The academic sin

On this day, 49 years ago, Zardoz premiered in the United States and I took the time and saw it again. Three things stuck in my mind:

1. That Boorman played with a number of contemporary ideas.
2. That the film truly is visually beautiful.
3. That I know what the inventor of the Tabernacle was talking about when he died.
   

I've written a little bit about what I found disturbing, when I was a student, but I never got to the core. I mentioned an almost sadistic aloofness that you're supposed to have as a student of mathematics, which attracted me to artificial intelligence as a means to set the record straight on what matches that ideal best, I mentioned the creepiness that comes with living in another world to which others hold the keys, I've known, but did not mention, the demand of Don Zagier from his hosts at the commemoration of Emil Artins 100th birthday at the University of Hamburg, where I was most impressed by the grace of Erich Kählers wife - he almost shouted it, the answer, though, was a hushed: Later!

This I've known for at least 22 years, partially since 31 years, but I never got to the core of it until today.

The academic sin is to consider individual insights not as acts of grace, as Schopenhauer correctly described them, that is as something that flies your way, over which you have no power to force it into being, but as expressions of personal superiority that bestow the authority to make decisions for others, to choose in what kind of a world they should live.

Now, if you invent something useful, you are in a way doing just that, and you may even be conscious of it and do it for that purpose, but that is not what I am talking about here. I mean the conviction that you're supposed to decide what's use- or rather senseful for others. It permeates the universities. The scary thing about Klaus Schwab is that he's preaching to the choir, to people, who see themselves as biologically superior and thus responsible for setting society's course, because that's what academia tells them.

It's a basic lack of humility and an implicit embrace of a collectivism, in which the non-academics would be grateful to the academics for deciding for them, well, they may not actually know it, but they could be made to understand just how grateful they are, if that was needed, and neither do I welcome this collectivism as a recipient of its provision, nor do I think that God's grace establishes any other responsibility than to Him.

The truth is that the whole concept is an abomination to me. And the people who're not calling grace grace are an abomination to me. And the people who're not allowing grace to grace others are. All of it is deeply wrong.

Well, you may also say that all of it is deeply irrelevant when all you do is try to prove mathematical theorems. True in itself, but it requires a very narrow view of your surroundings.