Can Education Save Us From the Coming Dark Age?

Postmodern obstacles to the overcoming of populist barbarism

Image: Midjourney, author-generated

Here’s a dialogue between myself and Benjamin Cain on the role of education in the upholding of secular humanism against the onslaught of late-modern “barbarians,” that is, the populist right-wing authoritarians who have been storming modern civilization’s gates.

Benjamin

Naively, we might think the purpose of education is to provide everyone with knowledge because knowledge improves our lives. As John 8:32 says, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Of course, that quasi-Gnostic text was talking about esoteric knowledge about Jesus’s identity, this being special knowledge that’s supposed to save us from what the Apostle Paul called the “natural” person’s condemnable presumptions.

For thousands of years, then, as the political philosopher Leo Strauss pointed out, there’s been a double truth doctrine. There’s conventional, mundane knowledge, which amounts to something like ideology in the cynical, Marxist sense. Education that provides such propaganda would serve the conservative purpose of stabilizing what’s typically a corrupt social order, as in an unfair distribution of resources.

Then there’s knowledge for an elite, often countercultural or marginalized class. Far from contenting this class of monks, philosophers, gurus, artists, or cynical rulers, or setting them free, this more realistic knowledge condemns the elites to despair, angst, madness, or paranoia. Rather than freely dispensing this knowledge, Strauss argued that the elites conceal it because it’s subversive. What is the world anyway but an inhuman, pointless, absurd, amoral, monstrous intergalactic wasteland that’s alien to our small-minded biases? Why should we expect that knowledge of natural reality improves our lives?

So, there’s the fearless, heroic, self-sacrificial neo-shamanic function of education for intellectual elites, and then there’s the cynical, conservative purpose of mass indoctrination. The latter’s job is to obfuscate the former’s output with myths and feel-good delusions.

If we turn to the late-modern setting, we find liberal elites lamenting the poor state of education, which…