What's Illiberal About the Conservative Arts?

Throne and altar: Bauerline on Berube:

: [A] weakness in Bérubé’s argument and to contemporary liberalism in general (in educational contexts). The procedures he details are evenhanded and rousing, but the ensuing liberal tenets of liberal education are just that: all procedural. They lay out how to argue and how to disagree, how to relate to one’s own beliefs and how to relate to others’. True to Bérubé’s neopragmatist outlook, classroom liberalism bears upon attitude and conduct.... The real debate lies not over debating tactics, but over course content.... Bérubé barely touches upon these, leaving What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? with a hole at the center....

[A]n assigned essay topic [by Berube].... the tendentiousness of the question is plain. Here is the final sentence:

Analyze the U.S. constitution (original document), and show how its formulation excluded [the] majority of the people living in America at that time, and how it was dominated by America’s elite interest.

And here is Bérubé’s comment:

If students of American political science are not introduced to the contradictions underlying the foundation of a revolutionary democratic nation that practiced slavery and restricted the vote to landowning men, they are being miseducated.

What Bérubé considers good history registers with conservatives quite differently. They note the emphasis on exploitation and hypocrisy, along with no chance to argue otherwise. The Founding’s positive side is glossed over.... And as for miseducation, the historical significance of the Constitution isn’t primarily that it legalized “exclusion” and “class domination,” but rather that a group of men acculturated to exclusion and domination should have conceived a system of government and a set of rights from which free and oppressed people have drawn inspiration for two centuries.

The assignment, then, asks undergraduates to take a partial and politically loaded viewpoint on the Founding. If we want full historical context, by all means bring in the inequalities and injustices of the time, but let’s not obscure the extraordinary moral and political breakthrough represented by the document.

The liberal outlook, especially regarding race and gender, has seeped into and saturated the curriculum so much that questioning it looks not like a new venture into the marketplace of ideas but like a violation of civility.... When substantive points are recast as lapses in decency, outsiders have no chance of gaining a seat at the table.... [T]he humanities remain tied to a liberal outlook-—not to liberal personnel, but more deeply to liberal values and pedagogies...

The only reaction I can think of that is appropriate to Bauerline is to echo the Monty Python innkeeper's reaction to the German tourists: "Don't mention the war!" Bauerline's "substantive points" seem to be: "Don't mention that Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder!" "Don't mention that Thomas Jefferson slept with his slaves!" "Don't mention that Sally Hemings's options when Thomas Jefferson came a-callin' were... limited!" "Don't mention that Thomas Jefferson tried to swiftboat Alexander Hamilton!" "Don't mention that George Washington thought Thomas Jefferson was an agent of influence of France's Jacobin dictatorship!"

The key is, I think, that Bauerline believes that inculcating respect for the throne and the altar--whether warranted or not--are the proper aims of education.

---

Bauerline on Berube:

:

The chapters contain lively characterizations of students, careful expositions of American fiction, and, in contrast to the regret cited above, blithe vilifications of conservatives. Yes, conservatives are, to Bérubé, a more or less deranged and ignoble crew. Some thoughtful “arts-and-humanities” conservatives are out there, he observes, but their kind is fading. In their stead, we have angry, hypocritical figures unhinged by the presence of liberals in classrooms. Their criticisms have reached a “fever pitch,” and are “hysterically overblown.” Their “mind-bending charge[s]” strike the profs as “surreal.”

But these insults appear mainly in the opening chapters of the book and don’t advance the core issue, which is how the tenets of liberalism enhance education. For that, Bérubé relies on lengthy demonstrations of his classroom practice. He counsels students to read closely, gather evidence, consider counter-evidence, address claims that dispute their deepest beliefs, and treat opponents with respect. Open your minds, face verbal challenges, keep complacency at bay, and play fair, he presses. These are the protocols of John Stuart Mill, and one has no difficulty believing that Bérubé runs a stimulating, reasonable classroom.

The strengths of the presentation, however, point to a weakness in Bérubé’s argument and to contemporary liberalism in general (in educational contexts). The procedures he details are evenhanded and rousing, but the ensuing liberal tenets of liberal education are just that: all procedural. They lay out how to argue and how to disagree, how to relate to one’s own beliefs and how to relate to others’. True to Bérubé’s neopragmatist outlook, classroom liberalism bears upon attitude and conduct.... The real debate lies not over debating tactics, but over course content.... Bérubé barely touches upon these, leaving What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? with a hole at the center....

[A]n assigned essay topic that was claimed by a conservative student to be anti-American, a claim rightly judged by Bérubé a silly exaggeration. Still, the tendentiousness of the question is plain. Here is the final sentence:

Analyze the U.S. constitution (original document), and show how its formulation excluded [the] majority of the people living in America at that time, and how it was dominated by America’s elite interest.

And here is Bérubé’s comment:

If students of American political science are not introduced to the contradictions underlying the foundation of a revolutionary democratic nation that practiced slavery and restricted the vote to landowning men, they are being miseducated.

What Bérubé considers good history registers with conservatives quite differently. They note the emphasis on exploitation and hypocrisy, along with no chance to argue otherwise. The Founding’s positive side is glossed over.... And as for miseducation, the historical significance of the Constitution isn’t primarily that it legalized “exclusion” and “class domination,” but rather that a group of men acculturated to exclusion and domination should have conceived a system of government and a set of rights from which free and oppressed people have drawn inspiration for two centuries.

The assignment, then, asks undergraduates to take a partial and politically loaded viewpoint on the Founding. If we want full historical context, by all means bring in the inequalities and injustices of the time, but let’s not obscure the extraordinary moral and political breakthrough represented by the document.

That Bérubé accepts such assignments as straightforward history goes a long way toward explaining why conservative criticisms appear unbalanced or cynical. The liberal outlook, especially regarding race and gender, has seeped into and saturated the curriculum so much that questioning it looks not like a new venture into the marketplace of ideas but like a violation of civility. This makes it almost impossible for conservative reformers in higher education to question, much less alter, the curriculum.

It’s a frustrating impasse. Liberal approaches to the curriculum are so embedded that conservative attacks look suspect on procedural grounds. Say that multiculturalism as commonly practiced is incompatible with the training of erudite students and you offend the other parties. Describe “diversity” as a coercive and illusory term that will be remembered as nothing but a curious example of the mores of the early twenty-first century and you become an unprofessional crank. The substance of your criticism is waylaid by its impropriety.

When substantive points are recast as lapses in decency, outsiders have no chance of gaining a seat at the table. Someone as professionally aware as Professor Bérubé should recognize that, and he has at other times done so. But here, he overlooks the situation, because, I think, the aggressive actions of David Horowitz and others have raised the threat level. What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?, the major statement on the issue by a major academic voice, never outlines the most important aspect of any educational program, its curriculum. On the evidence of its arguments, we may safely assume that in spite of all the publicized assaults from the outside (such as the Academic Bill of Rights) and all the humiliating episodes on the inside (such as Ward Churchill), the humanities remain tied to a liberal outlook-—not to liberal personnel, but more deeply to liberal values and pedagogies.

Comments

[Kate G]

That is a very interesting little complaint you've posted there, Brad. I particularly like the complaint that the real problem for conservative students and professors is that for some unaccountable reason, and in some mysterious way, telling other scholars that they are blind, stupid, ignorant of history and subject to "Fads" like multiculturalism and diversity isn't as socially acceptable as it once was. Alas, when you start off by insulting your intolocutor you find that, yes, you have rather lost the moral and intellectual high ground and then, darn it, you have to argue even harder to make your point and by that time no one seems to be listening.

But you said it better, Brad. Apparently, the writer applies bush's "soft bigotry of low expectations" to the founders and rules out of bounds consideration of the morality, expediency, and meaning of things like women's rights, slavery, treatment of indians, christianity etc... that the founders themselves argued about publicly and privately.

Kate G.

[Stan Jones]

Brad

In the interest of keeping John Clees characters straight, I believe it was actually Basil Fawlty (you did get the innkeeper part right) who admonished his staff to "Don't mention the war". Of course, being Fawlty, he proceeded to do just that.

[Emma Anne]

--- What Bérubé considers good history registers with conservatives quite differently. They note the emphasis on exploitation and hypocrisy, along with no chance to argue otherwise. The Founding’s positive side is glossed over.... And as for miseducation, the historical significance of the Constitution isn’t primarily that it legalized “exclusion” and “class domination,” but rather that a group of men acculturated to exclusion and domination should have conceived a system of government and a set of rights from which free and oppressed people have drawn inspiration for two centuries. ---

What I find interesting about this argument is the idea that anyone could reach college without having been steeped in the "Founding's positive side." Do these folks really think that American students haven't been taught year after year about the wonders of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution? The wisdom and feeseeingness of the Founding Fathers? The Boston tea party, and George Washington refusing to be made a king? Kids may not learn Latin anymore, but I hardly think they are in danger of missing this stuff.

[walkingtheline]

Can I admit to finding the militarization of American conservatism frankly alarming (bombs bursting in air and all). Foreigners are not in large obsessed with the civil war either.

Bérubé has my sympathies, if only because he seems the party with less stake in interpreting history as political allegory. That is an uphill battle when waged against nationalist nutcakes.

[David]

"Don't mention that George Washington thought Alexander Hamilton was an agent of influence of France's Jacobin dictatorship!"

Huh? Was GW really that bonkers? I've been teaching this stuff for over a quarter century, and this is news to me.

[anne]

Kate G:

'That is a very interesting little complaint you've posted there, Brad. I particularly like the complaint that the real problem for conservative students and professors is that for some unaccountable reason, and in some mysterious way, telling other scholars that they are blind, stupid, ignorant of history and subject to "Fads" like multiculturalism and diversity isn't as socially acceptable as it once was.'

Ah, always a keen eye to nuttiness.

[Bruce Wilder]

I think it interesting that the conservative critic takes a brief for the idealism of the Constitution.

In real life constitutional interpretation, the reactionary conservative position is often to argue against applying the broad, idealistic language of the Constitution broadly and idealistically, on grounds of "original intent" not being quite as broad and idealistic as the flowery language, by itself, suggests.

Reactionaries, who want to polish the marble images of the Founders in school, are often at pains to narrow the application of the ideals of the Constitution in court. For decades, reactionaries protected Jim Crow by refusing to recognize that the 14th amendment applied to blacks, while applying those protections to business corporations with enthusiasm. On the present court, Scalia, to date, has found the "equal protection" guarantees of the 14th amendment useful only when he wanted to appoint a moron of his Party, President, and on no other recorded occasion.

Perhaps, Berube could balance his liberal content with some conservative content, which highlights the ways in which conservatives have resisted the ideals of democratic egalitarianism every step of the bloody way.

[andres]

"You folks have perfectly adequate critical faculties - but do they only work in partisan mode? If so, who needs you?"

Note the tone in your above passage, TStockmann, and then note Kate G.'s passage:

"Alas, when you start off by insulting your intolocutor you find that, yes, you have rather lost the moral and intellectual high ground and then, darn it, you have to argue even harder to make your point and by that time no one seems to be listening."

So tell us then, doesn't the above seem to fit your tone? So why would we need you, then?

[andres]

"Even if you break your own heart, they (the ignorant, the fanatic) will break it for you just the same."

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations.

[andres]

To me, it seems perfectly obvious that an system that excludes women and slaves from the franchise (and also excluded American Indians de facto) is not intended to be a democracy in the modern sense of the word. Furthermore, in the late 18th/early 19th century, you not only had to be a free male, but also literate and with a substantial bank account and business connections in order to run for elected office, just as today. So the system created by the Constitution was intended to be a narrow oligarchy of white male landowners/businessmen in every sense of the word.

Saying this is the truth, and yet not an insult given that such an oligarchy functioned better and was less brutal than any other form of government then existing, as well as provided the necessary framework for expansion of the market and industrialization that would eventually spell the end of slavery and landowner oligarchy. Pointing out the various glaring faults of the Constitution is not the same thing as insulting it, something which our modern patriots (read: authoritarian apologists) don't seem to fully grasp.

[Warren]

Bauerline criticizes an approach to teaching that exclusively emphasizes the negatives about the early Constitution.

[But that's not what Berube teaches, is it?

Why do you and Bauerline both pretend to believe that Berube's courses focus exclusively on the negative aspects of the Constitution?]

Certainly this is a moderate and reasonable position. How can it be liberal to be dogmatically dismissive of the constitution and the entire American experiment? The American experiment is, after all, part of the invention of liberalism in the first place.

[andres]

"Don't mention that George Washington thought Alexander Hamilton was an agent of influence of France's Jacobin dictatorship!"

Er, Brad, Washington may have thought this of Jefferson, but certainly not of Hamilton who had a near poisonous hatred of both Jefferson and the French Revolution.

But it's true that most high school treatments of early US history gloss over or ignore some of the more nasty and unpleasant episodes, such as:

* Burr's attempted treason/secession.

* Jefferson's inability to come to morally consistent stance on slavery (which he could have done if he had moved from Virginia to Massachusetts, for example).

* The US ambassador to France conspiring to keep Thomas Paine locked up and even executed by the Jacobins, a plot in which Washington _might_ have been implicated.

* The campaign of retaliation by the Continental Army against the Iroquois tribes which had fought for Britain, in which no distinction was made between Iroquois warriors and their women and children.

* Later on, the Ostend Manifesto in which antebellum southern politicians (including future president James Buchanan) asserted their right to annex Cuba, with or without the Cuban people's approval.

In short, early US history is by no means as rosy as the textbooks claim. And this does not diminish the accomplishment of the US in creating a more egalitarian and democratic society than any that existed at the end of the 19th century.

[dale]

"If students of American political science are not introduced to the contradictions underlying the foundation of a revolutionary democratic nation that practiced slavery and restricted the vote to landowning men, they are being miseducated."

I find it hard to fathom someone who thinks this is a one-sided critique of US history.
This is how progress is made in our understanding of history and the moral development of society. Do we want history as legitimating mythology or history as a guide to a better collective self-understanding?

And on a more reasonable meta level- what better post-critical legitimating mythology could there be than that of our society as a self correcting, progressively better embodied working out of those original ideals of the Founders and their Enlightenment mentors? I find that a source of pride and encouragement.

[pontificant]

gotta disagree with you here, Brad, if I am following the conversation correctly.

If Berube's exam question is quoted acurately, it is, indeed, a weak one. Asking students to demonstrate their ability to support a conclusion built into the question is not asking enough.

How about a question that asks students to itemize the ways the constitution excludes and oppresses AND the ways it serves as an inspiration [to take berube's and bauerline's positions] and then reach a conclusion assessing the points of greatest significance?

[Eli Rabett]

In any country, you study that country's history many times. The history you learn in elementry school is cartoon like. As you grow older you learn more details and increasingly about ambiguities. In college one should be prepared to deal with the feet of clay issues, which, I hope is Berube's point.

Anyone who does not want to deal with the problems of history is trying to keep students fat, ignorant and drunk (which a lot of them are anyhow).

[Ken Muldrew]

Locke: "Life, liberty, and property"

Jefferson: "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"

Did Jefferson drop "property" due to his being uncomfortable with slavery, or due to the expropriation of the King's property (the colonies), or for some other reason? I vaguely recall reading something on this topic here at one time, but only vaguely (perhaps I was having a fat, ignorant, and drunk moment ;-) ).

[Colin Danby]

pontificant's right that the question is badly, tendentiously phrased but it's not MB's question -- it came from an exam set by a professor at Foothills College in CA which created a media controversy.

[Colin Danby]

What Dan Drezner's smart review
http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/002985.html#more
terms "procedural liberalism" clearly gets a good defense by Berube, and procedural liberalism is a positive-sum game.

So Bauerlein goes looking for zero-sum games. One is the traditional bugbear of curricular content: the more room for your stuff the less room for my stuff!

That battle is presented in Bauerlein by a bunch of code words: "race and gender," "multiculturalism," and "diversity" which he opposes to "training of erudite students." None of this is developed or explained; Bauerlein insinuates there's a stultifying orthodoxy which unfairly makes lonely standards-keepers like himself look like cranks. There's in fact considerable controversy over what race and gender mean, and lots of post-structuralist work in recent decades highly critical of the conventional "multicultural" model. "Diversity" is an almost meaningless term. If you start insisting that everyone who doesn't share your particular notion of erudition is a damned multiculturalist, you *will* get a reputation as a crank.

The second zero-sum game is around little texts like course descriptions and exam questions, in which you get people objecting to certain words, or formulations that appear insufficiently respectful of one thing or another. There was a long discussion of some of those on Tim Burke's
(http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=201#comments) blog a while back. Lots of practice in close reading.

[Jonathan Goldberg]

It was enscribed above:

"Don't mention that George Washington thought Alexander Hamilton was an agent of influence of France's Jacobin dictatorship!"

Huh? Was GW really that bonkers? I've been teaching this stuff for over a quarter century, and this is news to me.

And also:

"Don't mention that George Washington thought Alexander Hamilton was an agent of influence of France's Jacobin dictatorship!"

Er, Brad, Washington may have thought this of Jefferson, but certainly not of Hamilton who had a near poisonous hatred of both Jefferson and the French Revolution.

Am I reading an altered version of the original post? Cut and paste from our host's comments:

"Don't mention that George Washington thought Thomas Jefferson was an agent of influence of France's Jacobin dictatorship!"

It seems that the first of these posters changed "Thomas Jefferson" to "Alexander Hamilton" and the second poster failed to notice this. Correct?

[Jon Fernquest]

There should be room for both of them.
That's where the problem lies.

Even a huge university like US Berkeley has huge gaps in its coverage of world knowledge or approach to knowledge.

More government subsidies to education and **more lifelong contacts and engagements with education among the populace** which will only happen if the government supports it financially.

This will help long term career prospects, maintain an informed citizenry, and provide more opportunities for foreign exchange students.

Conservatives probably feel disenfranchised and excluded, but everytime I read something they they write, I ask myself the question, ***what are they are experts in?*** Conservative ideology?

Shouldn't they actually be an expert in some concrete subject like macroeconomics or history or Area Studies like Juan Cole is, also? There is simply too high a proportion of conservative ideologues who make no contribution beyond their ideological leanings, that's why they contradict themselves so often, they're always looking for some new ideological spin.

[Chip Poirot]

I reject the question. I do not reject the importance of teaching about the numerous conflicts beind the Constitution. I do not reject discussion of the issues involved.

Let's look at it another way. What would you think of the question: show how globalism marginalizes and disenfranchises the third world poor...?

A better question would be: compare and contrast neo-liberal and neo-marxist views on globalization...

Applying the same logic to the question at hand, I would prefer to rewrite it along the following lines:

Discuss the view that the U.S. Constitution solidified the power of elites..compare and contrast this view with the view that the U.S. Constitution provided the basis for expanding democracy. Are the two views incompatible?

That's not to say I think it makes sense to spend one's time complaining about exam questions.

[Colin Danby]

OK. For those of you interested in untangling this, Michael has kindly posted on his blog, direct from Pittsburgh airport and only slightly stained by quesadilla drippings, what wlatla has to say about the exam question in question.
http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/comments/1090/

I think it's safe to say that the the Bauerlein review provides a rather condensed version, which as posts above suggest might produce a misleading impression of the book's argument.

[Colin]

The url is cut off but www.michaelberube.com works as well right now.

[andres]

Jonathan: No, I used cut and paste directly from Brad's original post. Maybe I unconsciously edited the sentence, but it's more likely that Brad read David's comment and mine and reedited the original post.

But yes, Washington was more receptive to Hamilton than to Jefferson, and was deathly afraid that the Jacobin virus would spread to the US through Jefferson and through Jefferson's "stooges" (Madison and Paine).

[liberal]

Ken Muldrew wrote, "Did Jefferson drop 'property' due to his being uncomfortable with slavery, or due to the expropriation of the King's property (the colonies), or for some other reason?"

My guess: he realized that concentrated land ownership was a bad thing. (See e.g. Jefferson quotes at http://geolib.pair.com/essays/sullivan.dan/royallib.html)

[Ginger Yellow]

"How about a question that asks students to itemize the ways the constitution excludes and oppresses AND the ways it serves as an inspiration [to take berube's and bauerline's positions] and then reach a conclusion assessing the points of greatest significance?"

Because that would be such a catchall question as to be useless. It's basically: "Discuss the constitution." I don't know how exams work at the university in question, but at mine you got to choose three questions out of more than 20 in each paper. If all the questions were worded like that one, or if all the curriculum focused on exclusion rather than franchise, then I might be convinced there was a problem. Until then it seems perfectly reasonable - exams are supposed to test your ability to construct an argument and marshall evidence in support. That question provides a perfect opportunity to do so.

[Cyrus]

Jefferson is listing inalienable rights, rights that ought not to be taken away from a person, even with their consent. If a person can morally sell their property, that person does not have an inalienable right to it. (Examples about in medieval land law of ways in which a person might be granted broad use of an estate, but not be able to sell it.) One might claim that a person has an inalienable right to have property, in general, but not an inalienable right to any particular property. "The pursuit of happiness" is a phrase sufficiently ambiguous to avoid having to deal with this distinction.

[shander]

This is how the question the same should look:

“Explore the ways the law as laid out in the constitution favors interests coinciding with the minority of the population empowered to vote by its text.”

Certainly a litigator would see the unnecessarily pejorative caste to the *wording* of the original question itself and its sort of leading, sort of unanswerable question “what didn’t the constitution do and why didn’t the people writing not care to try to do it, because they were elite”. (also words “excluded”, “dominiated” and “elite”, “people” castes the question the way an advertiser or politician would)

I will give the instructor the benefit of the doubt that not all of his questions aimed to find fault rather than explore the many historically and durable merits of the Constitution in empowering the powerless and unconnected. (Isn’t the constitution remarkable in its dealing with indebtedness, habeus corpos and other things that attempt to head off human excesses pragmatically for the purpose of a more stable and less corrupt rule of law ?)

The Constitution was a huge extension of more rights to the petty bourgeois and a huge extentsion in rights under the law to many non voters compared to previous ones.

Trying to guess what other potential voters at the time would have wanted would require pages completely seperate from how the actual decisions were made.

It would be near impossible to determine whether personal incentives to deny freedom's to consolidate relative power was a more deterniming factor than pragmatic odds assesement of o take what incrmental change to the better they could hopefor without slipping back to the less freedom for all under the king. You're inclined to conclude if there was an incentive the wrong was based on the incentive, and also conclude that a rational minority might not accept a law that he found offensive that could replace one that was more destesitible because the right solution wasn't winnable at the time.

So it wasn't who was including in the composition necessarily but who held a veto? Dismantle slavery in the constitution and you'd have had no united states no matter who wrote the contitution?

The thing is a mess... Break the question down and substute other subjects and you'll see.

[kharris]

Emma Anne pegs a sizable weakness in Bauerline's critique. He ignores the educational context in which Berube's argument is nestled.

There is an old joke about history education, which I will get wrong, but which goes something like this: In grade school, the US Civil War was a war fought over slavery. In high school, it was a war over states' rights and keeping the nation together. As an undergraduate, it was a war fought over conflicting economic interests. In the PhD dissertation, it was a war fought over slavery.

Is Berube catching his students at a point at which they need their comfortable, civics-class version of history challenged? Or is Colin's point all there is to it – Berube chose somebody else's example and Bauerline attributed it to Berube? Bauerline decides to fight the same, hear-it-all-before fight, rather than listen to what Berube has to say about education. Berube is arguing for fact-based analysis, yes? For challenging students to think, rather than sit with their intellectual mouths open, waiting to have worms dropped in? I'd be curious to know whether Bauerline objects to that approach, as well as to the content. Bauerline acknowledges that Berube's argument for "liberal" education is an argument for technique. Well?

[Colin Danby]

Just to be clear, Kharris, Bauerlein does *not* misattribute the essay question to Berube. That error was actually Brad's, in his bracketed interpolation above

[A]n assigned essay topic [by Berube]

There's been more discussion of ths issues at The Valve, in which Bauerlein has participated.

[andres]

"There is an old joke about history education, which I will get wrong, but which goes something like this: In grade school, the US Civil War was a war fought over slavery. In high school, it was a war over states' rights and keeping the nation together. As an undergraduate, it was a war fought over conflicting economic interests. In the PhD dissertation, it was a war fought over slavery."

I must be getting dense, kharris, but I don't get the joke: all of the above are different aspects of the same thing, like the parable of the blind men groping the elephant. And slavery, if one wants to start with it, has a huge number of political and economic ramifications.

[Stuart Buck]

How do you get this:

Bauerline's "substantive points" seem to be: "Don't mention that Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder!" [Etc.]

From this:

"By all means bring in the inequalities and injustices of the time."