If the Susionline clones did not get their hatred of their own culture through their university lecturers, Don, where did they get it? Geoffrey Blainey was the Dean of Arts at Melbourne University before he was hounded out of that institution by student demonstrations, sit ins and death threats. So much for academic freedom from today's students.

Then there was the "stolen generations" hoax which was dreamed up by the same white hating, class baiting, Socialist academic historians who despised Keith Windsuttle because he exposed them. Why didn't the Susionline clones at least try to verify these outrageous "stolen generations" lies before working themselves up in self righteous apoplexy and mindlessly propagating a monstrous allegation as truth? The answer is, because it confirmed their fashionable prejudices that the white civilisation that they choose to live in was rotten beyond redemption.

So no, I do not agree with you that the trendies worldview is not culturally transmitted. I think that it's main transmission point is our universities. These universities seem to have been taken over by left wing academics who want to maintain a class solidarity in that their exalted kind will always go into bat against the Establishment as some sort of tertiary educated fashion statement.

It is true that the humanities are dominated by the left, but what is stopping anyone writing academic articles with a more balanced outlook, I get published attacking recent Labor policies and defending the Howard govt to some extent.

So we should stop whinging and contribute to shift the balance and make a difference.

In any case, does not Quadrant also have a bias?

Gee Lego, you give me too much credit!
You and other like minded individuals such as Individual seem frightened of universities?
As it happens, I only ever spent 6 months at a university doing one post grad unit.
I was a hospital trained nurse, not university trained.

I agree with the author in that Universities are not to blame for societies woes.
Some people, like Lego, feel threatened by others having more 'academic education' than themselves, but we need university educated people in our society just as much as anyone else.
How often do you see your Doctor or Vet?

As for the Stolen Generation, I have worked amongst these people and their children, so I know it happened. The stories are heartbreaking.
You don't have to be university educated to read history books Lego...

Don, in a world that teeters on the ever-present threat of nuclear war, the use of the word 'civilized' seems very much out of place.

Perhaps the world only ever reached a position of being 'partially civilized' when the flower people emerged towards the end of the Vietnam war.

I think that modern Universities are little more than Tertiary Technical Colleges that eschew the notion that humans need to be exposed to the humanities to soften their base instincts of greed, lust and brutality!

In "The Cultivation of the Liberal Arts (I)" (Quadrant, June 2013) Peter Coleman asks the question: "Were there stirrings of the old liberal and Christian ideal that the purpose of a university is the cultivation of wisdom?". In quoting Coleman, Don Aitkin leaves out the question mark, thus misrepresenting the views of the author. Apart from that I must admit I can't quite work out what Coleman or Aitkin are arguing about. The spark for the discussion is the book "On the Purpose of a University Education" by Luciano Boschiero, but Coleman does not seem to want to tell us what the book says.

Perhaps I am not the audience for Quadrant and so it is reasonable for me not be able to understand the articles in it. But Online Opinion is intended for a more general readership, so Aitkin's article in it headed "What has happened to the humanities?" should tell me what has happened to the humanities, but it doesn't. Aitkin says he is "... not as scornful as Keith Windschuttle about what has happened to the humanities ...", but still doesn't tell us what he thinks has happened to the humanities. If the author is of the view that the humanities are in decline and this is how humanities academics communicate with a general audience, then I can see a possible cause of that decline: a lack of ability to communicate and to show what they do is of value.

When the author of the references below went to Columbia University to study philosophy art and literature in 1957 he had never come across truly adult thinking before and he had a romantic attachment to the "Jesus" of his childhood and early teenage religion.
At the time Columbia was a very tough school where students were relentlessly challenged to justify all of their beliefs and presumptions about reality.
Within the first month it became completely obvious to him that there was no basis in Truth or Reality for any of the usual Christian dogmas and belief and that Western civilization had nothing whatsoever to do with whatever Truth was communicated in the Gospels
After suffering an intense existential crisis he threw it all away with both hands.
Furthermore, after having quite literally devoured all of the Western tradition he found that his graduation day was the unhappiest day of his life because he had inherited nothing but the bleak mortal vision that was communicated in one way or another by all of the artifacts of Western culture.
His findings were summed up thus:
"I saw only the constant drove of merely "civilized" humanity, a long history of illusions sewn up in the single foundation of a muscular mortality. There was only death, a constant ending, a rising fear, a motivated forgetfullness and escape. I knew this education would only be a long description of fundamental suffering, since all were convinced of the "Truth" of mortality". (obviously anyone who believes in the "resurrection" of their body or that they will be "saved" by "Jesus" is convicted of this bleak mortal vision - while pretending otherwise)
These references provide tools for really understanding the human condition and the state of the humanly created collective world-nightmare in 2013.
http://www.beezone.com/whiteandorangeproject/index.html
http://www.beezone.com/news.html
http://www.dabase.org/up-1-3.htm
http://www.adidaupclose.org/FAQs/postmodernism2.html
http://www.firmstand.org/articles/separation_of_church_and_state.html

" there's no doubt that all my courses were built on some unmentioned assumptions. ... Another was that Truth was Beauty. A third was that evidence (later, data) trumped speculation - this was the humanities version of the scientific method, much talked about in Science."

Sadly, most universities appear to have ditched scientific method. This is exemplified by the politicking by the 'consensus' of academic scientists who believe in and promote AGW. They do their best to denigrate and silence academics and others who have the courage to apply scientific method to question the veracity of the AGW hypothesis. Two recent 'victims' are Professor Bob Carter who had his adjunct fellowship terminated by James Cook University and Professor Murry Salby whose employment was terminated by Macquarie University.

lecturers would not be able to justify their pervese lifestyles if they were interested in truth. Its a moral problem not academic. That's why so many bereft of morals take up pseudo causes like gw, environmental studies and indigenous rewriting of history.

Although they would obviously pretend otherwise this one stark image sums up the death-saturated world view that the propaganda hacks that link into the Quadrant nexus actually subscribe to and promote.
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~spanmod/mural/panel21.html

This reference (on The Beautiful) describes the origins and cultural consequences of the dismal reductionism that mis-informs the academy altogether, including all of those who presume to be religious, and even sometimes prattle on about the loss of Beauty.
http://www.adidamla.org/newsletters/newsletter-aprilmay2006.pdf

This references with its associated footnotes describes the origins and cultural consequences of the reductionist perceptual strait-jacket that mis-informs the entire academy. A strait-jacket in which we are now all trapped, with NO exceptions. This essay was recently published as a book together with an essay titled The Maze of Ecstasy.
When did you ever hear or see anyone associated with Quadrant or the IPA write or talk about ecstasy!

http://www.adidaupclose.org/Art_and_Photography/rebirth_of_sacred_art.html

Peter Coleman argues - <that because we did not go down the path of universities as Christian institutions the result was 'the gradual abandonment of the liberal arts and the closing of the Australian mind'. For him there is a 'Christian ideal that the purpose of a university is the cultivation of wisdom', and further that 'the Christian revelation [is] at the centre of university education'. >

The cultivation of wisdom- is that the utopian idea, that we should all hold hands and sing songs of love and peace and the world will change forever and suddenly, magically, become a utopian paradise? This was and is the whole plan of the left wing academics and religious academics. Good luck with that plan to change the world. If only it was that simple.

The reason the humanities is losing it’s fervour in Universities today is that a lot of people are now seeing these utopian ideas for what they are, a beautiful idea in the minds of the religious and left
wing academics and they never were a reality, based on any kind of fact out here in the real world.

Civil liberties and human rights depend on the permission of the armies of countries to support the law courts, not on the decrees of academics or religious leaders. In the recent Fijian take over, the army shut the courts down when people ran to them for their civil rights. You won’t solve problems with delusional ideas of God and peace and love, brother. Try singing peace and love songs in front of a hostile army’s tanks.

The humanities at Universities would do better to research the driving, biological,imperatives of mankind as a species, and discover the reason we fight wars is over control of land and territory.
That is another fact, backed up in History books, funny how none of these facts are taught in the Universities, but all these unproven religious and hippie ideas of a wished for reality, are.
Our Universities have been teaching delusional ideas for too long.

The Ghost World Of Liberals And Conservatives. These videos examine neuropolitics and it's parallax effect on the way we perceive the world around us:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRel6Bg5jz4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf1l0MYPhog

If you follow the train of thought in the two videos I posted above what the presenter is implying is that Liberalism and Conservatism are symbiotic, they're two biological survival strategies which balance and compliment each other.
So ethnocentric White people like me, most Muslims, Aboriginals, Africans etc, are pre-disposed to favour smaller ethnically homogenous communities and we are instinctively suspicious of other tribes because we are in tune with the way they think.
In rough terms the other half of the people are inclined to want to create nations and federations of diverse groups and populations then play the role of peacekeepers and administrators.
Look at Australia in that light, we have deeply conservative, parochial upper and working classes and a large liberal minded middle class managing a "multicultural" meta society.
You could say that rapid and large scale Third world migration will from time to time throw things out of balance and cause conflict among conservative communities, (as it is now) but as long as the liberal middle can do it's job and keep expanding it's managerial system via social justice and social cohesion strategies at the same pace as population growth things "should" swing back to equilibrium.
I emphasised "should" because in the U.S.A and U.K to name two examples the Liberal middle classes are not doing their job well, they're striking out selectively at elements of the conservative people above and below them instead of mediating between all groups impartially.

Jay

Those videos were interesting. I’ve been fascinated with the subject of right-wing and left-wing brains since I read about a study commissioned by the actor Colin Firth a few years ago. Apparently, he jokingly declared on a panel show that he was going to find out if there is a neurological difference between right- and left-wing brains. He commissioned the study and, much to his surprise, found there definitely IS. Many other studies have reached the same conclusion.

Evolutionary-wise, it makes perfect sense. However, I’m not sure I agree with your comment that imbalances occur from time to time and tend to rectify themselves. My feeling is that people with right-wing brains (conservatives) have well and truly dominated human affairs since the late Neolithic era – about 6000 to 10,000 years ago. Small corrections occur from time to time, e.g. Ireland’s era of saints and scholars, the Rennaisance, the Enlightenment, the 1960s (and corresponding eras in non-Western cultures); however, the right-wing ALWAYS wins out.

In a strange contradiction to the videos’ premise that left-wing thinkers congregate into high-density cities, which indeed they do, it was actually the move to high-density living in the period 3000 to 6000 BCE that facilitated the rise of the right wing and its influence over human affairs. While right wingers may personally prefer the low-density lifestyle of the suburbs and rural areas, it’s much easier to boss people around when there are large numbers of them stacked into a confined space.

Liberals and Conservatives are biologically different? Gee, Killarney, I never pegged your for a racist. Welcome to the club!

Killarney,
My comment about imbalances referred only to Australia, an example would be the sudden influx of Indian students in the early part of the 21st century, that caused a lot of conflict and violence in the suburbs so the management classes had to step in and take control of the situation by changing the student visa requirements.

Killarney--<My feeling is that people with right-wing brains (conservatives) have well and truly dominated human affairs since the late Neolithic era – about 6000 to 10,000 years ago. Small corrections occur from time to time, e.g. Ireland’s era of saints and scholars, the Rennaisance, the Enlightenment, the 1960s (and corresponding eras in non-Western cultures); however, the right-wing ALWAYS wins out.>

Nature of Nuture?

The above is an interesting idea. Once again it begs the question, is it financial influence and resources that allows the middle classes to dominate, presuming the statement above is correct, or is it genetic selection. Given that the right wing classes have more
access to intellectual teaching,(well equipped schools)
and also the ability to have well fed healthy armies with superior
weapons and well nourished brains to think better and win wars.

Nuture or Nature?

It is usually no accident that wealthy nations have ancestry to some of the most successful conquerors on earth, this is how they gained
their wealth and power. But revolution and great warriors can
challenge and upend this power, creating new right wing classes out of warlords.
This is also why, right-wing conservatives have a great fear of working class unions, they are always wary of any rising up of the lesser well off that might threaten their wealth and privilege.

This is why when England was defeated by Mel Gibson's character in
Braveheart the Wealthy landowners then handed him over to the English
King. He had proved he could lead the masses and that was a direct
threat to the wealth of the Scottish wealthy, right-wing classes, so they did a deal with the English King to hand Braveheart over.
Braveheart was true in this part of the story.

This is an example of how the right-wing conservative classes guard their wealth, even turning a fellow countryman over to the hated English after he had saved them.