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Notes -
Berkley Law School's Jewish free zones is causing some stir. The student group also wants to ban Zionist speakers. I wonder how this will sit with progressive Jews, who themselves are quite often found heading pro-Palestine activism in the US. Now these bans are trotted out by progressives, not alt-righters. Accusations of anti-semitism likely won't find any purchase in the vogue that's disillusioned with Israel. And I'm not seeing any sign of American Jews tilting rightward anytime soon.
While I find "Jew free zones" to be exceedingly disingenuous, I do think people who rush to point out that they didn't ban Jews, just "Jews who support Israel" to be parsing finely in a way that doesn't apply in other circumstances.
Israel/Jews have always been a fault line among progressives. "Opposing Israel is antisemitic" is a motte-bailey used by both sides. I've seen lots of Zionists claim it's a bailey: "of course you can" in theory, oppose (some of) Israel's policies without being antisemitic. And yet there is no actual opposition to any actual Israeli action that they will not claim is motivated by antisemitism. On the flip side, a lot of leftists will claim "Oh, you're just labeling any disagreement with Israel as antisemitism" when a lot of opposition to Israel (especially on the left) is in fact motivated by antisemitism.
This seems very familiar to the left now. It’s not that GOP is extremists it’s maga (though all gop are basically maga). It’s not that Catholics are bad just those who actually are against abortion. As long as your identity isn’t real and it’s just superficial then your not actually a witch we can burn.
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Allan Bloom said that true open-mindedness is when one both (a) is willing to view different cultures as possible alternatives and (b) recognises that cultures are not, deep down, all the same.
People are familiar with the closed-mindedness that happens when people fail at (a) - the classic dogmatist who refuses to read about other religions or who dismisses other civilizations as savages. Yet there is also a closed-mindedness that comes from (b) - I have even known well-read professors who have been very reluctant to accept that Islamic or Confucian ethics meaningfully differs from contemporary left-wing liberal woke ethics in any respects. As Bloom pointed out, (b) is often driven by the combination of relativism and multiculturalism: a way of "resolving" moral conflicts in a multicultural society by denying their existence.
When I have taught philosophy and world religions, I have often found that the best students have strong beliefs/disbeliefs (including fundamentalist Christians or Catholics, and also New Atheist types) combined with a courage to think seriously about alternatives. So, while they are not Muslims or Ancient Greeks, they are willing to face a radically different culture, take seriously the possibility of adopting ideas from it, and thus they are motivated to apply reason to the intellectual problems that result, e.g. "How to live? What do I know? What can I know?" The students who start with a bland relativism and multiculturalism rarely developed a taste for such serious thinking.
Is this meant to be "fundamentalist (Christians or Catholics)" or "(fundamentalist Christians) or (Catholics)"?
The first. Though, given how intellectualist fundamentalist Catholics tend to be, it's perhaps less surprising when they show an aptitude for thinking seriously about philosophical or religious issues.
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This was my biggest problem with Scott's 'archipelago,' really. At first, it sounds pretty wonderful to me - a free and pluralistic place where all kinds of people and cultures can pursue their own ways in peace, which is differentiated from "the whole world we now live in" through this central authority which keeps them from trying to conquer or exterminate each other-
-But it doesn't just do that: it also exists to save the people from themselves. To make sure that is properly exposed to the Objective Perspective and hasn't just been Indoctrinated into living in their own culture, so that every child can choose for themselves how and where they want to live, rather than being kept in a place that's not really best for them.
And that just destroys the whole thing. That's not an archipelago of many cultures and many values: that is one culture doing a lot of pretending and play-acting. You can profess anything you want, so long as you don't actually believe it. You can say anything you want, so long as you don't actually mean it. The whole benefit of such an archipelago - that even if some great evil is choking out all the world, you can make for yourself some little island of refuge from it - is gone, provided you aren't limitlessly confident in the incorruptibility of the central authority. And if you're limitlessly confident in the incorruptibility of any institution, what reason (beyond matters of taste and cosmetics) do you have for bothering with this 'archipelago' thing at all?
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Add it here. Maybe someone will have the link.
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