metonymy4u

One of the harsh facts of modern inquiry is the professionalization of the academy. Teachers must become more and more specialized in order to publish or perish and students are increasingly inclined to see their education as one commodity amongst many. And what has this produced? A world of specialists and certificate holders, many of whom have little inclination to encompass a broader sweep of human knowledge or the genealogy of such. The question of where our knowledge originated, and where it seems to be taking us is as little valued today as it is understood. All the while, ideas are used wholesale: for political advancement, for monetary gain, for terror, for destruction. What I regret is that we forget that every idea, which is a habit of thought, was ushered along by a person, and may represent, if we could only spend enough time with it, the one instance of enlightenment that each of us may bring into the world with our fears, our hopes, sufferings and joys. And what a thinking animal is these days seems to concern very few. So people, and their ideas, are shot en masse. And yet each idea has a history like a person: unique, significant, in every way important and remarkable to me. If it were not so, then it would no longer make sense to think or to love.