contemporary literature professor need not even be an expert on any particular author or literary figure, but can be expected to be a master at applying a particular interpretive lens such as Queer Theory or Critical Race Theory.

The reality that the humanities and social sciences seem to be increasingly attracting one particular kind of person with one, very distinct, understanding of the world can be seen in other disciplines as well. Entire fields and subfields such as Diplomatic History and Military History are on the precipice of extinction, as more and more current and aspiring historians ignore or abandon these fields for the sexier (and more explicitly ideological) fields in Cultural and Social History.

What has happened in Literature and History departments as well as in other disciplines draws attention to something rarely considered in discussions concerning intellectual diversity in higher education. Conservatives will point to statistics such as the imbalance in the ratio between registered Democrats and Republicans as evidence of a political imbalance. Students it is argued are only getting one side of the story. While this sentiment is certainly understandable, it ignores an element of the current phenomena that might be even more deleterious to student learning and thus all the more intractable. The problem isn’t simply one of political imbalance, an absence of parity between Left and Right voices, but the extent to which humanities departments have become politicized.

Click here for the article.

http://www.againstcronycapitalism.org/