I woke up, got the paper and then read this half baked OpEd by David Brooks, the world's most confused conservative.
The thesis of his article: liberalism destroys institutions. Here's the opening paragraph:
A few years ago, a faculty committee at Harvard produced a report on the purpose of education. "The aim of a liberal education" the report declared, "is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to reorient themselves."
He then goes on to describe how important institutions are. But David, haven't you been paying attention to the GOP-led government over these past 8 years. If that doesn't sink in, I suggest that you take a trip up north to "liberal" Canada and compare their institutions to ours. You'll notice one constant theme, that conservatives under the mantra of Government doesn't work and ultra-free market capitalism have systematically attacked any institution that challenges their core beliefs. So if you want to look for the main reason of the erosion of certain institutions, look to your own corner. And now we come to why Harvard and other institutions of higher learning want to foster independent thought. The simple reason is to strengthen our institutions, not undermine them.
Now I could go on citing all sorts of examples, but this idea is not new. This approach permeates all of our centers of higher learning, yes this idea is itself institutionalized. In fact if you were to move to the Science section of the New york Times, you would find an article by Dennis Overbye entitled Elevating Science, Elevating Democracy, that expresses the true value of a scientific world view. When contemplating the meaning of President Obama's declaration that he will restore the "rightful place" of science in our society, he states that this place is
On a Pedestal -- but not for the reasons you might think.
And why?
Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.
That endeavor, which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view. These are the unabashedly pragmatic working principles that guide the buzzing, testing, poking, probing, argumentative, gossiping, gadgety, joking, dreaming and tendentious cloud of activity -- the writer and biologist Lewis Thomas once likened it to an anthill -- that is slowly and thoroughly penetrating every nook and cranny of the world.
Yes, science is institutionalized questioning. It is there not to undermine the other institutions found in our society, but to place them on a more factual-based foundation. Science neither wishes to destroy or to create institutions, it is an attempt to find an objective way at laying the ground work of our knowledge. This may help or cripple certain institutions, but at least it allows these organizations to evolve into something better. If certain institutions suffer, such as organized religion (one of the institutions that I believe that Brooks was defending) then it is their own fault, and it is up to that institution to adapt inorder to remain relevant.
That our educational institutions try to transmit this attitude is not only justifiable but is in keeping with the tradition of western thought, and this is arguably our most important institution. It is an institution that dates back to the ancient Greeks and that was then inherited by the humanists of the renaissence and developed by the individuals who took part in the Enlightenment. Today this set of ideals have been passed to those who sit in so called "liberal" universities. That David Brooks fails to point this fact out, speaks volumes about the amount of self-delusion that is to be found in certain conservative commentators. That the current crop of conservatives have been opposing science, speaks volumes about their core beliefs which have tended to be ideological in recent times.
Lastly I would like to bring up James Burke. In a land mark series from the 1970s, this popularizer of scientific thought explains this idea best in the opening episode of his landmark BBC TV series The Day the Universe Changed. Here it is in 5 parts:
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Brooks is not at all confused. He knows that what he says is utter bullshit.
He's just a lying sack of right-wing shit, trying to pretend to be some kind of "reasonable pragmatist". He's an ultra-rich plutocrat, engaged in apologetics for all his greedfuck buddies.
Every word that comes out of his mouth is an intentional lie.