I started reading a book called The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students by Allan Bloom. I bought it in part because I was blown away by the preface. I am still reading the introduction and I find an interesting idea or thought on virtually every page. The following is one such nugget from a seemingly thoughtful and wise man of american academia. I hope to someday be as insightful as this author appears to be so far. Since I will be teaching at COCC in the fall I find his thoughts particularly interesting.
“Only in the Western nations, i.e., those influenced by Greek philosophy, is there some willingness to doubt the identification of the good with one’s own way. One should conclude from the study of non-Western cultures that not only to prefer one’s own way but to believe it best, superior to all others, is primary and even natural–exactly the opposite of what is intended by requiring students to study these cultures.
Consistency would seem to require professors of openness to respect the ethnocentrism or closedness they find everywhere else.
However, in attacking ethnocentrism, what they actually do is to assert unawares the superiority of their scientific understanding and the inferiority of the other cultures which do not recognize it as the same time that they reject all such claims to superiority. They both affirm and deny the goodness of their science. They face a problem akin to that faced by Pascal in the conflict between reason and revelation, without the intellectual intransigence that forced him to abandon science in favor of faith.”
-Bloom, Allan (The Closing of the American Mind p. 36-37)