Crowleyism

Kevin's thoughts, like all of yours, have really helped me to contextualize Crowley's arguments. The political edge to her work is certainly just one aspect of it, even though she's sharpened it and made it impossible to read around. That deliberate step does have the effect of making us uneasy, as Berlin and others have argued that students need to feel, in order to start questioning their value systems and really seeing how socially constructed they are. One system of questioning seems to lead to the other, at least in my own thinking--I think, "man, am I liberal, or fundamentalist, or both?" Then, "where do these values come from?" Partly, though, I follow that line of thought precisely because the rhetorical pedagogues before Crowley have taught me to look for it; as a teacher, if we decide to make our students squirm in their value systems a little, I wonder if I need to indicate that that's precisely what I'm doing, and to make a pedagogical forum where students are encouraged to air their views precisely as they are, to put ideology forward so that we can all interact with each other's, and, most importantly, so they don't feel pressured into the communist party, the church of essentialism :), or any other group.

One part of Crowley's argument (and forgive me if it's been explored already) that seems a little more value-neutral (and, yes, she would say that's impossible), is her writing on fundamentalism, on page 13, where she aligns it with foundationalism, which basically says that every belief system stems fromm an ideological foundation. This seems important because it brings in the question of whether the antifoundationalism she claims, which is a critique of established systems of belief, comes from the same foundation. She points out that critiquing beliefs as nonrational is also fundamentalist, and says that she doesn't do that, which is perhaps arguable. She seems mostly to say that liberals are more open to debate than conservatives, which, even if we agree with this, has to be called into question by her book's own explorations. How open is she to interpreting the rhetoric of those who are clearly her ideological opponents, and doing so fairly? Again, she would argue that "fair" is impossible; she might also say that liberals go closer to it than conservatives.