Loth as one is to agree with CP Snow about almost anything, there are two cultures; and this is rather a problem. (Looking at who pass for public men in these days, one suspects there are now three cultures, in fact, as the professional politician appears to possess neither humane learning nor scientific training. They couldn’t possibly commit the manifold and manifest sins against logic that are their stock in trade, were they possessed of either quality.) … Bereft of a liberal education – ‘liberal’ in the true sense: befitting free men and training men to freedom – our Ever So Eminent Scientists nowadays are most of ’em simply technicians. Very skilled ones, commonly, yet technicians nonetheless. And technicians do get things wrong sometimes: a point that need hardly be laboured in the centenary year of the loss of RMS Titanic. Worse far is what the century of totalitarianism just past makes evident: technicians are fatefully and fatally easily led to totalitarian mindsets and totalitarian collaboration. … Aristotle was only the first of many to observe that men do not become dictators to keep warm: that there is a level at which power, influence, is interchangeable with money. Have enough of the one and you don’t want the other; indeed, you will find that you have the other. And of course, in a world of Eminent Scientists who are mere Technicians at heart, pig-ignorant of liberal (in the Classical sense) ideas, ideals, and even instincts, there is exerted upon them a forceful temptation towards totalitarianism – for the good of the rest of us, poor benighted, unwashed laymen as we are. The fact is that, just as original sin, as GKC noted, is the one Christian doctrine that can be confirmed as true by looking at any newspaper, the shading of one’s conclusions to fit one’s pay-packet, grants, politics, and peer pressure is precisely what anyone familiar with public choice economics should expect. And, as [James] Delingpole exhaustively demonstrates, is precisely what has occurred in the ‘Green’ movement and its scientific – or scientistic – auxiliary. They are watermelons: Green without and Red within. (A similar point was made of the SA by Willi Münzenberg, who referred to that shower as beefsteaks, Red within and Brown without.)
— G.M.W. Wemyss
#c-p-snow #green-movement #james-delingpole #technocrats #education
