Universities shun universal verities

The current debate at Sydney University about the activities of certain academics should not be allowed to hide the fact that the Australian university, qua university, is dead. It is not only dead in Australia. It is dead in the UK and in the USA although the idea of a university probably continues in one or two schools within the dead bodies in the USA – much as hair continues to grow for a short time after death.

The idea of the university can be traced back to the 4^th century Athens, to the Academy and the Lyceum, to the philosophers, Plato and Aristotle.

It was in those schools that the most profound reflection on the human condition, on human nature, that is, philosophy, was undertaken and encouraged in the students. Plato’s family tutor was a man called Socrates. Socrates, it has been reported, called philosophy down from the heavens and focussed it firmly on man. Socrates had once been a natural philosopher, reflecting on the heavens and is the subject of Aristophanes’s play, The Clouds.

The questions that Socrates addressed to the people he met in the market place could be characterised as the ‘what is …’ questions; what is beauty, what is piety, what is justice. The fact that he addressed such questions to ordinary people (or at least to those who purported to hold such opinions) was not so he had an opportunity to shoot their theories down. That method of procedure was an assumption that people’s opinions contained an element of truth; more in some and less in others and by his procedure of contradiction, to move that opinion to a position closer to the truth. The result being not ‘truth,’ but right opinion.

The legacy of the Socratics and particularly Aristotle was that unaided human reason, that is, common sense, could discern the correct way of life for mankind, the way of life that would make mankind happy.

This claim was contested by the claim of revealed religion that the best way of life for man was obedience to God – revelation properly understood. It was this contest that drove the intellectual development of the West, the development of the truly human that permitted the West to make the only claim to being a civilisation.

It was within the university that this argument was conducted thus perpetuating the theoretical life as that was understood by Aristotle.

Sometime last century, however, the university became a multivarsity according to the Chancellor of the University of California, Clark Kerr.

The university, as its name implies, was an establishment that turned its students towards the ‘one’, a universal or comprehensive view of the whole (verto - I turn). The students became universal men. The multivarsity, which succeeded the university, now turns its students towards many things: unus to multus. The universal view has given way to the many views; ie., to specialisation.

The cause of this change of focus of the university is to be found in the application of the scientific method to the study of man. In order to achieve this break-through in understanding, however, a metaphysical transformation of man was necessary. It was one thing for science to correctly predict planetary motion, the tides and chemical reactions, etc; it was an entirely different thing to apply that scientific methodology to human beings. After all, since every person contains a power of choice, every person is radically unpredictable – despite what statistics might imply. Science, modern physical science, derives its authority from its ability to predict outcomes.

The transformation of the human soul that modern philosophers accomplished during the 17^th and 18^th centuries, replaced human reason as the cause of human action with the passions. In this scheme, reason plays no greater part in human action than an animal’s reason plays in its.

In the 19^th Century, Auguste Comte developed his theory of positivism, a theory that is characterised by the distinction between facts and values. The theory, in a nutshell, posits that only facts can be known objectively; all values are subjective. Being subjective, values are qualities, and personal to the individual, like feelings. They cannot be objectively known or shared anymore that one person can feel another’s feelings. Under the positivist methodology, answers to questions such as ‘what is justice’, a question Plato addressed in his most famous book, are reduced by positivism to subjective feelings with no objective status.

The fact that every human being, every day makes and shares his value judgements seems incongruous with positivist theories that purport to explain human actions yet can have nothing to say about those values.

Positivism has been adopted in every Australian university where the social sciences and humanities are taught. Even the legal profession must learn ‘judicial positivism’ as part of its jurisprudence course: ie., what the law says is just is just and there can be no basis other than personal feelings for criticising the law.

One of the men responsible for developing his theory of judicial positivism, Hans Kelsen, removed a footnote that, in the German edition of his work, would have endorsed Nazi Germany when his book was translated into English after World War II.

The effect of the judicial positivism, however, was easily recognizable in the reasoning of the recent decision of the Australian High Court regarding the ACT’s controversial homosexual marriage legislation. This decision, and its implicitly positivist doctrine, gives a clear indication that there is nothing right or wrong about marriage, it is merely a question of sufficient public agitation to create the necessary ideology.

But it is not only the legal profession that has been infected by positivism. Every department in every Australian university faculty whose object is the study of human beings and their endeavours has embraced positivism. [Strictly speaking, history departments have assumptions that provide similar results but their adopted methodology is called historicism.]

By way of example: Alfred Marshall, the father of the economic theory of perfect competition was a positivist as was Karl Marx the father of communism; John Stuart Mill introduced positivism to political science; Freud to psychology and Comte himself incorporated his theory into what has since become sociology and anthropology. Nor should Max Weber be overlooked for his contribution although his authority might be challenged on the basis of his part in designing the Weimar constitution.

The thousands of students who have studied in and graduated from the social science and humanities departments have been indoctrinated with the notion of the subjectivity of values; that is, that there is no right and wrong, no moral principles derivative from human nature which can be known objectively. I use the word ‘indoctrinated’ because no debate of the topic is possible within those departments where the scientific veracity of the academics is proven by their publications in like-minded journals.

As if to perpetuate the triumph of science over philosophy, university departments of education train teachers based on positivist theories of education and graduate them with the same ideas that can be then transferred to the schools.

Given that the science of education merely makes a student an efficient educator, it is little wonder that the curricula such academics work on contain such irrelevant content to what was once known as a liberal education.

This was no where more evident than in the Australian Curriculum - English generated on behalf of the last government by the Commonwealth’s Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, where English education became an expression of multiculturalism, it being the only absolute with which the academics were familiar.

One might be tempted to assume that because all universities have Philosophy Departments, the problem is being overstated. An examination of what is taught in those departments, however, shows that the thought of the great philosophers is taught as a history subject and not as if those thinkers have contributed any insight into the human condition.

Positivism as a method of science for understanding human existence is so internally inconsistent that it beggars belief that it could find its way into institutions whose employees purport to ascertain the truth in matters under their microscope. How can any man have confidence in a theory according to which there is no rational basis for determining which of the values of Nazi Germany and the United Kingdom are superior?

If the object of study is to understand something as it is in reality, then one is obliged to understand the lives of people who, everyday, act on the basis that the decisions they have made are good. The Socratics concluded that everyone makes decisions on the basis of what they think is good and the fact that we can comprehend this, and discus it, and argue against it, means that such decisions are capable of being objectively understood and the better ones discerned from the reasons given.

A Liberal Education, such as universities originally provided cultivated human reason on the basis that men were truly happy by being just and decent and moderate in their desires. The multivarsity education has now replaced this with a scientific education, which asserts man’s activities derive, not from questions of right and wrong, but fundamentally from the irrational desires; that is, that he has animal origins – reason being merely a tool that he uses to achieve his desires. It is not surprising, therefore, that having been indoctrinated to believe that he is merely an animal that he should behave like one.

One should never despair of the future, yet, given the hands into which the education of this nation’s young has fallen, one could be forgiven for believing that all is lost. The universities themselves now protect their position by demanding an adherence to the prevailing methodology which has become an orthodoxy.

A return to the freedom of thought that characterised the early universities is not easily achievable. To begin with, the place of the positivist methodology could be challenged from within those departments that purport to study the overt behaviour of man by a frank admission that there research is as ridiculous as the general public believe it to be when the topics of funding are announced.

Alternatively the government with the power of the purse over the universities could either hold an enquiry into the value of social science research; or establish a limited number of small colleges (perhaps two) which would provide a small number of students with a level of scholarship and opportunity not currently available at any Australian university. The choice of academics to provide such leadership could not be entrusted to any current Australian. Mind you, the establishment of such colleges would be an Orwellian task but it is one that would appeal to someone who had the character of Alexander the Great.