The Laurier Society for Open Inquiry was founded by one
Lindsay Shepherd, after the fiasco at Wilfred Laurier University in January 2018,
wherein she was brought before the diversity inquisition (which, unlike its Spanish
counterpart, we all very much expect these days) for showing a video of U of T prof
Jordan Peterson expressing his controversial views on gender pronoun usage. The LSOI has since grown
to include 180 academics, students and community supporters, most from Wilfred Laurier University (WLU) and the
University of Waterloo, where the LSOI is based and most active.
The LSOI has fought an uphill battle with both of these
educational institutions, who have shown considerable covert sympathy to antifa
and other regressive left groups in their ongoing drive to censor controversial
speakers and remake our intellectual culture along Soviet and Maoist lines. Besides giving Shepherd herself the third degree - and not the kind these institutions should be known for, other events were cancelled due to the age old tactic of fire alarmpulling, tacitly supported by Canadian university administrations despite the
misuse of fire alarms being highly illegal, as well as by suspiciously elevated “security and police costs” which may be passed on to the speakers themselves
or the groups hosting their events on college campuses, according to a recent
policy revision at Waterloo University.
The LSOI has invited one Dr. Frances Widdowson, Associate
Professor in the Department of Economics, Justice, and Policy Studies at Mount
Royal University – my old alma mater - to present a public lecture at WLU
entitled "Does University Indigenization Threaten Open Inquiry?" on
May 9. The LSOI has launched a go fund me campaign to raise funds
assessed to the group for additional security needs for this event.
And not without reason. Two antifa like groups: Kitchener-Waterloo Against Fascism and the Grand River IWW Defense Committee have announced
their intent to protest the group in an event called "Racists Aren't Welcome Here" on the grounds that Lindsay Shepherd and
Widdowson are racists, right wingers and white supremacist sympathizers. An odd
action, given that Widdowson has described her politics as “Marxist-Socialist.” The event advises participants to wear masks. We can safely guess what that means.
Ah, Antifa. If it weren’t for you, we’d still not know for
sure that the far left can be every bit as hysterical and stupid as the “Obama
was a communist” tricorn hat and pointed hood crowd. They and the neo-Nazis
really do deserve each other.
And no, antifa aren’t the alternative left. They’re the
mainstream regressive left, just a more extreme version of it. They're the militant wing of the intersectional feminist movement and don't really care about worker's rights or economic inequality all that much, despite the Marxist and syndicalist IWW facades. They're all about identity politics, which is actually closer to fascism than anything. That these groups are tacitly (and openly) supported by media, academia and other power structures in our society suggests that they're far cozier with the elites and real systems of power in our society than their pantomimes of resistance and protest would have us believe.
This is the alternative left.
These days, leftists who support free speech, leftists like us, are the alternative, not the main
stream.
In case you’re wondering, “indigenization” is yet another fad/buzzword
to emerge from the wacky world of academic intersectional social justice
ideology. It’s not altogether different from “decolonization” which has led to
such wonderful results – as indicated by rampaging mobs, vandalized buildings
and intimidated students and faculty - in places ranging from South Africa to numerous
US colleges such as Evergreen or UC Berkeley. Or the feminist “transformation of the academy” of
the 1980s and 1990s, which ushered in so much of this propensity towards
ideology masquerading as scholarship in the first place.
The academic veneer of such programs as “indigenization”
includes, in the words of the abstract to Widdowson’s talk:
… a number of components, including proposals to increase the number of courses on indigenous subjects, the symbolic recognition of indigenous cultures, and incentives for promoting and incorporating indigenous “knowledge systems.”
This should all sound familiar to anyone who was on hand to watch Occupy Wall Street completely implode. Widdowson worries, again according to the abstract:
While some of these developments promise to enhance the university environment, others are a threat to the open and honest exchange of ideas. This is because some forms of symbolic recognition attempt to compel faculty and students to embrace a particular political and philosophical perspective, and dictates that “Indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing” be “respected and valued” discourage critical thinking.
You might be wondering: How specifically does examining
things from an indigenous perspective discourage critical thinking? If
anything, shouldn't it add to avenues by which one can approach an issue, thereby
opening up different opportunities for students in considering said issue and
encouraging them to think critically; as opposed to just following common "colonial" wisdom exclusively?
Of course, there's nothing wrong with examining
"indigenous perspectives" as such, although, the question of who
speaks for indigenous people as a whole stands out in my mind. One wonders if antifa groups or postmodernist academic leftists are the most authentic answers to this question. But there’s no
inherent harm in the study of such ideas any more than there’s
inherent harm in the study of feminist theory or critical race theory. Multiple
perspective are preferable to a single perspective, after all. Were we to thoroughly demonize and try to silence these points of view, we would become the very thing we're trying to fight.
However, Widdowson’s abstract explains further:
It is expected, in fact, that “Indigenous knowledge”, “research traditions”, and “new epistemologies” be welcomed uncritically, and indigenization advocates try to intimidate intellectual challengers with accusations of “racism” and “colonialism.” There are even arguments that the refutation of any indigenous idea constitutes “epistemological racism” or, more astonishingly, “epistemicide”. This pressure has a negative impact on open inquiry; it creates an emotional “no-go zone” that is hostile to examining indigenous-non-indigenous relations rationally. While this will increase the power of indigenization advocates and the resources made available to them, it will not improve indigenous education. Educational achievement can only be improved if people are better able to understand the world around them, and this is not facilitated by many indigenization initiatives.
This is a familiar pattern now. The problem, as we've seen time and again, is the high
barrier of intellectual protectionism constructed around standpoint and
conflict theory based ideologies. Rooted, of course, in the rationalization
that those deemed historically marginalized require their own safe spaces - the true origin of this now so rightly ill reputed concept, to develop their own consciousness free of meddling from the
dominant social groups. Capitulating to this line of thought was the original
sin of academia that has led to the proliferation of the dogmatic regressive
leftism of our time.
We know by now that this is intellectually catastrophic – the
results of protecting any school of thought from scrutiny or criticism always end
up being dogmatic, ideological echo chambers. Without external checks, belief
systems have a well documented tendency to become extremist, excessive and intellectually
lazy. This is why the SJWs resort to name calling and censorship, as opposed to
debate, when faced with ideological opposition.
There's nothing indigenous in my mind about the construction
of a manichean view that romanticizes so called indigenous knowledge while
viewing “white” or “western” ways of knowing; logic, reason, enlightenment etc.
as being innately oppressive and discriminatory. This is rooted in German
critical theory and French poststructuralism. Germany and France were not
indigenous first nations in North America, last time I checked.
Plus, while I can't attest to how effective "Indigenous knowledge”, “research traditions”, and “new epistemologies” would actually be since such concepts tend to be vaguely defined, I've always felt that this view that science, logic
and empiricism were somehow inherently "white" was actually the most
insidious form of white supremacy going. It implies that in order to remain
culturally authentic, non European cultures should stick to premodern ways of
thinking and leave this science stuff to us white guys, who are the only group expected to disdain its own premodern traditions in favor of enlightenment rationality. If I wanted to actually ensure
the continuation of Eurocentric colonialism, that's precisely how I'd do it in
this day and age. A problem, however, is that the predictably unequal outcomes you'd get from "indigenous" vs "white" methods of research and scholarship would be laid entirely at the feet of "institutional racism", thus fueling another round of dogmatic intersectional activism.
None of this precludes looking honestly at how the European
conquest and settlement of the Americas proceeded, or at how evils that were
visited upon the natives were rationalized. Nor should indigenous traditions be shunted aside entirely. They should be studied and understood honestly. An honest look at historical evils
is not the same the demonization of the present day descendants of the
perpetrators of those evils, and refusing to study such matters for fear of
causing offense, usually to more conservative types, is capitulation to a
political correctness of another sort, and not of a better sort than that which equates any
criticism of social justice ideologies with oppression and racism themselves.
Our academic institutions must censor no one, and they must shelter no one's views from reasoned critical examination. Peaceful protest must be allowed. The heckler's veto must not be. The stakes are high. If free speech and free inquiry perish in our institutions of learning and research, than they are doomed in the broader society and in our civilization as a whole.
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