All Thoughts Being Equal

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician and philanthropist Priscilla Chan, pledged to donate 99% of their wealth (over their lifetimes) to a philanthropic LLC they're setting up, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. There was some rather vitriolic criticism of this endeavor, which seems both somewhat predictable-in-hindsight but also rather strange at first blush. Do the criticisms have merit? What about the "debunking"? As you might expect, I think there's something missing here. I. As philosopher and Effective Altruism guru William McAskill (whose book Doing Good Better I read and reviewed ) noted : “Couple decides to give majority of their earnings to charity” is hardly a headline that you’d expect people to take umbrage at. But when you replace “couple” with “Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan,” suddenly everyone goes crazy. Even though the majority of commentators have been positive, a significant proportion of people have reacted with a...

I. Kayla at Crows Against Murder has a great post up about September—that calendrical signifier of Back To School which, for those of us in the current "quarter-life" cohort, is still about two-thirds of our entire lives, and almost the entirety of our remembered lives—and the prolonged existential crisis that is "adult life": But the milestones from my youth are no longer relevant.  I don’t have a promise of seeing old classmates, or meeting new ones.  I won’t develop new relationships with teachers or mentors.  Nobody will curate information for me to consume.  There will not be a semester, nor will there be the accompanying guaranteed measurable accomplishment that I can feel proud of by the time Winter Break comes around.  There isn’t even such thing as “Winter Break” anymore. Most disorientingly, I’m no longer building towards a discrete point at which I will have “graduated” from my current world to another one that is somehow more rea...

This post is a follow-up to Diagnosis of an overwhelming fear, pt. 2 , and a partial-follow up to Rhetorical imperialism I. The new hotness in this micro-epoch of the Age of Outrage is at Vox, where a pseudonymous professor touts his liberality but claims that his liberal students are terrifying . "I'm a liberal college professor," cries the headline, "and my liberal students terrify me": I'm a professor at a midsize state school. I have been teaching college classes for nine years now. I have won (minor) teaching awards, studied pedagogy extensively, and almost always score highly on my student evaluations. I am not a world-class teacher by any means, but I am conscientious; I attempt to put teaching ahead of research, and I take a healthy emotional stake in the well-being and growth of my students. Things have changed since I started teaching. The vibe is different. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes s...

In my previous post I made (quite spontaneously) a connection between cultural literacy as promoted by E. D. Hirsch and white privilege as described by Peggy McIntosh : One interesting thing about McIntosh's analogy is that some of the provisions in the "invisible knapsack"—namely the "maps, passports, codebooks, visas,"—are what you might expect a tourist to have. A traveler, who wants to be able to accurately and easily move around. E. D. Hirsch, in his Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know , describes cultural literacy in exactly these same terms. I wonder how much of what social justice activists and Tumblrites think of as "white privilege" isn't just evidence of a vast and still growing rift between class-cultures. However, gluing the fragmented cultures back together might smack of "cultural appropriation." That will be a tough sell. Indeed, it was a tough sell—too tough, since after a brief resurgen...

So you might remember my earlier post contra to Dr. Stephen Prothero's Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—And Doesn't. In that post, I raised some objections to Prothero's claim that "religion matters," including that it's a case of special pleading, and that a lot of the time, religion is somewhat incidental to the salient points of history. Well, on 15 November I attended a lecture here at Western by Dr. Prothero, mostly about his newest book, God Is Not One . In that book, he examines the world's eight greatest religions—in mostly-descending order, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Yoruba, Confucianism, Judaism, and Taoism—and especially their differences. In his lecture he explained that, far from being "eight roads up the same mountain" as some people claim, there are actually different mountains entirely. They ask and attempt to answer different "Big Questions." For example, Christianity asks "ho...

Disclaimer: This post may not sit well with you, as it deals with a topic that some people find sensitive and/or personal. While my response to that is not quite "Deal with it," you have been warned. I'm not going to pull any punches. Every year, Western Washington University selects a book for its "Western Reads" program, which is supposed to "promote intellectual engagement, community, and conversation" according to the website. The other time I actually read one of these selections, I definitely had a conversation... but it was a somewhat frustrated, somewhat snarky conversation with a friend about the poor quality of the writing. That was the 2008-2009 school year, however, and this is now. The 2011-2012 Western Reads selection is Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—And Doesn't , by Dr. Stephen Prothero, and it's an entirely different book bag of worms. (Incidentally, the terribly-written book I didn't finish readin...