Decolonizing the Curriculum and Viewpoint Diversity

But then I look at the stereotyped Non-Western philosophy list and I can't help but notice another thing - it's a rejection of things that contemporary heirs to the Romantic tradition hate. Fair enough, they are trying to draw out what seems to them best in the texts they are interpreting, and its my linguistic inadequacies which introduced the filter. But still, in the end, this focus, that this seems like the most salient positive achievement of the school or group under study - it still seems to me to be a reflection of disputes in contemporary mainstream Western philosophy.  (Or at least recent contemporary, at this point I think they are somewhat caricaturing their opponents.) I am not fully persuaded the focus reflects the priority or agenda of those either being studied or whose worldview is being represented,  rather than the schedule of priorities of those in contemporary academia. It just seems like too much of a coincidence.--Liam Kofi Bright (April 2019) On Eurocentrism

There are, roughly, two ways in which one can decolonize one’s bread and butter introductory, historical survey of political philosophy/theory curriculum. One is to give direct voice to those who challenge the universal authority of Eurocentric political ideas (hereafter: direct voice); another is to include traditions of thought that are not centered on, and often pre-date, European modernity (hereafter: comparative).* Both approaches have advantages, and both create, and are a consequence of, complex selection effects.

Before I get to to that, I want to get there by reflecting a bit on Bright's post (which, by his standards, got little attention in the blogosphere when it first apepared; but see Ethan Mills). Bright is focused on works that typically are not studied by English speaking philosophy students. The features of these works he is discussing can be categorized, roughly, as belonging in the philosophy of mind/metaphysics/epistemology areas. But they have a counterpart in features familiar to political theory. So, amidst a diversity of style and outlook, here are two additional stereotypical features one is likely to find. First, that the universal authority of Eurocentrentic reason is rejected in terms of parochial, local values (embodied in traditions ). Second, despite the apparent rejection of universal claims, they all end up saying pretty much the same thing: capitalism and imperialism are bad, egalitarian customs and institutions that celebrate communal life of mutual care, which reflect an authentic possibility, are good. What's indeed striking about the list -- and I only noticed it after reading Bright -- is that these reflect the program of romanticism, or at least the part influenced by the popular version of Rousseau. David Graeber and David Wengrow have been (recall) astute on this. 

So, Bright speculates that this may be due to a selection effect. To put his insight in catchy terms, there is a dominant Enlightenment narrative and the 'non-Western' readings are found to play out a dialectic familiar to European thought in which the 'non-Western' readings play a role that is despite their more egalitarian tendencies, the functional equivalent of Romanticism and its legacy in it. And, indeed, the 'non-Western'+ readings helped shape Romanticism (see also Graeber&Wengrow), and were subsequently shaped by it. I think Fanon is aware of this dynamic and pushes back against it, but about that some other time. One of the clear effects of this dialectic is to flatten the 'non-Western' landscape and efface the heterogeneity within the 'Western' traditions.

Now, if this were a polemical post, or a journal article, I would provide lots of examples. And the skeptical reader has every right to suspect I am stereotyping. But, instead, I articulate the risks of the first strategy (which also explains the selection effect Bright worries about); in shaping the curriculum -- here's a familiar route: Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Madison, Hegel, Mill,  -- it is tempting to correct their racism and imperialism by giving direct voice to those who challenge the universal authority of Eurocentric political ideas. Here the function of direct voice is to oppose. And one can even hope that the opposition is effective in creating an intellectual struggle that will lead to a kind of progressive synthesis in which the now existing 'Western' worldview is transformed through the confrontation with the voice of its opposite. 

Since curricula involve choices under extreme scarcity (time and student attention) that inevitably means sacrificing works of Europe's long illiberal, Christian and utopian history (so out go much of Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, More,  Burke, Paine, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Luxemburg, etc.) in order to make space for Equiano, L’Ouverture Cugoano, Gouges, Grouchy, L’Ouverture, Douglass, Sojourner Truth, The Declaration of Sentiments, Du Bois, Ambedkar, Gandhi, and MLK. (Because I have a cut-off before WWI, I teach about a third of these regularly.)**

As I note above, the effect of giving voice in this way -- and yes that locution is intended to problematize my own position -- is that it reinforces the idea that European modernity is this decisive world-historical rupture and that all thought must respond to it. One can recognize that racialized slavery, eugenics, patriarchy/misogyny, and imperialism are evils that shape our world and still note that the rupture-responsive model has its own flaws as a way to structure a curriculum. Effectively, the students are taught 'liberalism and its heroic, egalitarian critics.' (This is so even though there are plenty of genuine elistists among decolonial authors [see here for fruitful document initiated by David Owens].) Often, the critics draw on the lived experience under imperialism, and the egalitarian and spiritual strains in Christianity, Stoicism, Marxism, and Utopian anarchist/socialists. 

Another route is to seek out exemplary thinkers of intellectual traditions untouched by footnotes to Plato syndrome. I was first exposed to this when I encountered the curriculum of Singaporean undergraduates. One quickly ends up teaching some of the thinkers of the Chinese Warring States period (e.g., Mencius, Master Mo, and Han Fei) and Kautilya and/or Buddhist ideas. There is a real risk here in reinforcing the (idea popular in the late nineteenth century) of autonomous great civilizations with their own distinct (illiberal and/or spiritual) political outlook. But this can be prevented if one teaches a multiplicity of voices. I also tend to point out that Europeans became familiar with these traditions just as they started to articulate modernity. I doubt it is a coincidence that Rousseau and Grouchy can sound a bit like Mencius sometimes. 

I also end up teaching Al-Farabi (who is influenced by Platonic tradition) and Al-Ghazali (who pretends not to be) because it is important, especially in the Netherlands (where most students grow up functionally atheist) that revealed religion, theocracy, and political mysticism are discussed seriously. And, given the public hostility to Islam (which is treated as synonymous with backwardness and barbarism), I want all my students to immerse themselves in extremely sophisticated discussions within it. That they encounter a version of proto-feminism is a bonus.

One advantage of this alternative is that the defenders of meritocracy, hierarchy, and empire, and honoring the traditional rites all get their articulate say. (I suspect this is one reason why some are so attracted to teaching Confucianism these days.) This generates genuine viewpoint diversity, and has odd effect of pleasing, simultaneously, cosmopolitan and conservative/authoritarian students. Another attraction is that students notice that the post Hobbesian social contract tradition (with its arc -- via Locke, Rousseau, and Kant (and possible critique by Hume) -- toward Rawls) is just one possible strain of social contract theorizing. One other advantage is that one escapes the  quiet cognitive stranglehold of westphalian statehood, which is permissive of a relatively sharp demarcation between domestic and international political arena. Of course, many critics of, say, imperialism and slavery also note the interaction between political economy and international relations. 

It's possible, of course, that we are on the precipice, of the implosion of modernity, and that would allow much more adventurous decolonizing and decentering choices if there will be universities like ours then. But going against my natural pessimism, assuming we're not, lots of blends are possible (and, in practice, I blend). Direct and indirect voice can generate exciting courses that use 'history' to provide an introductory 'survey' of important arguments, concepts, and institutions in political philosophy. I don't mean to suggest that direct and indirect voice exhaust the possibilities (recall these posts inspired by Khader (here; here; and Bright here) on grasping and modeling the constrained choices of the oppressed). But there is, in fact, a clear choice lurking here. Decolonizing through direct voice indirectly facilitates a curricular narrative of historical progress (or dialectic); while comparative voice indirectly promotes a view that political theory involves learning to model fundamental trade-offs. Perhaps this is a false choice, and we need both.

 

*I include the colonial-settler enterprises in the Americas, and the US and Canada in the category of European Modernity.

+I dislike 'non-Western' and the role it plays in analysis. But it seems fine to use it in context of this dialectic. As I have noted the rise of 'Western philosophy' is tied to the rise of study of comparative civilizations in the late part of the age of imperialism.   

**Meena  Krishnamurthy has nudged me into teaching Ambedkar on caste.

Comments

[Eric Steinhart]

Yeah, that's a good post. It makes me think history is dead. Perhaps it should be.

[Cora Diamond]

Just asking...does Augustine count as a European?

[Eric Schliesser]

I suspect he counts as Roman the way Philo counts as Roman or Hellenic.:)

[Graham White]

Does Augustine count as European? Well, that's probably an anachronistic question to ask. He was Mediterranean, and before the rise of Europe, many people located themselves, culturally, as Mediterranean. And that continued up to the seventeenth century, say. Braudel's work (La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, etc.) was formative on this, but there's an awful lot of more recent scholarship. And, of course, the Romans, and the Greeks, and the Carthaginians, all thought of themselves as Mediterranean. Roads were really bad then, of course, which changes one's attitude to what the natural groupings are.

[Graham White]

(this comment is not a continuation of my previous comment). I am interested by the way in which critique and metacritique interact here. One of the significant things in which this current round of critique (which, by the way, I wholeheartedly support) differs from much earlier scholarship is that, previously, philosophers of the past could be excused from, for example, particular attitudes to women, slaves, etc., on the grounds that those were different times. Now this seems much less tenable, at least partly because those attitudes back then seem, now, to be much less excusable. And this questioning needs, surely, to be taken up into metatheory: we have to start asking ourselves "how do we select a balanced set of teaching materials" and answering it in a theoretically grounded way. I suspect, though, that it may take some while before things come to rest again. I suspect, as well, that it will be an awful lot of work.

[Eric Schliesser]

Hi Graham,
I have written a bit, meta-theoretically, on the very idea of excusing by way "different times, different attitudes.' Maybe you find it useful:
https://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2018/11/a-bad-defense-of-humes-badness.html