Born in the U.S., Henry A. Giroux ended up at McMaster U. in my hometown of Hamilton, Ontario. Well into his seventies, he apparently still holds his position there as a professor of Scholarship in the Public Interest. History being his primary scholarly focus, he embraced Critical Race Theory early in his career, applying what he calls “critical pedagogy” to the study of that subject. That he has garnered multiple honors and is frequently asked to express his opinions in our local newspaper suggests the extent to which his “critical” perspective is revered throughout academia and the political Left in general. Sadly, it is the cancer that is devouring the very brain of Western Civilization.
I have spoken in several blogs of the superficiality of CRT, equating it to little more than an irrational piece of religious dogma. Research “critical pedagogy” and you will be told it challenges students to examine power structures and patterns of inequality within the status quo of any given society. Neutrality [i.e., objectivity] is apparently discouraged in that it may deter one from identifying the culprits in such “patterns.” Yes, for the Left, when “inequality” occurs, there must be a villain, that distinction always going to those who have prospered, those who have succeeded while others have failed.
Among the quotes attributed to Giroux is the following: “The biggest lie of all is that capitalism is democracy.” It irritates me that I even need to acknowledge that the rich and powerful of any regime might abuse the benefits of their success. It is a simple fact of human nature, one which any sane government must seek to deter. But is capitalism inherently anti-democratic, inherently evil?
The profoundly stupid, Neo-Marxist belief underlying the ethos of “intellectuals” such as Giroux is the assumption that “patterns of inequality” are always the result of oppression rather than of the multitude of differences, intellectual, physical, moral, etc., evident throughout the species. As genuine freedom inevitably actualizes those differences in the socioeconomic realm, the Left’s simplistic denunciation of the gap between the rich and the poor quite literally entails a refusal to accept the givens of life itself. Giroux’s insistence that Capitalism is not an integral aspect of Democracy is rooted in this delusion, his antidote to the evils of Capitalism being the imposition of government power on the Freedom of the Individual. Yes, so irrational is the contemporary Left, that it promotes authoritarian government intervention [i.e., Socialism/Communism] as a vehicle to true human freedom, while denouncing actual human Freedom as a form of tyranny. I have an article before me by Giroux written in the aftermath of the recent American midterm election which is truly insane.
Published on Nov. 15, the article begins by identifying the Republican Party as “the new face of an authoritarian politics that is haunting America.” Had Republicans carried the Senate as well as the House, Giroux suggests, Democracy in America would be dead. Employing the hypocritical tactics typical of the contemporary Left, he cites the loathsome “election denying” conspiracy theories of various Republicans regarding 2020, while failing to mention the multitude of Democrats who made the same charges in various other elections. Declaring opposition to absentee ballots a hateful “voter suppression” tactic directed at Blacks, he fails to mention that even the N.Y. Times had indicted that practice in 2012 as an open invitation to fraud. On and on he goes venting his brazen bias. In attempting to illustrate the racism that pervades the right, he cites the antisemitism of Kanye West as if he in any way represents the views of the multitude of rational, intelligent, “conservative” advocates who represent the mainstream right. As I mentioned in a previous blog, Canada’s staunchly “conservative” Rebel News Network has been accused of antisemitism, a charge which its founder and leader Ezra Levant found utterly ludicrous, declaring whimsically that there could be no more “jewy” a Jew than he!
The Left indiscriminately hurls insults because any rational discussion of the substance of its perspective must inevitably reveal its absurdity. Giroux states succinctly: “Hate-filled rhetoric is no longer underground in the U.S.” He is of course referring to “rhetoric” coming from the Right. That those of his ilk invariably go to the fringes of “conservatism” [i.e., Kanye] to indict everyone of that mind-set, is pathetic. Even more so, however, is their inability to realize that a hateful condescension permeates most everything they say. Hence the never ending assault on populism by academics such as Giroux, the specious “logic” of these arrogant/elitist jerks being that those without university degrees who refuse to succumb to Critical Race Theory are just too ignorant to understand its profound insights.
But just how profound is this perspective that has come to dominate academia? Two individuals compete in several one hundred yard dashes, person A defeating person B by a substantial margin in every event. Has the former oppressed the latter or are his victories a simple result of his obvious athletic superiority? As a metaphor for the success of Western Man’s various colonialist exploits, the above is of course grossly simplistic. But so also is Critical Race Theory which ascribes that success to the unconscionable evil of Western Civilization. The courageous adventurers who set out from the shores of England, Spain, Portugal, etc. hundreds of years ago to explore the world that lay beyond their horizon, were not apparently motivated by that thirst to know and understand which seems to have been a characteristic of Western Man dating back to the ancient Greeks. No, CRT insists, they were simply a bunch of predatory bastards determined to exploit everyone they encountered, their vile agenda rationalized by the delusion that their civilization was infinitely more legitimate, infinitely more conducive to human fulfillment, than those of the various peoples they encountered in Africa, Australia and the Americas.
As I have said repeatedly throughout these blogs, no sane person would deny that Western Colonialists were guilty of some horrid ethical breaches over the last 500 years, nor that our history books have been prone to minimize those breaches. But Giroux’s “critical pedagogy” goes to the other extreme, brazenly denying the variety of ways in which Western European Civilization has progressed, however imperfectly, over the last 2500 years towards a rational, enlightened approach to the human condition which both enhances the well-being of its citizens while maintaining the rights and freedoms of the Individual to an extent unparalleled elsewhere.
Inasmuch as any Civilization which prioritizes the application of Mind and Will to the existential journey is likely to surpass those which do not, “critical pedagogy,” in its eagerness to reduce the historical narrative to mere issues of oppression, quite literally ignores that myriad of cultural attributes responsible for the vast disparities in achievement evident throughout the species. Its informing principle, of course, is Postmodern Relativism, the demonstrably stupid notion that no one set of Ideas or Values is superior to any other. Hence the demonizing of Sir John A. MacDonald for assuming that a culture which produced Socrates 2500 years ago had anything to teach the Indigenous of Canada. Hence the removal of Shakespeare, one of the greatest literary minds in all of history, from the curricula of various universities across North America because he was not sufficiently “woke.” Hence the ludicrous suggestion that Math and Science are taught in our schools not because they are of any Objective value but because they perpetuate “White privilege.”
As Mindless Sentiment seems to have replaced Intellectual Integrity as the driving force of the contemporary Left, it is perhaps not surprising that much of what’s emanating from that sector these days is embarrassingly stupid.