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12/20/2002 12:55:00 AM | Timothy Blog Recognition As for the Dartmouth Observer blog extending us 'recognition' and asking for it in return, I ask: why do such 'independent' thinkers need recognition? (Is Stevenson talking about 'recognition' like the kind that minority groups ask for under the rubric of multiculturalism he so dislikes?) Sure, there are now at least 3 blogs with people from Dartmouth posting. I'll recognize that. If he's asking for anything more that that, he'll have to be specific. (Before we exchange ambassadors, can we toss him a link, Jared?) But Stevenson's recent comments (mentioned below) are a continuation of incoherent and confusing thought on Stevenson's part. When I read Stevenson's observer posts (at least those about political theory) I got really frustrated as he kept saying things like 'race is a social construction, and governmental policy should never involve taking into account such unreal things.' He wouldn't say, despite repeated questioning over a month or two, whether he favored getting rid of things like enforcing civil rights laws and Indian reservations, which obviously involves using the 'social construction' that is race in governmental policy. Perhaps you can agree with the conclusion that the government should be largely race-blind, but I don't see how one agrees with the flawed logic Stevenson uses to go from his premises to his absolutist stance of race-blindness. Stevenson insists on using terms like 'social construction', but does not seem to grasp the fact that, at least SOMETIMES, it is others who are the ones who socially construct our identity. Whether you agree with Stevenson's opinion, he has an opinion, not a philosophy (or at least not a philosophy that isn't laughable). When asked if Serbian nationalism is less real to its victims because it is socially constructed, Stevenson said that yes, he did believe that Bosnians in the Yugoslavia could 'transcend' their identity. The final straw for me came with this Observer post, when Stevenson finally stopped using vaguely 'postmodern' and 'constructivist' academic jargon to argue government should never base policy on race, only to use John Rawls' liberal terms!! Stevenson said something like 'my philosophy is that race is a comprehensive doctrine'. I didn't really feel like arguing with him again by going over again how he had misused Rawls' terms. (In brief: race itself is not a comprehensive doctrine, through culture and religion could be. And the veil of ignorance does not forbid taking into account the existence of comprehensive doctrines, it just does not allow those in the original position to have knowledge of their particular comprehensive doctrines. Besides, unless Stevenson somehow claims the principles of justice mean that those in the original position would all agree to be race-blind (how? Rawls didn't), race-blindness would not be a principle of justice. Once the veil of ignorance was lifted, it would be morally permissible to take race into account when formulating public policy. There is also a long tradition of criticizing the early Rawls on the issue of comprehensive doctrines, including by none other than... Rawls! ) If he wrote that in a paper, a political theory professor grading it would scribble '???' in the margins and rightly so. A professor once told me the way to deal with the right is not to give them recognition. That has not been my philosophy. As those of you who know me know, I was fully engaged with conservatives on campus. I roomed with an editor of The Dartmouth Review, and I'm spending New Year's with some particularly morally blind posters on dartlog.net. (Some of my best friends are conservatives! ...yet I don't fail to publically critiize them in print.) But what recognition should we give Stevenson and his observer? You don't have to completely agree with Rawls of course, to use his terms, but to those with a bit of knowledge, Stevenson seems to be just spouting nonsense. I'll tell you what I won't recognize Stevenson as; a particularly special or independent thinker. I know Stevenson only by his comments on the observer. From them, he has not shown himself to be an intellectual, but full of pretention. Perhaps if I knew him personally I would not think the same way. But I don't see anything particularly original or 'special' in Stevenson's posts, certainly nothing to base an entire 'independent' way of thinking on. So I have to say that his self-applied label of 'independent' is just that: a label, and a marketing move at best. perma link |
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