Patrick Deneen on the academy's faux preoccupation with "diversity":
In the end, the aim of "diversity training" is for difference to be superficial: our differences are to distinguish us like clothing fashions but not be so deep as to foster "discrimination" or "judgmentalism." To discriminate would be, well - to recognize distinctions. To judge would be - well, to differentiate. Diversity can't allow that. I can wear as many nose rings as I want, but you are not allowed to acknowledge that you notice them. I demand to be different - but you'd better not say that I am.These discussions about the paramount importance of diversity take place in the backdrop in which intellectual diversity does not exist as a topic of conversation on today's college campuses. Indeed, it could be argued that efforts to encourage diversity are premised upon the dampening if not the elimination of intellectual diversity. It should be surprising to no one, then, that according to an article in today's Washington Post, universities have serious diversity deficit in the currency of ideas - what one would imagine to be of paramount importance in the life of a university. According to this article, you're as likely to see a Republican on a university campus as you are to see a glacier in Iceland.
That's not news, of course, but it seems to me that if I were a liberal, I would not want to go to a school where my beliefs rarely if ever got challenged. I am a conservative, and I wouldn't consider it to be an advantage to send my children to college at a school that was as uniformly conservative as many colleges are liberal. To be sure, I've got no problem with a school adhering to a core of moral and intellectual principles -- for example, I'd want a Catholic school to be authentically Catholic -- but I would expect them to use that as solid ground from which to look up and observe the cosmos of ideas from a fixed point. I'd want my kids looking up, not down at the ground, in fearful incuriosity.
Patrick also makes this insightful observation:
The one thing we do not have in today's university is diversity. There is one forbidden idea: the idea that there may be limits based in nature. The modern university exists explicitly on the rejection of this one assumption.
The university is not alone. Modern American politics -- hell, modern American life -- is based on the rejection, implicit and explicit, of this one assumption.
Add to Del.icio.us
Add to Technorati
Add to Digg
Add to Newsvine
Add to Facebook
Add to StumbleUpon
Subscribe
Cleveland, I'm puzzled by your repeated references to Pamela Anderson. Not that I wish to speak against her in any way, but she doesn't seem a good match for you. Surely a man of taste and culture such as yourself could find a more worthy object for your unseemly lusts. Surely there exists somewhere in your vicinity a woman who is desirable yet cultured, well-behaved and perhaps even Catholic. Some of Pamela's best assets weren't even real, you know. And she had them removed. If you must lust, lust for the best. This is a principle that I myself apply to chocolate.
I knew the second I deleted it from my crazy-long post that someone else would bring it up.
it was the Democrats that fought tooth and nail for slavery, until the Republicans stopped them.
That's nothing! They opposed a central bank too!
Small hint: Slavery ended 140 years ago. No one alive then is alive today.
And, while we're talking about party names, it's worth noting that the party that won the civil war, (and thus, actually freed the slaves), was not the Republican party, but Abraham Lincoln elected on a 'National Union' ticket, a party set up by pro-war Democrats and Republicans, so that neither peace-Democrats or Radical Republicans would win.
So if you want to pretend that the Republican then is the current party, then your party is the party that radicals basically forced Lincoln out of, in the middle of a war no less, and into the arms of the Democrats.
Or maybe we can just go with the idea that pretending names mean anything outside of their time is stupid.
It was the Democrats that would have killed the Civil Rights Act by filibuster had not Republican Senator Dirksen shamed them into relenting.
That is an...extremely goofy reading of things, especially considering you could make the claim without it. The filibuster was threatened over the very improper method of getting the bill out of committee, not over the contents of the bill. (Without that improper method, done by the Senate Majority Leader, the Democrat Mike Mansfield, the bill would have probably died in the Judiciary Committee*.)
Meanwhile, the bill wouldn't have even have existed if not for Kennedy pushing for it, and then it never would have gotten out of the House*, where it was subject to some sort of hold, if Johnson hadn't pushed for it after Kennedy's assassination.
* However, both of the threats to the vote on it were, indeed, Southern Democrats, Howard Smith and James Eastland. (Although Eastland never did anything because of the improper bill movement.)
But in the end, the bill was entirely voted on by regional lines, not party lines. Which resulted, as Johnson foresaw, in the Democrats losing the South for a generation.
In other words, before the Civil Rights act, there were two parties. Those two parties were both split in half, north/yes and south/no, by the act, and the Democrat's northern half lived and their party as a whole got their views, and the Republican's southern half lived and their party as a whole got their views.
However, we weren't talking about 'Democrats' or 'Republicans'. We were talking about the left and the right.
Cleveland,
Thanks for "hearing" me re: the 2 types of shame. Since I've been so long-winded today, that's all I'm going to say, but it would have been a "shame" to let that go by w/out comment :-)
"Cleveland, I'm puzzled by your repeated references to Pamela Anderson.... Surely a man of taste and culture such as yourself could find a more worthy object for your unseemly lusts." Sig
Too old for lust, I am but a weak and sinful man; one of neither taste nor culture. Moth to a flame, Sig. It's called concupiscence.
PS: You and my sainted mother would have gotten along swimmingly.
"Small hint: Slavery ended 140 years ago."
Anyone who believes that the Democrats gave up on keeping slaves 140 years ago never strolled the Ninth Ward in Narlins or portions of many big cities in Blue America. How do you think Democrats get enough votes to stay in office--from Socialists/liberals? No, for many years they have been stealing from Peter and giving to Paul on the plantations where votes grow instead of cotton.
Post a Comment
By submitting these comments, I agree to the beliefnet.com terms of service, rules of conduct and privacy policy (the "agreements"). I understand and agree that any content I post is licensed to beliefnet.com and may be used by beliefnet.com in accordance with the agreements.