A snip: "And so on. Victory in war (ww2) was achieved at the cost of six years of horrible suffering, especially by the people of Russia. But the peace that followed was a remarkable example of renewal and foresight. Americans sent their veterans to college, expanded their universities and research facilities, invested in education, roads, and public works, sent billions of dollars to help stricken Europe, reopened the country to immigration, renounced racial and religious bigotry, and set about fostering important new world institutions. All of this was achieved while not only maintaining our traditional liberties but expanding them.
Doing these things required rational, open-minded leadership, exercised for the most part by people genuinely committed to the public good and operating in an atmosphere of mutual trust in which a degree of self-sacrifice was expected from many. Will it take another world crisis to revive this spirit? We may find out in the year to come."
Note focus on higher ed!
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We should perhaps pause to consider the extent to which higher education is nowadays ideological in its nature. This is, of course, most visible in the humanities, where no campus has been exempt from the 'culture wars' and the many debates taking place around the (bogus) concept of political correctness. But it is also far more widely prevalent in the sciences than most would care to admit. It's not such a problem, obviously, in a country whose economy and culture are basically healthy, but when there is a crisis... Žižek's critique is very strong in this area.
ReplyDeleteYou make a great point. I've read in places that a significant barrier to Islamic science is the view that evolution is the ultimate heresy. Of course evolution is a key theory underlying most biology.
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