If it's taught, it must be true....

This is a pretty good followup to my last post, and definitely deserves the 'wish-bringing' label. It seems a few decades ago, certain professors (most notably, one Leonard Jefferies) at several putatively reputable universities began taking Afrocentrism (a theory based on, to put it charitably, the most dubious antecedents) out a whole new door.

Nowadays, it is taught in certain quarters that the roots of all that is profound, and good, and noble in Western Civilization actually rests with persons who were masquerading as Caucasians such as Plato, Aristotle, and Isaac Newton, but were, in reality- black.

This book, by Professor Mary Lefkowitz of Wellesley College, gives the details of this particular disease. But you can avoid spending $17 by imagining a world where there are no facts, merely intention, commitment in a certain direction and toward certain goals. The "facts" will then reveal themselves, as in a glass, darkly. These then become the received history of an individual, or group, or perhaps an entire society where conformity to that which never was can bring ease and peace of mind.

We live in a country where some universities shovel the truly great into the great hopper of their political mind-machine. It then remains to deliberately sift out the most obscure and marginal thinkers, who are then lionized as some cultural undiscovered country.

It's not inconceivable that our society could move full circle, from what may have been a lie, but truly one of those rare "good lies" as outlined by Plato in The Republic, to nothing but a set of murky supersitions well suited to a new dark age.