A very important, very relevant article - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

Spektr · 10-19-2004, 02:06 PM

Below is a link to an article emailed to me by one of my professors that I found extremely relevant to the social and political climate that we live in today. Please take a look at it and post your thoughts. I believe it covers issues that many citizens are either too apathetic towards or simply haven't realized yet.

Here's the article:
Down with 21st Century Philistinism

Please post content, not just links

-lebell

Down with 21st century philistinism
Frank Furedi explains why his latest book calls for a new Culture War.

by Brendan O'Neill

'Dumbing down' is often seen as being about the rise of reality TV and other dumb culture. In fact, says Frank Furedi, the problem is much bigger than Big Brother.

'Cultural institutions like universities and galleries no longer challenge us or encourage us to question what we know. Instead they flatter us. But flattery will get us nowhere.' Not content with having taken on risk-aversion, therapy culture and the paranoid parenting industry in his previous books, Furedi, a sociologist and prolific author who doesn't suffer faddish thinking gladly, lays in to dumbing down (or 'twenty-first century philistinism' as he prefers to call it) in his latest offering.

Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?, described by former Oxford don Terry Eagleton as a 'vitally important book', is a short and sharp critique of the way in which intellectual life has been degraded. Both inside and outside the university, argues Furedi, the pursuit of Knowledge and Truth is today looked upon with suspicion, at best as the pastime of the fusty, old, out-of-touch academic, at worst as an elitist project that seeks to impose outdated 'Western values' on to the rest of the world. Contemporary society seems to value knowledge (with a small k), culture and education only in as much as they can play a practical role in people's lives.

'Our society seems to have a big problem with the idea of art for its own sake, or knowledge for its own sake, or education for its own sake', he tells me. Instead, such things are deemed useful only if they serve some other sake - if they work as instruments of 'economic advance, social engineering, giving communities an identity, or providing therapy for the individual'.

So a university education is no longer valued in its own right, as a means of pushing an individual to his or her intellectual limits; rather, universities are discussed as making an important contribution to the economic life of nations by providing young people with the necessary skills and know-how for their future careers. Even Oxford and Cambridge, those bastions of excellence, are praised primarily for 'the vital role they play in the United Kingdom economy' (that quotation coming from the Bank of England's monetary policy committee, no less). In both the UK and the USA, says Furedi, some see filling the universities as a means to the end of keeping the economy chugging along.

Similarly, works of art tend to be valued less for any inner merit they might possess than for their (alleged) role in boosting the viewers' self-esteem, or even cohering fragmented societies. In his book Furedi cites Baroness Tessa Blackstone, Britain's former Minister of State for the Arts, who in a speech in 2001 posed the question: 'Can the arts be more than just frivolous, trivial, irrelevant?' She answered in the affirmative, claiming that the arts are important because they can improve employability, eradicate inequality and help prevent crime. She was also in 'no doubt' that the arts can 'contribute to improving health outcomes' too (1).

'When I use the term "dumbing down" I’m primarily talking about institutions, not people'

When arts and education are reduced to playing this merely functional role, says Furedi, we end up with cultural institutions more concerned with massaging individuals' self-esteem levels or striving to improve community relations than with providing people with an education or giving us stimulating exhibitions. He argues that 'flattering students is fast becoming the institutional norm in universities', where the role of academics is to 'support' students rather than to transform them, to hold their hands through to the end of the university experience.

His book discusses the example of Tyne and Wear Museum in north-east England, which adopted policies that 'flatter its visitors'. The museum has an access policy that 'encourage[s] the display of works from the collections which may not necessarily be famous or highly regarded, but have been chosen by members of the public simply because they like them or because they arouse certain emotions or memories' (2). This is becoming widespread, says Furedi, where cultural institutions 'increasingly give us what they think is good for us, and what they think we can handle. They patronise us, spoonfeeding us culture and knowledge'.

That's one reason why he doesn't like the phrase 'dumbing down'. His argument isn't that people are getting dumb and dumber; his is not an attack on 'Dumb America', the very popular idea that all Yanks are Bush-voting thickos, or on 'Dumb Britain' (the name of a regular feature in Private Eye magazine, which lists the stupidest answers given by members of the Great British public to quiz-show questions). 'When I do use the term "dumbing down" I'm primarily talking about institutions, not people. I'm talking about the elite, about the inability at the top of society to provide institutional support for the pursuit of scholarship, the arts or knowledge.'

For Furedi, this is an 'institutionalised philistinism', written into government policy documents on the arts, and into universities' and museums' 'access' policies. It is this top-down philistinism that gives rise to what some refer to as our 'dumb society' - to the degraded state of public debate and the widespread sense of political passivity. So his book is not only for those angry academics who are disturbed by what is happening to their profession, but also 'for anyone who takes ideas and argument seriously'.

Furedi's book has been welcomed by serious thinkers on both sides of the political divide, such as Eagleton on the left and philosopher Roger Scruton on the right. But it has also been accused of Grumpy Old Man-ism, described as a book for all those bitter and bespectacled intellectuals who hark back to the glory days when clever people like them were taken more seriously. Observer columnist David Aaronovitch argues that the likes of Furedi want to go back to 'Cambridge 1936, to that fabulous race of warrior dons who knew everything, to the days when intellectuals were intellectuals and women were their wives and mistresses' (3). For Aaronovitch, the 'inclusion' attacked by Furedi is really a 'new style of democracy', where universities and other institutions are being opened up to those who were previously kept at a safe distance.

Professor Sally Munt of the University of Sussex wrote a letter to the Observer thanking Aaronovitch for his article and arguing that it was high time that people like Furedi were unveiled as 'grumpy old men'. (Professor Munt's letter also included the sentence, 'A radical social analysis should depend upon the recognition of, and respect for, the dexterity by which most people negotiate an active self in this world' - perhaps confirming Furedi's argument that some academics have become dislocated from public life....) (4).

Furedi says that, fundamentally, his views have remained 'quite consistent'

Furedi's having none of it. He says that he and others who share his concerns 'are not demanding a return to the past - that is the last thing we want. But we want to make sure that the future isn't just more of the same'. According to Furedi, the fact that those who criticise the present can so easily be discredited as nostalgic golden-agers suggests there is 'widespread complacency and even conformism today, a sense that you are not allowed to ask awkward questions'. He says that the cheap accusation of being in love with an imaginary past is really 'a call for conformism in the present'.

As for the claim that 'inclusion' is a new kind of democracy.... 'I take a very traditional view of democracy', he says. 'When people want to be included they don't wait for an invitation; they kick the door down, they demand to be let in. The Suffragettes didn't wait to be included in the electoral system, and trade unionists didn't wait to be included in collective bargaining - they insisted on it. When working-class people wanted to learn they didn't wait around for an "inclusion policy"; they became autodidacts.'

Something very different is happening today, says Furedi. People are being included for the sake of inclusion, rather than for anything worthwhile. It is the act of inclusion that matters, whether in the universities, art galleries or wherever, rather than the question of what kind of content the 'included' will receive. 'The elite is saying, in a very Victorian fashion, that we know what's good for you. To see this kind of "inclusion" as a democratic moment is fundamentally to misinterpret what is a state-driven project, which includes people into an inferior version of what existed before. It is an entirely paternalistic project, masquerading as anti-elitist and democratic.'

How did Furedi get here? I first got to know Furedi when we both wrote for Living Marxism, the magazine launched and edited by spiked editor Mick Hume in 1988. It was published by the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), which was founded by Furedi and others in 1981 and which developed a reputation for its no-BS stance on everything from militarism to freedom of speech. In 1997 Living Marxism was relaunched as LM, which Furedi wrote for and I worked on. LM was forced to close in 2000 following a libel action brought by ITN, and some of the LM team went on to launch spiked, with Hume at the helm.

How did Furedi, a man of the revolutionary left, become what you might call a 'cultural commentator', writing books on issues such as parenting, therapy and now the devaluing of knowledge? Some of his detractors claim it is all a ruse to get into the papers; they accuse him of picking sexy, trendy issues on which he can make a controversial point or two.

In fact, argues Furedi, fundamentally his views have remained 'quite consistent'. 'Obviously ideas develop in relation to events, and some important political disruptions and breaks have occurred over the past 10 or 15 years', he says. 'So the way in which you express your ideas and make your arguments changes with changing times.' But he says he remains as committed as he ever was to human liberation and to freeing every individuals' potential - it is others who have changed.

'Classically the right was pro-state. Now it's the left that calls for state intervention'

Furedi found himself feeling 'ever-more estranged' from the conventional left. He recalls three incidents in particular that suggested the left was moving in a troublesome direction. 'The first time I felt it was when there were all these demands for "No Platform" for fascists, that fascists should be censored. I have always been, and continue to be, vehemently anti-fascist, but I felt that was just a cop-out, a very anti-democratic way of avoiding debate. I argued that rather than saying "No Platform" we should take up the fascists' views and undermine them, instead of opting for this very authoritarian, censorious approach.'

The second event was the miners' strike of 1984. A key issue in the strike was whether there should be a national ballot, which would allow all miners to vote on whether the strike should continue. In places like Yorkshire miners were striking hard, while other miners, in particular in Nottinghamshire, refused to strike on the grounds that there had not been a national ballot. The RCP campaigned for a ballot; just about everybody else on the left disagreed and the ballot was vetoed by Arthur Scargill, head of the National Union of Miners. 'I fully supported the strike', says Furedi. 'But I also called for a ballot, with a rank-and-file campaign to win the vote, for a strike that could be supported by everybody.' Thatcher supported a national ballot because she thought it would break the strike; the RCP supported a campaign for a ballot as a way of strengthening the miners. 'But others on the left wanted to prevent a ballot in case the vote went the wrong way. I thought this qualified approach to democracy on the left was a very big problem.'

The third event that further estranged Furedi from the left was the Cleveland child abuse scandal of 1987, when a number of families in the industrial region in the north-east of England were falsely accused of abusing their kids - often by health and social workers who considered themselves part of the left. 'I felt very uncomfortable, very uncomfortable indeed', says Furedi. 'People who I had known on the left were going around saying that loads of working-class men are child abusers. This very negative view of human beings took me aback. The kind of panic about working-class behaviour that would traditionally have been triggered by the right was starting to become a fixture of the left.'

Furedi says it is the left that has changed, rather than his own ideas or motivations. 'People who call themselves left-wing have become very different. So classically it was the right that was pro-state, now it's usually the left that calls for state intervention. Traditionally the right was anti-experimentation and anti-science, now the left is often at the forefront of that. Traditionally the right explained developments by conspiracy theory, talking about Jews or communists or whoever; now it's the left that seems to believe in conspiracies. In all this confusion, people need to rethink how they position themselves.'

Furedi scoffs at the idea that he has taken up what appear to be cultural issues in order to become a media darling. Rather, he says he is continuing the work started by Living Marxism, in trying to make sense of 'the way in which social disengagement occurs today, the growing passivity of the public, the strong fatalistic cultural and social trends that we see all around us'. But we cannot hope to understand society, and more importantly how to change it, without defending the importance of ideas and knowledge against today's philistines, he says. 'That is what my new book is about.'

cthulu23 · 10-19-2004, 02:17 PM

So some akademic is whining because they can't effectively brainwash the young with their communist propaganda....

/Inspired by Alto92, I just posted the very worst reaction that you could expect...hopefully it'll only get better.

alto92 · 10-20-2004, 12:28 PM

haha...appreciate the gesture cthulu. it works, too!

Lebell · 10-20-2004, 01:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cthulu23

So some akademic is whining because they can't effectively brainwash the young with their communist propaganda....

/Inspired by Alto92, I just posted the very worst reaction that you could expect...hopefully it'll only get better.

My experience is that this is usually the beginning of the end of a thread and the start of warnings and bannanations.

But hey, I could be wrong

irateplatypus · 10-20-2004, 01:36 PM

interesting read, but my reaction was one of tepid agreement tempered with the aftertaste of a bit of arrogance.

i wish these akademics

would make more purely intellectual propositions without clouding it with the seemingly irresistible urge to make a simultaneous political statement.

Ustwo · 10-20-2004, 01:38 PM

Quote:

uredi says it is the left that has changed, rather than his own ideas or motivations. 'People who call themselves left-wing have become very different. So classically it was the right that was pro-state, now it's usually the left that calls for state intervention. Traditionally the right was anti-experimentation and anti-science, now the left is often at the forefront of that. Traditionally the right explained developments by conspiracy theory, talking about Jews or communists or whoever; now it's the left that seems to believe in conspiracies. In all this confusion, people need to rethink how they position themselves.'

Oh my god, does that mean I'm really a dirty hippie?!

mo42 · 10-20-2004, 02:01 PM

As a current college student at the University of Illinois, I disagree with this article. While my classes do go over laboratory and experimental techniques used in modern biochemical and biological science, a whole lot of it is just pure background and knowledge. Learning how specific enzymes work at a molecular level, step by step, the origins of many of the techniques and how they were developed, how DNA is transcribed by the subunits of the replisome, and many other things are all covered.

Maybe because it's still a fast-developing science the search for knowledge and the ability to question current theories are still very much present, but it's definitely an exception to this trend he's seeing.

I can't speak for fields like business or psychology, but biochemistry very much encourages learning for learning's sake (and I find it fascinating), at least at U of I.

quicksteal · 10-20-2004, 02:37 PM

I completely agree with mo42. There are so many research universities (including Auburn University), that encourage students to perform research as an undergraduate. This guy is just whining--he claims that there is a problem with universities because museums display paintings because people like them. First of all, why would a museum display something that nobody cares to see. Secondly, he proposes no solution to the "problem" that we're facing.
I do believe that there is a dumbing down of the culture when we watch the news, and they portray events in an oversimplified manner. We see political ads all the time making outrageous claims based on a small piece of information, and people still believe that crap! But to say that universities aren't teaching students to learn on their own shows that the writer of this book isn't paying attention to what's really going on. I have always been encouraged to draw conclusions based on facts I find myself, whether I was in a history class, a science class, or an English class. I'm glad I got to read this article so that I could really come to know how useless "intellectuals" are.

Ustwo · 10-20-2004, 06:01 PM

The article has some points I agree with, but over all it seems like elitist whining.

I think he comments on the current left are right on the money but the rest sounds like the laments of an arm chair marxist.

Jizz-Fritter · 10-20-2004, 08:17 PM

I think that liberals have been fragmented by conspiracy theories for a very long time, but I don't see the anti-science part. /me

I think maybe the reason behind the dumbing down theory is a basic problem of intellectual dependence in our society, with public schools and television being to blame.

Take a look at almost any primary or secondary classroom, and you see when a kid doesn't understand something, they raise their hand. No, they don't look through their books or look at what notes if there are any, they are dependent on someone else to 'learn them'.

How many times have we heard, "Just tell me what to do!" in moments of great frustration? We're so conditioned to receive 'teaching' against our desire, that after 12 years of schooling, free will and curiosity are almost completely destroyed.

If you look throughout the world, generally you'll see a negative correlation between amount of schooling per year and performance.

John Gatto has written a book about the history of American compulsory schooling, his thesis being in that modern schooling was invented in India to reinforce the caste system (further refined by Prussia), schooling was forced onto America by the Utopian intelligentsia and elite business interests like Carnegie, Ford, Rockefeller, to dumb down and crush the independence of Americans. 'Tis an interesting read.

Dependent people won't disturb the economic order, and bored, incomplete people will require excessive managment and will buy more stuff.

Does it really take 20+ years to 'grow up'?

edit: the supression by liberals reminds me of that guy in france that wrote a book about how the holocaust didn't really happen. I think he lost his job or something, but Noam Chomsky came under attack for supporting this guys right to say what he wanted. Silly Frenchies!

Lebell · 10-21-2004, 09:25 AM

I don't think it is a liberal or conservative phenonemon to just want to be "told what to do", but a human one.

Thinking is hard work for some people

10-19-2004, 02:06 PM	#1 (permalink)
Spektr Copacetic Location: Nati	A very important, very relevant article Below is a link to an article emailed to me by one of my professors that I found extremely relevant to the social and political climate that we live in today. Please take a look at it and post your thoughts. I believe it covers issues that many citizens are either too apathetic towards or simply haven't realized yet. Here's the article: Down with 21st Century Philistinism Please post content, not just links -lebell Down with 21st century philistinism Frank Furedi explains why his latest book calls for a new Culture War. by Brendan O'Neill 'Dumbing down' is often seen as being about the rise of reality TV and other dumb culture. In fact, says Frank Furedi, the problem is much bigger than Big Brother. 'Cultural institutions like universities and galleries no longer challenge us or encourage us to question what we know. Instead they flatter us. But flattery will get us nowhere.' Not content with having taken on risk-aversion, therapy culture and the paranoid parenting industry in his previous books, Furedi, a sociologist and prolific author who doesn't suffer faddish thinking gladly, lays in to dumbing down (or 'twenty-first century philistinism' as he prefers to call it) in his latest offering. Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?, described by former Oxford don Terry Eagleton as a 'vitally important book', is a short and sharp critique of the way in which intellectual life has been degraded. Both inside and outside the university, argues Furedi, the pursuit of Knowledge and Truth is today looked upon with suspicion, at best as the pastime of the fusty, old, out-of-touch academic, at worst as an elitist project that seeks to impose outdated 'Western values' on to the rest of the world. Contemporary society seems to value knowledge (with a small k), culture and education only in as much as they can play a practical role in people's lives. 'Our society seems to have a big problem with the idea of art for its own sake, or knowledge for its own sake, or education for its own sake', he tells me. Instead, such things are deemed useful only if they serve some other sake - if they work as instruments of 'economic advance, social engineering, giving communities an identity, or providing therapy for the individual'. So a university education is no longer valued in its own right, as a means of pushing an individual to his or her intellectual limits; rather, universities are discussed as making an important contribution to the economic life of nations by providing young people with the necessary skills and know-how for their future careers. Even Oxford and Cambridge, those bastions of excellence, are praised primarily for 'the vital role they play in the United Kingdom economy' (that quotation coming from the Bank of England's monetary policy committee, no less). In both the UK and the USA, says Furedi, some see filling the universities as a means to the end of keeping the economy chugging along. Similarly, works of art tend to be valued less for any inner merit they might possess than for their (alleged) role in boosting the viewers' self-esteem, or even cohering fragmented societies. In his book Furedi cites Baroness Tessa Blackstone, Britain's former Minister of State for the Arts, who in a speech in 2001 posed the question: 'Can the arts be more than just frivolous, trivial, irrelevant?' She answered in the affirmative, claiming that the arts are important because they can improve employability, eradicate inequality and help prevent crime. She was also in 'no doubt' that the arts can 'contribute to improving health outcomes' too (1). 'When I use the term "dumbing down" I’m primarily talking about institutions, not people' When arts and education are reduced to playing this merely functional role, says Furedi, we end up with cultural institutions more concerned with massaging individuals' self-esteem levels or striving to improve community relations than with providing people with an education or giving us stimulating exhibitions. He argues that 'flattering students is fast becoming the institutional norm in universities', where the role of academics is to 'support' students rather than to transform them, to hold their hands through to the end of the university experience. His book discusses the example of Tyne and Wear Museum in north-east England, which adopted policies that 'flatter its visitors'. The museum has an access policy that 'encourage[s] the display of works from the collections which may not necessarily be famous or highly regarded, but have been chosen by members of the public simply because they like them or because they arouse certain emotions or memories' (2). This is becoming widespread, says Furedi, where cultural institutions 'increasingly give us what they think is good for us, and what they think we can handle. They patronise us, spoonfeeding us culture and knowledge'. That's one reason why he doesn't like the phrase 'dumbing down'. His argument isn't that people are getting dumb and dumber; his is not an attack on 'Dumb America', the very popular idea that all Yanks are Bush-voting thickos, or on 'Dumb Britain' (the name of a regular feature in Private Eye magazine, which lists the stupidest answers given by members of the Great British public to quiz-show questions). 'When I do use the term "dumbing down" I'm primarily talking about institutions, not people. I'm talking about the elite, about the inability at the top of society to provide institutional support for the pursuit of scholarship, the arts or knowledge.' For Furedi, this is an 'institutionalised philistinism', written into government policy documents on the arts, and into universities' and museums' 'access' policies. It is this top-down philistinism that gives rise to what some refer to as our 'dumb society' - to the degraded state of public debate and the widespread sense of political passivity. So his book is not only for those angry academics who are disturbed by what is happening to their profession, but also 'for anyone who takes ideas and argument seriously'. Furedi's book has been welcomed by serious thinkers on both sides of the political divide, such as Eagleton on the left and philosopher Roger Scruton on the right. But it has also been accused of Grumpy Old Man-ism, described as a book for all those bitter and bespectacled intellectuals who hark back to the glory days when clever people like them were taken more seriously. Observer columnist David Aaronovitch argues that the likes of Furedi want to go back to 'Cambridge 1936, to that fabulous race of warrior dons who knew everything, to the days when intellectuals were intellectuals and women were their wives and mistresses' (3). For Aaronovitch, the 'inclusion' attacked by Furedi is really a 'new style of democracy', where universities and other institutions are being opened up to those who were previously kept at a safe distance. Professor Sally Munt of the University of Sussex wrote a letter to the Observer thanking Aaronovitch for his article and arguing that it was high time that people like Furedi were unveiled as 'grumpy old men'. (Professor Munt's letter also included the sentence, 'A radical social analysis should depend upon the recognition of, and respect for, the dexterity by which most people negotiate an active self in this world' - perhaps confirming Furedi's argument that some academics have become dislocated from public life....) (4). Furedi says that, fundamentally, his views have remained 'quite consistent' Furedi's having none of it. He says that he and others who share his concerns 'are not demanding a return to the past - that is the last thing we want. But we want to make sure that the future isn't just more of the same'. According to Furedi, the fact that those who criticise the present can so easily be discredited as nostalgic golden-agers suggests there is 'widespread complacency and even conformism today, a sense that you are not allowed to ask awkward questions'. He says that the cheap accusation of being in love with an imaginary past is really 'a call for conformism in the present'. As for the claim that 'inclusion' is a new kind of democracy.... 'I take a very traditional view of democracy', he says. 'When people want to be included they don't wait for an invitation; they kick the door down, they demand to be let in. The Suffragettes didn't wait to be included in the electoral system, and trade unionists didn't wait to be included in collective bargaining - they insisted on it. When working-class people wanted to learn they didn't wait around for an "inclusion policy"; they became autodidacts.' Something very different is happening today, says Furedi. People are being included for the sake of inclusion, rather than for anything worthwhile. It is the act of inclusion that matters, whether in the universities, art galleries or wherever, rather than the question of what kind of content the 'included' will receive. 'The elite is saying, in a very Victorian fashion, that we know what's good for you. To see this kind of "inclusion" as a democratic moment is fundamentally to misinterpret what is a state-driven project, which includes people into an inferior version of what existed before. It is an entirely paternalistic project, masquerading as anti-elitist and democratic.' How did Furedi get here? I first got to know Furedi when we both wrote for Living Marxism, the magazine launched and edited by spiked editor Mick Hume in 1988. It was published by the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), which was founded by Furedi and others in 1981 and which developed a reputation for its no-BS stance on everything from militarism to freedom of speech. In 1997 Living Marxism was relaunched as LM, which Furedi wrote for and I worked on. LM was forced to close in 2000 following a libel action brought by ITN, and some of the LM team went on to launch spiked, with Hume at the helm. How did Furedi, a man of the revolutionary left, become what you might call a 'cultural commentator', writing books on issues such as parenting, therapy and now the devaluing of knowledge? Some of his detractors claim it is all a ruse to get into the papers; they accuse him of picking sexy, trendy issues on which he can make a controversial point or two. In fact, argues Furedi, fundamentally his views have remained 'quite consistent'. 'Obviously ideas develop in relation to events, and some important political disruptions and breaks have occurred over the past 10 or 15 years', he says. 'So the way in which you express your ideas and make your arguments changes with changing times.' But he says he remains as committed as he ever was to human liberation and to freeing every individuals' potential - it is others who have changed. 'Classically the right was pro-state. Now it's the left that calls for state intervention' Furedi found himself feeling 'ever-more estranged' from the conventional left. He recalls three incidents in particular that suggested the left was moving in a troublesome direction. 'The first time I felt it was when there were all these demands for "No Platform" for fascists, that fascists should be censored. I have always been, and continue to be, vehemently anti-fascist, but I felt that was just a cop-out, a very anti-democratic way of avoiding debate. I argued that rather than saying "No Platform" we should take up the fascists' views and undermine them, instead of opting for this very authoritarian, censorious approach.' The second event was the miners' strike of 1984. A key issue in the strike was whether there should be a national ballot, which would allow all miners to vote on whether the strike should continue. In places like Yorkshire miners were striking hard, while other miners, in particular in Nottinghamshire, refused to strike on the grounds that there had not been a national ballot. The RCP campaigned for a ballot; just about everybody else on the left disagreed and the ballot was vetoed by Arthur Scargill, head of the National Union of Miners. 'I fully supported the strike', says Furedi. 'But I also called for a ballot, with a rank-and-file campaign to win the vote, for a strike that could be supported by everybody.' Thatcher supported a national ballot because she thought it would break the strike; the RCP supported a campaign for a ballot as a way of strengthening the miners. 'But others on the left wanted to prevent a ballot in case the vote went the wrong way. I thought this qualified approach to democracy on the left was a very big problem.' The third event that further estranged Furedi from the left was the Cleveland child abuse scandal of 1987, when a number of families in the industrial region in the north-east of England were falsely accused of abusing their kids - often by health and social workers who considered themselves part of the left. 'I felt very uncomfortable, very uncomfortable indeed', says Furedi. 'People who I had known on the left were going around saying that loads of working-class men are child abusers. This very negative view of human beings took me aback. The kind of panic about working-class behaviour that would traditionally have been triggered by the right was starting to become a fixture of the left.' Furedi says it is the left that has changed, rather than his own ideas or motivations. 'People who call themselves left-wing have become very different. So classically it was the right that was pro-state, now it's usually the left that calls for state intervention. Traditionally the right was anti-experimentation and anti-science, now the left is often at the forefront of that. Traditionally the right explained developments by conspiracy theory, talking about Jews or communists or whoever; now it's the left that seems to believe in conspiracies. In all this confusion, people need to rethink how they position themselves.' Furedi scoffs at the idea that he has taken up what appear to be cultural issues in order to become a media darling. Rather, he says he is continuing the work started by Living Marxism, in trying to make sense of 'the way in which social disengagement occurs today, the growing passivity of the public, the strong fatalistic cultural and social trends that we see all around us'. But we cannot hope to understand society, and more importantly how to change it, without defending the importance of ideas and knowledge against today's philistines, he says. 'That is what my new book is about.' Last edited by Lebell; 10-20-2004 at 01:16 PM..

10-19-2004, 02:17 PM	#2 (permalink)
cthulu23 Banned	So some akademic is whining because they can't effectively brainwash the young with their communist propaganda.... /Inspired by Alto92, I just posted the very worst reaction that you could expect...hopefully it'll only get better. Last edited by cthulu23; 10-19-2004 at 02:19 PM..

10-20-2004, 01:36 PM	#5 (permalink)
irateplatypus can't help but laugh Location: dar al-harb	interesting read, but my reaction was one of tepid agreement tempered with the aftertaste of a bit of arrogance. i wish these akademics would make more purely intellectual propositions without clouding it with the seemingly irresistible urge to make a simultaneous political statement. __________________ If you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves. ~ Winston Churchill

10-20-2004, 02:01 PM	#7 (permalink)
mo42 Insane Location: California	As a current college student at the University of Illinois, I disagree with this article. While my classes do go over laboratory and experimental techniques used in modern biochemical and biological science, a whole lot of it is just pure background and knowledge. Learning how specific enzymes work at a molecular level, step by step, the origins of many of the techniques and how they were developed, how DNA is transcribed by the subunits of the replisome, and many other things are all covered. Maybe because it's still a fast-developing science the search for knowledge and the ability to question current theories are still very much present, but it's definitely an exception to this trend he's seeing. I can't speak for fields like business or psychology, but biochemistry very much encourages learning for learning's sake (and I find it fascinating), at least at U of I. __________________ It's not getting what you want, it's wanting what you've got.

10-20-2004, 06:01 PM	#9 (permalink)
Ustwo Pissing in the cornflakes	The article has some points I agree with, but over all it seems like elitist whining. I think he comments on the current left are right on the money but the rest sounds like the laments of an arm chair marxist. __________________ Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps.

10-20-2004, 12:28 PM	#3 (permalink)
alto92 Upright	haha...appreciate the gesture cthulu. it works, too!

10-20-2004, 02:37 PM	#8 (permalink)
quicksteal Crazy Location: Auburn, AL	I completely agree with mo42. There are so many research universities (including Auburn University), that encourage students to perform research as an undergraduate. This guy is just whining--he claims that there is a problem with universities because museums display paintings because people like them. First of all, why would a museum display something that nobody cares to see. Secondly, he proposes no solution to the "problem" that we're facing. I do believe that there is a dumbing down of the culture when we watch the news, and they portray events in an oversimplified manner. We see political ads all the time making outrageous claims based on a small piece of information, and people still believe that crap! But to say that universities aren't teaching students to learn on their own shows that the writer of this book isn't paying attention to what's really going on. I have always been encouraged to draw conclusions based on facts I find myself, whether I was in a history class, a science class, or an English class. I'm glad I got to read this article so that I could really come to know how useless "intellectuals" are.

10-20-2004, 08:17 PM	#10 (permalink)
Jizz-Fritter Crazy Location: Bowling Green, KY	I think that liberals have been fragmented by conspiracy theories for a very long time, but I don't see the anti-science part. /me I think maybe the reason behind the dumbing down theory is a basic problem of intellectual dependence in our society, with public schools and television being to blame. Take a look at almost any primary or secondary classroom, and you see when a kid doesn't understand something, they raise their hand. No, they don't look through their books or look at what notes if there are any, they are dependent on someone else to 'learn them'. How many times have we heard, "Just tell me what to do!" in moments of great frustration? We're so conditioned to receive 'teaching' against our desire, that after 12 years of schooling, free will and curiosity are almost completely destroyed. If you look throughout the world, generally you'll see a negative correlation between amount of schooling per year and performance. John Gatto has written a book about the history of American compulsory schooling, his thesis being in that modern schooling was invented in India to reinforce the caste system (further refined by Prussia), schooling was forced onto America by the Utopian intelligentsia and elite business interests like Carnegie, Ford, Rockefeller, to dumb down and crush the independence of Americans. 'Tis an interesting read. Dependent people won't disturb the economic order, and bored, incomplete people will require excessive managment and will buy more stuff. Does it really take 20+ years to 'grow up'? edit: the supression by liberals reminds me of that guy in france that wrote a book about how the holocaust didn't really happen. I think he lost his job or something, but Noam Chomsky came under attack for supporting this guys right to say what he wanted. Silly Frenchies! __________________ "Principle is okay up to a certain point, but principle doesn't do any good if you lose." Dick Cheney Last edited by Jizz-Fritter; 10-20-2004 at 08:23 PM..

10-21-2004, 09:25 AM	#11 (permalink)
Lebell Cracking the Whip Location: Sexymama's arms...	I don't think it is a liberal or conservative phenonemon to just want to be "told what to do", but a human one. Thinking is hard work for some people __________________ "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." – C. S. Lewis The ONLY sponsors we have are YOU! Please Donate!