Suicide Of The Humanities

The American Conservative ^ | February 3, 2021 | Rod Dreher

[C19fan]

This NYT profile of Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a radical Princeton Classics scholar, epitomizes what is wrong with the academic humanities in this radical era, and how dangerous the radicalization is to all of us.

Dan-el Padilla Peralta is a black Dominican Classics scholar at Princeton. He is also the leading figure in a move to tear down the field of Classics, which is the study of Ancient Greece and Rome. He came to this country as a small child when his mother required medical treatment in New York for complications related to the impending birth of his younger brother. After the brother was born, the family decided to stay in the US illegally. Eventually the father went back to the Dominican Republic; the mother and the children remained in the US, trying to regularize their immigration status.

[C19fan]

One of the few positive things about the age we live in is the massive opportunity for self-learning. Who needs these high tower types destroying their fields of study. One can access the source material directly, there are YouTube channels and podcasts devoted to the Greeks and Romans.

[Little Ray]

Humanities used to be part of what made us cultured and civilized. Now they are an existential threat to both culture and civilization.

[Verginius Rufus]

I attended a conference several years ago at Princeton and spoke briefly with Padilla. He seemed pleasant enough in the conversation. That was before I was familiar with his radical agenda.

[aspasia]

So far. Don’t expect free access forever.

[aspasia]

OK, but where is this ideal of studying something through the lens of “for its own sake.” Who believes that anymore? And Dreher just assumes we know what that means. It may be content neutral, but we aren’t. We, as human beings, are political and we intend to go somewhere.

[pierrem15]

I think what bothers them the most is that for the ancient Mediterranean cultures, it was manifest that slavery was the foundation of a civilization that could achieve what was more perfect and more beautiful than one without slavery. The fact that it was unequal was meaningless in comparison.

The "brilliant simplicity" of the Greeks was often that, which meant they just sought was best, regardless of how brutal the means.

[nickcarraway]

Has anyone ever told them social justice and leftists concepts originated in the West, and by white people? They are using a white European concept, to supposedly defeat a supposed white Western concept. They are not replacing it with concepts that originated in Africa or Asia.

[ifinnegan]

It’s ironic. The belief that there is white supremacy is itself white supremacy.

[ifinnegan]

It’s like a business deciding to no longer sell what it was founded to sell.

People would go to other schools but that’s why they want socialism, so there are no consequences for selling a product no one wants and no competition.

[chajin]

Professing to be wise, they have became fools.

[T.B. Yoits]

...massive opportunity for self-learning.

Absolutely, and one of the first things your learn is why such things need to be taken out of the hands of government. You quickly realize why government is so opposed to critical thinking but why they keep inserting themselves into individual's learning path.

For individuals, it's important that they recognize don't need government (nor government oversight television) but instead need friends who'll help guide them to the right classics. They also need to share what they've learned with others, government classrooms be damned.

Government education is where you go to solidify stupidity.

[Knocker]

An education without a firm grounding in classical civilizations is necessarily incomplete. You don’t need to develop fluency in the languages (but it does put you into a select class) to gain the timeless insights classics teaches. There is no substitute. One such insight is that slavery has been part of the human condition as far back in antiquity as we can discern affecting all races and classes of people and that attempting to seek redress after the passage of generations is folly. No one alive has been a slave or owned a slave, consequently no one is obligated to pay or is entitled to receive compensation.
Cranks in academic life are well known to manufacture controversy for a variety of reasons, some unfortunately motivated by personal issues rather than professional disagreements. The individual in the post represents the former.

[aspasia]

I didn’t know that slavery was the issue from the position Dreher was taking.

[Bookshelf]

Published by the Students of Johns Hopkins since 1896
February 3, 2021
“Undocumented professor recounts hardships”
By PETER JI | March 30, 2017
Sick faggot.

[jmacusa]

Another immigrant mutt with America hatred and an attitude problem.