Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

[Wade Riddick <wriddick AT usa.net>]

>". . . Students are, if the truth be known, a bad lot.  En masse they're
>as fickle as a mob, manipulable by any professor who'll stoop to it.
>They have, moreover, an infinite capacity for repeating dull truths and
>old lies with all the insistence of self-discovery.  Nothing is drearier
>than the ideology of students, left and right."


     "Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature."
     Samuel Butler

     "The enemy is not conservatism.  The enemy is not liberalism.  The
enemy is bullshit."
     Lars Erik Nelson

     "Read it?  I haven't even taught it yet!"
     old English professor joke


When a lot of people think of pluralism, they think of it synonymously with
democracy and that's simply not the case.

You need to ask yourself, like the founding fathers did, what motivates
people to act together?  Why do they believe what they believe?

There's a lot of statistical evidence in voting behavior to indicate that
people boil the world down to a few simple ideologies and reduce the way
they look at problems to a few simple dimensions.  What I think you're
witnessing in the academic quest for "truth" is really just political
coalition building.  Don't expect to tune in Fox-TV and get "fair" and
"balanced" - much less consistency.  Don't expect that academics aren't
guided by similar biases and prone to make mistakes.  A skilled debater
with a good handling of the facts can pick apart George Bush's business
expertise or a vegetarian's pseudo-scientific moralism with equal ease.
The more a person tilts to one ideological extreme, the closer they come to
the people at the other end of the spectrum.  In a sense the political
spectrum is closer to a circle than a line.

The problem is forum shopping.  Most people in power understand this now,
so they isolate themselves from questioning.  Control the agenda and you
control the result of the "questioning."  Ever heard, for instance, George
Bush really answer questions about how he made so much money as an
executive of oil companies going down the toilet?  Of course not.  When you
control who gets to be in "the press" and when your friends control who
gets hired and fired in journalism, you can pull enough strings behind the
scenes.  If you look at any given academic journal - especially in an area
like literary studies - "researchers" are largely asking themselves the
questions and answering the questions for themselves.  I think you get
closer to "the truth" when you watch the idiotic freshmen ask their
professors innocent questions - at least until they're properly
intimidated.  Then again, high school students would probably serve us
better in the national press corps.  They're not as concerned about playing
tennis with an undersecretary or getting producer credits... then again,
they will dis the smart kid to get in with the in-crowd...

This is all interest group behavior.  And, hey, if you're a doctor trying
to discover the reason advanced glycation products affect micovasculature
in diabetics then a certain bureacratic hierarchy of truth-seeking might be
called for... although I'll merely note here the non-linear zigs and zags
scientific quests often take as the paradigm shifts.

I've written about the increasing authority interest groups speak with
before in the list.  You might find some light on the subject in the
archives.

>And, perhaps like WP was presaging, we now live in what can fairly be
>described as the post-civilization/post-human culture.  There is lots of
>freedom here, thanks to the local meatheads:  Safety free, prosperity
>free, civility free culture.
>
>Where was it I recently read that "libertinism is the final step before
>totalitarianism"?