[aruanan]

If identity didn't matter, the Afro-Centrists wouldn't be trying to rip off other cultures to bolster their own sense of inadequacy. Another good treatment of this subject is found in Higher Superstition, The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, pp. 203-214. This is an excellent book, especially because the authors bend over backwards to avoid supporting the thesis of such people as Newt Gingrich that academia is dominated by whacked-out leftists. Still, they say, "

"When we use the phrase academic left we do not refer merely to academics with left-wing political views. There are countless academics who do excellent and penetrating work, in appropriate fields, from a left-wing viewpoint. There are countless left-wing scientists--although we are stodgy enough to insist that there is no such thing as left-wing science. We are using academic left to dsignate those people whose doctrinal idiosyncracies sustain the misreadings of science, its methods, and its conceptual foundations that have generated what nowadays passes for a politically progressive critique of it." p 9

"We are treading now on the slippery territory of the "political correctness" debate; and we face the fact that this book will be read as yet another salvo in that dreary war. If we are to be candid, we must admit that nothing we offer will comfort those who describe the PC furor as a vicious invention of the political right."p 8

"What we have to say is narrowly concerned with science and with misconceived attacks on science that grow out of a doctrinaire political position. The left has to take the blame, because that's where most (but certainly not all) of the silliness is coming from on this issue, at this time, although there has been an abundance of it in the past from the other side. The campus right has had the good tactical sense to leave the matter alone, except to comment on the foibles of the left. It may well be that there are dead-of-night confabulations betweeen leading anti-PC activists and, let us say, the Institute for Creation Research. If so, these have yet to come to light. In any case, we are not stalking-horses for social conservatism. If the academic left were to choose to abandon the most extravagant of its philosophical lucubrations, particularly those that lead to misguided assaults on natural science, the occasion for books like this one would disappear." p 9

[aristeides]

Martin Bernal once basically confessed to me over lunch that he didn't care whether what he was writing was true or not.

[Ciexyz]

I wonder if my alma mater Penn State is teaching these afrocentrist distortions.

When I was up there in Happy Valley, we had to take two courses in non-Western history, literature, religion or art history. I enjoyed the course in ancient Middle Eastern art. The civilizations of that period were magnificent, and there's no need to bolster their significance by suggesting that the Greeks stole their culture instead of developing their own.