Thinking caps on, America

By SALIM MANSUR, Sun Media:

Twenty years ago a dense meditation on the state of higher American education by a political philosopher at the University of Chicago rose to the top 10 of the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list.

Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind discussed how liberal education, by pushing cultural relativism in American universities over the previous 25 years, undermined critical thinking. Bloom taught Plato, and he recalled for his readers Plato's famous allegory of the cave and man's escape from its darkness via philosophy.

Bloom wrote, "A culture is a cave. (Plato) did not suggest going around to other cultures as a solution to the limitations of the cave." Instead, according to Bloom, Plato held "philosophy, not history or anthropology, is the most important human science" for assisting individuals to emerge eventually from the closedness of caves to the openness of republican democracy.

Cultural relativism is anthropology's revenge on philosophy, and subversion of critical thinking or reasoning. The function of rational thought is to assist individuals learn how to discriminate between good and evil, right and wrong, truth and falsehood, beauty and ugliness. But for such discrimination there needs to be standards -- measurements and criteria -- by which what is good, or true, or beautiful can be discerned, appreciated and separated from what is evil or false or ugly.

But cultural relativism insists standards are arbitrary construction of norms and values by those holding power or, in other words, predominantly white males.

Moreover, cultural relativists by conflating discrimination with bigotry put a chill on critical thinking and corrupted liberal education by subjecting it to political correctness.

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