Educated Fools

To my dismay, I constantly encounter that pretentious bumper sticker reading, "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." This attempt at pithy sloganeering fails to recognize that education and ignorance aren't actually opposites. Many Americans who have never attended college possess a profound acquaintance with common sense, while many with advanced degrees demonstrate an acute detachment from reality. Ours is a nation replete with educated fools.

I recently encountered such a fool in the person of a professor whose anthropology course had piqued my interest. In conversation, she made a series of assertions so reckless that she could only have entertained them by "virtue" of not considering their logical consequences. Yet she affirmed them with a superciliousness indicative of the worst stereotypes about academia's ivory tower.

She first contended that, since different people perceive reality differently, multiple realities exist. She apparently meant that, since perception ranks as the highest level of reality that admits of certain knowledge, it qualifies - practically speaking, at least - as the actual highest level of reality. I countered that generally something has to exist before anyone can perceive it, and that this something, however unknowable in its essence, constitutes a higher level of reality than that dependent on the mind of an observer. The subjectivity of human perception doesn't imply the absence of an objective reality. Those with different worldviews only inhabit "different worlds" metaphorically. The teacher basically conceded this point.

However, she subsequently asserted that everyone perceives through a filter conditioned by his or her experience of socialization and enculturation. Beliefs, then, have little or no foundational basis which would allow for their valuation either absolutely or relative to each other. In advocating this viewpoint, the teacher failed to recognize that she has no grounds for commending it to others because she cannot exempt herself from its implications. Her belief that beliefs result from socialization and enculturation would itself count as just another belief resulting from socialization and enculturation. No justification would exist for privileging it over opposing beliefs, and no criteria would exist for assessing its truth value. It would qualify as just as true - or just as false - as my own contrary opinion. It would amount to nothing more than an emotivistic decaration such as "I like pizza."

Our conversation reached its nadir when the teacher declared, "By the time you get to college, you have to throw all that truth stuff out the window." This struck me as her most inexplicable pronouncement, because, however false I may regard her beliefs, I cannot imagine that she herself does not regard them as true. Beyond that, the proposition that "truth doesn't exist" refutes itself, because it implies that at least one truth exists - namely, the truth that truth doesn't exist. It has a curious quality such that, if true, its truthfulness makes it false. Only an educated fool could maintain such a belief.

Ultimately, if students took these teachings at face value and ignored the contradictions, then not only would they have to reject most philosophers, scientists, and religious leaders, they would have to reject teachers. If no belief ranks as more true or false than any other - even the belief that no belief ranks as more true or false than any other - and the nonexistence of truth qualifies as the only truth, then teaching emerges as a meaningless endeavor. The appropriate response to this state of affairs would entail, not upper-level social science instruction, but a full Rousseauean retreat from formal education. However, I reject noble savagery as forcefully as I reject extreme postmodernism, so I simply enrolled in a different class. Sadly for the future of the West, not every aspiring scholar is following my example.