Since getting back from a trip to Prague, Vienna and Budapest, the 9 mac people and I have started regular Universiteit Maastricht classes with other students. I am enrolled in two classes right now. So recent events in these two classes have really bothered me. Maybe its just me being too sensitive, but the general consensus here seems to be that everything good basically came from Europe. According to one of my profs no one used to think before the greeks, i.e., the Greeks invented philosophy. In the same class people also decided that human rights come from Germany and Christianity, and that the real issue in the globalization debate is how to export modernity from the West to the rest. Basically, before the enlightenment, humanity lived in a pre-modern era without reason, human rights etc., and modernity from Europe will save us all.
The worst moment so far was when one of my professor basically said that social Darwinism and eugenics make sense, because according to him there is some truth to the idea that some races are inherently superior to others. As evidence he pointed out that a large number of nobel prizes have been won by Jews, and also that the Germans, come closest to the language and philosophical tradition that the Greeks had. He also said that National Socialism makes sense when you think about it, and that there was "some truth" to the idea that Palestinians have taken up the "Jew-hating" previously espoused by the Nazis.
The rest of the people from Mac and I have been talking for a long time about how so many ideas and inventions were thought of in the "east" a long time before the "west", and how it is important to bring up the non-western origins of these ideas for a variety of reasons. These classes have just confirmed this for me. I don't think Macalester is perfect, but it is definitely not as America-centric or Westcentric as these classes are with Europe. Case in point: One of the classes that other mac stuents are taking here talks about how Eastern Europe is basically backward, and Huntington and the Clash of Civilizations is actually correct. I was discussion leader in class one day and one guy was talking about the Arab world is very relativist (i don't want to take up space with his argument here), but when someone asked him what he was defining as the arab world his response was: Well that whole region from Morocco to Iraq and Iran. I was so pissed at this point that I cut him off and said Iran is not really the Arab world. But this is what a lot of our class discussions are like. We read these texts about hybrid and multiple identities, and how just the idea of the Muslim world is flawed, and people still come to class and make sweeping generalizations about everything, including Europe (or Western Europe, because the eastern part is clearly very different).
I don't want to come of as being whiny, but while shit like this is common, you don't expect to hear it in classes and definitely not from the professor. So now I am trying to get a hold of this book by Amartya Sen called "The Argumentative Indian". He discusses, in that book, examples of ideas thought as western/european/modern that originated in India. We are also reading parts of Orientalism for one of our classes next week. I wonder whether that will change anything about our discussions.
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You and Kabo and Sen are getting pretty tight, or so it seems from your blogs. I bought "The Argumentative Indian" in India, and read half of it in a train ride across Rajasthan. Great book, amazing author.
My copy of the book is even more Indian than most, it was under 200 rupees, made by one of those knock off publishers, and pages fall out every time I read it.
Its the best copy ever.
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