An educated mind

(The last photo is courtesy of Tom, over on the amazing: http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.com/)

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I was struck, reading Wellmon & Reitter's great introduction to Nietzsche's Anti-Education, by just how timely his criticism of the universities is; and also by how those views resonate with ideas expressed some twenty years earlier by Cardinal Newman (as intimated by Macintyre).

The question goes deeper than an examination of what the university stands for since it touches on the fundamental question: what is an educated mind and how is it cultivated? A subset of interesting issues within those larger ones would lead us to ask what the political ramifications of having an educated public are. Or, to put it the other way around, what kind of political body, what type of democracy exists when individuals are nourished on so much trash? Even at the supposedly higher levels of culture the best one can muster is to question, debunk or ridicule everything (at least anything that suggests stability, common values, reflection, tradition). 

Questions.

1. Can an educated mind exist given the levels of specialization that is currently to be found in the various disciplines? To say that one is an economist, for example, would suggest that one knows something about how the economy works. But apart from at a very general and abstract level academia doesn't really foster such an approach. 

Firstly, the narrowness of one's specialization precludes a wide reading of other areas within economics. Secondly, the intellectual approach itself is so abstract and ahistorical that it becomes increasingly difficult to say much about the relation between one's theoretical understanding and the workings of particular economies in the real world. Thirdly, one has no sense of the limitations of one's analysis (either in terms of the restricted nature of one's assumptions or in the limited scope to which one's inquiries can be applied). Fourthly, how does one in reality connect the dots, as it were, across the various sub-branches of any one discipline? 

These problems are wildly exacerbated when it comes to one's understanding of any material outside one's discipline. What does an economist, for example, understand of history, sociology, anthropology or ethics and how serious are the gaps in her knowledge for a complete understanding? 

In short, does the viewpoint of modern academia simply reproduce the fragmentation of perspectives and values (not that vales are important in a technical education!) that one sees in the wider society, a dispersion that leads to a constricted and contracted mind? No unity of mind, being or knowledge.

2. Question 1, therefore, naturally leads into the question of an integrated life, its possibility and its importance. Can a university foster any sense of coherence when it sits in isolation from the wider currents of cultural developments? Of course, the university has always prided itself in being independent of societal pressures but that is to state the case only negatively, in terms of the autonomy of certain ideals. But is there a potentially positive relation as well? If the 'outside' culture is increasingly materialistic and shallow can the university really set up its own set of standards or does it only do so by becoming irrelevant to the day-to-day concerns of ordinary human lives? In the latter scenario what develops is a highly rarefied world of abstruseness and pseudo-intelligence, the world of experts and technocrats following closely on its coattails. 

The world of the stuffed mind, the bombastic showman mingling with the pedantic poseur, the super-inflated ego of the self-righteous living out the "life of the mind" in one last great hurrah. 

So, one really needs to think about the symbiosis between an educated public and the university in a positive fashion.

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Back in the land of the pure it might be said that it is precisely this lack of education in the fuller, non-technical sense, that is woefully lacking. The absence of an educated public results in the acceptance of a coarse kind of conservatism in religious and "cultural" matters and allows a space for demagogues and manipulators in the public realm (which is, in effect, a destruction of the public realm).