Nick Chimicles

Sep 01, 2024

https://www.sundial-cu.org/p/where-did-the-intellectual-clash/comments

(Jonas Du/Columbia Sundial)

A professor of mine once remarked that if Contemporary Civilization were proposed anew today, it would face instant rejection. It’s an awfully cynical statement. What could make a class so contentious that it would be deemed unacceptable in today’s academic landscape?

At its inception, Contemporary Civilization presented Western history as both an aspiration and a subject for critical engagement. It showcased conflicting ideas from various eras to cultivate nuanced, critical thinking. Much of today’s approach to the West in intellectual life, however, is far more Manichaean. Thinkers are either lauded as forerunners of current social justice ideals (“good”) or vilified as symbols of Western oppression, patriarchy, and exploitation, and subject to relentless critique (“bad”). We must revive Contemporary Civilization’s founding approach by reintegrating a full spectrum of intellectual diversity into the curriculum, embracing the discomfort it may bring to students.

In 1946, Contemporary Civilization was first codified under the title “Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West” and split into two hefty volumes, each exceeding 1,000 pages. These volumes later became a model for general education and the symbols of what former University President Dwight D. Eisenhower called “education for democracy.”

These sourcebooks combined carefully curated excerpts from over 165 different authors of the Western tradition. Meanwhile, my 2022-2023 Contemporary Civilization class engaged with less than half the number of authors, around 72, with many of the more contemporary authors being deliberately non-Western, despite assigning an estimated 3,500 pages from dozens of individually purchased books.

Over the past eighty years (and especially since the sixties), successive Core committees seem to have developed a dangerous predilection for the “delete” key, with the result being an intellectually narrower, more linear conception of Western thought. Contemporary Civilization today hardly seems to be a general model for education; instead, it has become an exception primed for the chopping block.

The original syllabus was ingeniously structured around thematic sections, rather than a necessarily chronological order of individual authors. This approach fostered a discursive environment where contrasting opinions coexisted in discussions and spurred dialogue. Students in 1946 read Martin Luther’s works alongside those of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, a Jesuit counter-reformationist. They too read “The Declaration of the Rights of Man,” but did so alongside Robespierre’s radical writings, which pushed the declaration’s principles to their dangerous extreme, as well as Napoleon’s decrees. Marx and Engels were counterbalanced by Thomas Carlyle, a critic of materialist and utilitarian philosophies, and Andrew Carnegie, a proponent of capitalism and philanthropy.

The current curriculum has largely abandoned the deliberate juxtaposition of conflicting ideas that once characterized Contemporary Civilization. In the examples mentioned, we still read the first author or work, but their intellectual opponents have been excised. The effect is a cherry-picking of history that presents a dangerously lopsided view of Western thought.

By removing the intellectual adversaries of ideas, many of which are currently in vogue, we create a false narrative of moral and ideological continuity from past to present. This approach does not just misrepresent history—it actively hinders students’ ability to think critically about both historical and contemporary debates.

The present day reading list reveals a narrowing ideological focus, particularly in its more modern sections.

In the “Anti-colonialism” module, students read Franz Fanon’s “On Violence” which condemns the violent nature of colonization, but miss out on Niall Ferguson’s Empire which argues the British Empire was a crucial modernizing force globally.

When studying state power, Michel Foucault’s critiques are presented without counterbalancing works such as Francis Fukuyama’s “The Origins of Political Order.” The “Race, Gender, and Sexuality” section features the Combahee River Collective’s “A Black Feminist Statement” but omits contrasting feminist voices like Christina Hoff Sommers’ “Who Stole Feminism?”

Climate discussions include Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call for a planetary perspective but lack representation from environmental economists like Bjorn Lomborg, known for his cost-benefit analysis approach to climate solutions.

What is significant about the syllabus is not that many selections are of a certain ideological ilk, but rather that there is an utter absence of any intellectual counterweight in many of the modules. Such a curriculum is far from approaching the complexities of our modern era with the humility it deserves. It presents a monolithic worldview, unchallenged and unexamined, as if it were the only legitimate lens through which to view contemporary issues. This approach is not education: It’s intellectual cowardice masquerading as enlightenment.

Comparing these selections to a section in the 1946 edition titled “Crisis of the Twentieth Century” reveals a stark contrast in intellectual approach. The 1946 curriculum boldly juxtaposed texts that could not be more ideologically opposed: The Bolshevist Decrees alongside the Weimar Constitution; Stalin’s exposition on the 1936 Soviet Constitution paired with Hitler’s Speech to German Workers; Mussolini’s “Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism” set against the Charter of the United Nations.

In 1946, the world had just emerged from World War II, a cataclysm that shook Western civilization to its very core. Unspeakable horrors had been perpetrated in the name of ideologies represented in those readings. Yet, the Core Committee possessed the moral courage to examine their contemporary crisis from every angle, refusing to reduce complex issues to simplistic dogmas.

Our curriculum fails to present a holistic view of our contemporary crises. We do not examine Hassan Abbasi’s works on the need for Islamic resistance against Western influence, paired with Viktor Orbán’s push to protect Hungarian and European Christian identity. Putin’s “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” is absent, but so is Fukuyama’s “The End of History.” We analyze neither Xi Jinping’s Report to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, a comprehensive manifesto of state-directed economic planning, nor Donald Trump’s tweets on trade tariffs and protectionism. Not engaging with these various branches of thought—even if we think they are detestable—only breeds intellectual pusillanimity, leaving our students armed only with buzzwords and moral panic to face the challenges of their day.

The preface to the 1946 edition outlines a far more noble aspiration for CC students: “Reflection by the student upon society and history supplies both a pattern and a perspective for intelligent control.” If anything is lacking in our times, it is “intelligent control.” Emotion and philistinism runs rampant in our current political discourse, as each participant retreats to their ideological echo chamber. And now, Columbia students, once expected to be bastions of nuanced thinking, are playing an increasingly incendiary role.

This past spring, we witnessed a crop of students who are dangerously myopic, viewing every issue through the reductive lenses of decolonization, climate, race, or gender. Students, armed with righteous indignation but bereft of historical perspective, engaged in actions that betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of the very principles they claimed to champion. This is not the outcome of a curriculum designed to foster “intelligent control,” but rather the predictable symptom of an education system that prioritizes ideological conformity over critical thinking.

The intellectual monoculture that the current Contemporary Civilization curriculum promotes will produce not thoughtful leaders but dogmatic zealots, ill-equipped for our challenging world. The diversity of intellectual opinion that once defined the class must be recultivated. Without it, the ideologies of Columbia’s graduates will become increasingly unstable, a slow-motion sabotage of our capacity for self-reflection and reasoned debate.

This was originally published in the Columbia Sundial at the url:

https://www.sundial-cu.org/p/where-did-the-intellectual-clash

Nick Chimicles

Sep 01, 2024

https://www.sundial-cu.org/p/where-did-the-intellectual-clash/comments

(Jonas Du/Columbia Sundial)

A professor of mine once remarked that if Contemporary Civilization were proposed anew today, it would face instant rejection. It’s an awfully cynical statement. What could make a class so contentious that it would be deemed unacceptable in today’s academic landscape?

At its inception, Contemporary Civilization presented Western history as both an aspiration and a subject for critical engagement. It showcased conflicting ideas from various eras to cultivate nuanced, critical thinking. Much of today’s approach to the West in intellectual life, however, is far more Manichaean. Thinkers are either lauded as forerunners of current social justice ideals (“good”) or vilified as symbols of Western oppression, patriarchy, and exploitation, and subject to relentless critique (“bad”). We must revive Contemporary Civilization’s founding approach by reintegrating a full spectrum of intellectual diversity into the curriculum, embracing the discomfort it may bring to students.

In 1946, Contemporary Civilization was first codified under the title “Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West” and split into two hefty volumes, each exceeding 1,000 pages. These volumes later became a model for general education and the symbols of what former University President Dwight D. Eisenhower called “education for democracy.”

These sourcebooks combined carefully curated excerpts from over 165 different authors of the Western tradition. Meanwhile, my 2022-2023 Contemporary Civilization class engaged with less than half the number of authors, around 72, with many of the more contemporary authors being deliberately non-Western, despite assigning an estimated 3,500 pages from dozens of individually purchased books.

Over the past eighty years (and especially since the sixties), successive Core committees seem to have developed a dangerous predilection for the “delete” key, with the result being an intellectually narrower, more linear conception of Western thought. Contemporary Civilization today hardly seems to be a general model for education; instead, it has become an exception primed for the chopping block.

The original syllabus was ingeniously structured around thematic sections, rather than a necessarily chronological order of individual authors. This approach fostered a discursive environment where contrasting opinions coexisted in discussions and spurred dialogue. Students in 1946 read Martin Luther’s works alongside those of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, a Jesuit counter-reformationist. They too read “The Declaration of the Rights of Man,” but did so alongside Robespierre’s radical writings, which pushed the declaration’s principles to their dangerous extreme, as well as Napoleon’s decrees. Marx and Engels were counterbalanced by Thomas Carlyle, a critic of materialist and utilitarian philosophies, and Andrew Carnegie, a proponent of capitalism and philanthropy.

The current curriculum has largely abandoned the deliberate juxtaposition of conflicting ideas that once characterized Contemporary Civilization. In the examples mentioned, we still read the first author or work, but their intellectual opponents have been excised. The effect is a cherry-picking of history that presents a dangerously lopsided view of Western thought.

By removing the intellectual adversaries of ideas, many of which are currently in vogue, we create a false narrative of moral and ideological continuity from past to present. This approach does not just misrepresent history—it actively hinders students’ ability to think critically about both historical and contemporary debates.

The present day reading list reveals a narrowing ideological focus, particularly in its more modern sections.

In the “Anti-colonialism” module, students read Franz Fanon’s “On Violence” which condemns the violent nature of colonization, but miss out on Niall Ferguson’s Empire which argues the British Empire was a crucial modernizing force globally.

When studying state power, Michel Foucault’s critiques are presented without counterbalancing works such as Francis Fukuyama’s “The Origins of Political Order.” The “Race, Gender, and Sexuality” section features the Combahee River Collective’s “A Black Feminist Statement” but omits contrasting feminist voices like Christina Hoff Sommers’ “Who Stole Feminism?”

Climate discussions include Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call for a planetary perspective but lack representation from environmental economists like Bjorn Lomborg, known for his cost-benefit analysis approach to climate solutions.

What is significant about the syllabus is not that many selections are of a certain ideological ilk, but rather that there is an utter absence of any intellectual counterweight in many of the modules. Such a curriculum is far from approaching the complexities of our modern era with the humility it deserves. It presents a monolithic worldview, unchallenged and unexamined, as if it were the only legitimate lens through which to view contemporary issues. This approach is not education: It’s intellectual cowardice masquerading as enlightenment.

Comparing these selections to a section in the 1946 edition titled “Crisis of the Twentieth Century” reveals a stark contrast in intellectual approach. The 1946 curriculum boldly juxtaposed texts that could not be more ideologically opposed: The Bolshevist Decrees alongside the Weimar Constitution; Stalin’s exposition on the 1936 Soviet Constitution paired with Hitler’s Speech to German Workers; Mussolini’s “Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism” set against the Charter of the United Nations.

In 1946, the world had just emerged from World War II, a cataclysm that shook Western civilization to its very core. Unspeakable horrors had been perpetrated in the name of ideologies represented in those readings. Yet, the Core Committee possessed the moral courage to examine their contemporary crisis from every angle, refusing to reduce complex issues to simplistic dogmas.

Our curriculum fails to present a holistic view of our contemporary crises. We do not examine Hassan Abbasi’s works on the need for Islamic resistance against Western influence, paired with Viktor Orbán’s push to protect Hungarian and European Christian identity. Putin’s “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” is absent, but so is Fukuyama’s “The End of History.” We analyze neither Xi Jinping’s Report to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, a comprehensive manifesto of state-directed economic planning, nor Donald Trump’s tweets on trade tariffs and protectionism. Not engaging with these various branches of thought—even if we think they are detestable—only breeds intellectual pusillanimity, leaving our students armed only with buzzwords and moral panic to face the challenges of their day.

The preface to the 1946 edition outlines a far more noble aspiration for CC students: “Reflection by the student upon society and history supplies both a pattern and a perspective for intelligent control.” If anything is lacking in our times, it is “intelligent control.” Emotion and philistinism runs rampant in our current political discourse, as each participant retreats to their ideological echo chamber. And now, Columbia students, once expected to be bastions of nuanced thinking, are playing an increasingly incendiary role.

This past spring, we witnessed a crop of students who are dangerously myopic, viewing every issue through the reductive lenses of decolonization, climate, race, or gender. Students, armed with righteous indignation but bereft of historical perspective, engaged in actions that betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of the very principles they claimed to champion. This is not the outcome of a curriculum designed to foster “intelligent control,” but rather the predictable symptom of an education system that prioritizes ideological conformity over critical thinking.

The intellectual monoculture that the current Contemporary Civilization curriculum promotes will produce not thoughtful leaders but dogmatic zealots, ill-equipped for our challenging world. The diversity of intellectual opinion that once defined the class must be recultivated. Without it, the ideologies of Columbia’s graduates will become increasingly unstable, a slow-motion sabotage of our capacity for self-reflection and reasoned debate.

This was originally published in the Columbia Sundial at the url:

https://www.sundial-cu.org/p/where-did-the-intellectual-clash