Why good ideas are oft-born as twins

"We often praise ideas for their originality and criticise other ideas for being insufficiently novel. So, what do we make of the fact that most important breakthroughs in sci-tech history—the telegraph, telescope, and transistor; the laws of calculus and gravity—were 'simultaneously invented' by independent people around the same time? (Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray notoriously filed for a telephone patent on the same day.)
    "Which is to say: Some of the most important ideas in the world weren't 'new' when the inventor we credit came up with them.
    "It's even more uncanny than that. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace didn't just independently come up with the basics of evolution. They both cited the exact same essay—Malthus's infamous 'Principle of Population'—as inspiration for thinking about species evolution as a competitive game where unforgiving environments shape genetic survival. As @DavidEpstein writes in today's essay, adapted from his ... new book Inside the Box, the frequency of idea twins in history suggests that once a problem is framed by a generation of thinkers with sufficient clarity and precision, the answer almost 'wants' to be found."

~ @Derek Thompson summarising David Epstein's essay 'Why Your Best Ideas Aren’t Original'

"All abstract knowledge depends, for its meaning and validity, on other knowledge that sets the context for it. For example, algebra depends on addition, and calculus depends on algebra. The more complex the knowledge, the more extensive the knowledge that must precede it.
    "One major aspect of the fact that knowledge depends on other knowledge—the aspect most relevant to and most violated in education—is that more abstract knowledge depends on less abstract knowledge. This is the principle of the hierarchy of knowledge."

~ Lisa Van Damme from her article 'The Hierarchy of Knowledge: The Most Neglected Issue in Education'

"Valid concepts [once discovered] function as a 'green light' to induction, permitting [further] generalisations from observed particulars, while invalid concepts block or distort the process."

~ summary of the inductive process given in David Harriman's 2011 book The Logical Leap: Induction in Physics & Philosophy

"[I]nherent in this is that concepts are future-looking. A concept is like a policy or a commitment. It’s like forming a file. ... A file, if you have a filing system, does not only organise and condense data that one already has, it does so on the premise of keeping up with this method of organisation. ... 
    "[T]o form a concept [then] is to institute a policy of applying what one knows from the study of each instance to the study of each other instance, to regard the instances as interchangeable, at least within a certain context, within a certain, you know, varying in degree. And this policy applies to information yet to be discovered, as well as to the information one already has ..."

~ Gregory Salmieri from his 2006 essay 'Objectivist Epistemology in Outline'

These days, they're just skulling the hemlock

Being an insightful entrepreneur is no guarantee of any other smarts.

Turns out too many tech-bros are talking up turning off. Where Socrates famously told his jury in the case for his life that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” too many Silicon Valley so-called "thought leaders" are advocating the un-examined life as the ultimate productivity hack.

Ted Gioia has the story:

At his trial in 399 BC, Socrates faced the death penalty on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth. But in reality, philosophy and free inquiry were put on trial. Socrates had spent his life asking too damn many questions. And now the authorities wanted him to shut up.

Socrates was given a chance for a rebuttal. He had gotten himself into this mess by talking too much—and now he had one last chance to talk himself out of it.

His response ranks among the greatest moments in the history of Western culture. In a famous phrase, Socrates told the jury that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

That was why he asked so many questions. “Examining myself and others” is the “greatest good” of which we are capable, he insisted. If we abandon introspection and critical thinking, we descend to an animal life—and that is unworthy of us as human beings.

The jury was unconvinced. And a short while later, Socrates was put to death with a dose of poison. His days of asking questions were now over.

It’s now up to us ask questions in his place. In many ways, that is the story of Western culture.

It used to be. And now what's happened?

A prominent venture capitalist [let's call him Marc Andreessen] recently boasted that he aspires to “zero” introspection—“as little as possible.” This mindset, he claims, is a huge productivity boost. The less time wasted on thinking, the more time you can spend on doing.

“If you go back 400 years ago,” he adds, “it never would've occurred to anybody to be introspective.”

That’s an odd statement, and reveals a total ignorance of Socrates’s plea for an examined life—which is, to be blunt about it, the origin story of Western [reason], philosophy and science.

No introspection. Total ignorance. Who would have thought there'd be a connection.

Without Socrates and his legacy, there is no Silicon Valley. There is no venture capital. There is no IPO on the NASDAQ.

What does a life with introspection even look?

A good example might be Forrest Gump ...

All this leads to the obvious question: How do we spend our time after we give up introspection. We’re fortunate that tech bro influencers are already offering solutions....

This viral video—with more than one million views!—recommends staring at walls for extended periods. “Believe it or not,” explains Luke McCarthy, “this helped me have one of the most productive weeks of my life.” ...

Is this really a productivity hack, or just incipient mental illness?

'Who Deserves Our Support?'

"Whenever I begin to debate certain issues such as the war in Iran or the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, I am confronted with the fact that the side I support has done some pretty stupid (sometimes evil) things. America supported the Shah, who was an oppressive dictator. Israel enabled the rise of Hamas by supporting Islamist social and charitable organizations within Gaza in order to create a counterweight to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). And then there allegations of even more sinister actions, ranging from the plausible to the ridiculous. It is easy to see why so many people retreat to a kind of neutrality. They shrug and say both sides have some valid points. Who can know which is worth supporting?

"Without a well-grounded philosophical framework, there really IS no way to know. ... if you’re not thinking conceptually, it might be hard to make a distinction between this group dropping bombs and that group dropping bombs.

"You might be tempted to view the conflict in terms of who is the underdog. Who is the David fighting Goliath? Of course, even on these terms, it’s pretty bizarre to view a nation of about 10 million (Israel) as the Goliath when they are facing down Iran (a nation of about 90 million) or the entire Arab world (around 500 million) or the entire Islamic world (perhaps as many as 2 billion).

"But regardless, this is the wrong way to look at the conflict. Instead, we should be thinking in terms of what kind of civilisation does each side represent? What values would we like a society to uphold — and which of these 'sides' [if any] better represents those values? ... it does mean understanding the fundamental distinction between [semi] free and unfree societies — between good societies that sometimes makes mistakes, and fundamentally bad societies that (like all societies) have many good people in them who are just trying to live their lives.

"Once you understand the distinction, you might come to understand that the only way to 'Free Palestine' or to truly support any of the “underdogs” in the world is to free them from the ideological chains of their terrible belief systems. Fundamentally, these people are not angry at the West because they have (sometimes legitimate) grievances about particular actions, but because they resent the example that even a semi-free society presents. While we can’t force people to be free or even to believe in freedom as an ideal, we can (and should) show them the utter futility of continuing to support the death cult of Islamism. It was only utter defeat that discredited Nazism in Germany and emperor-worship in imperial Japan — and allowed them to develop into much happier, freer, and more prosperous societies. That is what I wish for Palestine, Iran, and all the oppressed people of the world."

~ Stewart Margolis from his post 'Who Deserves Our Support?'

"Death to America" is now a categorical imperative, apparently

 

According to The New York Times, Ali Larijani has effectively 

been running Iran since January 2026. He was in “charge of

 crushing, with lethal force, the recent protests demanding the 

end of Islamic rule.” He is now the key power broker in Iran’s transition.

Larijani is a Ph.D. in Western Philosophy and a specialist

on Immanuel Kant. He wrote his dissertation on Kant and 

three published books [on the German Philosopher].

"Religious fanaticism and radical subjectivism are two sides of the same false coin. One enables another: 

    "Radical subjectivism annihilates metaphysics.
    "The religious fanatic fills his 'void of reality' with his arbitrary assertions (God, miracles, angels, devils, afterlife, etc)."

~ Paulius Lebedevic [hat tip Stephen Hicks, Quote-Unquote Marrk-Goldblatt]

"Ideas have consequences - and in today's volatile world (March 2026), with US-Israel strikes escalating against Iran, regime continuity under power broker Ali Larijani, Russia's enduring war footing in Ukraine, and multipolar fractures everywhere, the intellectual foundations rejecting liberal democracy in favour of "higher duty" and civilisational destiny stand out starkly.
    "In Russia, Alexander Dugin supplies the metaphysical fireworks: a heady mix of Heidegger, Nietzsche, and traditionalism remixed into Eurasianism and his "Fourth Political Theory." ... Duty isn't optional-it's ontological, an existential imperative justifying sacrifice, expansion, and absolute obedience to the state as civilisational guardian. ...
    "[And so] with Iran, where Ali Larijani -- the current top power broker effectively steering the regime ... -- is a genuine Kant scholar .... 

    "Operating within Shia theocratic-revolutionary Islamism, Larijani's Kantian toolkit emphasises deontology: i.e., absolute duty over personal happiness or utility, and reason's limits that 'make room for faith.' This lends philosophical rigour to prioritising collective obligation to the Islamic Republic-categorical imperatives of regime preservation, anti-hegemonic destiny, and order -- over Lockean individual liberties or empirical critique. 

    "Lethal force against dissent or external threats? Not mere power grab, but duty-bound necessity to sustain the higher moral-political order.
    "The parallel is striking: Both reject the British Enlightenment path (Locke, Smith, Mill) that grounds secular democracy in individual rights, free markets, and a limited state that serves citizens. 

    Dugin does it with apocalyptic, anti-modern mysticism and civilisational clash. Larijani does it with measured, pragmatic deontological reasoning adapted to clerical-authoritarian stability.
    "Russia gets the wild-eyed prophetic theorist; Iran gets the calculating insider philosopher. Yet both scaffold regimes where the individual is subordinated to a transcendent collective fate - whether empire or revolutionary faith—precisely when global power shifts demand such justifications.
    "Philosophical coincidence? Or a deeper pattern in how anti-liberal thought sustains authority amid crisis?"

~ Paul Steeper from his comment 'In Our Current Geopolitical Moment - A Contrast of Anti-Liberal Scaffolds: Dugin's Eurasian Destiny in Russia vs. Larijani's Kantian Duty in Iran' [hat tip Stephen Hicks]

"This should be basic teaching for school children. And their teachers..."

"Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification."

~ Ayn Rand from 'Galt's Speech' in her book For the New Intellectual

"What is the actual structure of human reasoning when we engage in deduction?"

~ Leonard Peikoff from Lecture 15 of his lecture series 'History of Philosophy'

"To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes. Centuries ago, the man who was—no matter what his errors—the greatest of your philosophers, has stated the formula defining the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete it: Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.

"Whatever you choose to consider, be it an object, an attribute or an action, the law of identity remains the same. A leaf cannot be a stone at the same time, it cannot be all red and all green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the same time. A is A. Or, if you wish it stated in simpler language: You cannot have your cake and eat it, too.
...

"The law of identity does not permit you to have your cake and eat it, too. The law of causality does not permit you to eat your cake before you have it. . . .

"The law of causality is the law of identity applied to action. All actions are caused by entities. The nature of an action is caused and determined by the nature of the entities that act; a thing cannot act in contradiction to its nature."

~ Ayn Rand from 'Galt's Speech' in her book For the New Intellectual

[Hat tip Louise LaMontagne]

Revenge?

Is revenge a dish best eaten cold? Or not eaten at all. 

There are moments, writes Allan John, when 

the urge for revenge can feel irresistible. We tell ourselves that one bad act warrants another—that striking back will somehow restore justice or bring relief.

But revenge rarely solves the original problem.

And most importantly, it doesn't heal the hurt. The Count of Monte Cristo shows a post-escape life wasted in seeking revenge. The story illustrates the idea that "it doesn’t degrade you when others treat you poorly; it degrades them." 

Nick Cave and his wife Susie chose another path: after their son's tragic death, they chose to find happiness "as an act of defiance or 'revenge' against the overwhelming pain." As they say, the best 'revenge' is outrageous success.

You can't choose what others do to you, or what is done to you. But you can choose how to respond, and whom to become. As the philosopher Diogenes observed, "How shall I defend myself against my enemy? By proving myself good and honourable."

It might be self-defeating. But that doesn't mean it don't feel good. Here's a Nick Cave song revenging himself on a critic, from a few years before his epiphany ...

Bonus vid: Anita Lane + Barry Adamson with the classic revenge song ....

Thanksgiving isn't a New Zealand holiday, but giving thanks should be a universal trait.

Robert Green Ingersoll was the nineteenth-century's Christopher Hitchens—a famous and crusading atheist—like Hitchens except Ingersoll was kinder, and not a Trotskyite. And he was full of gratitude. This, here, was just a portion (the final part, starting page 58) ) of his famous 1897 Thanksgiving Sermon [hat tip Jerry Coyne] ...

A Thanksgiving Sermon

by Robert Green Ingersoll

Whom shall we thank? 

Standing here at the close of the 19th century — amid the trophies of thought — the triumphs of genius — here under the flag of the Great Republic — knowing something of the history of man — here on this day that has been set apart for thanksgiving, I most reverently thank the good me,. the good women of the past, I thank the kind fathers, the loving mothers of the savage days.  I thank the father who spoke the first gentle word, the mother who first smiled upon her babe. I thank the first true friend.

I thank the savages who hunted and fished that they and their babes might live. I thank those who cultivated the ground and changed the forests into farms — those who built rude homes and watched the faces of their happy children in the glow of fireside flames — those who domesticated horses, cattle and sheep — those who invented wheels and looms and taught us to spin and weave — those who by cultivation changed wild grasses into wheat and corn, changed bitter things to fruit, and worthless weeds to flowers, that sowed within our souls the seeds of art. 

I thank the poets of the dawn — the tellers of legends — the makers of myths — the singers of joy and grief, of hope and love. I thank the artists who chiseled forms in stone and wrought with light and shade the face of man. I thank the philosophers, the thinkers, who taught us how to use our minds in the great search for truth. 

I thank the astronomers who explored the heavens, told us the secrets of the stars, the glories of the constellations — the geologists who found the story of the world in fossil forms, in memoranda kept in ancient rocks, in lines written by waves, by frost and fire — the anatomists who sought in muscle, nerve and bone for all the mysteries of life — the chemists who unraveled Nature’s work that they might learn her art — the physicians who have laid the hand of science on the brow of pain, the hand whose magic touch restores — the surgeons who have defeated Nature’s self and forced her to preserve the lives of those she laboured to destroy. I thank the discoverers of chloroform and ether, the two angels who give to their beloved sleep, and wrap the throbbing brain in the soft robes of dreams. 

I thank the great inventors — those who gave us movable type and the press, by means of which great thoughts and all discovered facts are made immortal — the inventors of engines, of the great ships, of the railways, the cables and telegraphs. I thank the great mechanics, the workers in iron and steel, in wood and stone. I thank the inventors and makers of the numberless things of use and luxury.

I thank the industrious men, the loving mothers, the useful women. They are the benefactors of our race. The inventor of pins did a thousand times more good than all the popes and cardinals, the bishops and priests — than all the clergymen and parsons, exhorters and theologians that ever lived. The inventor of matches did more for the comfort and convenience of mankind than all the founders of religions and the makers of all creeds — than all malicious monks and selfish saints.

I thank the honest men and women who have expressed their sincere thoughts, who have been true to themselves and have preserved the veracity of their souls.

I thank the thinkers of Greece and Rome. Zeno and Epicurus, Cicero and Lucretius. I thank Bruno, the bravest, and Spinoza, the subtlest of men.

I thank Voltaire, whose thought lighted a flame in the brain of man, unlocked the doors of superstition’s cells and gave liberty to many millions of his fellow-men. Voltaire — a name that sheds light. Voltaire — a star that superstition’s darkness cannot quench.

I thank the great poets — the dramatists. I thank Homer and Aeschylus, and I thank Shakespeare above them all. I thank Burns for the heart-throbs he changed into songs. for his lyrics of flame. I thank Shelley for his Skylark, Keats for his Grecian Urn and Byron for his Prisoner of Chillon. I thank the great novelists. I thank the great sculptors. I thank the unknown man who moulded and chiseled the Venus de Milo. I thank the great painters. I thank Rembrandt and Corot. I thank all who have adorned, enriched and ennobled life — all who have created the great, the noble, the heroic and artistic ideals.

I thank the statesmen who have preserved the rights of man. I thank Paine whose genius sowed the seeds of independence in the hearts of ’76. I thank Jefferson whose mighty words for liberty have made the circuit of the globe. I thank the founders, the defenders, the saviors of the Republic. I thank Ericsson, the greatest mechanic of his century, for the monitor. I thank Lincoln for the Proclamation. I thank Grant for his victories and the vast host that fought for the right, — for the freedom of man. I thank them all — the living and the dead.

I thank the great scientists — those who have reached the foundation, the bed-rock — who have built upon facts — the great scientists, in whose presence theologians look silly and feel malicious.

The scientists never persecuted, never imprisoned their fellow-men. They forged no chains, built no dungeons, erected no scaffolds — tore no flesh with red hot pincers — dislocated no joints on racks, crushed no hones in iron boots — extinguished no eyes — tore out no tongues and lighted no fagots. They did not pretend to be inspired — did not claim to be prophets or saints or to have been born again. They were only intelligent and honest men. They did not appeal to force or fear. They did not regard men as slaves to be ruled by torture, by lash and chain, nor as children to be cheated with illusions, rocked in the cradle of an idiot creed and soothed by a lullaby of lies.

They did not wound — they healed. They did not kill — they lengthened life. They did not enslave — they broke the chains and made men free. They sowed the seeds of knowledge, and many millions have reaped, are reaping, and will reap the harvest: of joy.

I thank Humboldt and Helmholtz and Haeckel and Buchner. I thank Lamarck and Darwin — Darwin who revolutionized the thought of the intellectual world. I thank Huxley and Spencer. I thank the scientists one and all.

I thank the heroes, the destroyers of prejudice and fear — the dethroners of savage gods — the extinguishers of hate’s eternal fire — the heroes, the breakers of chains — the founders of free states — the makers of just laws — the heroes who fought and fell on countless fields — the heroes whose dungeons became shrines — the heroes whose blood made scaffolds sacred — the heroes, the apostles of reason, the disciples of truth, the soldiers of freedom — the heroes who held high the holy torch and filled the world with light.

With all my heart I thank them all.

* * * * 

"Welcome to the world of reality - there is no audience."

"Welcome to the world of reality - there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth — actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.... True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care — with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world."

~ David Foster Wallace from his novella Something to Do with Paying Attention

"Things and Actions are what they are"

"Things and Actions are what they are, and the
"Consequences of them will be what they will be;
"Why then should we desire to be deceived?"

~ Joseph Butler (aka Bishop Butler) from his 1726 Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel — 'Sermon 7'

CUE CARD ECONOMICS: Economic Harmonies, and The Miracle of Breakfast

FRENCH EXISTENTIALIST PHILOSOPHER Jean Paul Sartre famously stated “Hell is other people,” and he wrote many books attempting to prove it. 

Unfortunately, all he proved to most readers was that Hell is reading Jean Paul Sartre books.

A century earlier his countryman Frederic Bastiat discovered, argued and helped to prove something very different; that other people are the very opposite of hell. Said Bastiat in his own magnum opus Economic Harmonies:

“All men’s impulses, when motivated by legitimate self-interest, fall into a harmonious social pattern.”

This is the big lesson that economics can give to philosophers: that the world is not made up of the “fundamental antagonisms” between people that some philosophers find everywhere; antagonisms alleged to be ...

Between the property owner and the worker.
Between capital and labour.
Between the common people and the bourgeoisie.
Between agriculture and industry.
Between the farmer and the city-dweller.
Between the native-born and the foreigner.
Between the producer and the consumer.
Between civilization and the social order.

And, to sum it all up in a single phrase:

Between personal liberty and a harmonious social order.

What economics can teach philosophers (and what Bastiat can still teach economists) is that other human beings need neither be a burden nor a threat, neither a hell nor a horror but a blessing.

This is the greatest lesson economics can teach: that in a society making peaceful cooperation possible we each gain from the existence of others.

What a great story to tell!

TO START TO TELL THIS long story, a story that all of economics really serves to show, let’s begin with a short story—an excerpt, from a short story by a great short story writer: O. Henry. As his characters sit down in their wilds to break their fast with something “composed of fried bacon and a yellowish edifice that proved up something between pound cake and flexible sandstone,” they begin to reflect on The Perfect Breakfast:

Such a breakfast, they sigh, might only be possible in New York. "It's a great town for epicures,” they say. As is virtually every city.  We take for granted now that in virtually every cafe in every city in the country we can sit down to the perfect breakfast. We reach over to Brazil or Kenya for our coffee and down to Christchurch for our mushrooms and rolls; to Pokeno, or Vermont, for our bacon and head further down to the Waikato to dig a slice of butter out of a Te Rapa urn and then turn over a beehive near a manuka patch in Nelson for our honey.

This is the Miracle of Breakfast: that we can eat like the gods for the cost only of a few dollars thanks to the freedom to trade, the division of labour and the 'invisible hand' of the market. And we take this for granted.  We take it so much for granted that, rather than celebrate sharing the meal that gods eat on Olympia, we complain if our eggs are too cold.

And we don’t need long arms to enjoy it: we need the arms and minds of other people who are free to produce, free to trade, free to enjoy the fruits of their own labour by trading those fruits with others.

This is the lesson integrated by all of economics:  that when you remove force and fraud people are a blessing rather than a curse. Thanks be to the freedom to trade, the division of labour and the 'invisible hand' of the market that makes it possible.

This is the great lesson of Economic Harmonies hinted at by Adam Smith, made explicit by our friend Frederic Bastiat, and developed in specific areas by the likes of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig Von Mises. Bastiat first noticed it in a visit to Paris. Paris gets fed, he observed, yet no-one celebrates the miracle:

A light we term self-interest. It is this, says Bastiat, that is at the root of all the Harmonies.

Think about it. On our own we can produce barely anything in a single day.  If we were to permanently endure self-sufficiency or life in the wilds not only would the meal of ambrosia perpetually elude us, our lives would be one long round of much labour for very little reward.  (That's the point of Robinson Crusoe if you remember.) We need others to keep us supplied as we now take for granted—with food, with drink, with iPods, iPads and the very roofs over our head—but how to enlist those others in our aid? Simple: we rely on trading with those others. On voluntary cooperation. In short, we offer them their own profit in return for ours. 

We appeal, in short, to their own self-interest, a point made by Adam Smith in the part of his famous book where he invokes his most famous metaphor:

And so we do. By pursuing our own self-interest, through our production, our trade, our enterprise, we ensure “Paris gets fed.”

But there is no central planner here. That is the second part of this miracle: the “resourceful and secret power that governs the amazing regularity of such complicated movements” is not the result of government planning but the opposite: it is a naturally developed “spontaneous order” regulated by this “inner light” of self-interest and the power of free exchange.  That power, that light,  “is so illuminating, so constant, and so penetrating, when it is left free of every hindrance” it produces the order we take so much for granted.

This, Bastiat’s great lesson of spontaneous order, was taken up by Friedrich Hayek, observing society relies on the spontaneous order arising out of our voluntary cooperation.

This great miracle can only happen when each of us is free to follow our own road, to make use of our unique knowledge and circumstances to pursue our self-interests,  so promoting that of the society more effectually than when we really intend to promote it.

SO WHAT EXPLAINS THIS Miracle of Breakfast then? Bastiat’s own conclusion is summed up in three points:

• Free exchange
• Self-interest
• Spontaneous order

Or in one idea:

“That the legitimate interests of mankind are essentially harmonious.”

This, then, is the great lesson integrated by economics, if we are willing to hear it:

• That human interests do not require acts of sacrifice…
• That bettering the condition of one person does not necessitate the worsening of someone else’s…
• That one person’s wealth does not necessitate another person’s poverty….
• That the creation of wealth requires only that everyone mind their own business and get the hell on with it. ...
• That the interests of all members of society are harmonious if and insofar as private property rights are respected; or, in modern parlance, that the unhampered market can operate independent of government intervention.

Mind you, it takes all of economics to prove the point. And most philosophers are unable to read, or integrate, that much. 

But so too are so many of today’s economists.

* * * * 

* Reposted from 2012, based on a post from 2005. The title comes from a lecture by the late John Ridpath.

Who cares about 'Cultural Christians'? [VIDEO]

WATCH:

SO MANY ATHEISTS, AGNOSTICS, no-theists, pantheists, and otherwise non-Christian coves like Richard Dawkins, Elon Musk, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are now calling themselves "cultural Christians" that it's become a phenomenon. Even Nick Cave is signing up. The argument, many say, for subscribing to the nonsense is that, they say, Christianity built western civilisation — so any decent supporter of civilisation should subscribe as well.

A book by Tom Holland is cited as one of the main influences on this movement. Holland is a prolific podcaster who has previously written — and written well — on the histories of Rome, Greece, Persia, and Islam —  Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind "isn’t a history of Christianity," he says, so much "a history of what's been revolutionary and transformative about Christianity: about how Christianity has transformed not just the West, but the entire world." So transformative, says the author, that we of the west find ourselves unable to even see the cultural transformation clearly.

In some in Christian circles this “Tom Holland train” is spoken of as a new route to Christianity.

But there are problems with the book. Most especially that he speaks of a philosophical transformation that preceded and informed the cultural change, yet his philosophical discussions are all but absent.

Not so in another book, by Charles Freeman.

Freeman's book The Reopening of the Western Mind is a magnificent 2023 sequel to his investigative opus The Closing of the Western Mind — an exploration of how Christianity's rise saw the fall of independent thought —the rise of faith bringing the death of reason — ushering in a millennia of darkness age only (en)lightened, eventually, by the revival of interest in Greek and Roman thought. (You can read my own summary of that great story here.)

You can see almost immediately how that might pit Freeman's books against the tale told by Tom Holland. Not least because Holland's overlooking of the importance of Greco-Roman thought (most especially that of Aristotle) undermines the very basis of his story.

An absorbing discussion with scholars from the Ayn Rand Institute (part of a "Bookshelf" series that I hope takes off) examines these two contrasting perspectives (above), evaluating their arguments and assessing their historical and philosophical accuracy. The discussion covered: 

• The central arguments of the books; 
• Why the Church feared Aristotelian philosophy; 
• How Freeman’s books provide a more thorough and philosophical analysis than Holland’s; 
• How Holland diminishes Greek influence on modernity; 
• How Holland appropriates secular ideas and thinkers into Christianity; 
• The role of Christianity in the abolition of slavery; 
• The relationship between Christianity and science; 
• Why Holland’s book gained popularity while Freeman’s did not.

Fascinating.

[NB: The books are published with different titles in the US and the UK, confusingly, so here in NZ you might see the same book with two different titles. I've linked below, if you click the cover pics, to what seem to be the best sources here.]

Which is the best Logical Fallacy?

(A list going around on email, originally credited to Brian McGroarty. Hat tips and additions to and from Stephen Hicks, Paul Hsieh, Nancy Tang, Bob Marks, Steven Den Beste, Mike Williams, Justin Weinberg, James Dominguez)

Ad Hominem: This is the best logical fallacy, and if you disagree with me, well, you suck.

Affirming the Consequent: If it is proven that Affirming the Consequent is the best, then I will be very happy. I am feeling very happy, so obviously Affirming the Consequent is the best fallacy.

Appeal to Authority: Your logical fallacies aren’t logical fallacies at all because Einstein said so. Einstein also said that this one is better.

Appeal to Emotion: See, my mom, she had to work three jobs on account of my dad leaving and refusing to support us, and me with my elephantitis and all, all our money went to doctor’s bills so I never was able to get proper schooling. So really, if you look deep down inside yourself, you’ll see that my fallacy here is the best.

Appeal to Fear: If you don’t accept Appeal to Fear as the greatest fallacy, then THE TERRORISTS WILL HAVE WON. Do you want that on your conscience, that THE TERRORISTS WILL HAVE WON because you were a pansy who didn’t really think that Appeal to Fear was worth voting for, and you wanted to vote for something else? Of course not, and neither would the people you let die because THE TERRORISTS WILL HAVE WON.

Appeal to Flattery: If you agree with me that Appeal to Flattery is the greatest fallacy, it shows that you are intelligent and good looking and really good in bed. And a snappy dresser.

Appeal to Force: If you don’t agree that Appeal to Force is the greatest logical fallacy, I will kick your arse.

Appeal to Ignorance: No one has been able to prove that another fallacy is better than Appeal to Ignorance, so it must be the best.

Appeal to Majority: Most people think that this fallacy is the best, so clearly it is.

Appeal to Novelty: The Appeal to Novelty’s a new fallacy, and it blows all your crappy old fallacies out the water! All the cool kids are using it: it’s OBVIOUSLY the best.

Appeal to Numbers: Millions think that this fallacy is the best, so clearly it is.

Appeal to Pity: If you don't agree that Appeal to Pity is the greatest fallacy, think how it will hurt the feelings of me and the others who like it!

Appeal to Tradition: We’ve used Appeal to Tradition for centuries: how can it possibly be wrong?

Argumentum Ad Nauseam:
Argumentum ad nauseam is the best logical fallacy.
Argumentum ad nauseam is the best logical fallacy.
Argumentum ad nauseam is the best logical fallacy.
Argumentum ad nauseam is the best logical fallacy.
Argumentum ad nauseam is the best logical fallacy.
Argumentum ad nauseam is the best logical fallacy.
Argumentum ad nauseam is the best logical fallacy.

Bandwagon Fallacy: It's obvious that Bandwagon is going to win as the greatest fallacy. You wouldn't want to be one of the losers who choose something else, would you?

Begging The Question:
Circular reasoning is the best fallacy and is capable of proving anything.
Since it can prove anything, it can obviously prove the above statement.
Since it can prove the first statement, it must be true.
Therefore, circular reasoning is the best fallacy and is capable of proving anything.

Biased Sample: I just did a poll of all the people in the "Biased Sample Fan Club" and 95% of them agree that Biased Sample is the best fallacy. Obviously it's going to win.

Burden Of Proof: Can you prove that Burden of Proof isn’t the best logical fallacy?

Complex Question: Isn't it terrible that so many people disparage the Complex Question fallacy and beat their wives?

Composition: Each of the other fallacies suck. The Fallacy of Composition is therefore better than the whole lot of them combined.

Denying the Antecedent: If Denying the Antecedent were not the best fallacy, then I would be sad. I am actually in quite a good mood right now, so obviously Denying the Antecedent is the best.

Division: This is the best list of fallacies. It follows that there could be no better description of the Fallacy of Division than this.

Equivocation: The best fallacy is on this list. Equivocation is on this list. Therefore, the best fallacy is equivocation.

The Fallacy Fallacy: Some have argued that the Fallacy Fallacy couldn't be the best fallacy because some arguments for it being the best fallacy are themselves fallacious. Clearly, this is a fallacious argument, from which we can only conclude that the Fallacy Fallacy is indeed the best fallacy.

False Analogy: Just as the jelly donut is the best donut, so too is False Analogy the best fallacy.

False Dilemma: I’ve found that either you think False Dilemma is the best fallacy, or you’re a terrorist.

False Premise: All of the other fallacies are decent, but clearly not the best as they didn’t come from my incredibly large and sexy brain.

Gambler’s Fallacy: In all the previous talks about this subject, Gambler’s Fallacy lost, so the Gambler’s Fallacy is going to win this time because it's the Gambler's Fallacy's turn to win!


Genetic Fallacy is best because all those other people who proposed fallacies only believe them because of their social conditioning.

Guilt by Association: You know who else preferred those other logical fallacies? *(insert pictures of Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot here)*

Hypostatisation (personification): Go, Hypostatisation Fallacy, you can do it! If you just try hard enough you can be the best fallacy there is! Oh come on now, don't look at me like that

Non Sequitur: Non Sequitur is the best fallacy because none of my meals so far today have involved asparagus.

Post Hoc/False Cause: Since I’ve started presuming that correlation equals causation, violent crime has gone down 54%.

Red Herring: They say that to prove your fallacy is the best requires extraordinary evidence, because it’s an extraordinary claim. Well, I’d like to note that “Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence” is itself an extraordinary claim.

Relativism: Well maybe all those other fallacies are the best for you, but to me, the relativist fallacy is the greatest logical fallacy ever.

Slippery slope is the best logical fallacy, and if you disagree with that, well, it’s a few short steps to the total collapse of the logical abilities of mankind and consequent downfall of society in general.

Special Pleading: I know that everyone is posting about their favorite fallacies, but Special Pleading is out-and-out the best, so it should just win with no contest.

Straw Man Argument: Apparently you think the Straw Man Argument is bad because you have something against the Wizard of Oz. Well, you know what? It doesn't have anything to do with the Wizard of Oz! Therefore, the Straw Man Argument must be the best fallacy.

THE LONG READ: A Christian Nation?

WHAT’S THE BASIS OF western civilisation? A commenter here at Not PC suggested that the foundation is religion —specifically Christian religion.

Now that's a widespread view to be sure, but being widespread doesn’t mean it’s not totally wrong. Which it is.

As I said in response to that commenter, "I suspect the Classical Greeks might raise some objections to the proposition, as might several historians of both the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment." 

If the basis of western civilisation can be described as a focus on reason, individualism, and happiness on this earth — ideas that were a product not of theologians but of Classical Greeks — ideas which were fortunately rediscovered for the west in the Renaissance, and then developed further in the Enlightenment — then, far from being any sort of foundation for these ideas, Christian religion is at odds with all of them. (More on that below.)

My commenter however suggested that as leading proof of his thesis was the observation that the USA is a "heavily Christian country" Which is true. As one data point in that thesis's favour he notes that "the US produced 173,771 patents in 2006. Check all Islamic countries since 1700 and you might get 1000.” 

Fine. But observe that a leading cause of scientific inquiry is the Enlightenment focus on reason and this earth. It is not being “heavily Christian.”  And the fact is that theocracy — any theocracy — is bad for free-wheeling scientific research.  

It's equally true that religion — any religion — is a hindrance rather than a help to scientific research. (Faith and mysticism are twin handmaidens of religion, but not handmaidens to truth—they so-called shortcuts to knowledge that are nothing but short-circuits destroying the mind, and destroying science if we would let them.) 

To properly assess causes for the claim above then, we might observe that the number of patents issued during the Dark Ages, over which the Christian church presided, can be counted on the fingers of one foot. Given that Islam is now enduring its own Dark Ages, it’s no surprise to find that their religious darkness (and patent production) is just as stultifying as the west's.

Fact is, the reason for the disparity in those quoted figures above is not because there are different religions in the US and in Islamic countries; it is because the influence of religion is far less and far less all-pervasive in the US than it is in the Islamic theocracies. The separation of religion and state was well done by America's Founders.

NOW I CAN ALREADY HEAR the claim that "the US was founded as a Christian country." Well, it simply wasn't. The Founding Fathers themselves were quite clear that they never intended that. John Adams for example declared explicitly, 

“The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”

Read that again just so you take it in:

“The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”

You can't get too much more of a blunt declaration than that.

Fact is, America's Revolution was not founded on the Christian God or upon any religion at all, but upon a view of human freedom and a declaration of rights that were both a product of the Enlightenment. As Thomas Jefferson explained (and he would know):

“Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, no more than on our opinions in physics and geometry...”

So declared Thomas Jefferson.

Fact is, the US was not a nation founded on religion at all. It was fully a Nation of the Enlightenment, that proud and unique era in human affairs that represented an overthrow of religion, and a renaissance of reason. [More quotes in this vein here] In fact if religion is anything to America it’s not a bulwark but a handbrake . It’s a threat, not a foundation—which is a what philosopher Leonard Peikoff maintains. 

Think about it: Just what exactly did religion bring to history? Founding Father James Madison has the summary:

“Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise....During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.”

Ignorance, superstition, bigotry and persecution. They do not describe western civilisation, but they do describe the Dark Ages to a 'T'; that ordure-strewn wasteland of crosses and graves and misery; those dark centuries over which the Christian church so dolefully presided.

As philosopher Leonard Peikoff explains, 

"The Dark Ages were dark on principle. Augustine fought against secular philosophy, science, art;  he regarded all of it as an abomination to be swept aside; he cursed science in particular as 'the lust of the eyes'. . .
    “As the barbarians were sacking the body of Rome, the Church was struggling to annul the last vestiges of its spirit, wrenching the West away from nature, astronomy, philosophy, nudity, pleasure, instilling in men's souls the adoration of Eternity, with all its temporal consequences.""

The church made Augustine a saint for his views. No wonder. Augustine distinguished between what he called the City of God (based upon faith) and the City of Man (based upon reason) – he praised the former and damned the latter. Concern solely with life on Earth was a sin, he said. For Augustine, man was "crooked and sordid, bespotted and ulcerous." 

"Intellectually speaking [concludes Peikoff], the period of the Middle Ages was the exact opposite of classical Greece. Its leading philosophic spokesman, Augustine, held that faith was the basis of man's entire mental life. ‘I do not know in order to believe,’ he said, ‘I believe in order to know.’ In other words, reason is nothing but a handmaiden of revelation; it is a mere adjunct of faith, whose task is to clarify, as far as possible, the dogmas of religion.
    "What if a dogma cannot be clarified? So much the better, answered an earlier Church father, Tertullian. The truly religious man, he said, delights in thwarting his reason; that shows his commitment to faith. Thus, Tertullian's famous answer, when asked about the dogma of God's self-sacrifice on the cross: ‘Creo quia absurdum. (‘I believe because it is absurd.’)
    "As to the realm of physical nature, the medievals characteristically it as a semi-real haze, a transitory stage in the divine plan, and a troublesome one at that, a delusion and a snare - a delusion because men mistake it for reality, a snare because they are tempted by its lures to
jeopardize their immortal souls. What tempts them is the prospect of earthly pleasure.
    "What kind of life, then, does the immortal soul require on earth? Self- denial, asceticism, the resolute shunning of this temptation. But isn't unfair to ask men to throw away their whole enjoyment of life? Augustine's answer is: what else befits creatures befouled by original sin, creatures who are, as he put it, 'crooked and sordid, bespotted and ulcerous'." ['Religion vs America,' Leonard Peikoff]

In his book A History of Knowledge, historian Charles Van Doren points out that

"God was the last of the three great medieval challenges [note: others being the “struggle for subsistence” and a “world of enemies”], and the most important. Human beings had always been interested in God and had attempted to understand his ways. But the Greeks, and especially the Romans, had kept this interest under control…In the early Middle Ages it overcame the best and the brightest among Europeans. It can almost be said that they became obsessed with God." [A History of Knowledge, Charles van Doren, p. 100]

What were the practical results of this approach to life? You won't be surprised.

Dutch economic historian Angus Maddison points out that from 500 to 1500 AD Europe suffered from zero-percent economic growth. Zero percent! This in a period in which onea slice of bread per day could be considered a good meal. In which the average infant had a life expectancy of just 24 years -- if, that is, they weren't of that third who failed to live beyond their first year. [See Angus Maddison, Phases of Capitalist Development, pp 4-7, and Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective]

Says French historian Fernand Braudel of the pre-eighteenth century era, 

"Famine recurred so insistently for centuries on end that it became incorporated into ma's biological regime and built into his daily life..." [Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Centuries, pp 73-78]

Everything human took a dive, only re-emerging centuries later with the Renaissance (which represented the rediscovery by the west of Aristotle and the Classical Greeks), and then the Enlightenment (which represented the application of Aristotelian reason to human life).

Life during the Dark Ages was shit. Almost literally. Sanitation collapsed, and disease rocketed; agriculture barely fed those who worked the fields, and that in good years; literacy and education plummeted; learning almost vanished; scientific research itself was almost non-existent, replaced instead by arcane theological explorations into the nature of the supernatural; life expectancy as we've said was just barely above the teens ... and the ethic of faith, sacrifice and suffering oversaw it all. The only thing that flourished in this time was the church, and its churchmen.

The result was not at all a flourishing of reason and a devotion to life on earth. Quite the opposite. For that we had to wait for the rediscovery of Aristotle (for the west) in the Renaissance – and for that we do have to thank the world of Islam (whose scholars had preserved Aristotle’s works, and during the period those works and their secular focus were valued Islam enjoyed its own Golden Age.)

W.T. Jones, the 20th century's leading philosophical historian, summarises the state of the west at this time: 

"Because of the indifference and downright hostility of the Christians ... almost the whole body of ancient literature and learning was lost... This destruction was so great and the rate of recovery was so slow that even by the ninth century Europe was still immeasurably behind the classical world in every department of life... This, then, was truly a 'dark' age." [W.T. Jones, A History of Western Philosophy, vol. 2, The Medieval Mind' pp141-142]

And so it was: An age in which ignorance, superstition, bigotry and persecution flourished. 

In no way do those qualities describe western civilisation — but they do describe the Dark Ages to a 'T,' those centuries over which the Christian church so dolefully presided, and whose shackles the west had to break to emerge, like a butterfly, from its pagan chrysalis.

And those qualities also describe to a ‘T’ the present-day Islamic theocracies—who like the west of that Dark era rejected the sunlit secularism of the Greeks only to embrace its polar opposite. We can see in them now what the west's Dark Ages was like then (and, in reverse, see in the West now what the Islamic Golden Age may have become, if not for its destruction by theology.)

SO IN SUMMARY, the basis of western civilisation is not Christian religion. Sure, Christian religion in its Enlightenment clothing contributed art, music, literature and much more. But the foundation on which those contributions were made was contributed by the rediscovery and then the application of Greco-Roman thought and Aristotelian reason. 

Because the leitmotifs of western civilisation are not ignorance, superstition, bigotry and persecution —all the things so associated with the Christian-dominated Dark Ages —but their polar opposites: reason, freedom and individualism.

We got these beneficient ideas from the Greeks. And we had to shake off centuries of religion to rediscover them.

RELATED LINKS: 

• Murdering tall poppies - that's what Easter is all about - NOT PC
• The Founding Fathers on religion - Ayn Rand Institute
• Religion vs America - Leonard Peikoff
• The Universalisability of Western Civilisation - George Reisman
• Christianity’s War against the Mind – Aristotle Versus Religion - Andrew Bernstein
• Gimme That Old Time Religion! - James Valliant
• The Nature of Western Civilisation - George Reisman
• The Tragedy of Theology: How Religion Caused and Extended the Dark Ages. A Critique of Rodney Stark’s The Victory of Reason. – Andrew Bernstein (with responses)
• “So, How Come You Keep Bashing Religion?” - NOT PC

NB: This is a 2007 post, re-posted here slightly edited (and with links updated) from a 2010 update. There's a pretty good comments thread back there, if you'd like to check it out.

“The art of *not* reading is a very important one."

“The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.”

–Arthur Schopenhauer from his essay 'On Books and Writing'

What if man were 'just' some kind of a machine?

“Recently I was with a group of mathematicians and philosophers. One philosopher asked me whether I believed man was a machine. I replied, ‘Do you really think it makes any difference?’ He most earnestly replied, ‘Of course! To me it is the most important question in philosophy.’ 

    "I had the following afterthoughts: I imagine that if my friend had finally come to the conclusion that he were a machine, he would be infinitely crestfallen. I think he would think: ‘My God! How horrible! I am only a machine!’ But if I should find out I were a machine, my attitude would be totally different. I would say: ‘How amazing! I never before realised that machines could be so marvellous!’”

    ~ Raymond Smullyan from his book This Book Needs No Title. Hat tip Stephen Hicks, who reckons this to be his favourite response on the issue of 'physicalism' and human dignity.

Why Johnny isn't Reading [updated]

We all know that many students emerge from universities knowing less than they did when they entered; graduating with heads full of random, un-integrated bites of information, and arguments they’re aware (deep down) they’ve never really mastered. 

We know you can leave today's universities without every having heard of the giants of your own field; that you can be given an economics degree having never read (or read of) Adam Smith; or an architecture degree without ever getting to grips with Frank Lloyd Wright; or a philosophy degree without ever even encountering, or wrestling with Aristotle.

But it gets worse. More and more young people "just don’t want to read books any more: they seem to lack either the will or the attention span."

"If you’ve been teaching at the [university]  level for a number of years," says the Atlantic in a long piece on the distressing development, "and your teaching involves reading books, you’ll have noticed the phenomenon." I have. Even fourteen years ago it was evident.

Economist George Reisman used to reckon that graduates in any discipline should really emerge possessing 

the essential content of well over a hundred major books on mathematics, science, history, literature, and philosophy, and do so in a form that is well organised and integrated, so that he can apply this internalised body of knowledge to his perception of everything in the world around him. He should be in a position to enlarge his knowledge of any subject and to express his thoughts on any subject clearly and logically, both verbally and in writing. Yet, as the result of the mis-education provided today, it is now much more often the case that college graduates fulfil the Romantic ideal of being ‘simple, uneducated men.’” [Emphasis mine.]

This is everywhere. As the Atlantic recounts, 

students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. .... Many students no longer arrive at [university]—even at highly selective, elite [universities]—prepared to read books.

The Spectator and Daily Skeptic tell a similar tale. The problem starts even earlier than university.

[A] student told [one uni lecturer] that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

Hard to study literature if you've never read a book. And can't. 

Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

The result:

Students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. ...; students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of [one] English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.

A sonnet is only fourteen lines!

The problem is said to be the internet.

Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework—then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing. “It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, told me. “Being bored has become unnatural.” Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.

But "teenagers are not bothering with the internet either."

They don’t want to know that much to actually initiate a question of the internet. If pushed, they might ask Alexa at home but they hardly go to the bother of typing out a question.
    And this, I have finally worked, out is the reason for teenagers’ disinterest in the possibilities of the internet: the current generation of children are passive users, not active ones. They look at their phones and entertainment is presented to them via their specific feeds: reems and reems of the stuff on Snap or TikTok. Teenagers have no need to actively look for anything, as everything has already been perfectly curated for their specific needs (generally beauty for girls, fitness and jokes for boys – disappointing but there it is). Internet use is a bit like reading a magazine of old, someone else has done all the hard work for you and all you have to do is sit back and scroll. ... 

[F]or the vast majority of children, the internet is as ignored and unvisited as the libraries and bookshops of old.

 So perhaps the problem is not that regular whipping boy. Perhaps the problem is that generations of children — teachers of the teachers of the teachers of today's teachers — have been taught dis-integrated knowledge; that facts are negotiable; that the author is dead; that creators are hegemonic; and that the oceans are boiling and colonial settlement is necessarily genocidal. The hierarchy of knowledge is routinely ignored (or entirely unknown), and teachers increasingly see themselves as agents of social and political change instead of what they once were: teachers. 

Is it then any surprise, after decades of this intellectual rot emanating from philosophy departments and then teachers colleges — a result of the long 'progressive' march through the institutions —that we're not overwhelmingly seeing strong, healthy, confident, independent and knowledgeable young folk, but too many who can't write, can't read, and can't think? 

How to solve this?

Start by burning to the ground the teachers colleges from whence this poison emanates. (Or at least close them). And insist that teachers know their goddamn subject. Philosopher Leonard Peikoff is a strong advocate of this policy to fix Why Johnny Can't Think:

There is no rational purpose to these institutions (and so they do little but disseminate poisonous ideas). Teaching is not a skill acquired through years of classes; it is not improved by the study of “psychology” or “methodology” or any of the rest of the stuff the schools of education offer. Teaching requires only the obvious: motivation, common sense, experience, a few good books or courses on technique, and, above all, a knowledge of the material being taught. Teachers must be masters of their subject; this — not a degree in education — is what school boards should demand as a condition of employment.
    This one change would dramatically improve the schools. If experts in subject matter were setting the terms in the classroom, some significant content would have to reach the students, even given today’s dominant philosophy. In addition, the basket cases who know only the Newspeak of their education professors would be out of a job, which would be another big improvement.
    This reform, of course, would be resisted to the end by today’s educational establishment, and could hardly be achieved nationally without a philosophic change in the country. But it gives us a starting point to rally around that pertains specifically to the field of education. If you are a parent or a teacher or merely a concerned taxpayer, you can start the battle for quality in education by demanding loudly — even in today’s corrupt climate — that the teachers your school employs know what they are talking about, and then talk about it.
    “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free . . .” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “it expects what never was and never will be.” 
    Let us fight to make our schools once again bastions of knowledge. Then no dictator can rise among us by counting, like Big Brother in 1984, on the enshrinement of ignorance.
    And then we may once again have a human future ahead of us.

 UPDATE:

At least one youngster is fighting back. On the tech front, at least.

And one school. On the philosophical front.

"Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement.... " [updated]

"Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement. It is by no means an obvious remedy for the obvious evil which the interests of that class will necessarily demand. It is a construction of theorists, deriving from certain tendencies of abstract thought with which for a long time only the intellectuals were familiar; and it required long efforts by the intellectuals before the working classes could be persuaded to adopt it as their programme."

~ Friedrich Hayek, from his 1949 article 'The Intellectuals and Socialism'

UPDATE:

"Socialism is not a movement of the people. It is a movement of the intellectuals, originated, led and controlled by the intellectuals, carried by them out of their stuffy ivory towers into those bloody fields of practice where they unite with their allies and executors: the thugs."

~ Ayn Rand, from, her 1962 essay 'The Monument Builders,' excerpted in the Ayn Rand Lexicon entry on 'Socialism'

“What is it about the study of modern philosophy that tends to make brilliant minds stupid?"

“What is it about the study of [modern] philosophy that tends to make brilliant minds stupid when it comes down to what are known as actual cases? Consider Martin Heidegger, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ludwig Wittgenstein ... four great names in twentieth-century philosophy: the first was a Nazi, the second died certain that America was responsible for all the world’s evil, the third was a Stalinist long after any justification for being so could be adduced, and the fourth lived on the borders of madness most of his life. Contemplation of the lives of philosophers is enough to drive one to the study of sociology.”

~ Joseph Epstein from his Essays in Biography [hat tip Stephen Hicks]