Is the past taught as the present. Should it be? Is it possible to teach it any other way?

Read those three questions carefully.

L Pitkin #231 points to Smaug [#195]:
Smaug: “How would Adam Smith’s preferred ordering of the economy compared with Karl Marx’s affect social equality?” is an academic exercise. Asking, “Because of its effect on social equality, is Marx’s or Smith’s preferred ordering of the economy right?” is a political question.”

That’s nicely put. Disinterested description is preferable in the interest of clarity, but it’s amoral. It’s also impossible to achieve.
At #258 on this page I linked to my mention on another post of Derrick Bell’s discussion of Brown vs Board of Education. He argues that segregation should have been allowed but equality enforced. He argues this with cool reason founded on fact. He’s not a self-righteous white man trying to feel good about himself. He doesn’t begin as so many liberals do with the assumption that intentions are valuable in themselves. (I think of Brad DeLong turning purple with rage at the thought of his liberal technocratic justice being questioned.)

Players don’t have the best view have the chessboard. I make my sharpest observations when I force myself to think as if I don’t really care about the outcome of a particular debate, one way or the other. Sometimes it’s easy; but then I go on just to practice my debating skills. As a parallel to the academic preference for an ideal of engaged disinterest, it’s good to remember though few people here do that our justice system is maintained by advocates and factotums for hire.
The rule of reason is the rule of good intentions. Fish is being a pompous ass and playing a political game, but the question that stands at the title to this post is the question that divides Moses and Aron. It’s standard stuff.
What’s vexing is that the answer is “yes.”

Argument is a game and you can’t assume what side you’re on. Liberals assume while claiming not to. Conservatives are chained to their assumptions and proud of it. But contrary to Liberals continued attempt to engage them, it’s not the assumptions that they celebrate it’s the chain. There is a logic to this that needs to be examined. Indeed it has been, but not by liberals.

Try not to assume. Try not to have faith, in others or yourself. That last one is really hard for liberals. If the Palestinians had a nigger Jesus like King or Mandela liberals would be more than happy to celebrate their recognition of him and bask in self-satisfied glory. But all the Palestinians had was Arafat, and that and memories of WWII meant that “reason” was against them.
Try not to have faith. Pace the New atheists, you’ll never succeed, but living “the examined life” it’s your job to try.

Here’s an old old lecture. I heard it first in about 1968:
Creative writing classes have no place in the university. And the same for courses on contemporary fiction. Business schools are trade schools and there’s no reason for them to be accredited as anything else.
Live life in the present, study the past. Without distance there’s no chance for anything approaching clarity. The objective and scientific study of the present is no more than the celebration of yourself dressed up in a labcoat. You’ll always end up lying to yourself.

So here I am 40 years later debating with academics who want to change the world by writing books. When Fish is saying if you want to go out and change the world do it. If you want to talk about ideas then do it. But don’t think that replaces anything else. I want to talk to you about living under an authoritarian government in Singapore, and you won’t do it. You probably can’t. But you want to bring politics into the academy because you can’t bring it out on the street. Fish is giving you a dare.

Do you know when I started to become an asshole? It started the first time I was lectured by academic snobs who called themselves leftists and accused me of being both under-intellectualized and reactionary, while they had the publications and the references to prove it. Publications full of dogmatic rereadings of sophisticated and ironic europeans, retooled as roadmaps to careers in the academy. And here I was, a carpenter and construction worker and the son of academics who read Chaucer and Henry James, for pleasure, and who risked arrest and having their 3 children taken away and put in foster homes, in the defense of what they believed.
My qualified defense of Fish is due to the fact that he amuses me. My unqualified contempt for you due to the fact that you deserve it.

See, here’s the thing: David Duke has a good argument.

To B

And that has nothing to do with any arguments.

Do you value the Irish culture, Irish traditions, Irish language, Irish looks, Irish character, Irish genes; do you feel these things need to be preserved, kept pure and protected from corrupting influences? No? Well, if he can manage to get you start caring a lot about these things, then you’re gone, he’s got you. And that has nothing to do with any arguments.

David Duke may still have a teaching gig at the Ukraine’s most antisemitic private university, so perhaps your thesis is being tested.

So, David Duke puts forward the standard nativist argument. The liberal guy – who came there to debate David Duke! – responds with standard ad-hominem (you’re a racist, we don’t want racists here). And so it goes: nativist argument – ad-hominem in response, five or six rounds. Pathetic.

I’ll tell you this: I have little doubt that if David Duke was allowed to teach a political philosophy class while emphasizing and advocating his favorite perspective, he would’ve beaten most (if not all) of you and converted at least a half of the class. He is very logical, consistent and convincing – for the average undergrad, that is. Much more convincing, I suspect, than Rawls’ convoluted abstractions.

Just something to think about.

As I have been trying to put forward and you still seem to be missing, it is your approach to debate that is extremely insulting. What I have seen under this post are commenters that have taken your points seriously even thought they found them lacking. They have made serious efforts to engage with the substance of your views, and where they have disagreed with you they have provided both textual evidence and broader contextual reasoning about the meaning of the texts. In fact, the comments have been of the nature that 1) they understand the general point you are making but 2) argue that the general point is not the issue at question in the post and 3) that the is it very difficult to see how you can get to the interpretation on the specific issue because it just does not seem to be supported by what the author says in the specific text or in other writings.

You however have not made any effort to respond in kind and to address the evidence and substantive arguments presented to you in a way that is comparable to what your objectors have done. Instead you have just stubbornly reasserted your own position, not taken the textual evidence presented as worth anything whatsoever, and used various transparent debate techniques to keep the discussion going so as to ‘win’ by having the last word. By not taking others efforts seriously and refusing to try addressed the actual evidence and reasons presented by others you show a great deal of disrespect by 1) not taking others efforts as being worth anything and 2) by actively frustrating a debate instead of trying to push it forward (i.e. bad faith). Your approach only works in the blog format. Among a ‘live’ group of people the unacceptability of treating others in this way becomes quickly apparent and collectively rejected. So I do not feel the least bit bad about the few sarcastic comments directed towards you; in fact I feel vindicate in my expectation that such an approach is the only one that could get your attention.

Look, I may represent the bottom of the barrel but nobody has to scrape me.