Wednesday, May 16, 2018
The Demise of Scholarly Inquiry and Insight
To narrow the focus of existence, I suggest to young people that the the goal of all strivings should be knowledge and beauty. That, of course, encompasses a lot of potential subject matter but I think it also encapsulates everything of substance and value. All the other worthy goals of existence (“be nice to others,” “work hard and honestly,” etc.) are offshoots to some degree of attempts to immerse one’s self in knowledge and beauty.
In my home, I have a “study.” I’m not wealthy by any means but I like having a room with fine art prints on the walls, book cases stocked well with books on the humanities and social sciences, and the air buoyantly graced with the thoughts of Bach or Beethoven. It’s just a personal choice in atmosphere but I hope it effectively conjures a course to knowledge and beauty.
An ambience like that of my “study” is a target of derision in the modern academy. It conjures images of “whiteness” and “western imperialism” to the feeble mind that is unable to see anything beyond strident political rhetoric in all of existence.
I contemplated this after seeing a cartoon recently that depicts the sad state of affairs in “scholarship” today. The gist of the cartoon is beyond accurate, only omitting the fact that the dumbing down and indoctrination occurs as early as elementary school. A youth needn’t attend a modern college to be filled with the stale drumbeat of neo-Marxist passion/envy.
These same issues come to my attention when I hear Jordan Peterson discuss a wide variety of issues from politics, to psychology, art, and mythology. He has become noteworthy among a youthful mass audience precisely because it is so refreshing to simply hear a smart person talk about smart things minus the patronizing gloss of politically correct dust and agitation. Old-fashioned scholarship and inquiry is a firm bedrock for a soul in ascent. What is passed off as “academic” today is a mere decent into chaos. The uglier they can make that path of decay, the more satisfied the Jacobin scowl becomes.
It’s no coincidence that “revolutionaries” across the ages immediately begin destroying the vestiges of a culture’s highest expressions of beauty and philosophical thought. Burning books is not just the pastime of Nazis. Any political worldview that hates life immediately feels the need to destroy it wherever it can.
There may be a self-indulgent quality to those who relish immersion in the higher learning of earlier times but somewhere along their journey, contemporary students will realize they’ve been conned by sleeping wizards and their potential to live a full life has been stolen from them by the charlatans of politically correct sophistry.
When a new generation looks behind the curtain and rejects the wizard’s bogus charade, they can once again know the joy of a peaceful walk on the path to knowledge and beauty.
