By all means, we should listen to our philosophical opponents, if only to know better how to fight them. But we should also take their anecdotes with a pound of salt, and check their sources, both of their information and of their funding.
The pound of salt also comes in handy, because even the most sincere people have their blind spots. For instance, re phonics, in practice phonics is and always has been a part of a balanced literary program. It is a tool, among many tools, to help a teacher do that most important thing—teach their students to read.
People have always, long before the Jolly Phonics materials, or IXL, Transphonics, or any of the other commercial materials came into being, used sound, and associations, and rhythm, and rhyme to teach reading. The primary difference is that the teachers using phonics in this way are not necessarily buying a set of corporate learning materials to do it.
I'll confess, I do not trust Yascha Mounk. I think his fears of wokeness and minority "identity culture" are at best breathtaking displays of astigmatism in an ocean of white supremacist identity culture."No, there's no data supporting this," Mounk famously admitted in an interview on Firing Line, after being asked to support one of his claims about the dangers of wokeness in schools. "But there are stories." This should have been the end of the interview, but they soldiered on, unabashed.
(This encounter starts around 8.45 minutes into the interview. https://www.tpt.org/firing-line-with-margaret-hoover/video/yascha-mounk-xjckji/)
"There are stories," Dr. Mounk says. Yes, there are lots of stories, we're swimming in them. "Post-birth Abortion!" "Kitty Litter In Classrooms!" "Welfare Moms in Cadillacs" "Scary Black Men!" "Commies Everywhere"
I love movies, but let's face it, look at the tropes in cinema, look at the seminal hits. The first huge hit movie was Birth of a Nation, a pro-KKK propaganda piece. Remember the mega-smash Gone With the Wind, a love song to good ol' slavery. John Wayne, the Savage Indian, the Handsome Cary Grant against the Heathens of India, the Bond Girls with names like Miss Goodhead, and Pussy Galore, the pathetic, limp-wristed cowardly "fag"...
These are the building blocks of our social background. Women, minorities, binary people, even us oft-maligned atheists do not have this dominant cultural history, and so when we march it is against an oppressive power, not on behalf of it.
There is an inherent difference between the defensive minority aspiration of "Black Power," or "Black Lives Matter," (both of which contain the invisible "also,") with "White Power," with its centuries of real, overwhelming, uninterrupted power behind it, and which, instead of the invisible "also" carries the invisible "uber alles." Were the tiki torch Nazis in Charlottesville pleading for equal representation and fairness under the law, or were they demanding what they consider to be their natural right of absolute rule?
These are important distinctions. Marching for LGBTQ Rights, or Women's Rights or Native American Rights, and marching for White Male Rights cannot carry the same subtext in our society, because the West has, since the heyday of Rome lived under the white male supremacy banner.
I don't think Yascha Mounk, who is clearly a brilliant, well-read guy, and a German Jew besides, can be unaware of this. He obviously knows this, which is why I say I don't trust him, rather than that I disagree with him.
