John Dawkins Versus John Calvin
These were the closing comments made at the
First Reformed Post-Graduate Conference
held at Knox Presbyterian Church, Wantirna, Victoria,
20th February 1993.
Indeed, men who have either
quaffed or even tasted
the liberal arts penetrate
with their aid far more
deeply into the secrets of
divine wisdom.
[John Calvin Insitutes
I:V,2]
These comments are given
with concern for the structure and character of the university education in
this country at this time. You and I are part of a spiritual revolution which
has relentlessly tried to transform higher learning into a form compatible with
its religious beliefs. In our western and "post-capitalist" society
the university is clearly subject to momentous forces for change. Let us then
draw the current situation as we now find it.
Our corner of Western
civilisation is in the process of radical and far-reaching change. Sure, we
have an election the week after next, but the impact of the gods of Science,
Reason, Progress and Technology have all made their demands upon
"post-Christian" society in Australia and the person-in-the street is
increasingly confused and unable to live consistently with the changes that
keep occurring with daily regularity.
As third-world countries now
adopt and adapt the revolutionary humanism which has shaped European society
since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the entire globe is caught up
in the maelstrom. And we are caught up in it. Fellow Christian students let us
take a sober look at ourselves!
Our meeting today has been
to encourage us to begin to plumb the depths of our own intellectual
responsibility. We are led to ask : Just how much has our learning and our view
of things has been shaped by the "religion of unbelief" that
underlying religious thrust of the modern or post-modern university which is
the mortal enemy of Christian discipleship in science and scholarship. Sure, we
have been encouraged to begin the painstakingly difficult task of "knowing
the enemy"; we need to become much more critical of our own accommodation
to the intellectual vision which shapes the contemporary university, which has
shaped us.
Ordinary citizens, fed and
catechised with the dogmas of our time from an early age, are very often
paralysed; something very serious has gone wrong. They feel it in their bones,
and we do too, but our minds are too often distracted from the task of
understanding what it is. How do we diagnose the disease? How do we know what
to do so that we can bring about some healing? Pessimism and a sense of
futility reigns. This sense of pessimism and futility does not just stay out in
the street. It invades our homes; it has even taken a strong hold of our cherished
churches. How many times have you raised some serious questions about the spiritual direction your church or
congregation is taking only to be put in your place by pious
anti-intellectualism? How many times have you heard the word
"intellectual" or "theoretical" or "academic"
spoken as a swear word when you were struggling tp put your fears into logical
form?
The only option for many of
us appears to be a more sophisticated life-style, with further refinement of
our consumer tastes in art, literature, private hobbies and liturgy.
But what of our public
responsibilities? How is the nihilism, emptiness and blatant materialism which
has our neighbours enslaved to be understood so that it can be effectively
resisted? How can we ever get to a position where government and nation,
economy and society, is changed so as to encourage, rather than to discourage,
the cultivation of human talent?
Or to apply this line of
questioning to our universities : Is it possible to study so as to gain some
integral and unified perspective upon - the breakdown of the ozone layer; the
destruction of the earth's vegetation; the smog and pollution in our air, water
and food; the melting of the ice-caps and the erosion of the coasts and arable
land; the destruction of animal life; the traffic problems of big cities; the
population explosion; droughts and famines that afflict African and Asian
peoples; massive destruction of food surplus; the spread of HIV infection and
AIDS; the rise in terrorism among and between nations; Glasnost, Perestroika
and the end to the Cold War and the consequences; the world's refugee problem;
homelessness; resurgent Islam and fundamentalist regimes of East and West,
Europe, America and the third-world; arms proliferation and reduction;
inflation; crime and police corruption; institutionalised immorality and the
search for profit in all kinds of previously questionable practices;
psychiatric and other mental disturbance; divorce and marital strain; the
effects in the next generation of abortion law reform; and so on.
This list would be
impressive if it wasn't so depressing.
Surely the university, as a place of serious and disciplined learning,
would be the place where students, of all kinds and specialties, could come to
frame for themselves a coherent and integral perspective from which to
contribute to the many-sided discussion of these momentous issues? Surely the university would be the place
where students would be encouraged to form a non-self-centred, non-provincial,
global outlook? Surely the university
would be the place where one could investigate the inner-connectedness and the
inter-connectness of all these matters?
Surely the university and its proud traditions of honest and objective
scholarship would be the place where we could discern where western society had
made a wrong turn? Surely the
university would be the place to gain historical and philosophical insight into
the underlying religious/cultural commitments which have brought the
cultivation of the planet to the brink of such manifold disaster?
But no! So many of my
colleagues, who have had to negotiate their way through the bureaucratic and
political maze of the Australian university over the last decade, would listen
to these questions and then, in all probability, dismiss the implication as
misplaced idealism. For the post-modern humanist the "community of
scholars" is dead and gone. And the university has been emptied of that
kind of commitment which led to its emergence many centuries ago. The nihilism
which is the presupposition of the person-in-the-street, as he sucks on his
tepid meat-pie and scans the football results in the newspaper, is the same
nihilism which is leading the armies of university and college bureaucrats into
a deepening crisis.
And it is my own experience
of that crisis first-hand which has brought me to organize these conferences
for reformed university students. I fear for the future of reformed students
because the spiritual crisis which has rocked the university has in all
likelihood worked its way very deeply into their own way of thinking - and
sadly it is the rare Christian student who seems to care very much that it has
done so! And as Christians that presents us with a very serious problem indeed.
Like lemmings, universities
and colleges throughout Australia, and the rest of the industrialised world,
have moved ahead taking the unabashed form of "degree factories";
over-paid senior executives in tertiary education, completely dominated by
"corporatist values", have thoroughly capitulated to the government
requirement that financial profit be the primary, if not sole, purpose of
scientific research in all fields. And then senior academics, scholars some of
whom have outstanding record for research and publication have also capitulated
in spectacular fashion. And this is all bad enough in itself. But let us note
that Christian students, like lemmings, have travelled a similar path and seek
to work out their discipleship when they are so thoroughly un-prepared to meet
the challenges of our time with specialist insights that are born of a
Christian world-view.
Academics are fragmented by
an arbitrary, but fiercely defended, professionalism; they seem to be quite
incapable of indicating any alternative direction. But among Christians it is
no different. Our own pious inflexibility insists that the many serious
problems mentioned above can only be addressed by specialists working on
problems one-at-a-time. Specialists, we plead, must be given their respect. But
do we ever stop to consider in what this professional autonomy consists?
Moreover, just because a Christian has specialist training -say in psychology,
or business administration or law - it does not mean that their professional
advice is Christian as it should be. For over twenty years now we have heard that
it takes much more to have Christian teaching in our schools than simply
placing Christian teachers in front of a classroom of children. If it is so
important in school what about all the other professions? Where do we hear of a
biblical approach to psychiatry? I hear lots about "not judging" and
"being loving" to my Christian brothers and sisters in the
psychiatric and psychological professions. But what about the development of a
Christian philosophy which would shape and inform the conceptual basis of these
so-called "caring professions".
Consider how reformed
thinking over the past two decades has been inordinately shaped by an
uncritical appropriation of the latest insights in psychology? And by reformed
thinking here I mean, quite frankly, the way congregations encourage Christian
discipleship. These ideas about professional respect and autonomy I have also
heard propounded from our pulpits. Well the crunch time is here! It is long
passed the time when reformed Christians should have had done with attempts at
avoiding Christian thinking by artificial attempts at accomodation and
synthesis.
Despite what any
discipline's theories might assert about the inter-relatedness of all
knowledge, our actions bespeak a firm commitment to the view that our corporate
responsibility can be neatly divided into water-tight compartments. Yet the
problems are not so easily isolated from each other as you will have learned
Sunday by Sunday trying to relate what you hear to what you learn at
university.
Universities may be organised
to isolate history from philosophy; social science from the laboratory of the
natural sciences. But a Christian university must encourage all to work
together to furnish insights which will be of benefit to all because they
deepen our understanding of the way God has made us and thereby contribute to
our reflection about how our discipleship is to be developed in this time, in
this place.
But the problems which
confront us cannot be addressed by specialist academics working in splendid
isolation of each other. In point of fact the problems which we confront have
been exacerbated by the professionalistic fragmentation which is the hall-mark
of academia.
Even if any one academic
specialist wishes to come to terms with the problems, as seen from the perspective
of one particular discipline, it will yet require the closest possible
co-operation with many other specialists. Such co-operation has been found to
be extremely difficult, if not totally impossible, within the hallowed halls of
enlightened academic self-interest - the (post-)modern university. The
university finds itself in the embarrassing situation where it has used up all
its resources on an institutionalised internal squabble in which each science
goes its own way. In so doing each puts itself forward as the true source of
those theoretic insights which alone can be the basis for the entire enterprise
of higher learning. This process may have produced some valuable insights in
times past. But we are now entering a new phase.
Keep in mind that under the
impact of the Australian Federal Government's "re-structuring"
proposals, the university has been required to transform itself into many
multi-faceted business schools. The internal intellectual competition between
disciplines is now being re-constructed under a public-business philosophy
which gains its momentum from a world-view which is liberal, socialistic,
bureaucratic and materialistic. In my own experience Monash is said to have
"merged" with Chisholm some two-and-a-half years ago. Some ex-Chisholm
die-hards claim that Monash has taken over. What has actually happened is that
the mentality that once dominated Chisholm has now been given free rein to take
total control of the "Greater Monash".
In decades past, salvation
has been offered in the name of scientific research. Yet such salvation has
been found wanting; alternative scientific specialties fought each other for
pre-eminence with equally convincing counter-perspectives. Now this general theoretical competition has
been re-interpreted to be one form of market-place competitiveness; the
university is now to be interpreted in terms of "the market".
Specialists in the various disciplines are now required to form their programs
and to re-form their curriculum, to maximise their "competitive
advantage". Each discipline in the university/academic curriculum is
viewed as a centre of self-interest and the Government's policy is being
implemented as the epitome of "enlightened self-interest". In other
words, business management rhetoric has become the Queen of the Sciences, and
the Federal Government insists that it be so.
An abstract theory called
"economic rationalism" is foisted upon the entire academic community,
as each academic sector labours with the burden of being a "cost
centre". The Federal Government's proposals mean that the entire
intellectual community is required to judge itself in terms of a monetarist
understanding of the "national good". Now, the universities are to be
organised on the principle that the monetarist approach, adopted hitherto by
Business Schools, is the only means of effectively running tertiary education.
As Minister for Trade &
Industry, John Dawkins commissioned the project that led to "Australia
Reconstructed". As Minister for Employment and Education and Training he
simply applied the Big Government/Big Union/Big Business mentality to
universities. He has wanted Big Universities! How did all this come about? Why is the Government's initiative actually
deepening the crisis in our universities? At the outset of his ministerial
career Mr Dawkins claimed to be reversing the destructive influence of
monetarism. As Minister responsible for Education he has acted in a way that
will indelibly stamp our universities with the monetarist mould. His is an
ideology thoroughly compatible with monetarism. Accountants are the priests of
this religion in which the staff/student ratio is the Government enforced law
which must be obeyed.
There is more to this than
can be covered in a short speech here. There is, however, a very interesting
reversion at work in the Dawkins' ideology. It can be seen most clearly when
his approach to learning is contrasted with that of John Calvin. This Reformation prophet, whose name has
often been associated with the Capitalist's profit[1],
explained the purpose of university study in these terms:
Indeed, men who have either quaffed or even tasted the
liberal arts penetrate with their aid far more deeply into the secrets of the
divine wisdom. (Institutes
I:V,2).
Battles, Calvin's
translator, adds in a footnote:
"To Calvin, liberal studies were an aid to comprehension of the
divine wisdom conveyed in Holy Scripture". In other words, university study is of inestimable value on the
human pathway to wisdom. It is part of that cultivation of the earth in which
mankind will find and fulfil its vocation. It is indispensable for men and
women as they work in all spheres of society. Such knowledge will encourage
wise and useful living even in the marketplace. But Dawkins has reversed
all this. For him, and those of his
school - a nation-wide horde - those who have self-indulgently quaffed the
divine wisdom of mammon, and who have carefully calculated their own
market-value, have gained the one thing necessary to understand all the secrets
of the liberal arts. Indeed for them a larger market share is the way of
salvation. In other words we are in very desperate times. The universities of Australia have been
taken over by a sect. This sect has
Federal and State Government blessing.
The sect has received the backing of the major political parties, and
will not be content with simply ensuring that a responsible fiscal policy be
adopted by the various university bureaucracies. No! The aim is the
transformation of the entirety of the intellectual outlook of those trained in
the universities of this land.
Salvation through profit: this
is the key to knowledge.
Further investigation and
analysis of this sect and its doctrines is called for. It will require
painstaking and unremitting labour for insight to emerge. But it will also
require that we graduates give ourselves unstintingly to the task of
establishing a Christian university in this land; yes we do it so we can work
together as Christ's disciples in the world of learning and scholarship; yes we
do so to provide a place for our children to follow Christ in scholarly
research; but we also do it for the purpose of restoring the student vocation
to its God-honoured place of searching out the way of the Lord in His creation;
and we do it to contribute to the genuine reformation of universities in this
land.
Because understanding does not come magically at the click of some spiritual fingers, or via the increment of some trade-weighted index, it is still an open question whether the universities of this land have the intellectual openness to philosophically push back the worst excesses of this sectarian take-over. But we Christian graduates should have no doubts about the power of Jesus Christ in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. And it is in His power and in His service that we shall labour long and hard in the belief that in Him something permanent can be established.
20
February 1993.
This chapter develops
the argument
of an article of the
same name published
in the Chisholm IT
student newspaper
The Naked Wasp 12:5 1989 p.18