It's a Wrap! Pass the Pizza Mr. Mao....

Day 13
Well, we turned in our Final Exams at the beginning of class today. If you will allow me one gentle conceit, I come to class with 74 out of a possible 75 points tucked into my pocket, so a “C-level” grade on the Final should still get me an “A” for the class. But I am confident that all will be well.

The lecture was mercifully short, and the professor brought pizza for the class. I always knew he was a likable sort—and this proves it. So, in addition to being utopian-control freaks that lean precipitously away from freedom, toward tyranny, and in denial of theism and human nature whose ideas—if fully implemented—would pose an existential threat to our way of life and a degradation of civilization itself, they can also be relatively intelligent folks who bring free pizza to class. Who’d have thought?

I will be registering for my next wave of classes soon and will write in an update at that time.

Be well,

Academic Apartheid

Day 12
We spent the first half of class today watching the first part of a television documentary on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (RCC) in post-Apartheid South Africa. Remarkable how Bishop Desmond Tutu officiated that noble public discussion and testimony—helping guide that country away from devolution into anarchy and additional bloodshed and into a more-free, equal, and open society. Thus, Apartheid rests upon the ash-heap of history with sister evils: Communism, Fascism, and slavery, among others (though pockets of Communistic thought and slavery exist to this day).

I take nothing away from the historic nature of those events or the tragic impact upon the individual lives and collective soul of South Africa when I ask, “Why are we watching this video here and now, in this class?”

If this topic is to be the framework for our study of Advanced Argumentation, why are we not exploring the nature and quality of the arguments that facilitated the philosophical surrender of the South African regime? Why do we not hear Desmond Tutu’s speeches that were of such quality as to prevent revenge-seeking and retaliation by the repressed and disaffected black population? Why do we not hear the arguments made before the United Nations that caused the governments of the world to lean the weight of economic sanctions against the few, struggling, and increasingly isolated supremacists leading the South African Nationalist Party?

Instead, we only see the suffering and hear the stories of the oppressed in emotional appeal. These are worthy stories, indeed. They are worth telling together with the tales of the Holocaust, Gulag survivors, and other heroes and martyrs for humanity. But this class is to teach us the intellectual weapons wielded in such struggles and the student might be better served with less history lesson and reflected guilt—and a bit more effective argument and persuasion technique. This is an opportunity lost to learning the lesson at hand. Progress toward the focused education course implied by my degree track sits in the back of the bus behind dogma and indoctrination.

Be well,

“The Destruction of the Christian Church…is…Necessary”

Day 11

I lead today’s entry with a heartbreaking quotation from one of our primary texts, James Baldwin’s Collected Essays, "White Racism or World Community?":

“It’s got to be admitted that if you are born under the circumstances in which most black people in the West are born, that means really black people over the entire world, when you look around you, having attained something resembling adulthood, it is perfectly true that you can see that the destruction of the Christian Church as it is presently constituted may not only be desirable but necessary.”

Now, one can refer to the literary devices of great writers—as, for all of his faults, James Baldwin certainly was—as they might use shock and exaggeration to garner the attention they require in making what they believe to be salient points; but the questions are begged:

• What would a student be indoctrinated to believe in reading this in a structured class?
• What would a radical take from an independent reading of this work?
• What use would such language be in the hands of a race-monger or sophist seeking adoration and power?

Mr. Baldwin’s prose has a keen edge, but a sharpened tool left idly on the ground gains action in the intent of the hand that finds it laying there—for good or ill.

Be well,

A Lesson learned

Day 10
A bit is revealed to us this evening. Our professor—again, a very bright and studied man—who is charged with instructing us in Advanced Argumentation has:

• Undergraduate degree in psychology
• Masters in Philosophy
• Completing his doctoral dissertation in Cultural Studies

I venture that he is pursuing the Liberal trifecta. I do enjoy the class and I believe that one gets out of all educational opportunities a proportionate measure of what one puts into them. But his hat-trick of left leaning coursework would seem to do less than adequate to prepare for the professorship of the course at hand.

This new information does give us a window to understand and more readily forgive his Liberal ideological bias spread so thickly in our assignments. He is simply teaching what he has learned—and probably all that he has been effectively taught.

Ironic that we are this very week reading from Emerson’s essay of 1844, “New England Reformers,” that:

“The criticism and attack on institutions, which we have witnessed, has made one thing plain, that society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things around him: he has become tediously good in some particular but negligent or narrow in the rest; and hypocrisy and vanity are often the disgusting result.”

As we approach the end point of this class—a mere three addition sessions on—we begin to see evidence that renovations are sorely needed in our institutions and in the minds of the educators.

Be well,