Why Academia?
It’s about the search for truth. All things must be questioned and investigated. Certainly all options and alternatives explored. Scholarship is the opposite of Voc Tech. Is this accepted in academics today? The one who questions any field of discipline is the most loyal to it. Only be trying it with fire will it get stronger, will it even become real. We have set up Western Civ so that it will only grow by way of academia, really. And I suspect we have betrayed our heritage.
So that the major thrust of law school, business school and engineering colleges should be to question current approaches and theories about law, business and engineering. Humanities, human science, social science: it’s all in the same boat in academia. There are NO sacred cows. And the more you tilt at those currently accepted the more protected you should be.
You don’t bring up then dismiss alternatives, but instead you study them. Why is anyone even interested in them? What provokes them? Do they work for anyone? When and how? What is the history, motivation behind and future of any given approach? Find and read the best work of your worst enemies. Dig in every field.
How will you even know when you come up with something worth further inquiry? Good question! That’s the test of whether you’re a scientist or scholar or not. How to know something new? How to detect value? What are the standards and our tests for them?
If the current approach is relativism and one is offended by fundamentalism, how does one do anything but dismiss it? One is not impressed by the most famous or best works in the field of ones enemy. But perhaps your enemy doesn’t even represent the main truth in his own position. Does anyone? Is any field of study complete or even hardly started? How to do the work of refinement?
It’s possible that something new and valuable will strike one as being repugnant and uninteresting. In fact, I suspect this is the rule. That is the nature of the first discovery of something hidden. If it’s popular and you find it and are excited by it, it wasn’t likely any discovery of yours in the first place. We aren’t surprised by the value of gold or diamonds. We are told about them. Being excited by finding them is easy. But a new idea causes a very different reaction. Of course, bad ideas might cause a similar reaction. Or maybe not? Quite likely the WORST ideas are hugely attractive. They involve the greatest perversion of a grain of truth. The worse they are, the ‘better’ the people they pervert. A simple error has nothing on a famous error. What kind of errors do the politicians and experts of an era fall for?
I suspect that any good idea requires a long fermentation period. One has to dig thru and be open to the whole gamut and keep working and keep being open to new arrangements coming up thru the odds’n’ends.
