It has long been one of the primary aims of the western educational tradition to free the mind (hence the “liberal” arts, the arts that liberate) not from a ruling narrative, which is undesirable and impossible, but from unexamined assumptions that may make a ruling narrative irrational or incoherent. The collapse of such education in our time only means that we are frequently dealing with individuals and groups of people, often highly “educated,” who are conspicuously unaware of their ruling visions and the assumptions they bring to questions of the day, and who are therefore little able to
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