One of the most enduring myths of our age is of modern civilization's crowning glory is that it is built upon disinterested, neutral, scientific, objective inquiry. Past ages were characterised by blind prejudice and mysticism. Consequently, ignorance dominated. Modern man, it is believed, has escaped from such primitivism and truly entered an enlightened age. The modern explosion of knowledge has released captive mankind from the shackles of brute ignorance—or so the myth shrills.
But humankind has a distinct proclivity toward self-deceit. Every age has a tendency to think of itself as the biggest, the brightest, and the best that the world has ever seen. Ours in no exception. Every so often the veil of blindness is drawn back and we see our world for what it is. Sadly, this supposedly enlightened modern world is racked with blind prejudice, mysticism, ignorance, cant and hypocrisy.
Occasionally society throws up a person who combines fierce intellectual prowess with radical objective self-awareness and criticism. Michael Polanyi, one of the most formidable physical chemists of the last century, was such a person. However, he gave up his stellar scientific career as a result of a kind of mid-life crisis. He turned instead to become a professional philosopher of science, accepting a specially created chair for that purpose at the University of Manchester in 1948.
What provoked Polanyi into this career shift was a conversation with Nikolai Bukharin, leading theoretician in Stalin's Communist Party. Bukharin argued that the distinction, common in the west, between pure science (letting the facts speak) and applied science (social advocacy) was incorrect. In the Soviet Union, scientists were free to research whatever they liked, but owing to the enlightened state of Soviet society and its comprehensive internal harmony, all Soviet scientists in fact were inevitably led to lines of research that would benefit the current Five Year Plan. Therefore, when the state and its institutions controlled and directed research it was merely acting consistently with the already pre-existing harmony of scientific and social aims.
That conversation profoundly disturbed Polanyi. He knew that it spelled the end of rational scientific endeavour as we know it. But he was not provoked to change careers until this Soviet view of science began to be advocated in Britain in 1938. It was argued by the British Association for the Advancement of Sciences that the progress of science had to be socially guided. Polanyi saw that this would lead to the kind of self-deceit and ignorance prevalent within the Soviet Union. For the rest of his life, Polanyi advocated for rigorously honest scientific inquiry, which led him to espouse a philosophy of science which is both profound and humble.
While strongly advocating a rigorous scientific method in the discovery of knowledge about the material world, Polanyi remained acutely aware of the limitations of science and scientific knowledge. He called for a deeply self-critical consciousness of the tenuousness of scientific discovery, the circularity of knowledge, the “tricks” of the mind, the inaccuracy of experimental data, and of the influence of prior suggestion. He knew, however, that such self-criticism, such remorseless objectivity, is impossible in advocacy-science.
But Polanyi has lost the fight. Today, more than ever before, the Soviet model is being applied in the West to science and scientific research. Perceptions of social need and advocacy of causes dominates the Academy—which inevitably produces a quasi-religious certainty to the status-quo view. It is hard to be objective and disinterested when all around you the social, institutional, and political consensus is advocating a particular perspective. Today the vast bulk of academics invariably study a certain cluster of issues with the intended outcome of proving and reinforcing the prevailing social paradigm or consensus. Bukharin's world has come to pass.
You may think that this is extreme. Far from it. Recently, the Sydney Morning Herald carried a piece entitled, “Academic Freedom: Exit Far Left. The author argued as follows:
Have a different opinion? Think again. The debate is over. A highly politicised ideological bias exists in academia - one harmful to students, damaging to standards and which threatens intellectual diversity - according to the majority of submissions to the Senate's academic freedom inquiry.
In nearly all cases, this bias comes from one direction - the left. A prominent academic, Mervyn Bendle, in his submission says it "dominates research programs, publications and textbooks at all levels and therefore influences every aspect of education in Australia".
Pick any controversial issue today - Work Choices, anti-terror laws, Israel-Palestine, or climate change - and in academia these issues have been decided. There is only one accepted view on each - no debate is allowed. . . .
Heaven help anyone on campus, academic or student, who dares to question what Dr Bendle calls a "radical orthodoxy", characterised by "theories associated with neo-Marxism, postmodernism, feminism, radical environmentalism, anti-Americanism, anti-Christianity, and related ideologies".
Bendle argues this entrenched left-wing culture has its roots in the counterculture of the 1960s. Yesterday's radicals are today's establishment, and now they will tolerate no dissent. Resistance is futile. You will be indoctrinated.
No recent research has been conducted into the ideological leanings of Australian educators, but in the US a 1999 study found more than 70 per cent of academics identified as left wing, compared to only 15 per cent as conservative. In some humanities departments, conservatives are outnumbered by up to 30 to one. The situation is so bad the University of Colorado recently debated creating a "chair of conservative thought" in a desperate attempt to restore some balance. . . .
One former trainee teacher, Beccy Merzi, told the inquiry: "I became so fed up and disgusted by the continual barrage of criticism of mainstream values, the lack of focus on practical ways of teaching, and the continual focus on minority groups, postmodernism, gender, queer and other studies that I abandoned my teaching degree. "
But it's not only the course content that is biased - it's lecturers' conduct. Submission after submission documented educators using their classrooms to promote their political views and belittling or marking down students who disagreed.
"I have been abused and mocked by a lecturer in front of others for refusing to acknowledge the 'genocide occurring in Lebanon' during the Israeli-Lebanese war," one student, Joshua Koonin, told the inquiry.
This age is neither enlightened, nor knowledgeable. It bears the hallmarks of a Dark Age in which mysticism increasingly masquerades as truth. The pseudo-science advocacy of global warming mania is just the latest example. One only has to read the socio-political advocacy that is being published in so-called scientific magazines like the New Scientist to illustrate the point further. Bukharin's vision has come to pass. Polanyi's worst fears have been realised. The Academy is soundly compromised, although not yet widely discredited. The left wing-academy complex remains firmly ensconced and influential—for now.
The fall of discredited pseudo-academics, however, is certain. Just as the former Soviet Union collapsed from the inside as reality impinged remorselessly upon the willfully ignorant power elites (remember the years of bad harvests being blamed regularly and routinely on fifty sequential years of bad weather), so reality—providential, God-controlled reality—will increasingly squeeze pseudo-academics in a divine vice. Because God is Truth, and the history of the world belongs to Him for His purposes, eventually truth will out.
Meanwhile, we need to be working diligently to establish and promote new academies of learning and research that are not afflicted with the benighted ideologies of this current dark and ignorant age.
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