Sara Giordano, mentioned in an earlier post, is a Women’s Studies professor at UC-Davis, and recent author of Those who can’t, teach: critical science literacy as a queer science of failure, in which she argues that science, as and because it is defined by Western civilization, is a tool of racism and sexism. Along the way, she displays a Women’s Studies professor’s nebulous grasp of philosophy and economics by insisting capitalism is an economic system enabled by “Western science,” as opposed to some handwavingly defined “feminist science,” which apparently would favor Marxism.
Capitalism, to Giordano, is a colonialist tool; part of a conspiracy to define some people as “non-human.” She takes a long winded path to recast the standard Marxist complaints about worker exploitation as oppression of women and minorities:
“At the root of the justification for social inequality then is Western science (together with philosophy and other modern disciplines). By producing the categories of human/nonhuman as forms of natural (yet flexible) racial difference, capitalism becomes justified as a natural (yet flexible) economic system (Melamed, 2015).”
The suggestion that colonialism was not purely evil will attract death threats. I mention this not to contend colonialism wasn’t very often rapacious and immoral, but to demonstrate its invocative power. This is why Professor Giordano feels the need to make colonialism morally equivalent to science and capitalism: Untrue.
And even if it were true, it would not justify rejection of 21st century science, nor dismissal of the precept of individual liberty inherent in Western ideals.
Professor Giordano is convinced that by encouraging scientific illiteracy (and nowhere does she qualify this call for willful blindness with the word ‘Western’) we can initiate a better world:
“…not knowing science may lead to a more just world,…” ““A transfeminist technology will value illiteracy for its improductiveness for industry, as a way of finding paths unimagined by speed and productivity.””
The fact is, we don’t have to imagine it. Stalin, Mao, Castro, Kim Jong-un, Pol Pot, Chavez, et. al. have already shown us the outcome.
Ms. Giordano’s identity politics have blinded her to what capitalism actually is. Dr. Richard M. Ebeling provides a view of capitalism she would likely embrace, if it didn’t preclude her prerogative to remake society as a feminist autarchy. What Is “Capitalism” Anyway? Read the whole thing, but here’s a salient bit.
The bedrock concept behind an explanation of “capitalism” is private property. That is, the idea that an individual has a right of ownership and exclusive use of something. For the classical liberal, the most fundamental property right possessed by an individual is his own person. In other words, an individual owns himself. He may not legally or informally be treated as the slave of another person. The individual has ownership over his mind and his body. Neither may be controlled or commanded by another through the use of force or its threat.
Now, I’m sure Professor Giordano would reply that even if that is the ideal, it isn’t how it’s worked in practice. This is true, but since she is arguing in favor of a utopian solution demonstrated to be the deadliest, most oppressive set of social experiments ever performed, it is also irrelevant. At best.