A friend sent me the following link to an article in Reason Magazine online
that described the Orwellian practice of "race sensitivity training" in
college freshman orientation programs.
http://www.reason.com/0003/fe.ak.thought.html
This made me think about times when the "intellectual establishment" is out
of synch with society, which appears to be the case now, as the article about
"thought reform" in academia illustrates. There are times, such as the
mid-18th century through the beginning of the 20th century, when the
intellectual establishment seems to be "ahead" of society as a whole, in the
sense that, in hindsight, the established and credentialled intellectual
elite was developing and thinking through the ideas that society would
eventually come to adopt in a new social paradigm. There are others, such as
the "High Middle Ages", when the intellectual elite are "behind" society, in
the sense that they are preoccupied with working out the details of the
established paradigm and aren't "leading".
I think we may well be in one of the latter periods. Deconstructivist,
socialist postmodernist relativism seems to me to be the hallmark of the Old
Order. Just as the elite of the late medieval Catholic establishment engaged
in an increasingly irrelevant and detailed re-working of hierarchical,
authoritarian christian theology and social theory, so the "soft social
science" intellectuals of contemporary academia seem to be mired in a program
that is less and less in touch with the dynamics and real values of the
society that supports them. And just as the early reformers at the end of
the Middle Ages looked back to classical times for legitimacy, I think folks
like Hayek and von Mises, looking back to Adam Smith, grounding the really
new intellectual order on the best of what came before. Like the new
thinking of the Renaissance, it is likely that what Hayek and von Mises have
given birth to will grow past those original intellectual foundations.
Greg Burch <GBurch1@aol.com>----<gburch@lockeliddell.com>
Attorney ::: Vice President, Extropy Institute ::: Wilderness Guide
http://users.aol.com/gburch1 -or- http://members.aol.com/gburch1
ICQ # 61112550
"We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know
enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another
question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species."
-- Desmond Morris
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