"Strongly regret taking this course"

By far, and I mean BY FAR, my least favourite class so far at Ryerson has been second term sociology in everyday life. The professor isn’t so bad, in that she gives an entertaining lecture and has a good sense of humour. The content though is like Marxist feminist boilerplate – men are bad, white men worse, straight white men worse still, and straight white corporate conservative men are filth. As a straight white (mostly) conservative male, I have very little moral authority in this environment, so I usually just keep my mouth shut and listen.

In the second week of class, in our tutorial, our TA offered a little nugget of advice for achieving a good mark on group assignments: the opposite of ethnocentrism is cultural relativism. In order not to be ethnocentrists (and implicitly, to get a good mark), we must strive to be cultural relativists. Hm. Smells a little fishy to me. I'm pretty much convinced that all cultures are not equal. Cultures that, just for example, recognize gender equality and religious freedom are better than cultures that don't. It surprises me that people should regard that as a controversial statement! Some cry racist in the face of such a statement. As Mark Steyn responded to such a criticism, it's not being racist, it's being culturalist. Nevermind the fact that we learn in critical thinking class (from the philosophy branch, intended to train us how to dissect and analyze arguments) that relativism is a fallacy, an impediment to good critical thinking. Honestly I just want a decent mark. Mouth shut.

Next we were instructed not to pass "value judgments" on other cultures, because we’re not qualified. Not we as university students, more like we as westerners. We are so blinded by our own biases and hegemonic tendencies that we can’t possibly be trusted to make sane judgments on other cultures. Hm. Kinda smells fishy again, but I’m starting to get used to it.

After watching a video on the Baka, a tribe of tree climbing pygmies from the rainforests of Africa, we are asked in tutorial “Who is more free – the Baka, or us?” (Never mind the obvious lack of a clear operational definition for so vague a concept as freedom, just answer the question!) Several hands go up. The first student says the Baka enjoy more freedom, because they, you know, can wander around and do nothing all day while we have to work and stuff (paraphrased). Fair enough, decent interpretation, and the TA nods in approval. Next student is called on, and offers “we are more free, because we don’t have to spend like 8 hours climbing a tree to get some honey, and spend every other waking minute looking for food, we can just open our fridge.” Good interpretation and one I am actually more inclined to agree with. The TA? Not so much.

“No, actually they are more free, because they don’t have as many rules and things governing their daily lives as we do.”

Hm. Sounds a little like a value judgment to me: they are more free because our system of organization is such a burden. I spend about 30 seconds a day looking for food, and maybe another hour eating it. The Baka spent their entire day doing chores with two possible outcomes: food, or shelter. The ENTIRE DAY. One Baka literally spent 8 hours climbing a tree to get a single hive of honey for the tribe. I have to stand to the right and walk to the left on the escelator and line up in an orderly fashion when I go to the bank, and I've living under the friggin yoke? Come on. Lesson being: value judgments are bad, unless made against the west (which brings a favourite Thomas Sowell quote to mind: “What 'multiculturalism' boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture - and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.“)

Last week in lecture, the prof almost broke into tears of rage talking about the Toronto clean streets act, which effectively outlawed squeegee kids and aggressive panhandling a few years ago. The prof feels that these kids only wanted to be productive members of society, using the only means at their disposal, and old white men in suits fucked them over for some elitist security bullshit and tourist dollars. Never mind that they create a traffic nuisance, or that they spend their earned money on drugs and booze and not assistance polishing their resumes, or that business interests suffer when the corner in front of your shop looks like a small scale tent-city, with barely clothed-facially pierced and tattooed teenagers (my tattoo cost $80 – how the fuck are they affording tattoos?) laying about on impromptu beds of denim jackets and knapsacks. Never mind the burden a non-taxable sub-vocation might put on our society. Never mind that they have to STEAL the very instruments of their trade – the squeegees- from gas stations in order to self-start. No, never mind any of that hegemonic gobbledegook. It’s all about conservative white men getting hard-ons by screwing over non conformist teens.

I’ll never forget dealing with squeegee kids when I worked at a café near Bloor and Bathurst, toiling for 10-12 hours a day to make a fraction of what those kids made in half a day of cleaning people’s windshields with filthy brown water (that they occasionally bragged about pissing in). Sorry, these kids are not being robbed their chance to contribute to society, they are actually biting them thumbs at society. But to hear the professor tell it, they are victims of a hegemonic elitist culture of evil conservative straight white men.

Last week our TA instructed us to write a paper on the question "Are people umemployed because they are lazy and are not willing to accept middle class values?" Well, some yeah, but not all. But wait - it was a trap! This week we were told that everyone in Canada who is unemployed is a victim of the system, and the actual instances of people being jobless because they are lazy or unskilled are SO RARE that to even consider the possibility is to be a slave to the dominant hegemonic ideology of our culture. If we want to avoid being intellectual slaves, we need to accept that unemployed people are ALL upstanding people who have no flaws or deficiencies. Hmm. To illustrate, our TA reads us an excerpt from (as she casually calls it) “today’s paper” (the Star, not the Daily Worker, but that's probably only because the former is available free in news stands all over the university). The excerpt concerns a poor single mother who lost her job at some manufacturing place, and now is practically broke and starving, and it’s pretty much all the systems fault. You know, the evil hengmonic dominant ideology. That system.

So…anyway, this week I did on line anonymous course evaluations for each of my 5 courses, as I had done for my five first term courses. Any idea how a straight, white (mostly) conservative male might get his revenge for having this nonsense shoveled at him for 16 weeks?