A Pedagogue's Progress

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Notes from seven hours spent in Borders today

Spent quality time today in Borders with one of the most brilliant people I know. The following talking points surfaced over the course of seven hours (you should have seen my parking bill afterwards):

Singapore needs a libertarian, centre-right political party, and not a centre-left one, to effectively challenge the PAP's hegemony. It would take a leaf (several leaves) out of the PAP's book, but champion political liberties instead of "soft authoritarianism" (a concept, dear students, which we'll be looking at shortly). We think it should be called the Singapore Liberal Party, and that neither of us will have anything to do with it (because he's a foreigner and I despise politicking).

Human beings survive existentially by ordering, limiting, and therefore simplifying experience; and (a proper) education assists us in this regard by supplying the ideas, categories, and facts which help us understand ourselves, the world, and our relationship with the world. Far too many people, however -- especially the so-called educated -- do not and cannot move beyond fixed and narrow ways of perceiving experience, and in doing so miss out on what the poet Louis MacNeice calls "the drunkenness of things being various." (The poem is "Snow," for those of you who may be interested.)

Martin Luther was not a very nice guy at all (kill the disobedient peasants!) and John Calvin was a religious totalitarian.

Far too many Christians are ignorant of their religion's long and complicated history.

Religion can both constrain and amplify immoral behaviour. Atheists and secular humanists are perfectly capable of behaving morally.

The argument, frequently employed by theists and Christians in particular to defend religion, that 20th century secular tyrants (Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao) were responsible for murdering more people than religious zealots were, while strictly true, is considerably weakened by the following propositions: 1) secular ideologies like Communism and Fascism had all the trademarks of fundamentalist religions (see Calvin's Geneva); 2) religious leaders and institutions -- the Catholic Church in particular -- were frequently complicit in the crimes of these secular tyrants.

Now, I should really get back to those lecture notes...

Posted by kungfuzi at 10:13 pm |

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Your author graduated from Dartmouth College in 2004 having majored in History and English. From June 2007, he will be teaching contemporary Southeast Asian history at another of his former schools.

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