Is this really the entirety of the contemporary (which seems to mean post-WWII) section of the core curriculum? It looks bizarre, not just because it looks so blatantly ideological but also because of the nature of the texts. I would have expected to see novels, plays, film scripts, literary biographies, poetry collections, etc., not all these political tracts and the like. Moreover, very few of the texts on the list are truly major works on a world scale. The only one that I think qualifies in that respect is the de Beauvoir book. To replace the others, I could easily think of an abundance of works that would be appropriate to study.
My humble suggestions to improve this Columbia University freshman reading list:
The Moral Equivalent of War — William James (1910)
Civilization and Its Discontents — Sigmund Freud (1930)
The Abolition of Man — C. S. Lewis (1943)
The Use of Knowledge in Society — F. A. Hayek (1945)
Politics and the English Language — George Orwell (1946)
Man’s Search for Meaning — Viktor Frankl (1946)
The True Believer — Eric Hoffer (1951)
Letter from Birmingham Jail — Martin Luther King Jr. (1963)
The Tragedy of the Commons — Garrett Hardin (1968)
Live Not by Lies — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1974)
Anarchy, State, and Utopia — Robert Nozick (1974)
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World — René Girard (1978)
A Conflict of Visions — Thomas Sowell (1987)
The Nurture Assumption — Judith Rich Harris (1998)
The Blank Slate — Steven Pinker (2002)
While not the only point, one I've always found sound is that if even part of their systemic oppression contention were true, they'd not be permitted to indoctrinate with nonsense multiple generations for decades along any and all the vectors they use.
It's the most irrational of times. Born by those who crave power at any cost and enabled by those with no backbone to stand for the objective truth.
Hey @grok what do they mean by ‘degrowth’ in the titles of these books?
“Anti-colonialism and resistance” is already propaganda based on the anachronistic reactionary concept of “colonialism” and the exceptionalization of such cultures relative to out-group colonization trajectories intrinsically assumed to be “natural” in competing political formation rather than simultaneous active projects.
This is pure propaganda
