What I might have learned at Melbourne Uni
More like a leaking reactor than a liberal arts faculty – Miranda Devine – www.smh.com.au
Readers of Miranda Devine’s piece likening Sydney University’s Faculty of Arts to a “leaking nuclear reactor” may wonder whether its indoctrination of students with leftist propaganda and postmodernist nonsense is an isolated phenomenon. The answer is no.
For the curious, here’s a list of things I would have learned from the Cultural Studies program at the University of Melbourne, had I not read more widely than my studies required:
- Knowledge does not describe the world: it is only a trick the powerful play on those they oppress. This being the case, it is more important that research expresses the appropriate politics and sentiment (determined not by yourself, but by your peers and superiors) than that it is carefully reasoned and backed by evidence.
- Human action is not determined by the individual will, but by external forces. This means that no-one is responsible for their failures, all of which are attributed to some kind of system, like patriarchy, colonialism, or, most likely, capitalism. (Asserting that people do bear responsibility for their own actions is condemned as “voluntarism.”)
- The less sense a piece of writing makes, the more likely it is to be a work of genius that is worthy of your reverence, and from which you should draw quotations to substitute for your own opinions in writing and in conversation.
- To be “subversive” and to reject, out of hand, any element of our present society, is always virtuous, independent of whether your criticism is reasonable and whether or not you propose any viable alternatives.
- If you don’t believe all of the above, you are probably some kind of right wing lunatic.
Devine is right to quote David Stove describing a faculty that harbours such beliefs as being actively dangerous. Teaching students that knowledge cannot be objective and that they are not responsible for their actions is liable to diminish their ability to understand the world and to use that understanding to shape their world and achieve their goals. It is that ability which created our civilisation, its culture, and its technology. Without it we are no better than animals.
January 31st, 2005 - 11:09
If there’s a continuum with the department’s attitude at one end and yours at the other, I think I’d occupy a position somewhere in the middle. I agree with you that the insularity of the department creates a dogmatic style of thinking that abrogates intellectual responsibility. I also strongly oppose the reification of continental theory that I see in the department, and its shift away from being curious and omnivorous about culture (which I see as the primary role of a cultural studies department).
I also really hate the way a ‘postmodern’ speaking position allows people to escape the moral and ethical dimensions of their own arguments, and lets people exist in a state of perpetual ironic detachment, never really believing in anything.
But while I champion responsibility, I am suspicious of claims to objectivity, and I think that a pragmatic kind of relativism (perhaps ‘skepticism’ would be a better word?) is valuable. I have found it useful to consider to what extent our subjectivities and actions are shaped by social forces larger than ourselves.
January 31st, 2005 - 12:57
I agree with you, Mel, that “a pragmatic kind of relativism” is valuable. Certainly, no-one is unbiased or infallible, and it is worth keeping an eye out for mistakes, distortions and lies motivated by a speaker or writer’s implication in particular social contexts. And I’ll also be one of the first people to argue that a good deal of what makes a person who they are is nurture, not nature: it’s precisely that fact that makes humans⦠well⦠human.
But the fact is, there’s a world out there, the qualities of which are largely independent of what you or I think they are (quantum uncertainty aside). When a thinker like Foucault, so beloved of our department, focuses on the way that knowledge is an effect of power, this tends to get ignored. The best way to investigate a piece of so-called “knowledge” is not to ask who put it forward, but to ask whether it is or is likely to be true. This means asking, of a statement or argument, things like:
not:
and so on⦠This last set naturally leads us into the logical fallacy of the ad hominem argument (arguing for or against a position on the basis of its supporters’ personal qualities).
On another note, I think it’s kind of sad that if, indeed, there is a continuum in the department, that I would be at one end and someone like, say, Audrey (as an example), would be at the other. Because that’s actually a fairly narrow range of viewpoints. I personally would consider myself to be somewhere between Keith Windschuttle (on the issue of what intellectual traditions we ought to follow: I have no interest in what he has to say about Aborigines, and don’t even know whether I’d agree or disagree) and “the department.” But where are our Windschuttles or, on the issue of objectivity, our Ayn Rands? And where are our commie-hating, god-loving, Aristotle-reading conservatives? I disagree with many of the things that they might have to say, but our department is much poorer for our not having them around to argue with, and to ensure our students are exposed to a range of viewpoints.
January 31st, 2005 - 13:26
I just realised I forgot to address the question of personal responsibility. The thing is, the science relating to free will is still incomplete. Daniel Dennett, probably the world’s pre-eminent philosopher of mind, seems to think that free will is something that evolved, one of the things that gives humans their survival advantage over just about everything else on Earth. But on the other hand, our best guesses about how the mind works are that the mind is just what the brain does, and the brain is really just another biological machine, like everything else in our bodies, so its activities ought to be fully determined by physical factors: our immediately forthcoming thoughts and actions are just following on from the current physical state of our brain.
There are obviously issues to be resolved here. Now, I’m not a philosopher of mind, but it strikes me that there is something in my experience that isn’t adequately accounted for by a purely mechanistic theory of mind, as it stands, and that’s intention. Although I form habits by doing things, because doing things strengthens the neural pathways that facilitate their doing, my intention to form a habit (by making sure I write some of my thesis every day, for instance) can be effective. That is to say, if I choose to form a mental habit, I’m more likely to form it than if I didn’t bother with the discipline. Maybe this is all an illusionâ¦
But suppose I didn’t believe that it made any difference whether I intended to form a habit or not, that whether I finished my thesis or just slacked off until my scholarship ran out was already determined by the current state of my brain, which was in turn determined by my genetics, my upbringing, and so on. Then, if I was wrong, I would be likely just to leave everything up to my mechanistically determined destiny, and, failing to take action, I’d probably just slack off until my scholarship ran out.
This, I believe, is the kind of effect it has to teach people that they aren’t responsible for their actions. In short: they fail in life, and other people have to pick up the pieces of their shattered dreams. It’s lucky that most of us are impervious to “learning” that we aren’t responsible for what we do, and go on taking action regardless. Why do we do this? Because our experience tells us that it does make a difference what we intend.
Sure, in the absence of true scientific knowledge about whether free will exists or not, we can go on arguing about it. But in the absence of such knowledge, I’d say we ought to be pragmatic, and believe we are responsible for what we do. Because if we don’t, and we leave things to mechanistic destiny, we relinquish our ability to control our lives and achieve our goals. And that, I don’t need to tell you, would suck.
February 3rd, 2005 - 15:28
Hehe, man I must have missed a lot of lectures, because I didn’t learn any of that when I did my degree at Melbourne… then again, I was an Arts student, so it’s not really my fault.
I just couldn’t stand al those pretentious students acting like they were better than everyone else.
But that’s just me.