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
incime 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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