Marshall Sutherland

Tue, 02 Aug 2022 08:00:58 -0400

dwatney@hub.farthinghalearms.com

#^Where Are We Heading? Bret Speaks with Peter Boghossian

Bret Speaks with Peter Boghossian on a multitude of subjects surrounding wokeism, Covid, and the endpoint of our present course. Support the sponsors of the ...

podcast

Tue, 02 Aug 2022 20:25:34 -0400 last edited: Tue, 02 Aug 2022 20:26:21 -0400

Alexandre Hannud Abdo

aleabdo@hubzilla.com.br

I like Boghossian and the stuff he's been doing. The other guy seems to lack a bit of reflexivity. I can feel Boghossian is a bit uneasy at how his buddy easily slides, from them seemingly agreeing on a hypothetical, towards positively asserting things. Not to mention his "USA-centric" view of the world, which makes him look like a character of Latin American "gringo jokes".

I also think these discussions are useful but limited as far as they focus only on the intellectual and institutional perspective and miss key elements in the picture of why and how do these secular fanatical movements emerge, and that they're not the first of their kind – take bolchevism for example, or it's capitalist countepart fascism, which is making a comeback. And how the fact that scientific rationality constructs and yields "power by other means", making it an unsurprising target for political goals long before wokism. That conflicts between scientific rationality and secular or religious political movements have always been an integral part of Western history or, more properly, of World history. Not to suggest that they're not dangerous, much to the contrary, given the examples I've just cited.

Related but not to the point, the other day a group of doctoral students in sociology from Brown University was here attending a workshop I was involved in, and I asked one of them about wokism in academia. He could only tell me that he felt this whole thing was blown out of proportion by the media and in social media, and that real life in universities he was aware of was pretty much unaffected by it. Maybe he's biased by his privileged (if the word can still have a meaning) Ivy League experience?