Bu…ye…gija

This is the maiden edition of what I hope will be a staple of the PIS blog, ‘Bu…ye…gija’, where all the half-formed thoughts that never quite collected in my head before two o’clock, all the proposals and dismissals and rebuttals I had on the tip of my tongue when the discussion swung in another direction, are instead imposed on the PIS community via the blogosphere.

‘…Bu…’: The clash of civilisations

To refresh our memories, Samuel Huntington claimed in 1994 that, post-Cold War, the world would be reconfigured with ‘fault lines’ between cultures replacing political and ideological boundaries as the sources of crisis and bloodshed. He claimed globalisation would lead to greater conflict, not less, because greater proximity means greater friction. He claimed Western civilisation is in decline and under threat, and that consequentially, the West ought to focus on enhancing its cohesion and protecting its own interests, restraining its universalist pretensions, which are immoral and dangerous, not interfering with other civilisations.

The Clash of Civilisations seems to come up in every second Arts subject and most lecturers are contemptuous of it. That attitude seems to me pretty valid. That’s not to say that Huntington doesn’t make any good points or truthful observations. Here are some:
– That China and South-East Asia (‘Confucian civilisation’) are an emerging economic and most likely political center and that their system will likely differ to some extent from purely Western liberal democracy, Fukuyama-style.
– That people are starting to think of themselves as civilisations: we can see that trend before the end of the Cold War, in the EU, the Pan-Arab movement, the Pan-African movement.
– That after the Cold War ethnic nationalism has made a significant return.
– That there are some fundamental antagonisms between some different world groupings or ‘civilisations’. There may well be something irreconcilable between the West in its current state and substantial parts of the Arab world in their current state. When one ‘civilisation’ has a post-Enlightenment worldview times 200 years, and the other civilisation has a pre Enlightenment worldview times about 200 years, amounting to one side practicing the rule of law and the other carrying out stonings of adulterers on Friday nights, it’s plain wrong to write off the language of ‘clash of civilisations’.

Huntington’s problem is simply that he got carried away. He does make some decent general points about the state of the world. He started out with a sound sensible idea, but sensationalism and fame got the better of him and led him to contort it and expand it into a spectacular all-encompassing Nostradamusesque prognosis of the future. It is predominately extremely simplistic stuff. Dividing the world up into seven civilisations is an extremely tidy way to describe the world, and it shows e.g. according to Huntington, Greece, the cradle of Western civilisation, is not considered part of the West. Huntington claims there are four torn countries. Surely every country is torn in a hundred different ways in terms of its imagined national identity. Surely every country within a civilisation is not exactly the same. As was said in the meeting, there are huge rifts within civilisations that are not going to disappear in a hurry.

‘…ye…’ Cindy Sheehan

I believe it’s a highly positive development that Americans are beginning to criticise Bush over the Iraq war. The administration has evaded accountability both over justification for the war itself, and its inept aftermath. For the good of the country that needs to change, and a critical public discussion needs to permeate the cognitive insulation and groupthink of the Bush White House and force a rethink of strategy.

Precisely because of this, Cindy Sheehan makes me a tad uneasy, because the debate she has prompted seems to not be about these things. It instead seems to be largely emotive. The Iraq war was wrong because Cindy Sheehan’s son died. The Iraq war is wrong purely because it is costing American lives. Maureen Dowd contributed to this the other day in the Age (reprinted from the New York Times) claiming that a bereaved parent’s moral authority was ‘absolute’. Let’s calm down and think about that. Nobody’s moral authority is ever ‘absolute’. And the ‘authority’ of certain citizens who comment on an issue often has to be taken with a substantial grain of salt e.g. does anyone argue that the family of a crime victim has ‘absolute’ authority when it comes to commentary on the criminal justice system? Rather, it’s recognised that they’re in no position to make a judgement on the nuances of policy. Their view is distorted. The same applies to the families of war dead.

I sympathise with Cindy Sheehan’s situation. I admire her courage. She is entitled to her opinion that all US troops should be immediately withdrawn. But she is in no position to put forward ideas on where America should go with regards to Iraq. If someone argues that invading Iraq was counterproductive foreign policy, incompetently implemented, they deserve all the media attention they can stomach. But the Cindy Sheehan movement seems to be simply saying that eighteen hundred deaths makes Iraq wrong. Not the type of Iraq debate America needs.

‘…gija…’ Teachers, left-wing bias and the fostering of scepticism in students

An interesting batch of education-related issues were discussed at Wednesday’s meeting: Peter Costello’s comments on anti-American left wing bias among teachers, the federal Government’s ideas on testing performance in government schools, Brendan Nelson’s ideas on values teaching etc. At the PIS meeting this all fused into a debate about how school-kids are taught, and what is important for them to learn.

The debate on classroom bias is the same as media bias. Does classroom bias exist? Of course it does. It’s unavoidable. And, like media bias, it’s not undesirable. All you have to ensure is that there is a diversity of different biases in a school. This means encouraging engaged, interested students. One of the best ways of encouraging engaged, interested students is to have engaged, interested teachers – left-wing or otherwise – who provoke them to think and debate issues. A majority of my school-teachers were left-leaning. Sometimes I fought with them, sometimes I agreed with them. But I came out of Year 12 engaged and interested. Do you know how I can prove that? When I got to uni, I was taught about constructivism and deconstructivism and postmodernism and all the allegedly scepticism-producing stuff we mentioned in Alice Hoy, and I sat and I listened, and after the lecture I emerged into the sunlight, and I said to myself, ‘what a heap of hooky shit’, and I went to a PIS meeting instead.