It has been three weeks since the last class—Spring Break intervened into one and our professor was ill for another. Today we are back at it.
As previously discussed, this class is called “Advanced Argumentation, Critical Reasoning, and Public Communication.” I feel compelled to restate the title of the class because—as we have now passed the half-way mark towards its conclusion—we have had precious little argumentation, mostly no critical reasoning, and the public communications we have studied have been more indoctrination than analysis. One could forgive the abject Liberal ideological nature of the works we have studied if in the process we analyzed what techniques or methodology made one argument more effective than another. Instead it seems that we are consigned merely to read extremist Liberal demagoguery and discuss its relative “correctness” as compared to another in the metrics of agreement with mainline Liberal thought.
Please Sir, I Want Some More…
It would be refreshing if the professor were to introduce a Conservative author once in a great while—even if such introduction was purely to pour ridicule. Sowell, Buckley, Safire, et al—they will not whither before even an unfair onslaught. At least the students would be therefore aware of contrary view. Rather, we are given one set of Liberal writings and assigned to compare them to another set of Liberal writings and we get to judge between them. This seems akin to offering a man his choice of entre’ at a soup kitchen—you get to have whatever you want so long as you bring low expectations and choose precisely what is being served that day.
I am afraid that I embarrassed the professor just a bit today. We always have a good deal of reading for each session, and today it was doubled up due to the missed class. But the professor spent a great deal of time on two essays in particular—namely, “The Crusade of Indignation” by James Baldwin and “Wealth (2)” by Emerson. As is his wont, he focused on anti-capitalist snippets here and collectivist sentences there, all to the previously defined somnambulant nodding of the class (I am left to wonder if they had read the assignments at all). I had, in fact read them thoroughly—the dismal science of economics being, to my mind, not so dismal—because I was interested in what they had to say. I offered to openly contrast the two essays by reading excerpts from each and the professor eagerly agreed.
Emerson Said What?
Turns out that when it comes to industriousness and productivity, Ralph Waldo Emerson was pretty Conservative, indeed. Where Baldwin sought some method of artificial wealth distribution, Emerson very squarely believed in individual productivity and self-sufficiency, and said so in words more forceful than even I am comfortable with. I will let Emerson speak for himself:
“Wealth brings with it its own checks and balances. The basis of political economy is non-interference. The only safe rule is found in the self-adjusting meter of demand and supply. Do not legislate. Meddle, and you snap the sinews with your sumptuary laws. Give no bounties, make equal laws, secure life and property, and you need not give alms. Open the doors of opportunity to talent and virtue and they will do themselves justice, and property will not be in bad hands. In a free and just commonwealth, property rushes from the idle and the imbecile to the industrious, brave and persevering.”Yep…that’s Emerson on the topic.
I did not comment beyond reading this passage from our assignment. Our professor then spent the next fifteen minutes parsing that what I read aloud did not quite mean what I thought it did. Well, it seemed rather clear to me.
I actually felt a bit uncomfortable on behalf of the professor. He stammered through his rebuttal and directed his comments to me (again, at great length), but—since I offered nothing more than a gentle reading—he was, in fact, arguing with Mr. Emerson himself. What’s worse…he knew it.
I must sign off. My wife will be quite upset that I come home so late as it is. Be well.
No comments:
Post a Comment