September 2012
Academics I trust assure me the
scourge of political correctness in the universities is on the wane.
Specifically, I’ve been told by an English literature professor at one Canadian
university, and a PhD history candidate at another, that their respective
departments are abandoning the impenetrable jargon of postmodernism and
returning to the scholastic sobriety of yore.
Encouraging, but don’t put the
champagne on ice quite yet. If Literature and History are indeed resuming their
traditional mandates, they are, after all, real academic disciplines with a true
scholarly base to return to.
This is regrettably not the case with
Identity Studies — Womens/Gender/Men’s Studies (identical triplets), Queer,
Black, Disability, Chicano — which are pseudo-disciplines. That is, they did not
spring from a rational, disinterested spirit of inquiry into objective
phenomena, but from revolutionary beliefs and theories about society. Identity
Studies are to evidence-based scholarship as astrology is to astronomy. With
astrology you buy the whole irrational, unsubstantiated package or leave it. So
even if they wanted to moderate their perspective, with no authentic scholarly
tradition to resume, they must, like sharks, keep swimming ahead vigorously or
die.
All Identity Studies arose from the
disastrous philosophy of multiculturalism, which teaches we are a nation of
groups, not individuals. All were forged in a politically activist crucible
wrought from Marxist ideology superimposed on particular group grievances, most
of them by now superannuated in this highly inclusive era. All are soft on other
cultures’ vices, but demonize Western civilization. All are primarily centres of
recruitment for a socially transformative agenda. None offers a diversity of
interpretive opinion in its readings or tolerates students’ dissent from its
party line.
And none is “on the wane.”
You’re skeptical? I urge you to take a
walk through all these pseudo-disciplines in their natural habitats — their
annual conferences, in which the latest “scholarship” is presented to the
hardcore academic faithful — at the side of courageous international journalist
and anti-Islamist whistle-blower, Bruce Bawer, via his latest book, The
Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal
Mind.
As a gay man and a classic liberal,
Bawer cannot be accused of insensitivity to minorities. And as a PhD in English
Literature, he is well equipped to analyze the Ur-texts that nourish the
pedagogical group-victimhood industry. Bawer’s book combines research into the
seminal texts of each program with direct experience auditing industry
spokespeople.
If what passes for intellectual
content at these annual conferences were not so culturally influential —
there is not a public school teacher in the West today whose education is
untainted by Identity Studies rubrics — this book could be recommended for its
entertainment value alone. For no satirist could possibly top the unremitting
comic flow of hypocrisy, ignorance and fatuous narcissism that Bawer describes
in his anthropological sojourn from conference to conference — those programs
mentioned above, plus Fat Studies, Whiteness Studies and Cultural Studies.
Bawer shines a revealing light on
gurus in these fields who run the gamut from odious to merely bizarre. Venerated
queer theorist Judith Butler, for example, supports terrorist groups Hamas and
Hezbollah, and denounced a gay organization in Germany as Islamophobic for
criticizing Muslim violence against gays.
Another example — more amusing than
shameful — comes from “Men’s Studies” (not to be confused with the nascent Male
Studies, a bona fide program), which is “a wholly owned branch of Women’s
Studies,” and premised, without irony, on the operative question, “Why are men
so awful?” Men’s Studies’ founder, Robert Connell, became “Raewyn” in a 2008
sex-change operation. The anomaly of a man trapped in a woman’s body heading up
a domain called Men’s Studies has yet to be discussed by Men’s Studies
“scholars.”
The road to these academic Hells is
paved with bad ideas. If you haven’t time for the whole book, at least read
pages 14 through 38. Here Bawer provides a succinct and cogent primer on the
three toxic texts that form the foundation not only for Identity Studies, but
“for the political mentality that undergirds the humanities today,” namely:
Prison Notebooks, by Antonio Gramsci; Pedagogy of the Oppressed by
Paulo Freire; and The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon. Once you grasp
these ideological Svengalis’ essence and the anti-Western revolutionary agenda
their works promote, all that ails our riven culture is illuminated.
This is an informative, credible and
even shocking book in which all Identity Studies programs are hoisted to
justified ridicule by their own intellectually corrupt petards. Read it and —
when you stop laughing — weep.
National Post, September 5, 2012.
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