Priyamvada Gopal: on the front line of Britain’s imperial past

The fundamental flaw in the author's logic is to infer a lack of ethnic representation as an indicator of social injustice or discrimination. This assumption is unjustified as there is an alternative viable and empirically supported explanation that needs to be examined as well - that is, the lack of equal gender/ethnic (or whatever group/identity based) representation in any profession could be due to an expression of choice and/or talent. For example, there is a reason why certain ethnic groups dominate in certain Olympic sports events (i.e., ethnic differences in anthropometric characteristics play a significant role in the performance of specific sports/performance arts such as ballet). This is what Jordan Peterson is trying to argue - perhaps engage less in ad hominem/name-calling (he is a white privileged male so his arguments are invalid) arguments towards him and focus more on his points?

While I am sympathetic to the broad objectives, I find the concept of decolonising the curriculum somewhat perverse for at least three reasons (right off the top of my head, which suggests here are probably many more as well). First, the idea or aim to 'decolonise' immediately falls back upon the very binaries of Enlightenment thinking that drove Empire itself. As long ago as the 1980s this was recognised and nicely synthesised by Partha Chatterjee (1986) in his book Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. There, he wrote of India's anti-colonial nationalists that there was 'an inherent contradictoriness in nationalist thinking because it reasons within a framework of knowledge whose representational structure corresponds to the very structure of power nationalist thought seeks to repudiate' (p.36). So, can't we not think of anything more creative that a simple de-colonising effort? Second, like decluttering, decolonising suggests a removal (out with the old/bad in with the new/good). Yet such an effort involves executive decisions about what is good and bad and those must necessarily rest upon some sovereign claim to decide. Was it not a feature of the colonial that the (mainly) European empires took for themselves this sovereign right to rule on what was good and bad (using binaries like civilisation vs barbarism, reason vs superstition, etc)? In pursuing our decluttering decolonising do we not thus accept the premise and only challenge case facts on who can decide? That would seem to be a potentially very great error. And finally, rather than sweeping aside or censoring via a decluttering decolonisation of the curriculum, should we not be adding other voices and putting plural ways of viewing the world into active contrast and conversation. Thus, again decades ago now, Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) argued in his book Provincialising Europe that 'European thought is at once both indispensible and inadequate in helping us to think through the experiences of political modernity in non-Western nations' and so the point, he proposed, and I think I agree with him, is not to declaim its forms, it is 'not to reject social science categories but to release into the space occupied by particular European histories sedimented in them other normative and theoretical thought enshrined in other existing life practices and archives. For it is only in this way that we can create plural normative horizons specific to our existence and relevant to the examination of our lives and their possibilities' (p. 16, 20). I don't think what Chakrabarty is offering out as a model could be called decolonising, yet what it holds before us seems to be a wider, fuller and more plural set of opportunities for thought than a movement to remove/redact/decolonise. Some food for thought anyway!

The internet, social media in particular, has brought to light an unpleasant intolerance of any view that is not completely in alignment with one's own. People won't debate, they prefer to screech - often they cannot even be bothered to articulate why they hold the views that they do, never mind explain what they find incorrect in someone else's thinking. They also fail to discriminate between opinions and the people holding them - if one of your views isn't in alignment with theirs, then you are quite beyond the pale even if you share opnions on other topics. Then of course we have this distressing tendency to judge people in the past in the light of opinions of today. I often wonder what opinions we take for granted today will be viewed as abhorrent by people in a centuary or two. We grow and evolve, individually and as a people. Concepts like imperialism and colonialism, which Romans and indeed Victorians accepted as the norm, the 'bringing of civilisation to the unelightened' as well as lining their own pockets, are now things that the global mindset has moved on from, and no nation would dream of doing such a thing today. But that's now, not then. Finally, I do hope Gopal's students are becoming genuine critical thinkers, not just slavishly accepting her interpretations any more than they might have accepted other opinions before they took her class. See my first point about the social media mindset that cannot comprehend a variance in opinion.