Jon Cogburn's Blog

Adam and the Ants- Prince Charming

from New York Times moderated blogs

      

[Note: original article is here]

I’m absolutely with Fish until the last point about truth not being the goal of classroom inquiry, which as a professor strikes me as horrid.

I don’t currently teach political philosophy or ethics, but I can say that I absolutely want my classroom discussions to be about trying to find the truth with the students. Instead of saying that the professors shouldn’t do this, Fish should say that the institutional norms rightly require the professor to provide the best arguments and evidence for both sides of an issue and to help students she disagrees with develop the best argument they can (the last time I taught an ethics class I ended up doing a disproportional amount of work helping a student rewrite and rewrite a paper arguing against gay marriage; I disagreed with the student, but by teaching him to make the best case he could with better argumentation and better citation of good philosophers, I helped the student develop the facility to get closer to the truth, which contra Fish, is my job).

The overwhelming majority of professors deeply know that smart, informed people of good will can disagree about most of the hot button political issues confronting the United States. The overwhelming majority of professors who teach things relating to political philosophy and ethics run classrooms that are consistent with this wisdom. However, the idea that one should only find truth in one’s research and not in the classroom has nothing to do with this wisdom and is ripping off the students who benefit from being exposed to and helping our research.

— Posted by Jon Cogburn      

    

David Mitchell

The thin woman looked at me as she spoke. "You'd have to ask them yourself. Maybe there are many answers. Some get a kick out of self-abasement and servitude. Some are afraid or lonely. Some crave the camaraderie of the persecuted. Some want to  be big fish in a small pond. Some want magic. Some want revenge on teachers and parents who promised success would deliver all. They need shinier myths that will never be soiled by becoming true. The handing over of one's will is a small price to pay, for the believers. They aren't going to need will in their New Earth."

Flaubert

One should be wary of touching one's idols, for the gilt comes off on one's fingers.

Roger Scruton

American visitors to Paris, Rome, Prague, or Barcelona, comparing what they see with what is familiar from their own continent, will recognize how careless their countrymen often have been in their attempts to create cities. But the American who leaves the routes prescribed by the Ministries of Tourism will quickly see that Paris is miraculous in no small measure because modern architects have not been able to get their hands on it. Elsewhere, European cities are going the way of cities in America: high-rise offices in the center, surrounded first by a ring of lawless dereliction, and then by the suburbs, to which those who work in the city flee at the end of the day. Admittedly, nothing in Europe compares with the vandalism that modernists have wreaked on Buffalo, Tampa, or Minneapolis (to take three examples of American cities that cause me particular pain). Nevertheless, the same moral disaster is beginning to afflict us—the disaster of cities in which no one wishes to live, where public spaces are vandalized and private spaces boarded up.

Until recently, European architects have either connived at the evisceration of our cities or actively promoted it. Relying on the spurious rhetoric of Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, they endorsed the totalitarian projects of the political elite, whose goal after the war was not to restore the cities but to clear away the “slums.” By “slums,” they meant the harmonious classical streets of affordable houses, seeded with local industries, corner shops, schools, and places of worship, that had made it possible for real communities to flourish in the center of our towns. High-rise blocks in open parkland, of the kind that Le Corbusier proposed in his plan for the demolition of Paris north of the Seine, would replace them. Meanwhile, all forms of employment and enjoyment would move elsewhere. Public buildings would be expressly modernist, with steel and concrete frames and curtain walls, but with no facades or intelligible apertures, and no perceivable relation to their neighbors. Important monuments from the past would remain, but often set in new and aesthetically annihilating contexts, such as that provided for Saint Paul’s in London.

Citizens protested, and conservation societies fought throughout Europe for the old idea of what a city should look like, but the modernists won the battle of ideas. They took over the architecture schools and set out to ensure that the classical discipline of architecture would never again be learned, since it would never again be taught. The vandalization of the curriculum was successful: European architecture schools no longer taught students the grammar of the classical Orders; they no longer taught how to understand moldings, or how to draw existing monuments, urban streets, the human figure, or such vital aesthetic phenomena as the fall of light on a Corinthian capital or the shadow of a campanile on a sloping roof; they no longer taught appreciation for facades, cornices, doorways, or anything else that one could glean from a study of Serlio or Palladio. The purpose of the new curriculum was to produce ideologically driven engineers, whose representational skills went no further than ground plans and isometric drawings, and who could undertake the gargantuan “projects” of the socialist state: shoveling people into housing estates, laying out industrial areas and business parks, driving highways through ancient city centers, and generally reminding the middle classes that Big Brother was supervising them.

Devo- Gates of Steel

Martha C. Nussbaum

It [collective rape and murder committed against dissenting rural people by the cadres of the ruling communist party of West Bengal] is this issue that has split India’s left. The artists and intellectuals I’ve named are in a few cases motivated by a woolly romanticism about agriculture and an ideological opposition to all industrial development. For this they should be criticized. Some of them may also have had unrealistic expectations for this government, whose Stalinists roots they have perhaps insufficiently appreciated. For this lack of caution they should also be criticized. They also, however, have had the courage of consistent moral principle, standing up against brutality even when the perpetrators are friends. For this they are to be greatly admired. Not so admirable, by contrast, have been the statements of some leftists to the effect that one should not criticize one’s friends, that solidarity is more important than ethical correctness. One may or may not trace this line to an old Marxist contempt for bourgeois ethics, but it is loathsome whatever its provenance.

A particularly fatuous document of this kind was a letter authored by Noam Chomsky, signed by a number of Indian American intellectuals who should know better, and published in the Hindu, a leading national India newspaper, on November 22, 2007. Besides lauding the CPI(M) for “important experiments” for which it deserves no particular credit (such as “local self-government”), the letter reasons that people on the left ought to focus on opposition to the actions of the United States in Iraq, rather than fighting with one another. “This is not the time for division when the basis of division no longer appears to exist,” concludes Chomsky, having asserted, entirely without cause on that date, that things are basically back to normal and that the two sides have reconciled. This is the type of left politics that holds that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, no matter how many rapes and murders that friend has actually perpetrated.

Mohsen Namjoo - Ro Sar Beneh

Paramahansa Yoganda

The life of ordinary man is monotonous, at best. He wakes, bathes his body, enjoys the after-bath sensation, eats breakfast, hurries to work, begins to get weary, is refreshed by lunch, again pursues his work, and finally goes home, bored and listless. The hour of his too-heavy dinner is punctuated by various noises from radio or television and often ill-humored remarks from wife or children. This typical man may then attend the movies or a party for a brief diversionary respite; he comes home late, is very tired and sleeps heavily. What a life! But he repeats this performance, with unimaginative variations through the best years of his life.

By such habits man becomes like a machine, a human automaton, fueled with food, automatically performing tasks sluggishly and unwillingly, without joy or inspiration, and partially shutting down its activities by sleep--only to repeat, on the following day, the same routine.

The Baghivad Gita commands man to avoid this mere "existence."

Forty years long was I grieved with that generation, and said, It is a people that do err in their heart, and they have not known my ways.