A place to write letters now! This place keeps getting bigger and better, doesn’t it.
Seriously, i love it. Daniel Dennett’s article is excellent. That thing about multiculturalism and honor killings. Bad Moves – I just read the one about false dichotomies, very good. Mind you, I think I do that a lot. Oversimplify. My sister is always telling me that.
And that Comment thing about philosophers “wittering” – that was hilarious! Not to mention the fish.
Simon Blackburn’s article provides the philosophical underpinning necessary to argue against what I call “the democratizing of ideas.”
It seems to me that the concept of democracy in a political sense (“one man, one vote”) has now been extended to require that we always treat one man’s ideas as though they were as valuable as any other man’s ideas. Valuing one set of ideas (perhaps because the speaker has read more, practiced more, or is simply a better thinker) over another’s ideas has become unacceptable–snobbish, racist, elitist, white-European-male-centric, etc.
This crystallized for me years ago while watching TV press coverage of that West Coast sect whose members committed suicide because they believed their redeemer was approaching earth in a space ship hidden behind the comet (remember that idiocy?. Interviewers spoke with a former member of the sect, treating his exposition of that ridiculous position with the grave respect usually given to pronouncements by the Archbishop of Canterbury, or Mother Teresa, or the Pope…. Regardless of whether one thinks that all religions originate in myth, a serious belief in the arrival of spaceships hidden behind comets with concomitant multiple suicides surely lacks the theological underpinning worthy of our pundits’ respect–yet no one dared publicly criticize this bizarre belief.
I have always thought that American liberal education as it was practiced until the early ’70s created a group of individuals who were in effect a veneer of civilization over a rough wood of uneducated and uncritical opinion, rather analogous to the Romans in Celtic Britain. That, of course, would now be considered an unacceptably elitist view. But at least those individuals were capable of evaluating ideas and judging their relative worth based on some objective criteria, and thought it appropriate to do so.
The advent of political correctness has unavoidably brought in its train the lowest common denominator of opinions and opinion-makers, and we are all the worse for it.
Your article about education and inequality presents interesting and challenging positions with respect to the accessibility of education. It assumes incorrectly a dialectic argument whereby the existance of a place in an educational institution precludes another from attaining it. This does not need to be the case. A commitment to achieving education for all those that want and require it would prove these arguments baseless.
The argument is whether we provide an education for all that require or want it or not. Books, and not bombs, is where our taxes need to be spent.
This is a test of the letters page by the webmaster.
Thanks!
Can’t resist. Have to test. Blah blah, yak yak, witter witter. Thank you. Yours very sincerely, Editor.
P.S. Great site. Love it to bits. Keep up the good work.
A place to write letters now! This place keeps getting bigger and better, doesn’t it.
Seriously, i love it. Daniel Dennett’s article is excellent. That thing about multiculturalism and honor killings. Bad Moves – I just read the one about false dichotomies, very good. Mind you, I think I do that a lot. Oversimplify. My sister is always telling me that.
And that Comment thing about philosophers “wittering” – that was hilarious! Not to mention the fish.
Keep up the good work.
Simon Blackburn’s article provides the philosophical underpinning necessary to argue against what I call “the democratizing of ideas.”
It seems to me that the concept of democracy in a political sense (“one man, one vote”) has now been extended to require that we always treat one man’s ideas as though they were as valuable as any other man’s ideas. Valuing one set of ideas (perhaps because the speaker has read more, practiced more, or is simply a better thinker) over another’s ideas has become unacceptable–snobbish, racist, elitist, white-European-male-centric, etc.
This crystallized for me years ago while watching TV press coverage of that West Coast sect whose members committed suicide because they believed their redeemer was approaching earth in a space ship hidden behind the comet (remember that idiocy?. Interviewers spoke with a former member of the sect, treating his exposition of that ridiculous position with the grave respect usually given to pronouncements by the Archbishop of Canterbury, or Mother Teresa, or the Pope…. Regardless of whether one thinks that all religions originate in myth, a serious belief in the arrival of spaceships hidden behind comets with concomitant multiple suicides surely lacks the theological underpinning worthy of our pundits’ respect–yet no one dared publicly criticize this bizarre belief.
I have always thought that American liberal education as it was practiced until the early ’70s created a group of individuals who were in effect a veneer of civilization over a rough wood of uneducated and uncritical opinion, rather analogous to the Romans in Celtic Britain. That, of course, would now be considered an unacceptably elitist view. But at least those individuals were capable of evaluating ideas and judging their relative worth based on some objective criteria, and thought it appropriate to do so.
The advent of political correctness has unavoidably brought in its train the lowest common denominator of opinions and opinion-makers, and we are all the worse for it.
Your article about education and inequality presents interesting and challenging positions with respect to the accessibility of education. It assumes incorrectly a dialectic argument whereby the existance of a place in an educational institution precludes another from attaining it. This does not need to be the case. A commitment to achieving education for all those that want and require it would prove these arguments baseless.
The argument is whether we provide an education for all that require or want it or not. Books, and not bombs, is where our taxes need to be spent.