Liberal education, he says, “helps make us free” by showing us “not only the empirical scaffolding of our Universe-a.k.a. science-but also its conceptual scaffolding, a.k.a. the ideas, concepts and history which shape the world we live in.” Erode that education and you’re eroding freedom, citizenship and ultimately democracy itself. When the political elite doesn’t know politics, that’s a sign that liberal education is indeed being eroded.
Set aside a few minutes for this one.
“We can only hope that those taking the long view are right—that the roots of a diverse and robust American democracy are deep enough to survive the current drought.”
I hope so, too,but I doubt it will happen in my lifetime.This generation of idol worshippers has to die out and have their sophistry become apparent to the next generation.
The purpose of government is to protect individual rights. In order to do this it must hold a monopoly on coercion, which is really the same thing as “violence”. That’s hardly an extremist viewpoint, it’s the rational, civilized viewpoint. If someone or something other than government were routinely allowed to use coercion, we would have entrenched gang warfare.
But government is only supposed to use coercion as a means of enabling individuals to defend themselves. The fundamental moral principle of civilization, as formulated by Ayn Rand, is that ‘No person has the right to initiate the use of force or fraud on any other person’. Government is the institution that enforces this principle, but that means it may not itself violate it.
Meanwhile it’s true that, broadly speaking, “liberal education” is supposed to provide an intellectual background that includes the ideas and concepts that shape the world we live in.
However, it is not true that there is some sort of mind-body dichotomy between this and scientific or technological education that prepares students for a productive career. Some people are practically-minded, some are more abstract-minded, and there is room for (and necessity of) all.
In particular it is fatuous to describe careers as “being a cog in the giant machine of post-industrial capitalism”. An economy consists of all acts of voluntary trade of goods and services for mutual benefit among individuals in a society. Capitalism is the system in which this voluntary trade is not interfered with, since government intervention will almost inevitably distort the economy, lower the standard of living, and often lead to ruin.
Finally, note this line: “Liberal education, for example, cannot take root in a culture which is intolerant of dissent or suspicious of originality.” If today’s society or democracy is going off the rails, the main culprit is the university culture of “political correctness”, whose predominant characteristic is precisely that same intolerance of dissent. In other words, today it is the no-longer-liberal “liberal education” that is the biggest problem.
Ayn Rand identified out the reason for this too. She recognized that Immanuel Kant divorced reason from reality, which enabled G. W. F. Hegel to write an enormous amount of fantasy drivel which somehow got passed off as philosophy. This in turn led to Karl Marx and his followers, who are equally out of touch with reality.