Stagnation

Upon listening to this incredibly interesting interview on NPR, I was automatically stricken with thought. Later on that night, I actually read the article in which the NPR interview was based upon. Now, one must be wondering, what exactly am I ranting about? The article can be defined simply as the social science bias of liberalism. Among the community of Social Scientists, it appears that most take a staunchly liberal stance and thus for the most part, offer the same opinions as each other without any protest. Thus, how is one to propagate knowledge when only one point of view is put forward and agreed upon on an almost unanimous basis? The author termed this the "tribal moral community," which I personally think is a great term to define this idea.

I personally can contest to the idea of prevalent liberalism from a Social Scientist point of view. Coming from a Social Sciences background, I was clearly raised with a liberal point of view. I can attest to the ideology that most universities especially thrive under this so called liberal base. Academics alike tend to think on a liberal basis and when spreading their knowledge, so comes their political stances and ideologies. As such, a so called "tribal moral community" is created in which one and all agree upon said stances and therefore no argument will be brought up against it. Doesn't this whole idea go against what our forefathers wanted us to do? Instead of passively following the crowd, they wanted us to challenge each other intellectually to bring about varying points. If all were in consensus on a said topic then no one would bring about contradictory points to explore said topic and thus a whole world of knowledge could quite possibly be lost. I might be exaggerating the point, but regardless, a completely differentiating view is thus ignored and never even explored in the first place. Where does that leave academia?

In this sense, academia thus becomes a stagnant pool, at least among the social sciences.