Those are excellent points Dr. Eslami.
Richard John Neuhaus, a Lutheran pastor who later became a Catholic priest and bioethics advisor to George Bush the sr. said “Culture shapes politics, and religion is at the root of culture”
Jim Kauffman and the late Gary Sasso (was Dean at University of Iowa) and passed away 2 years ago from cancer- wrote this piece and critiqued whole language, "radical multiculturalism," and facilitated communication
in 2010. Of the three- cultural relativism and multi-culturalism are what people are going to have to figure out right now- and the difference between “universals and particulars” and what the “sweet spot” is…
I think about the situation of Afghan refugee families, particularly those with disabled children, and the cultural dilemmas they face. There is a prevailing Western Enlightenment view rooted in the philosophies
of Plato and Aristotle that is now seen as outdated. This view presupposes some sort of universal elements within the human condition, hence terms like "humanism" and "Christian Humanism." However, we are moving away from universal concepts in education. The
current multicultural conception, particularly its radical or hard form, focuses on hardening identity and traditions within groups. And tradition is conservative by necessity, as they help to define individual identity.
For example, consider what might occur when an Afghan family, having fled their home country, and their faith and community is the only thing keeping them afloat—and religiosity by the way is a known protective
factor in prevention science literature for those reasons. But what happens when their child comes home and wants to be referred to with gender pronouns like "they"? There is going to be to a clash of civilizations and worldviews- the normative values are
too different driving the underlying views.
And the current postmodern ideologies in education seem to encourage students with autism and female adolescents into this direction as disproportionate rates than one would expect. And then, the underlying
gender ideology rejects empirically-based scientific viewpoints, resists scrutiny and questioning, and operates in a manner akin to religious belief, grounded in its own ideological premises. Outside the West- it is referred to as “Western ideological colonization”…how
is that for a term…or “Western Decadence”- and as Neuhaus said- Culture shapes politics, and religion is at the root of culture”- but religion is broadly defined in the sense that- everyone- even the non-religious- have a world view that is informed by something-
some ism or ideology that functions and provides some kind of value- based framework- whether they realize it or not- even my secular- materialist friends of whom I have many…
As someone who takes pride in being from the South but is committed to its progress or a working toward a new South- I am always the bad guy in the films it seems- I can't help but think that promoting the
strict or hard forms of multiculturalism without balanced by universal human experiences will inevitably lead to problems. At the end of the day- this is what you get:
https://archive.org/details/takeyourchoice3/mode/2up?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
The review from 2022 is not very encouraging from whoever wrote it- Pandora's Box has been re/opened. My reflection is not meant to disparage anyone—I come from a time when open inquiry meant that nothing
was off-limits for discussion. Which I don’t do with undergrads anymore- but doctoral students have to be anti-fragile. And I've learned that we must distinguish between what "is" from what "ought" to be. We live in a very strange, extremely complicated, and
often opaque time right now and it will require many intelligent/smart people with a lot of heterodox thinking to resolve our thorny educational issues- MDB
PS- the smart people by the way are all of you…we need help figuring all this out...MDB