Spiegeloog-columns
Sections:
1. Introduction
2. "I want to be read"
P.S.
1. Introduction
I keep being unwell, so I made another translation of one of
the columns I published in Duch 21 years ago. The former three were ME + me : Real science & real
psychology = joy, "Mandarins
with an IQ of 115", and Yahooism & democracy.
And I do not have the health on the moment to supply
background remarks, though I do intend to supply them eventually. The
following was published in Dutch in April 1989:
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"I want to be read"
Multatuli
wrote, and I write the same, for it is time to make up an intermediate
reckoning: This is the last Spiegeloog of this academic year.
Why do I want to be read, at least as far as my columns in Spiegeloog
are involved? In the first place, because I want to confront you with a
number of my ideas, about which I think that they are, in case I am
approximately correct, both in your interests and truly
socially relevant. Some of these ideas are:
- that the education you receive at the UvA is
exceptionally bad, both compared to what is usual at good foreign
universities, as when measured in terms of sensible intellectual norms
- that this robs all intelligent students, without
exception, of their fundamental
human right of receiving an education that is fit for their talents
- that the civilization in which we live is slowly
corrupting and moronifying: Where education is bad, culture turns
cancerous.
- that having to pay money back for one's study
loans for what is on offer at the UvA is plain fraudulent theft
- the primary responsibility for the above, ever
since the Mammoetwet of 1963 and the WUB of 1970, and for all levels of
education from toddlers to the universities is that of the professors
and lecturers in the universities: They get paid for it; they know most
of it (or at least should); they should be best able to see the
importance of good education and real science for the maintenance and
improvement of human civilizaton and culture; and they have, with very
few exceptions since these laws were accepted, year after year done
nothing at all to stop the many moronifications introduced in Dutch
education, and have kept silent about all the many worsenings of
education, and said nothing at all about the flood of stupifications
that have been or still are being introduced:
- shortening of the time to study
- worsening of the system for study grants
- stupification of courses required for entrance
of university
- stupification of courses required for
university degrees
Who has ever heard of a demonstration of
professors and lecturers (in their own student days extremist radicals,
often) against this? Where are the thousands of angry letters of
professors and lecturers and schoolteachers? Did anyone ever see any
interest in anything on their parts but
1. their salaries
2. their salaries
3. their salaries, and
4. idiocies and cant about the great importance
of science and education like
"studying one does in a town"?
- that the reason your university teachers do not
exercise their responsilities is not so much that they don't want to as
that they are grossly incompetent: The great majority of your
university teachers is not really interested in science or education;
can't teach; doesn't do any scientific work of any importance
whatsoever; and keeps "working" in the UvA because there they will get
3 times as much as elsewhere for at most 1/10th of the effort they
would have to make in a normal commercial firm.
In the columns I have written
this year in Spiegeloog I have spoken of all these issues, often in a
satirical or indignant mood, with the result that the pieces I
published since April 1988 contain the sharpest and most satirical
criticism of the UvA that has ever been published, to the best of my
knowledge. (Thanks to the editor! This takes courage!)
I have displayed your teaches as
whores of reason; I have said that the majority are parasites and
impostors, because they are incompetent and lazy; I have asserted that
most are hypocrites and not really interested in science; I have
insisted that the consequence of these stupefied schools and
universities will be a cultural and civic moronification, that is
politically very dangerous - but the ladies and gentlemen who are
professors and lecturers do not even answer me.
What might be, do you suppose,
the reason that your professors and lecturers do not answer me, even
while I asserted in almost every column I wrote that these highly
educated supposedly highly intelligent and - in any case - extremely
wellpaid ladies and gentlemen are lazy and incompetent? These all are,
I'd say, provable defamation if I lie, or a reason for them to
disappear from tyhe UvA if I speak the truth? Would it be that they are
each and all too afraid to loose a public debate with me?
In any case, who remains
silent consents (Qui tacet consentit): Your teachers allow
that their reputations have been muddied for a year now, and the reason
is that they know there is little to save for them: Most know very well
that they don't have any scientific reputation themselves, while most
have a reputation for teaching awfully bad courses.
Apart from that: I'm not quite
the only one to speak as I do. Similar if not the same things have been
said by others: By Willem Frederik Hermans about the Dutch
universities; by Alan Bloom about the
American universities ("The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher
Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's
Students"); by Alain Finkelkraut about France (known to
me only from interviews); and by Alexander
Zinoviev about Russia ("Yawning Heights" - an excellent satire of a
vert brilliant logician and philosopher of science).
But what is the point of my
verbal violence? Why do I confront you with such ideas and criticisms
as I did - which is never popular, since it damages too mant illusions
and breaks down too many pretensions? Why don't I do like almost
everyone does - a friendly compliment here; some sweetness there; some
flattery spiced with invisible irony over there and, provided you don't
differ overly much from the dominant fashions in ideas, behaviour and
personality, and your career takes off?
In the end the reason I don't do
so is that I believe that the humane world gets destroyed by moral
donothings and spineless serving of "the bitch goddess Success" - and
apart from that I am just too much horrified by the stupidity, the
parasitism, the fraudulence and the impostures that I had to witness in
the UvA to make my contempt invisible: I do not have much of a talent
for tact, by which those who are higher gifted in this one respect than
I am are able to treat prominent dumb parasites as if they are
welldoers and scientist of rank, so as to become part of their cliques.
For behold: In most respects of
importance we live in a barbaric century: 100 million deaths by 2 world
wars; at least 250 million continuously starving human beings; in more
than half of all countries torture is "a matter of course" when
interrogated by police; human rights are not fully maintained in any
country for all citizens and are in most countries systematically raped
as concerns most citizens. And next to this, mankind has two
fundamental problems there never were before: Nature is being poisoned
at high speed by economical greed and political incompetence; and a
handful of professional politicians and dictators, none of whom is
known for being anything special in terms of intellect or morality, is
capable of blowing up the world.
What can be done against this?
In the short run very little, but in the longer run (if that is given
to us) the only way to change the sketched situation in a rational and
reasonable way is to use existing science in a better way and to make
better use the scientific methods of rational reasoning; by giving the
greatest possible number the best possible education; by keeping the
centers of science and culture, and especially the universities, as
autonomous and scientific as possible instead of making them
subservient to the state's bureaucracues or to popular political
madness; and by striving for a political order in which the major
social and governmental priorities are these:
· 1.
To provide all human beings with an income that is sufficient to supply
their needs as regards food, housing, clothing, health and education.
· 2.
To provide all human beings with equal chances for an education that is
appropriate for such talents as they have, and to decide what they want
to do with their own lives themselves
· 3.
To provide all human beings with the rights to free speech, free
thought and free action, in so far as they do not hinder others from
the same, and to organize themselves into groups to further their own
interests and to reach their own ends.
· 4.
To provide all human beings with equal protections by laws that give to
all the same rights and duties (apart from lacking the capacities
therefore)
· 5.
To have as main social and political ends
o the
protection and maintenance of human life and of nature;
o to
further science and art; and
o to
realize social ends by means of free cooperation, mutual tolerance,
according to the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, and on the basis of relevant
scientific knowledge
My "program" (if this crude
sketch deserves that name) is, in short, completely in the tradition of
the Enlighenment and Greek philosophy - as old as the heathens, and
never realized even in approximation in any society of more than a few
tenthousands of human beings.
What I see in The Netherlands,
and what happened to me in the UvA, is for a great part in total
contradiction with this. In The Netherlands and in the UvA the tendency
is precisely the other way:
All education has been
simplified; there hardly is any scientific education in most faculties
in the university; all of Dutch scientific education is governed by
political pressure groups and professional political careerists without
any scientific competence or interest, whereas the decisions about
Dutch education are mostly taken on the basis of political delusions;
and the universities almost completely lost the autonomy they used to
have.
And while The Netherlands, from
a historical point of view, at present is one of the least unpleasant
places to survive, none of the above five points hold here:
Children of poor parents since
Minister Deetman can no longer be rationally expected to be able to
study; seen historically, the chances in Holland are more equal than
they were and then they are elsewhere, but in practice "equality" turns
out to mean more and more "socially adjusted to the average", instead
of equal chances to develop individual talents; the freedoms of speech,
person and association exist in Holland, and are very important, but
the social usage they are put to are mostly very poor: Irrational
fashions in opinions, clothing and behaviour determine for most what
they will think, wear, do and dare, and the main result are impostures
and cultural poverty; equal rights and equal duties exist as little in
Holland as elsewhere, although indeed the inequalities tend to be
larger elsewhere; and the most important social and political ends
practised and touted in The Netherlands are economical - not cultural,
not scientific, and not moral either.
In my eyes, Holland moronifies,
and not only Holland. I do not know the Dutch numbers, but they will
differ little from the following - and please note these show that this
is not a "scientific" age (but a barbarian and moronic one):
"The scientific world view is very rare. My guess is that
at least 99% of all currently living human adults have a non-scientific
world view and way of thinking. Most people probably base their lives
on religion and/or magic. (..) let me amuse the reader by mentioning
some results a Gallup investigation conducted in the U.S. in 1978
produced. According to it, 57% of all Americans believe in ufos, 54% in
angels, 51% in ESP, 39% in devils, 37% in precognition, 29% in
astrology, 24% in clairvoyance, and (only!) 11% in ghosts." (pag. 226
van R. Tuomela, "Science, Action, and Reality", D. Reidel Pub. Comp. 1985, ISBN 90-277-2098-3.)
This frightens me: Humankind
evolves by means of science and moral action - the greatest enermies of
humanity are human stupidy and human egoism: "Stupidity and egoism
are the roots of all vice" (Buddha)
I believe that the coming 25
years will be decisive years for the continuance of humankind, and I
believe that the only realistic chance it will lies in a radical change
in the ideas about and the usage of science and education. I do not
expect you to agree with me - I write to make you think. What moves me
(in part) can be put in the following terms:
What is the explanation that
Athens and Florence, each with at most 100.000 inhabitants, in a few
generations could produce a culture with hundreds of geniuses in most
fields of science and art... whereas in a country like The Netherlands,
with 14 million inhabitants, who per person per days produce a 100 or a
1000 times more (joules, not culture) than the Athenians and
Florentians, so that the past 50 years for the generation that come
after us will be mostly important only because of the gigantic amounts
of poisons, pesticides, and plastics this generation will have left
behind, without compensating it by any truly excellent science,
literature, cultural creation or architecture?
My answer: It is implausible to
suppose less talent gets born - ergo, the system of education and the
ways in which individual scientific and artistic talents are treated
fail, if a civilization produces little of value.
What we need is a new
Enlightenment, a new Age of Reason - a renaissance of an integrated
scientific and ethical vision, as sought by such different thinkers who
were united in this respect like Aristotle, Lucretius, Voltaire,
Diderot, Multatuli and, in this age, Bertrand Russell en Mario Bunge:
That is the way to provide the best chances for the classical ideas of
rationality and reason - where I, briefly and approximately, mean by
"rational": using and looking for ideas that can be founded on logical
argument, empirical testing, and that are empirically or mathematically
based, and mean by "reasonable": acting according to ideals that are
ethical, practisable, liveable (*) and tolerant.
The degree in which human beings
think and act rationally and reasonably is proportional to their level
of civilization. And that is my central concern.
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P.S. As I said, I don't have the
energy to provide elucidatory notes, though foreigners probably will
need them.
If you want to know more about Holland, heaven for
drugsmafiosi and morons, check out The Undutchables
- which is not my work at all: I only owe a copy of an English
third printing, but that is written by two foreigners who lived
together 22 years in the Netherlands before they fled back, and who
know and understand Holland and Dutchmen (and women) quite well, and
write humorously about their subject. They're currently in their sixth
printing, so they must have got something well.
Interestingly the first edition (I didn't know) is from the
year this essay was written in: 1989.
For more on the joys and beauties of Holland see Laudatio Neerlandica, and the
links there.
P.P.S. It may be I have to
stop Nederlog for a while. The reason is that I am physically not well
at all. I don't know yet, but if there is no Nederlog, now you know the
reason.
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