Dear Friend of Wisdom,

 

                                     I am enormously grateful to the following for helpful suggestions in connection with campaigning for wisdom-inquiry: Christer Nylander, Ingrid Löfström, Lee Beaumont, Anand Kumar Awasthi, Joan Fogel, Ian Glendinning, Roger Anderton, Jack Whitehead, Will Wade, Phil Webber, and Ronnie Hawkins.

                                     There are now 368 members of Friends of Wisdom, so if we all send off one campaigning email or letter a day, that will amount to 134,320 missives in a year.  And if these missives are sent to people who are both influential and likely to be sympathetic, gradually we should create an awareness of the urgency of the need to transform academia, the strength of the argument for quite specific structural changes that need to be made, and the real possibility of doing it in democratic countries.  It would be excellent and appropriate for our emails to be formulated in different ways, emphasizing different aspects of the scandal and what needs to be done about it.  Am I serious?  Of course not.  But probably something like this is needed if we are to create an awareness of the urgency of the need for change in the public domain.

 

                                    What I find absolutely extraordinary is the manner in which most academics seem oblivious to the gross, profoundly damaging, structural irrationality of academic inquiry, the indifference to intellectual standards that this reveals.  Most scientists deplore faking of experimental results, or the practice of “ghosting” papers in medical journals.  Most academics working in the humanities deplore plagiarism.  But when it comes to the profoundly damaging structural irrationality of academia as a whole, there is blindness or indifference.  The implementation of knowledge-inquiry – which academia still, by and large, does – results in three of the four most elementary rules of rational problem solving being persistently violated; and, of course, it involves the failure to put aim-oriented rationality into practice (something most academics will know nothing about).  Not only does the intellectual value of academic inquiry suffer as a result.  Humanity suffers.  This gross structural irrationality is a cause of our current global problems and our incapacity to deal with them adequately.  The structural irrationality of academia is the key crisis of our times, the crisis behind all the others, and yet most academics seem oblivious to the situation.  Why?  Specialization does not help.  There is no academic discipline concerned with the overall aims and methods of the enterprise.  Within philosophy there is the sub-discipline of philosophy of science, but not philosophy of inquiry.  This does not even have an entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  The study of Higher Education hardly seems up to the job.  Academic bureaucrats have other priorities in mind.  Those relatively few academics who are aware that all is not well with academia as it is may nevertheless feel it is pointless to try to do anything about the situation except, perhaps, in a small-scale, local way.  The edifice of universities world-wide is too vast and impersonal a structure for there to be any hope that individuals, arguing for the need for change, could have any impact whatsoever.  For the majority, educated as they have been, and working as they are, within the framework of knowledge-inquiry – more specifically, within some specialized bit of this framework – the idea that there is something seriously wrong with this framework will seem, no doubt, more or less meaningless, the call for change hopelessly utopian.  And knowledge-inquiry, once in place, imposes its own system of censorship which excludes criticism of itself.  Standard empiricism excludes discussion of aims and methods of science from science itself on the grounds that such discussion does not concern empirically testable ideas.   And knowledge-inquiry officially bans proposals for change from inquiry on the grounds that such proposals are not contributions to knowledge.

 

                              Despite all this, there clearly are many academics aware that academia, as at present constituted, fails to respond adequately to the problems of humanity.  Even Stephen Hawking thinks there is a chance technology will end up destroying us in the next 100 years or so.  Martin Rees agrees.  As I have put it on more than one occasion, before modern science, wisdom was a personal luxury; now, with the power to act that some of us possess as a result of modern science and technology, wisdom has become a global necessity.  It is a necessity that only academia conducted along something like wisdom-inquiry lines can provide.  Ingrid Löfström tells me of the Ubiquity University: see http://www.ubiquityuniversity.org/ .  There is The Global Challenges Programme at my own University, UCL, which has been in existence for over 5 years now, and which seeks to bring specialists together to tackle global problems.  And Will Wade tells us that “UCL, IOE, Sheffield Uni and Lancaster (and 8 international institutions) are partners in a new funded Centre in higher education called the Centre for  Global Higher Education (CGHE)”: see https://www.ioe.ac.uk/research/112125.html .  Chapter 4 of my How Universities Can Help Create a Wiser World (2014), entitled “Is the Wisdom Revolution Underway?” gives an account of a number of initiatives in universities that can be regarded as steps towards wisdom-inquiry.  (See also Are Universities Undergoing an Intellectual Revolution? Oxford Magazine , 290 (8th We), 2009, pp. 13-16; http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/view/people/ANMAX22.date.html .)

 

                          What Friends of Wisdom has been calling for, ever since its inception in 2002, is perhaps, at last, beginning to happen.  If so, it is happening with agonizing slowness, in a dreadfully muddled and piecemeal way, and in a way which is overshadowed by changes in quite different directions.  We urgently need academics and non-academics alike to wake up to what is going on – or what needs to go on – to help give direction, coherence and a rationale to this nascent revolution from knowledge-inquiry to wisdom-inquiry, so that eventually, as a result, humanity may learn how to make progress towards as good a world as possible.

 

                            Best wishes,

 

                                   Nick Maxwell