What Have The Ancient Greeks Ever Done For Us?

The Free Speech Fates have woven a Greek thread through today’s episode, starting with the Olympic Games. A 33-page ‘Portrayal Guidelines’ document, published ahead of this summer’s Paris Games, states that a person’s sex is not assigned based on genetics alone. As reported by the Telegraph, the International Olympic Committee has been accused by Martina Navratilova of waging a 1984 version of war on women after asking journalists not to use terms such as “born male” or “biologically male” to describe transgender athletes. It argues that such labels are dehumanising and constitute “problematic language”. Despite the ferocious backlash, Yiannis Exarchos, chief executive of Olympic Broadcasting Services, promised that his team in Paris would use the guidelines as “our Bible”, and “we call on our colleagues across all media to embrace them”. Meanwhile, Greek philosophers are at risk of being scrubbed out of various study courses. A new toolkit for ‘decolonising’ philosophy in secondary schools and universities summarily dismisses canonical western philosophers from Plato and Aristotle through to Descartes and Wittgenstein as ‘dead white males’ who engaged in solipsistic “armchair theorising” and must now make way for more exciting and sophisticated voices from the ‘Global South’ (Mail, Times). The toolkit was drawn up by four undergraduate student interns, working alongside four academic philosophers at SOAS (formerly the School of Oriental and African Studies) in London. We end by discussing our fears around a new form of diversity training, namely ‘plus-size inclusivity training’. Our concerns appear to be shared by oncologist Professor Karol Sikora, who is quoted in the article, “Plus-size inclusivity training is just the sort of nonsense that the senior management in the NHS will make part of the ridiculous politically inspired mandatory training all doctors are forced to do. Please bring back some common sense!”. We couldn’t agree more.

‘That's Debatable!’ is edited by Jason Clift.