Osita Nwanevu writes:

It’s garnered less attention than the other events of our already wretched new year. But to understand why Renee Nicole Good was killed on Wednesday, why the White House has designs on Greenland, and why the people of Venezuela may soon be governed, in effect, by a junta of oil companies backed by the US military, we should also consider an email Martin Peterson, a philosophy professor at Texas A&M, received about his course Contemporary Moral Problems last week.

His syllabus, he was informed, contained material banned by the college’s board of regents in December – part of the wave of censorship the Trump administration and the Republican party have encouraged at universities across the country. He was given two options: change the syllabus “to remove the modules on race ideology and gender ideology, and the Plato readings that may include these” or teach another course.

The offending material included selections from Plato’s Symposium, one of his most important and widely read works. In it, the philosopher Socrates and his companions at a banquet discuss the nature of love. And in one passage, the playwright Aristophanes offers an account of how love and sexuality came to be. There were once three sexes, he says – male, female and androgynous – and all humans were, at first, physically joined pairs. But after we mounted an attack on the gods, Zeus split us in two, and we’ve ached to complete ourselves with partners – ⁠of the same or another sex – ever since.

The “gender ideology” of this tale comes to us from the fourth century BC. And philosophers in the many centuries since have examined it not only for what it tells us about the Greeks in Plato’s day but for what it might tell us, as far removed as we might be from ancient Athens, about sex, love and longing. It is a tale about universal aspects of the human experience philosophers have examined in the service of understanding what it means to be a human being.

The efforts to answer or speak to that question ⁠are the highest and best accomplishments of what we’ve come to call “western civilization”. The coherence of thought implied by that phrase – invoked so often by a movement now cancelling Plato – have been belied by the bitter and bloody conflicts, often animated by philosophical and theological divisions, that characterized most of western history until very recently. But our disputes over what it means to be human have been fought out atop a consensus – a consensus Donald Trump and the American right now challenge daily – ⁠⁠that the question itself is of transcendent importance.

This year marks the 250th anniversary of the American answer to it – the idea that human beings are equal, possessed of a universal dignity that entitles us to basic rights and a chance to flourish and prosper, whoever we may be. That idea has always had flag-waving enemies. And today, the latent belief of the nativists vying to make America great again is that there is nothing especially interesting or consequential about the American project. [Continue reading…]