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Confucius, born as Kongzi (Ipsumpix/Corbis via Getty Images)
“They Kant Be Serious!” ran the headline in the Daily Mail a few years ago, above claims that students at SOAS wanted to do away with the likes of Plato and Descartes as part of efforts to “decolonise” the curriculum. Now, a mixed team of undergraduates and academic philosophers at SOAS have produced “Decolonising Philosophy: A Toolkit”, giving rise once again to anger and incredulity in Right-leaning newspapers.
The spectre of the “woke academic” has haunted public discourse, on and off, for years. It grew out of an older, broader disdain for humanities staff in particular: purveyors, it was said, of a pointless and politically-motivated education, in exchange for which students racked up enormous debts. Prominent, now, on the charge sheet is the claim that we confuse, in our writing and teaching, the encouragement of critical thinking with the preaching of a particular line on vexed questions of identity politics and social justice. Worse still, we do it using the linguistic equivalent of what my old headmaster used to call a “notice-me haircut”: a stream of fussy, high-sounding abstractions, infused with a sense of moral superiority.
The new SOAS guidance offers up plenty of red meat for those committed to this view. The prose is a little portentous in places, and the usual linguistic suspects are all present and correct: heteronormative, whiteness, coloniality. There is also the old trick, pioneered by Sigmund Freud, of pre-emptively defending your ideas by making opposition to them a symptom of psychological deficiency — in this case we find “institutional gatekeepers” potentially locked in a “subconscious struggle” to avoid sharing their power.
And yet the clever thing about Freud’s trick was that sometimes he was right: one really might oppose an idea on apparently intellectual grounds without recognising the emotional charge involved. Beneath my frustration with some of the toolkit’s prose (“coloniality’s operational life” — was there really no other way of putting that?) lies a certain amount of wounded pride at what can feel like undergraduates schooling me on how to teach.
If I had a criticism of efforts to decolonise university curricula, it would be that they rarely give enough space to defining “colonial”. The historical insight at the heart of efforts to decolonise this or that aspect of contemporary Western life is that modern European colonialism was about much more than boots on the ground. Cultural seeds were sown via colonial and missionary education systems, the ways that colonial bureaucracies categorised people, the respect in which Western intellectual output came to be held and the felt need among some colonised people to acquire certain skills or adopt certain ideologies in order to get ahead — or even survive — under colonialism.
Leaving aside for a moment the question of which of the Western ideas involved were good or bad, the point is that they put down deep and stubborn roots, becoming a kind of cultural knotweed. Colonisers were affected too, as people in countries such as Britain and France were fed warped understandings of the non-Western world and were encouraged to take it for granted that their own ideas and standards — moral, political, civic — enjoyed universal applicability.
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SubscribeThe West, born from the Roman Church, has been in heresy for 1000 years, with error compounding upon error to bring us to our present malaise. One in which liberals can’t see that they’re cut from the same cloth as communists or radical decolonisers. That it’s all part of the same extended heresy.
It’s time for a return to coherent philosophy with actual metaphysical roots. Let’s come home to Orthodoxy. And turn back from a centuries-long intellectual detour that’s fast approaching a cliff.
I’d maintain that the “orthodoxy” of which you speak is itself a ‘wrong turning’, not just for the West but for humanity as a whole. The traditional religions have been built around a misunderstanding of the human condition, which came about as a result of the need to control, or manage our earliest attempts at forming societies; this, after the evolution of consciousness allowed us the intellectual capacity to do so.
Concepts such as “original sin” and even (or especially) “god” arose from not having the means to take a much broader view of ourselves, which the subsequent flow and development of being able to now reflect upon such early attempts allows. One could cite Copernicus, or Galileo, for pushing us beyond those earlier attempts to understand ourselves, in which we thought that every ‘effect’ had a ’cause’ and must therefore involve a ’causer’; but there’s something more profound than the advent of modern science.
We are creatures imbued with a spiritual tendency to seek beyond ourselves. What we hitherto thought provided succour for our ‘souls’ is now a hindrance, because of that earlier misunderstanding. Trying to restore the old sense of religiosity is like the wistfulness of lost innocence – powerful, but something that humanity as a whole must address.
The ‘certainties’ offered by Islam and previous versions of Christianity are anything but. The so-called “prophets” weren’t in any position to know better at the time, and recognising this isn’t ‘heresy’ but necessary for all our futures. I accept it’ll take some coming to terms with, but i remain optimistic – in fact, the very opposite of nihilistic.
There’s no argument here, just a series of assertions about why Christianity doesn’t fit your perception of human nature. You display many of the heretical viewpoints to which I alluded: humanism, scientism, rationalism, evolutionism, and progressivism, to name just a few. At their root is your determination to find a reason for being that excludes God. That drive has led you to patent absurdities, such as your claim that the universe has no cause.
You seem to be the only person on this site who’s determined to respond to my every comment with a lengthy riposte. I don’t mind that. If anything, it shows that you’re closer to the Lord than someone with complete indifference. But I think your insistence points to a certain insecurity. I said nothing about nihilism, but you mentioned it anyway…perhaps, on some level, you detect the truth of what Dostoyevsky wrote: “Without God, everything is permitted.”
I’d say the concept of original sin still has quite a hold, no matter the broadness of one’s view.
Generally I can see what you’re trying to say. But not in this instance.
Decolonisation efforts in universities are big on “lived experience”
Define the difference between ‘lived experience’ and simply ‘experience’.
Here’s another one decolonisation = simple revisionism. And the reason that it won’t work is also simple: survivorship bias. The music, art, ideas, philosophies, writings and religions that exist today are entirely the result of that.
Anyone for Mithras or Mani or Logical Positivism or Existentialism – Nah . . .
This is true. I would say survivorship bias is also created by both utility and sustainability. If a culture functions well at scale over a long period of time, its probably good at balance and accurately evaluating itself. So it’s sustainable over time because of balance. It can continually improve itself because of balanced observation.
Multicultural Relativism is basically a tool to reverse the “hegemonic” evaluative lens of the dominant culture.
Which basically just means it wants to eliminate objectivity which is obviously central to evaluation/observation. Balance is impossible without it.
Relativism is attempting to change perception. There are legitimate things everyone can learn from other cultures but the idea that all culture values are equal is just unequivocally false. Redistributing and engineering the social hierarchy is something you see in broken countries not flourishing ones. Certain precepts like redistributive justice won’t ever increase freedom or prosperity. There’s enough historical record for that to be an obvious truth at this point.
I suppose it’s different from the experiences of dead people
Functional definition: “experience” is appeal to personal but empirical insight, concerning which insight (or not) debate can take place; “lived experience” is appeal to my interpretation of my experience, sealed off hermeneutically from criticism by any other person (but especially by present company).
(The most interesting remark I have heard re: “lived experience” is Coleman Hughes’ observation that both James Baldwin and Thomas Sowell experienced adolescence in the same Harlem ‘hood. But . . .)
There is a sickness in the west, its symptom being the elites of the culture being hell-bent on erasing the culture. The biggest sin in that mindset it to be proud of who we are. We will die a deserved death when the Chinese or the Muslims finally kick the stool from under us.
Yes. Someone once asked: “Why does the West always win?” Now the West is tying win at losing.
Here I thought decolonization was an attempt by pseudo Marxist academics to smash the cultural and philosophical underpinnings of the most privileged, free people in the history of the world. My mistake. Decolonization is apparently a humble attempt to expand our knowledge of different cultures and philosophies. Nothing more. I guess we have failed at that in the west. It’s not like we have welcomed and embraced people and cultures from every corner of the world, adopting many of their customs and beliefs. My lived experience has apparently created a huge blind spot.
Makes you wonder how we managed to expand our knowledge of different cultures and philosophies in the past.
Africa is a mess
And not because of Europeans.
To be fair I would say partly at least because of Europeans because the new states are just so incoherent. Most African states don’t have two or three but dozens of languages that are used by different tribal groups.
They’re always eager to tackle cultural blind spots but they rarely acknowledge their own. I suspect few even recognize they have one, but they do. These academics are always the ones who fret over the ‘western-ness’, ‘whiteness’, and ‘colonialism’ inherent in their culture or any other, but those terms were not invented by the cultures themselves but invented by a subset of self-loathing academics who rejected their own cultural legacy and created those terms for the specific purpose of cultural critique. This was never a legitimate attempt at some dubious notion of collective self-reflection. It was always an attempt to reject all traditional cultures in favor of some academic notion of ‘fairness’ or ‘objectivity’, an attempt to ‘progress’ beyond the perceived shortcomings and failures of traditional western culture, a set of shortcomings and failures almost exclusively related to the historical traumas of the 20th century, the world wars, the Great Depression, the Cold War, etc. The problem is academics are no more objective or fair minded than anyone else. They’re just as human as the rest of us, but they’re steeped in the conceit that their education allows them some special privilege over the unwashed masses. They haven’t created an alternative to cultural myopia or cultural bias. They’ve simply invented a new culture with a new set of biases that was formed more or less deliberately over less than a century and therefore based on an even tinier fraction of human history than the cultures that came before it which evolved organically over many centuries or even millennia. In that context, the difficulties are less surprising.
It’s my contention that our academic culture can legitimately be understood as a cult. Cults generally spring up over a relatively short time period in response to a particular set of environmental and cultural factors. Cults are often informal offshoots of other more ancient traditions characterized by the emergence of a particular interpretation of a particular religious or cultural tradition. The cult mentality then enforces this interpretation on others and establishes conformity within whatever social circles and power structures the cult inhabits, which can be anything from a particular church congregation, to an extended family, to a social club, etc. We can take some solace from the fact that cults tend to grow quickly under certain conditions and last while these conditions hold but tend to fade quickly into irrelevance when the underlying conditions change, and we have indeed entered a period of change that will likely see the cults and fads of the years from WWI through the globalist era begin to die off and look increasingly ridiculous in hindsight (as they already look to many of us to begin with).
Yes.
Not only is this a cult but one whose agenda is soft cultural genocide against Western Civilization. Soft, in that, it is done slowly. Stamping out our writers. Tearing down our statues. Stopping the teaching of our history but vilifying it. Indoctrination our children to hate their heritage. I am not using hyperbolic language when I say cultural genocide. The term decolonization is a declaration of war against Western peoples.
I think the increasingly unhinged behaviour of social science academics might be a consequence of their subconscious realisation that the Internet has made the vast majority of them quite obsolete. Why pay to be lectured by some mediocrity at a second rate university when you can watch Thomas Sowell on YouTube?
And boy is he worth watching!
‘One of the challenges for the decolonisation agenda is to avoid conflating a healthy inquiry into the conditions of our knowledge — historical, political, racial — with the pushing of a particular political agenda’ – I hate it when these Martians come down and start lecturing the good people of planet Earth
“Good ideas are not restricted to any particular location.” True, surely, but it does not follow that “good ideas” can be found just anywhere. What matters is not where one learns, but what one learns. And when it comes to “what,” it is hard (not a strong enough word) to match Plato and Aristotle.
As we had seen with recent case of Indian bilionares in Switzerland keeping staff as slaves, there is little to learn from savages with cast system.
The sooner we clear people from disgusting cultures from Western society and go back to our roots, the better.
I downloaded the “toolkit” and it is pathetic wokey rub-bish. There’s a girly girl complaining about how she felt “embarrassed and upset” at the way that colonial racism was portrayed in class. Know what? I feel embarrassed and upset listening to the rubbish that pompous wokeys crank out every day of the week all over the world.
My dad had to flee Russia because Bolshevist colonization of Russia. I decided to flee Britain because lefty colonization of Britain. Non-lefties in universities live in terror of lefty colonization of everything.
Yeah. Kant. Kant and his critical philosophy, in my view, leads directly to relativity and quantum mechanics, do not pass Go. When some black or brown culture can produce the next Kant that leads directly to the next physics, that makes Oppenheimer look like a kid in a playpen, I will pay attention. Because really: why should our current physics — or Decolonized Philosophy — be the last word?
“if the word “colonial” is misconstrued in some quarters in terms of anti-white racism, anti-capitalism or Western self-hatred”
If? I don’t think it is “if” nor is it being “misconstrued” it is very clearly intended to mean those things.
Problem though: the British did not colonize Britain. It is their home. Definitionally.
If you want to talk about colonization in Britain, you are going to have to start talking about the Normans, or the Norse, or if you really feel daring, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, and the Scots. However, a bit too late decolonize that lot, yes? And having been in residence for about a thousand years or more, mixed in together, I think the descendants of that lot can justifiably take the hump about people telling them they need to decolonize in their own country.
Mind you, if you are a Lakota scholar of US history I can well-understand why the terms colonizer and decolonization (whatever that might mean in the US today) would feature in your work. However, assuming you are not that Lakota scholar lecturing in the UK on a sabbatical, talking about “decolonization” is just a mindless exercise in copying American academic fashion.
As a SOAS alumni I don’t think it is a good idea at all to let students decide what they need to learn. It’s a hard Left echo chamber where dissent and debate are very superficial and mostly skewered in favour of extreme Leftism combined with Islamism.
At least that’s what it was when I was there- and something tells me matters may have got much more strident, though one has not revisited in many years…
SOAS is also broke.
Hardly a surprise…all the time it used to give doles to various ” Left” causes- including freebies for ” talks” by one North Islington radical MP
I’m an alumnus too, graduating in 2021. (I was a _very_ mature student.) SOAS has always had a well-deserved reputation for radicalism. Things have been toned down somewhat since Habib took over as director from Amos.
There are corners of hard-leftism, but my impression overall was that the majority of the faculty worked hard to give students a fair and balanced education. Some of the faculty who taught me were pretty hard-left, but that did not bother me. They left their personal politics at the lecture-room door.
In my time at the turn of the millenium, other than some rare balanced voices, most were hard Left. There was zero tolerance for dissenting views in the student debating circles. The pet causes were always slanted in favour of the globalist activist gang. I once faced serious threats and bullying for espousing issues which the Left Islamist caucus disapproved of.
I am not too enthused by the kind of coverage one sees in the alumni newsletters etc still. It is slanted and prejudiced.
It is difficult to think that Jewish/ Israeli or non Left Indian students would be able to echo their views freely if it went against the Left mainstream.
I was never much concerned with the goings-on in the SU. Apart from anything else, I had a job to go to, so I was forever dashing off from lectures and tutorials. But yes, the SU hasn’t changed, it’s dominated by the hard-left brigade. Extreme opinions, voiced in cut-glass accents.
Do you ever poke your nose round the door, to see what’s going on? I did that a couple of months ago, to have a look at the Gaza encampment that had been set up between the Brunei Gallery and the Paul Webley Wing.
I used to try and help out with counselling various students who were travelling to study. I also contributed to their alumni newsletters- however they never finally published the stuff after commissioning it.
Frankly my best memories are of the college halls of residence and the camaraderie there, rather than the overall academic experience – other than my Modern Indian history paper tutorials which were great fun, and in the spirit I had thought SOAS would epitomise- given that distinguished historians like Kenneth Ballhatchet and Peter Robb were from SOAS.
If I recall the crowds of robed figures who graced the stairwells in fevered and angry discussions, I am sure the Gaza discourse is as animated as ever!
Thankfully I am across the seas and unlikely to visit!
Ah, so you read History too! If you don’t mind me asking, whereabouts across the seas are you?
India! Nice to know we have History in common
I would love to belive you, but I don’t.
I had never met hard lefty who did that in my 65 years.
We need to shut down these anti-Western institutions or purge them of Academics pushing these poisonous ideologies. Ironically these same academics who shut down any dissent will claim academic freedom. A western idea.
“But if us woke academics can invest some energy in generating a quality of trust with our students that overflows beyond the classroom, then our ivory towers may be good for something after all.”
It is WE not “us”.
As in:
But if we [ ] can invest some energy in generating a quality of trust with our students that overflows beyond the classroom, then our ivory towers may be good for something after all.
Would you say:
But if us [ ] can invest some energy in generating a quality of trust with our students that overflows beyond the classroom, then our ivory towers may be good for something after all.
No, because you’d sound like an absolute idiot. “Academics” with an inability to demonstrate the most basic understanding proper English grammar. Stunning. We are not amused.
Why do students in the non-Western world need to travel to the UK so they can learn about their own philosophical traditions?
Is it because we in the West know more about non-Western belief systems than they do themselves?
What the universities can do is to remove the cancer of postmodernism from all its courses, not just from philosophy
The Greek philosophers do come in handy for today’s student, the use of sophistry as a means of debate since logic, evidence and objective truth are so oppressive.
I taught philosophy at university level for years. The students don’t know anything so the idea of getting them to construct the courses is laughable – all it would do is skew the content to faddish faux intellectual nonsense centred on coaxial justice issues. The idea of comparative courses is good, but that cannot be a replacement for learning the basic Western philosophical tradition at UG level first. If they don’t then they don’t know what they are comparing.
I like the idea of comparative courses. But I think the author’s point is that non-Western traditions have to be studied in their own, non-Western contexts, not from a base of the Western tradition which would dictate the categories used. However, I do think it’s important to continue studying Western philosophy. I would find an East-West comparative course very interesting.
This is not really about comparing, is it?
It is about denigrating Western culture and philosophy to claim that some rubbish justifying cast system etc is somehow better.
I didn’t know that Socrates was a colonizer and that he and Plato and Aristotle needed to be decolonized. I guess my philosophy professors failed do teach us properly.
It has been observed that wokism is a Procrustean attempt to apply theses specific to American history in contexts where they don’t belong (UK for example). (Hmm . . . sounds a bit like a critique of colonialism . . .) Here is a good example. The notion of Socrates et al as colonisers comes from George G M James, Stolen Legacy (also foundational to Bernal’s Black Athena). Socrates et al stole whole-hog from “Egyptian mystery religions.” It is essentially an attempt to map the politics of American slavery and segregation onto history at large, as if the Greeks were Alabama white boys and the Egyptians were African Americans.
Yes, Egyptians had great culture.
African Americans should be grateful that they were taken from Africa.
They keep complaining about the West, but very few want to go back.
Some did.
Look at great success of Liberia.
With respect, Socrates fought at the siege of Potidaea for the Delian League, a cover for the Athenian Empire so he was certainly a ‘coloniser’ by that measure.
The more important point for a student to grasp is that colonisation and colonialism is a historic constant across all nations and cultures. The idea that Non-Western nations lived in a state of pacifist anarcho-communism is one of the more absurd and tenaciously enduring Leftist Myths. Across World History ‘the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must’ as Thucydides put it or Vae Victis in Plutarch’s words.
The author of the article suggests, with warm approval, that a Japanese Academic might be useful in ‘decolonising’ the Western curriculum. That would raise a wry smile in Korea, I think.
The Japanese colonised not just Korea but the Ainu people of Hokkaido who they kept as hereditary slaves. The Ashanti colonised the Akan in West Africa, the Bugis colonised the Penisular Malays, the Moguls colonised the Carnatic Indians, the Arabs colonised the entire Near East. All these conquerors opressed and expropriated their victims, many tried to eradicate and erase the very name and language of the nations they had overcome.
It is, rather, the idea of colonial ‘guilt’ that is the truly exceptional and unprecedented western solipsism. Coming, as it does, from a blend of Christian piety, Augustinian Just-War theory, Anglo-Norman land law and Romantic Nationalism.
Rather than opening their students minds to the broader weft and warp of history and philosophy this ‘decolonising’ program digs down deeper into the dismally monoglot, ephemeral, western self-obsession.
I assure you none of this nonsense is being discussed in the global capitals of the future. It is late-empire stuff.
“The idea that Non-Western nations lived in a state of pacifist anarcho-communism is one of the more absurd and tenaciously enduring Leftist Myths.” Well stated.
‘It is more about treating them as part of a particular tradition that has gained outsized influence because of the economic and military power of Europe and the wider West in recent centuries. ‘
Teach about male, stale, and pale Western people and your tiny island can also govern two thirds of the world.
How did this ‘outsize influence’ ever happen? Is it because we used to be taught the good stuff – the stuff which is useful and actually works?
This is a classic mott and bailey argument. Decolonisation ideology isn’t about learning more about zen or Confucianism, Aboriginal songlines or even you’d-fecken-better-say-it’s-sacred-if you-want-to-live Mohammedianism. It’s about violently destroying Western civilization for its wicked historical sins. Franz Fanon and Hamas, that’s what floats the decolonization boat. This guy thinks we’re all sheltered know-nothing 18 year-olds in his 101 tutorial, and he’s trying to give us a fireside chat about how really it’s just harmless comparative philosophy. Hey buddy, that’ll work on Guardian readers, but not here.
How is SOAS still going?
It’s not “going” as an academic institution. The students don’t want to study the courses they freely signed up for. The lectures don’t want to teach their own courses and are going on strike, again. A financial and academic basketcase that abuses the UK visa system to fund a grossly overpaid executive team.
So basically usual lefty parasites, who want benefits of capitalists system why trying to destroy it.
Labour Party in a nutshell.
Which is, of course, precisely the charge that can be made against decolonisation etc.
This ignores the remarkable openness of western thinkers to ideas from elsewhere – particularly from India and Japan, but also more widely. It has not always led to accurate understanding, and has sometimes fed into cultural conflicts within western culture, but the spirit of openness is still there. Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Heidegger were all open to such ideas. Hume was possibly influenced via Jesuit accounts of Buddhism. Many looked to Polynesia for ideas of how the good life should be lived, and for a vantage point from which to critique the west.
At the popular level, many will tell you there is a problem with western thinking vv eastern thinking, while knowing little of either, and yoga, meditation etc have entered easily into the west.
The term “decolonisation” really gives the game away that this is a political, not a philosophical project, and that it is part and parcel of women’s studies, gender studies, queer studies and the rest. It promotes grievance rather than seeking after truth and seeks to promote its own interpretation of intellectual history as oppression.
Few would object if this was just about opening up philosophy to wider influences beyond the west. If that’s all it honestly is (which I doubt) then it’s marketing is appalling.
For humanities students, the likes of Edward Said genuinely constitute philosophy. His postcolonial generation were the children of Foucault and Derrida and now their grandchildren are now in charge. I also thought the weakness came from the division between Continental critical philosophy and the Anglo analytic tradition. The 2nd- and 3rd-generation adoption of French structuralism as a blunt political tool emerged out of this academic crack.
“Continental critical philosophy and the Anglo analytic tradition”
That’s interesting. I have long felt that the wokery, for want of a better word, was a toxic blend of American paranoia and French cynicism.
A conspiracy theory view of history combined with a an instrumental approach to the principle of objectivity.
If I was to teach philosophy I’d start with ideas of likelihood and the logic of probability and how these build to create heuristics and statistical models of the world based on repeated observation and historical learning (that now drives AI). Then work from that back into philosophical history to see how some of the declarational logic and pub-game philosophy stands up – for instance does metaphysics even make sense looked at through a probabilistic context. At one level starting philosophy with the Ancient Greeks is like starting medicine with a course on Gallen and the four humours.
“A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost.” That’s why teaching a course in biology doesn’t start with Galen or Aristotle. The problem is, the reverse is true for philosophy. Unlike biology (which is going to ratchet up progress, and by gaining empirical insight) there are no empirical drivers (and no cutting-edge) for philosophy, and it is best not to try to reinvent it afresh without paying close attention to the long history of its mistakes (starting with the Greeks).
All such endeavours seem the consequence of a multicultural society. To preserve some remnant of Enlightenment spirit, the British state would have to impose secularism in public life because the resulting debate would really expose the alliance between the Left and their friends the religious radicals being that both want to preside over the destruction of the old Enlightened West.
Yes, not quite.
The rank stench of ‘bad-faith’ which adheres to the whole exercise of ‘de-colonisation’ comes from the obvious fact that this pretended excercise in greater objectivity is being advanced and stewarded by an intellecual caste who we know have rejected the idea of objective truth in the first place.
‘Truth is a function of power’ is all we know they agree on.
So we laymen are left with the unavoidable conclusion that what this is really about is not truth, as we know it, but power.
And we won’t be mugged by it.
De-colonisation centres the discussion around so-called ‘power dynamics’.
Such a perspective is inherently Marxist, and thus politicised.
If you cant say what you mean, why should I pay attention to your views?
The concept of – if not the term – “power dynamics” certainly does not orginate with Marx. Read Antigone, Medea or Richard II.
The way of seeing all things under the sun through the lens of ‘Power Dynamics’ is absolutely attributable to Marx and his particular reading of Hegel.
Plus, the concept of ‘power dynamics’ is just jargon for the extant social heirarchy. It sounds technical but is really just pseudo-scientific.
Much like most of both Nietzsche and Frued.
Nietzsche & Freud also said things about power struggles; but neither is specifically Marxist.
So what I’m wondering about is what is exactly new and radical about these ideas? The idea that we necessary view reality through a subjective (cultural) lens has been explored so often already. Especially in the context of historicism and colonialism (e.g. Orientalism). Any anthropologist already knew all of this.
Even the poststructuralist critique of linguistic and symbolic structures underlying our society – which seems to have had a lot of influence on contemporary decolonization ideas – is already ~50 years old. Criticism of Eurocentric curricula go back to at least the 60s as well. New lexicon, old ideas it seems to me.
Even from an activist stance I find it all a bit boring. Critique of enlightenment absolutism appeared right from the start and had a lasting effect in form of romanticism. Also more recently titans like Marx and Nietzsche produces earthquakes. Where is the impact today? If anything we seem to be stuck. In my opinion the philososophical activism we see today has been co-opted in late capitalist culture a long time ago, precisely for the reasons that Fredric Jameson predicted. It seems radical but it reinforces the status quo.
“Any anthropologist already knew all of this.” But who now reads anthropology? One might think Boas and Ashley Montagu settled racialism some time ago. One might think Mead did the same for the notion that gender is nurture not nature. And yet it is like we are back in the early 20th c. (Rather like Piketty’s trough: there are Gilded Age spikes both in the early 20th & early 21st centuries.)
Yuri Bezmenov explained how all this works back in 1984. “Decolonize” is the same as demoralize.
ARGHHHH I have been hearing all this kind of stuff for at least 50 years argh argh argh. There are already debates about how to teach the history of philosophy. These ideas are in fact, echoed in many of the debates WITHIN ‘western’ philosophy. Argh argh argh just shut up will you. Sighs.
As China is increasingly a rival and threat to the West, it makes sense to understand Chinese culture and philosophy. The same can be said of other large, increasingly powerful civilisations.
But that is not the aim of decolonisation of curriculum.
Not just in philosophy but other subject.
Problems with China are multiple.
They are enemy.
For a start we should not teach enemies in our universities.
But both Conservatives and Labour claim we need foreign students.
No, we don’t.
Shut down 70% of universities.
That brings the numbers down to what uk had 30 years ago.
Before failed bus conductor, John Major, created pseudo universities to provide employment for Neo-Marxists parasites.
The term decolonisation isn’t needed if philosophy is to encourage study of Japanese or Chinese philosophy, which should of course be encouraged either as part of the core curriculum or as an adjunct. Nothing is being decolonised there. “Decolonisation” if it means anything has to mean removing European philosophy from the curriculum and even then the term decolonisation doesn’t work. Replacing European philosophy with non European philosophy in Europe is more or less colonisation, it’s certainly not decolonisation.
I say that as someone who prefers the ethical considerations of confucius to most of the badly argued, illogical scribbles of western philosophy. By all means get rid of Hegel, Acquinas, Marx and indeed most continental philosophy.
But it’s “problematic” as the decolonisers would themselves say to use that word, it indicates that they don’t understand words. Which you would think might be important in an epistemology that bases knowledge on words, not maths or the scientific method. Makes you wonder about the rest of it doesn’t it?
SOAS should be defunded and closed down ASAP
A good historical and moral case can be made for decolonising our knowledge in this sense: recognising and tackling entrenched habits of thought, sometimes in painful and humiliating ways where difficult topics including racism and religion are in play.
A better case can be made by dispensing with the obnoxious habit of judging people and events of the past through the lens of the present. It’s a bit much to attack people from centuries ago for failing to live up to 2024 standards. Every time terms like “decolonize” appear, one can almost feel a collective loss of brain cells and IQ points.
One of the challenges for the decolonisation agenda is to avoid conflating a healthy inquiry into the conditions of our knowledge — historical, political, racial — with the pushing of a particular political agenda.
This presumes that the decolonization agenda is also not itself a political agenda. Who believes the two are separate? There is zero evidence of academia engaging in a “healthy inquiry” of anything. If only that was being done instead of the ritual self-recrimination in which the West and white people are held up as history’s villains.
Wrong crowd.
Quite.
Turns out it’s actually quite difficult to mount an argument with any real intellectual rigour in defense of neo-liberal dogmas.
“It is more about treating [Scorates Plato and Aristotle] as part of a particular tradition that has gained outsized influence because of the economic and military power of Europe and the wider West in recent centuries. … As one of the creators of the toolkit, Paul Giladi, tells me: “Good ideas are not restricted to any particular geolocation.””
Here is where the de-colonizers go wrong every time. Good ideas are in fact not equally distributed among all “geolocations.” (How is that different from “location”?) Socrates Aristotle and Plato’s “outsized influence” is not simply because the West had military and economic success where other civilizations did not – but because Socrates Aristotle and Plato had “outsize influence” within the West and in turn were part of the cultural melange that prompted the West to have outsized military and economic (and cultural) success. Because in fact the good ideas of Socrates Aristotle and Plato are *better ideas* than the good ideas of whatever passed for philosophy in 500BC on the plains of America or the jungles of the Congo.
The problem with modern academics is they’re not nearly as smart as they think they are. They can’t imagine how it is possible that Socrates’ dialogues – or the Sermon on the Mount, or Heloise & Abelard, etc. – connect with Britain’s success in the Opium Wars, for example.
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What about framing your ideas in a positive way? Instead of being anti- this and de- that, say upfront what you want to build. In words that make grammatical sense, if at all possible. As of now, all “woke” proposals sound like “let’s destroy everything and from the ashes, a New Eden Shall rise – details to be determined after destruction is accomplished”. We can be forgiven for deeply distrusting such programs.
Because most woke are Neo-Marxists.
Despite all the historical evidence, they believe that West is evil and whatever they propose is better.
When you point out to two comparative examples in Europe and Asia with the same genetic stock (West and East Germany and North and South Korea), they foam at the mouth and call you fascist.
We need to Decolonize Queerness, using Aboriginal Thought-Structures!
There is already a long history of cross-pollination between philosophies of the West, Middle-East, Far East, China and India, so midwit ‘woke’ ideologues aren’t really required.
What about African, or Aztec cultural assumptions? Should we indulge a sort of relativism over the possibility that blood sacrifices might increase crop yields? And pride ourselves for our liberalism and open-mindedness?
The article makes a valiant good-faith attempt to defend the academic fashion for ‘de-colonization,’ but I’m just not buying it. Thanks anyway!
Imagine Jerry Falwell promoting: Decolonise Queerness . . .
“It is more about treating them as part of a particular tradition that has gained outsized influence because of the economic and military power of Europe and the wider West in recent centuries.”
And here’s the fallacy: there’s an assumption here that the growth of Europe’s economic and military power owes nothing to the intellectual traditions in question. But actually, few of us are genuinely prepared to go along with the idea that the European renaissance and the subsequent western age of reason are not essential foundations of the West’s global hegemony.
Particularly the fact that the imminent conversion to a multipolar world is only happening at all simply because much of the rest of the world has taken on board many of the same principles: free trade, democracy, property rights, the scientific method and the philosophical basis for regarding scientific beliefs as qualitatively distinct from other belief systems etc – that’s why China and the rest are now rising at such a rate.
I don’t think that the other side is “acting in bad faith”. I think they truly believe what they are saying. That is actually the problem.
This article is Rousseauian through-and-through. I’m all for learning from other cultures. But the statement “good ideas aren’t tied to a certain geolocation”, smacks of cultural (and thus moral) relativism.
Sorry, I don’t think we have very much to learn from the culture of Somalia. Aztec society was amazing and intricate, but pretty damn evil.
“Decolonizing” implies tearing down our own philosophies so that they can be replaced by alternatives. No thanks.
“the word “colonial” is misconstrued in some quarters in terms of anti-white racism,… or Western self-hatred.”
No it isn’t. It’s accurately construed in terms of those things. Nobody but you is fooled by your pious little gesture towards honest self appraisal when you own up to “a certain amount of wounded pride at what can feel like undergraduates schooling me on how to teach” and fail to properly acknowledge that your guild has poisoned education with leftist ideology.
Adding insult to injury you’ve done this while capitulating to the imperatives of marketization. You say universities “can’t yet” facilitate the small class sizes needed to teach world philosophies but it wasn’t very long ago that most could do this. You’ve already forgotten how quickly customer demand has become the deciding factor in what you can and can’t teach and act like you’re earnestly trying to achieve the thing whose absence you collectively are responsible for.
This article reeks of bad faith. It’s a litany of assumptions that you’re trying to pass off as beyond dispute, such as that Western culture can’t be thought of as superior to other cultures; that European colonialism was self-evidently bad; and that the West’s dominance gave its ideas an unfair advantage rather than the ideas being responsible for the dominance. When you’re willing to admit these counter arguments into your classrooms I’ll start to believe you’re losing the ideological blinkers but having more classes based on the doctrine that all cultures have equally valid philosophical canons is just more woke bs.
Thanks for pointing out the pomposity and falsity of that ‘can’t yet’!
“ It is more about treating them as part of a particular tradition that has gained outsized influence because of the economic and military power of Europe and the wider West in recent centuries.”
Wouldn’t defenders of western traditions argue that the West achieved such dominance because the quality of their thinking?
Perhaps the most “colonial” or imperial attitude of all is the notion that one can stand outside of a particular viewpoint and view the world from a neutral space above. Those who advocate for looking at all philosophies and religions “neutrally” and considering them all equally are doing this.
In the West, we come from a specific religious and philosophical heritage. You can’t help but view all other cultures from this viewpoint, so yes Plato/Aristotle are more relevant and deserve more time than Japanese philosophers because they help you understand the cultural mix you swim within better.
And judging the West as sinful based on standards developed in the West (i.e. Christian standards enhanced by the Greek tradition)
is foolish. The Chinese have an entirely different worldview than us and have no quibbles about dominating the environs far beyond the Yellow River valley and pressing it into their civilization. All civilizations have a worldview and spread it, ours at least is the wellspring of much more good than evil.
Am I the only one to suspect that, in a post-liberal future, woke guilt-trips won’t have quite the same effects on the racialism of Chinese overlords that they do on contemporary Western targets? (Will colonialism, like George W Bush, ever be missed?)
Quite right too. All these Greek and German and French philosophers colonising down to earth, empirical British minds…
Plato was a greek philosopher in the greek empire. Is he really that Western though? It was 2,000 years before western European global empires. Notably the Jews fought against hellenisation in the Chanukah story to keep their culture but now cleansing the former lands of Judea of the Hebrew language and embarking on arabisation and islamisation are now considered acts of “decolonisation”.
Wow the author is naive. People who use pretentious bull terms like heteronormative as others use words like older, get or silly are not nice. They want power. They want to dominate you. Like a colonist.
“It is more about treating them as part of a particular tradition that has gained outsized influence because of the economic and military power of Europe and the wider West in recent centuries.”
This makes it sound as though the West obtained immense “economic and military power” by accident, or through Divine intervention. The “outsized influence” implicitly decried is actually a function of how effective the cultures the author identifies as part of the West have been. These nations organized their people under a structure of laws and cultural axioms that allowed their citizens to flourish: excelling at the search for knowledge, successfully applying science and technology, and exploring the world around us.
Today the wealthiest nations on the planet are those who’ve harnessed the technologies overwhelmingly created by the West, and their international commerce has its foundations in Western economic theory and development.
Other nations and principalities were not so capable. This is not to say everything Western civilization brought to the world was good. But, it is remarkably disingenuous to suggest that the evolution of our 21st Century society with all its benefits just sorta happened.
“Whatever happens we have got/ The Maxim Gun, and they have not.” On the other hand, China invented gunpowder. It had, at one time, the most advanced imperial bureaucracy and the most advanced science in the world. So why the West, rather than China? (This was Max Weber’s question.) But the reason why need not be: “a structure of laws and cultural axioms that allowed their citizens to flourish . . .” Life remained, for many, nasty brutish & short even as empire expanded.
I resigned from my full-time lectureship at a UK university in 2017 as I foresaw this tsunami of Marxist crap rushing towards the shores of academia.
I am sorry, you only noticed that in 2017?
Quite hilarious.
The word ‘decolonisation’ is the real problem. Nobody has a problem with studying philosophy from continents outside Europe but why make it so adversarial?
“Leaving aside for a moment the question of which of the Western ideas involved were good or bad…”
For the moment? That question has been off the table for many decades, with the resulting loss of a search for Truth and Beauty in much of the educational establishment.
You mean Edinburg pay him to spout this twaddle!
Decolonisation my entire backside. Our universities developed out of these and many other philosophers from around the world, aspects of whose teaching were inculcated by taking an enlightenment perspective on evaluating information.
That is our culture which should be upheld in our country.
If people want to look at their experiences from another cultural or countries point of view, they are welcome to do so by going to learn amongst that culture.
This is critical race theory by the back door, trying to give itself validation.
Sheesh! Don’t they ever stop?
I think the attempt to try and treat all philosophical and intellectual currents equitably might be noble – although probably almost impossible, the values of post Enlightenment liberalism being imbued in almost every sentence of this article. They themselves reflect Christian values going back hundreds of years – as Tom Holland so clearly argues. This includes that the weak should be concerned about are somehow morally strong and perhaps even have an advantage in getting into Heaven. (It is easier for a camel to foster the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter Heaven etc. Although this sentiment was often very hypocritically observed it was never censored by the church authorities).
So by all means decolonize ideology and thinking – but this means willingness to accept the legitimacy of many ideas which are entirely uncongenial to the modern Western progressive mind. For example that a strong cultural disdain for other societies is entirely legitimate – as for example taught and practised centrally in Chinese civilization for millennia (and in reality still today – look how the Chinese are received in Africa however much money they “invest”). We might more typically in fact call this ‘racism’ – but racism is just fine! “Homophobia” – also entirely fine; the Nigerians and Ugandans have legislated entirely the opposite way to their Western former colonial powers.
So .. is this academic willing to actually truly decolonize his thought?
A very useful article for which I would like to thank the UnHerd editors. I had come across Christopher Harding’s name recently and his latest book sounded as if it might be worth reading. I now know not to bother. Thanks again.
It is not possible to be “recognising and tackling entrenched habits of thought” while applying an ideological filter to ideas (or worse, sources of ideas) themselves in order to delete them. The way to effectively do that is to seek more ideas, not less, and developing better methods of evaluating them. Marxism, for example, one of our worst set of ideas, should continue to be studied. We should understand why it is so terrible, ad infinitum, so we can better detect how it morphs and re-emerges over time.
Studying the philosophical, religious and political ideas of non-Western cultures is certainly a very valuable endeavour. That being said, studying them through the lens of ‘colonialism’ is in and of itself is a terrible way to go about it.
The biggest problem isn’t the ‘anti-White’ stuff, it’s that you can’t actually be properly critical of traditions if you’re approaching them through the lens of absorbing implicitly ‘oppressed’ foreign knowledge. When learning about Derrida, I was free to come to the conclusion that I think his ideas are obscurantist, pointless BS. I can argue as to why, but the point is I was able to critically think about his ideas. If Derrida were an Indian philosopher in the context of one of these courses, the tendency would just be to say ‘well, it’s not that these are bad ideas, I just haven’t adequately addressed by own colonial subjectivity and Western biases’. The ‘anti-colonial’ framing shuts down critical thinking.
There is also the practical problem that to critically engage with any of these canons generally requires a lot of background to understand what any author is talking about or responding to. A nuanced understanding of Chinese philosophy requires a person to be familiar with the broad strokes of 3000 years of history, and the major ideas, schisms and authors of Legalism, Confucianism, Taoism, Buddism and Mohism, as well as their evolution over time (which, side note, almost all of which massively predates European colonialism). And a lot of subtle and generally untranslatable concepts. Dharmic and Islamic philosophy is similarly complex. The idea that you can just sprinkle a few major authors at random in a ‘Philosophy’ course and have students be able to say anything non-superficial is just silly.
To do that properly, you’d have to have courses which specifically focus on a given canon, maybe with a ‘compare and context’ element with Western ideas. Alternatively, you could do a ‘comparative philosophy’ course that systematically and thoroughly maps out how different traditions tend to approach the same concepts and their big-picture evolution. But that kind of systematised and universalist approach to knowledge is something that ‘decolonial’ authors usually scorn. And also doesn’t leave much room for talking about the evils of colonialism.
More generally, the ironic thing about ‘decolonising’ is that you’re right back to thinking about cultures relative to the West. The goal isn’t to understand a discourse as the authors involved in that discourse understood it – the goal is to unpick the insidious tendrils of the Western intellectual hydra. It’s an awful way to try and learn about the world.
Actually the “decolonised” philosophy that Dr Harding describes here sounds fascinating and I’d definitely sign up to that!
The very premises entail their conclusions as must be. I am utterly convinced that the Aristotelian framing of reality by Thomas Aquinas delivers the actual metaphysical principles of existence itself. And indeed his late disciple’s W. Norris Clarke, S.J. “Person and Being” as recommended by philosopher Peter Kreeft as the most important philosopher of our time, will further capture being itself as indeed Person as we see in the rising of person and community from cosmic dust. The basic axioms of logic, the principles of reason itself simply aren’t negotiable. Sanity hangs in the balance. Aquinas would be no fan of Descartes’ self imprisonment in secondary awareness of being conscious OF SOMETHING, and Kant remains in his head. Thank God for Aquinas and the hope of sanity and truth.