My own view is that the Referendum, the way it was conducted, and the outcome, were all pretty disastrous. The UK economy is, I think, much more fragile than people tend to think. We forget
how Mrs Thatcher managed so successfully to destroy our industrial base – so that now we can hardly produce our own steel, and certainly can’t build nuclear power stations any more. If the UK really does leave the EU, then it will not only disintegrate; it
will suffer a long economic decline. Science, education, universities, the arts will all suffer. The poorest people – just those most enthusiastic about Brexit – will suffer the most. Certainly those who lied to them abominably in the run up to the vote
– Tory Brexit MPs – will not suffer. The whole charade came about because David Cameron, idiotically, wanted to appease his anti EU backbenchers. (It had exactly the opposite effect, of course.) It was foisted onto us because Cameron cared more about his
internal party squabbles than he did about the fate of the country. And little England – or Lidl England, as the Germans now like to call us – will become a one-party state.
Democracy requires an educated electorate – educated about what the problems are, and what needs to be done about them. If universities put wisdom-inquiry into practice, they would give a
high priority to promoting such public education, in an intelligent way. But universities do not put anything like wisdom-inquiry into practice. They suffer from damaging structural irrationality, as a result of having inherited knowledge-inquiry from the
past. Our failure to get into the public arena the elementary idea that universities, as at present constituted, betray both reason and humanity, has a lot to do with the ghastly intellectual level of discussion, the tidal waves of lies and their massive
influence, that we suffered from here in the UK during the run up to the Referendum vote. And of course it has a lot to do with our failure to do anything really serious about the biggest problem that faces humanity, the impending disasters of climate change.
And that is to say nothing about Trump, Putin, Assad, Isis, China, population growth, destruction of habitats and extinction of species, drug-resistant bacteria......
Best wishes,
Nick
Website:
www.ucl.ac.uk/from-knowledge-to-wisdom
Publications online:
http://philpapers.org/profile/17092
http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/view/people/ANMAX22.date.html
From: Group concerned that academia should seek and promote wisdom
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Richard Vytniorgu
Sent: 21 July 2016 22:25
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: The wisdom in Brexit?
Dear all,
I have been listening attentively to British scientists spell the apocalypse after Brexit, but in light of our general interest in universities organising themselves around wisdom-inquiry rather than pure knowledge-inquiry,
I wonder what your thoughts on this are. I can't recall FoW having a proper Brexit back-and-forth... (forgive me if I'm mistaken).
Nick: perhaps you could step up and give a statement, from your perspective, about whether Brexit is going to be as woeful as we are all told.
Personally, I think the Brexit Jeremiads are spelling doom and gloom because they see the purpose of universities as offering specialised knowledge around particular themes. I understand there are moves now
to attend to Third World problems, which gesture at wisdom, but my suspicion is that academics who are trained in knowledge-inquiry will simply adapt in the sense of impact paradigms rather than real wisdom ones.
My own personal experience of how UK universities have responded has been a classic case of what Dickens called 'telescopic philanthropism', embodied in Mrs Jellybee. Rather comically, we see Mrs Jellybee in
throes over natives in Africa while her children tumble down the stairs and get ink all over themselves. The point is this: that we can easily focus so hard on the global and 'third world' or whatever, and ignore what's happening on our doorstep -- the political
mood that is shaping our localities and country. Universities seem to be doing just this -- ignoring: they are going as far as to ignore why some people voted Brexit, and claiming the moral superiority in 'we know best what's good for this country -- science
and freedom of movement among EU scientists'. They claim that science and technology is what drives Britain forward -- but forward for whom? Oh yes, for Mrs Gibbs who wheels her rollator along to the surgery to gain expert medical care. But what about when
Mrs Gibbs gets home: her son calls because workers have been laid off due to company cuts; her granddaughter cannot find a job after graduating; her young niece had to wait hours in hospital to deliver her baby. These problems are not going to be solved by
British science; they are to be solved by wisdom exercised in domestic politics -- by new perspectives applied to political ideology. But so far as UK universities engage in telescopic philanthropism, they will not see these domestic problems and why Mrs Gibbs
voted for Brexit -- because she thought it would get her family back together.
My feeling is that universities have been colluding in neo-liberal and globalised politics for too long because it suited their expansionist agendas; their students -- especially the Red Brick ones -- seldom
come from the city or locality in which the university is situated, and their PhD students and postdocs see the world and EU as their career marketplace. One could easily pick up, say, Exeter University, and drop it outside Ambleside or Antwerp, staff and
students and all, and by and large it'd do the same work.
I am not trying to tar individual academics; I talk merely in generalities -- the big picture.
So, Nick and others, from the perspective of wisdom, is there any scope for seeing the vote for Brexit in terms other than a gross folly and naive backwardness -- the up-yours from poor Mrs Gibbs?
Best wishes,
Richard.