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When did human rights become racist? A reflection on relativism in Australian education

I am an agnostic left-leaning history academic and a high school teacher committed to the defence of human rights and, in the era of alternative facts, truth and civility. I had always assumed that most humanities teachers in this country, regardless of political leanings, were on the same boat.
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Ken Wiber, the American philosopher & author, has written extensively on the above topic. He even wrote a novel which he called ‘Boomeritis’ critiquing the flaws in extreme post-modernism. “In short, (Postmodern/Pluralism IE-Green Meme) believes that it is universally true that there are no universal truths; it believes that its view is superior, but it also believes that there are no superior views anywhere.
This is called a “performative contradiction,” because you yourself are doing what you claim you cannot or should not do. This view ranks ranking as being bad; judges judging as being oppressive; gives a very Big Picture about why Big Pictures are not possible; claims it is universally true that there are no universal truths; places hierarchies on the lowest level of its particular hierarchy; and claims its view is superior in a world where nothing is supposed to be superior.” Wilber, Ken: The Religion of Tomorrow: A Vision for the Future of the Great Traditions
Thank you for this excellent article. I couldn’t agree more. Where there are good reasons for making a judgement (‘drawing a line’, ‘holding the line’) then we have not only a right but the positive obligation to do so. I teach this issue (using the wonderful James Rachels text referred to in the article) to undergraduate students and I see the relief on their faces as we work our way through it. The relativist claim that ‘anything goes’ does run up against human rights, and they have been very confused about how to handle that in the past. The take-home message is that one must be very careful about making judgements, but sometimes it is quite clear that one must do so. Understanding why someone has done something (explanation) is important, but it does not equate to then judging what they have done to be right (justification).
These are real problems but nothing can be done until it is addressed at its most basic level. No one listens to philosophers these days but all this relativism did not just spring up out of nowhere. The process of secularization has been proceeding all through the 20th century and we have now reached a point where western countries have several generations of value free education. That is we have value free teachers passing their ideas to the next generation without even knowing what they are doing. The only way out of this bind is to teach philosophy (no I don’t mean Kant and Heidegger!) from the early years. Teaching all children how to think critically and weigh different options from the very start would go a long way to shifting the balance. I can’t pretend that educators or politicians would ever accept this however as they are all products of the same epistemology free system and so cannot recognize the problem.
Some of the comments remind me of K. Liessmann’s Theorie der Unbildung (Theory of non-education). Unfortunately, I cannot find a decent account of this in English…