Post #334

That's not to shabby, I think!

Since I left university my political and ideological views have been swinging to the right in certain ways. If there is on thing I wish I'd done differently in those four years (aside from the one thing everybody wishes they'd done more of: studying), it is to have been more openly critical of my professors and peers when my intuitions or persuasions nagged me. Instead I often just went with the flow of things and accepted the overwhelmingly supported set of positions and beliefs held by people walking about campus. No thinking person could make a moral opposition to abortion, no thinking person could possibly support the regime change in Iraq, no thinking person could deny the persecution of women and ethnic minorities in Canada, no thinking person could support the military mission in Afghanistan, or the national Conservative Party, or any republican in the United States, and so on and so on.

Only in a (so-named) Women's Studies class did I begin to release my nagging thoughts and disagreements, because what they were feeding me was distasteful enough even to overthrow my sometimes naive respect for professorial authority (as well as the authority of class agreement with said professor, which unanimously there was with myself as the lone exception). Even then, however, I found myself genuinely embarrassed or afraid to speak my mind, for risk of being smacked with the label of a racist, or homophobe, or sexist, or worse. Sitting in a room full of angry young women, insistent that I accept their radically postmodern views on race and gender and sexuality and political ideology, and ready to be gravely offended if I don't, was an experience not all too unlike the few-and-far-between occasions that I've been to a catholic shurch service.

And as I've grown and had some entirely new experiences since then, and read more and seen more and met more people, I'm beginning to realize just how incredibly hard it is to become a person who thinks freely. The illusion of free thought is seemingly so complete and satisfying because it is a corollary of our necessary free will. Every idea and opinion, even of the most fanatical brainwashed zealot, seems entirely free and chosen and most of all true. In fact, ironically, you might say there is a reverse correlation between the degree of unlikelihood of a belief, and a person's willingness to reconsider it thoughtfully. This surely is a severe deficiency in our species.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I think this post proves that you are not thinking freely. Of course there were people who were not socialist at your university; however, how you acted in the classroom could have kept you from meeting them.

At the university I attend there are many people who adamantly question all of what you've mentioned.
10:02 PM
Max said…
Sure, sure, there are people who take their contrary positions. But, perhaps what I should have said was that there is a pretty clear zeitgeist in the Canadian university these days, and it is very clearly leaning hard to the left, and in ways more controvercial than many students notice. I don't think any serious professor or observer would say that's not true. A UBC professor by the name of Graham Good recently wrote a great book called "Humanism Betrayed," I'd recommend it.

My grade in the mentioned WS class was bad, and I handed in good solid work that didn't follow the ideological line of the professor. My open disagreement cost me dearly. I saw girls getting A's or better for mediocre-at-best work that was really just parroting. By 4th year I knew what an 'A' essay was, and I was getting 'C''s for 'A' essays.

As for the rest, there is no possible way you'd be able to know my experiences, classes, and peers, so with all due respect could you please just keep the snide comments to yourself? There are so many kind-spirited ways to have made the same points you did, but you chose a very ill-spirited way, and that is disappointing.
5:45 PM
Anonymous said…
Sometimes when I am thinking of an idea, I realize that the very things that stemmed it were almost pre-supposed by my culture, my gender, my age and my freedoms, and that any conclusion I thereon derive is more of an example of a culture vaccuum more than originality, or, let's face it, intelligence. I'm free to think whatever I want, but the structures I use to think are somewhat restricting. Just on a linguistical level, we structure our thoughts around language, which is probably far more limiting than we'd dare admit, and then secondly, on /assumptions/. We assume x, y and z and use those assumptions to build our ideas up. God forbid someone tell you y is false. It's funny, but even the people who point fingers at the assumptions are just too, thinking inside the box created for them.

This circular way of looking at things surely beats me down whenever I'm trying to develop myself, and often it gets tiring and very discouraging. I try to reason with myself though, however pointless, that being aware of all these social and psychological mechanisms of course seems overwhelming at first, just like thinking about globalziation did for the first time a few years ago. After practice, the concepts make a lot more sense to you, and you can find a lot more use from knowing them than you would've otherwise.

You can't jump over an obstacle if you didn't know it was there, right.
6:11 PM
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