June 20, 2011 · 11:10 am

A Dream Deferred. Shelby Steele.

Shelby Steele

Shelby Steele

A Dream Deferred : The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America. Shelby Steele.

Reawakening the Dream…. December 7, 2000

This morning, sometime around three or four AM, I woke up thinking about Shelby Steele’s A Dream Deferred. I read it a number of months ago and have been wanting to write a brief note about it. There are so few intelligent, reasonable, sane voices speaking about racial matters in America I feel it as a duty to try to acknowledge those who are so scorned by the forces of both white and black extremist liberalism. The thought that impelled me out of bed was that I owe it to my memory of the best friend I’ve ever had in my life, who happened to be black, long deceased and sorely missed. So I struggle for words, knowing I will never meet that high mark. Others may criticize Mr. Steele for emphasizing this and underplaying that, but I want to praise his thoughtful probing of the dynamics of affirmative action and how it assuages white guilt while keeping some black people from developing their highest potential. As a former college English instructor, I occasionally had minority students who were accustomed to being handed A’s and were shocked to receive C’s. Repeated experience convinced me that affirmative action was part of the problem. They lacked the self-discipline and responsibility that Steele extolls: “Very often those who educate poor blacks feel excused from the responsibilities of high expectations and academic rigor by the very conditions that make such expectations mandatory….”

Now available in

The Myth of the Enlightenment: Essays
Forthcoming, September, 2014.

https://www.earthrisepress.net/myth_of_the_enlightenment.html

Frederick Glaysher

 

Leave a Comment

Filed under Race in America

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

June 19, 2011 · 10:15 am

Quest for Cosmic Justice. Thomas Sowell.

 

 

 

Thomas_Sowell

Thomas Sowell

 

 

The Quest for Cosmic Justice. Thomas Sowell.

Chastising the Self-Anointed…. June 27, 2000

Thomas Sowell may be one of the most despised black men in America–despised by extremist liberals, black and white, because Sowell has devoted his abilities to exposing their destructive ideologies of social redemption as counter productive to the best interests of all Americans. Widely known for his provocative, nationally syndicated newspaper articles and other books, he focuses, inThe Quest for Cosmic Justice, on the misguided thinking behind the modern impulse to reform the very nature of the human condition from individual responsibility, competition, and performance to the tragic consequences of affirmative action and politicized egalitarian equality. Sowell locates the source of much of the problem in the academy, law schools, and government where “new elites” are quietly repealing the American Revolution. The “morally self-anointed,” as he calls excessively liberal reformers and radicals, “have for centuries argued as if no honest disagreement were possible, as if those who opposed them were not merely in error but in sin…. Given this exalted vision of their role by the anointed visionaries, those who disagree with them must be correspondingly degraded or demonized.” Marx, Lenin, Hitler, and Mao all followed this procedure, as have utopians of similar or less horrible results…. That comparable dynamics rule the day, especially in the humanities in many American universities, will not surprise those who have any real experience of those departments. Sowell evokes the American political system and tradition in the hope of preventing its further erosion….

Now available in

The Myth of the Enlightenment: Essays
Forthcoming, September, 2014.

https://www.earthrisepress.net/myth_of_the_enlightenment.html

 

Leave a Comment

Filed under Race in America

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

June 18, 2011 · 10:49 am

Qualitative Difference

ebooks, ereading

ebooks, eReading

February 11, 2009 Qualitative Difference

Reading is reading is eReading. And then I have afterthoughts. It is different. I “access” it in a different way. It feels different. Personally speaking, I wouldn’t want to read every book in digital format. Cover and paper weight have an aesthetic feel to them that steel and aluminum can’t provide. The leather case for the Sony Reader helps, but it’s still different.

Yet I found myself fully immersed in Cervantes’ imaginative world. The allegory took over and pulled me into it, as I eagerly suspended my disbelief. All the cliches about reading were just as true. I escaped from the harshness of reality into the perfection of an ideal world, relishing the delights of his intellect and humor.

Since I’ve read so many ebooks now on electronic devices than I can even recall, I continue to be surprised when I come across protestations against ereading. Even educated readers can be resistant to the idea that there is “no difference,” yet ereading is just as intellectually exciting, rewarding, invigorating, and capable of changing my consciousness.

Is all that self-evident? There are a lot of people resisting the notion… the experience.

I suppose my point is that the quality of the reading experience is or can be every bit as deep and reflective as with a physical book. One needn’t feel one has betrayed books and letters by admitting as much. Far from that, it is the experience that counts, and the cultivation of consciousness that only reading can provide.

Physically, there’s a qualitative difference; intellectually, reading is reading is eReading.

Frederick Glaysher

 

Leave a Comment

Filed under eReading, eBooks

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

June 17, 2011 · 7:10 am

Google or Books? Dust in the Brain.

ebooks, eReading

ebooks, eReading

July 18, 2009 Google or Books? Dust in the Brain

An often benighted view of ebooks from Peter Green’s review in The Times Literary Supplement July 15, 2009.  Google Books or Great Books? The enduring value of the Republic of Letters, in all its forms.

Anthony Grafton, WORLDS MADE BY WORDS: Scholarship and community in the modern west. 422pp. Harvard University Press. £22.95 (US $29.95). 978 0 674 03257 8

Why is there always this insecurity? Why must it always be one or the other? What is it about so many scholars and people of literary sensibility, speaking as a poet, if I may say so of myself, that they cannot see the profound cultural and intellectual value of digital books?

I have on my Sony Reader over 1,400 books and articles, hundreds of them from Google, Gutenberg.org, and elsewhere. The vast majority of them are GREAT BOOKS. I’m currently reading Jane Austen’s PERSUASION, an ebook from Gutenberg, not to be confused with a Harlequin romance, though tastes and temperament may differ.

I’ve been reading great books all my life and am emphatically not threatened by the bourgeoning online availability of much of the entire world cultural heritage. It’s a vast enrichment to be celebrated! Not merely so you can look up a hardcopy in a brick and mortar library.

Only insecure academicians seem to think otherwise. Begrudging recognition of what Google has accomplished falls very short of the mark of what it and others have achieved and deserve, as a result of the over-all computer revolution of the last three decades.

Who is seriously thinking of replacing traditional libraries entirely? I don’t believe it will happen or even can or should happen. There are distinctive virtues of the traditional, physical library that only it can accomplish.

Predictably, here’s the same old, out-dated conception of the role of the humanist, the calling of the sensitive, sophisticated, well-read, intellectual mind, according to Green, apparently Grafton, and so typical of the university today:

What, then, is the true legacy of the Republic of Letters in its pursuit of truth? For scholars, the answer has always been clear. The giants of Renaissance humanism retrieved, in the teeth of medieval opposition, that Graeco-Roman, essentially secular, world view, along with much of its literature, that was in danger of perishing altogether, or at the very least of surviving only as stunted religious allegory and misunderstood moral aphorisms.

This tenor is eventually followed up by the same tiresome, usual pieties, derision for “vocational training,” flourishes in the direction of St John’s College, the value of Latin, etc. The pathetic, endemic failure of imagination among scholars and academia is all it seems either Grafton or Green can come up with. No wonder so many young people have left the humanities and literature behind, in search of what they may not know, but clearly they won’t find it often, today, in a university.

Better to search and read online than in the dusty arguments of hundreds of years of repeated, near-sighted, and blind cliches. Pity, The Times Literary Supplement, a magazine I’ve read for decades, can’t come up with anything better than this either. But then, they’re part of the problem, not the search for the answer.

Frederick Glaysher

 

Leave a Comment

Filed under eReading, eBooks

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,