Replies

Revel's book The Flight From Truth is one of the all-time great statements on the necessity of accurate information and intellectual honesty in public discourse. I was fortunate to pluck it off the shelves for the first time in years, just yesterday. The excerpt above is the conclusion of the book.

Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit the Palace Of Reason: http://palaceofreason.com

But the point I wish to make is this. As long as intellectuals find it normal to regard "the struggle for the freedom of the mind" and "human rights" as granting them latitude to make abstract pleas on behalf of liberty while refusing the same rights to their contradictors, and as long as they claim to be upholding the truth while in fact cultivating falsehood, the failure of culture and its powerlessness to exert any positive influence on history in the moral sphere will continue on into the future to the greater detriment of mankind.

And so it goes and will as long as the Earth lasts. Haven't read Revel in years, thanks for the refresher of why I liked him so much.

Still, I venture to hope that we have finally reached the end of an era during which so many intellectuals strove above all to place mankind under their ideological domination, and that we are entering a new epoch in which they will at last settle down to their true vocation, which is to place knowledge at the service of human beings—and not simply in the scientific and technical domains.

Much of the anti-globalization sentiment among highly educated people is, I believe, simple cultural and intellectual protectionism, designed to preserve a world in which the highly specialized knowledge of intellectuals is still very important. Indeed, at least some of the intellectual motivation of the jihadist movement may well be about mullahs and their fanatic hangers-on realizing that decentralizing forces are eliminating their ability to control their societies.

As technology begets greater demands for liberty worldwide over the next couple of decades, the blowback from those who are used to ruling, be they clerics, intellectuals or ministers, is going to be pretty fierce. The road from here to there is going to be bumpy.