Cooling down the hotbeds

By Capt. Fogg

Every word is a prejudice,

said Nietzsche. That's why one man's pillar of probity is another man's "hotbed" of heresy.

You know these colleges are hotbeds of liberalism!

said the man across the table.

These kids just aren't old enough to be able to tell what they're being taught from the truth. They're not teaching both sides.

He's got an interesting point. High levels of education in our country do seem to be associated with high levels of free thinking and pragmatism and therefore must be caused by it as proved by the cum hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy -- and whereas that's obviously bad and according to the divine doctrine of judging truth by what the less educated are comfortable with, it's therefore quite obvious that opposing viewpoints in other fields this Republican might be ignorant of or disagree with are not being given equal or preferred classroom time or assigned reading: the voice of the people isn't being heard at Harvard.

Disciplines like mathematics, physics, biology, engineering, and medicine? They only teach one side, and that's elitist. Everything has two equal and opposite sides, the right side being, by definition -- right. You know all those things are best left to folksy opinion, anonymous blog comments and to websites run and funded by Republicans who hold forth from country club and yacht club dinner tables all over America.

In history classes, we can be sure courses are not being taught about the secret liberal cabal ruining the world from its headquarters in Kenya, about the danger of subjecting corporations to the law rather than letting them write it, or that those poor women in Salem really were agents of Satan and why universal suffrage doomed the country to divine wrath. Why, even Pythagoras and Newton and Einstein are treated as relatively established authorities and one hardly hears of the four elements or phlogiston or the aether or divine creation as acceptable differences of opinion at those hotbeds any more. And what of alternative cosmologies and opposing views in the sciences and history and literary criticism? Well, in fact they are being talked about and constantly tested, but we do have the other conservative doctrines of "if I don't know, nobody knows" and the inapplicability of past experience to the present time -- and that, dear reader, is that. It's a hotbed.

No, what they should be doing at Columbia or the London School of Economics and Political Science and other centers of liberal propaganda and academic honesty is reciting the catechism that includes such credos as: tax cuts pay for themselves and never, ever cause recessions; massive concentrations of wealth and political power in the hands of a tenth of one percent of the population make for opportunity and "freedom"; and, like a driverless car, the markets will always stay on the road -- and so government should stay out of business practices and move into the pulpit, as God and the Founding Fathers intended.

Face it: universities, public and private, are hotbeds, and that's cold comfort. Hell, why don't we do as that great capitalist prophet, Mao Zedong, did and simply close them down? The people know best!

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)