Category: Flashback

Education has been portrayed as ‘white’ – what use is it when strutting the streets?

Helena Echlin on the misery of being a PhD candidate in English and American literature at Yale. She has to stifle her urge to write ‘eh?’ in the margins, discovers that obfuscation is de rigeur, and that people who talk nonsense are now looked upon not as sloppy thinkers, but as sages.

Do scientists ‘keep the faith’ and if so is that a good thing? Is religion a good source of morality?

What life was really like in Saddam’s Iraq and what it’s like now.

When students are consumers, they want what they pay for.

‘There has been a tendency among Marxist, or marxisant, critics of Darwin, and social Darwinism, to criticise, or ridicule, the theory as a simple product of the society in which it was developed.’

‘psychoanalysis, unlike a scientific theory but very much like certain religious or political movements, has essentially been immune from attacks leveled at it either from inside or outside the movement.’

‘What could be more foolish than to base one’s entire view of life on ideas that, however plausible at that time, now appear to be quite erroneous?’

‘How, given the recent and sorry history of ideologically motivated conceptions of knowledge — Lysenkoism in Stalin’s Soviet Union, for example, or Nazi critiques of `Jewish science’ — could it again have become acceptable to behave in this way?’

What is a government department doing endorsing the idea that traditions and myths count as evidence?

Book reviews in glossy magazines, worshipful interviewers on public radio and tv, ‘annoying’ as the ultimate condemnation…

Terrorists, freedom fighters, fundamentalists, postcolonialism, the Enlightenment – all contested, as usual.

‘Sexual selection really is a good candidate for explaining a great deal about the unique evolution of our species.’

‘the findings were nicely congruent with the hypothesis’ – yes, they always are, that’s the problem.

‘I don’t need a Hell to fear to be ethical, or a paradise to reward me for my good.’