Creation by Destruction, Destroying to Create...

"Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse."
H. L. Mencken

And it would seem that Mr. Mencken was correct, and scarily so. The American university system has produced some of the most destructive ideas, machines, chemicals, processes, weapons, etc...that have ever been visited upon the world. This development is both a perverse contradiction to and an inevitable product of Western academia.

Universities have, within the last century, become laboratories of experimentation without boundaries. In one sense this means: There is no intellectual pursuit that is forbidden. There is no line of research that is proscribed. There is no ideological stance that is taboo. Succinctly, there are no rules.

In another sense this means that there are no limits to the objects, ideas, hypotheses, etc…that could not be attained through the university system. These intellectual laboratories have infinite potential. This infinity is encoded in the very name “University,” which can be morphologically traced back to the Latin word ‘universus’ (i.e. totality, whole). The aim of a university in the modern sense to study, comprehend, name, delimit, categorize, analyze, organize, codify and otherwise grasp the totality of existence. To know everything, not just as naked facts and concepts, but as relational objects and subjects, each of which exists distinctly from all other things. Each individual existence is predicated on an intricately interlaced connection with the totality of all existences. Singular existence can only come about through the inter-connectivity of everything.

And so we must ask a question of this model of academia: What is the ultimate goal of such an institution?

From this query we find that we are lead inescapably to another question: Is this goal attainable?

Let us, for the moment, put aside these questions and continue our interrogation of the products and practices of the university. These learned institutions have been built and sustained by the humanistic ideal of the Supremacy of Reason; the belief that human reason is the only path to True knowledge. Without reason there is no True or Valid knowledge about the universe. A world devoid of reason is a cruel and uncertain place that makes the human subject incapable of progress or intellectual growth. In such a world the human subject can never move beyond bare existence, can never invent, can never understand, can never conceptualize, can never become a full human being. Under this paradigm we find that the only noble and worthy endeavors are based upon a solid foundation of Reason; the scientific method, the standard of falsifiability, reproducibility, etc…

And this seems all fine and good, rational as it were. The university, as an institution built on these assumptions, serves to radiate the benefits of reason and guide the progress of humanity. Fundamentally it acts altruistically. But this is a mere facade, both ideological and practical.

Infinity stretches in all directions, both positive and negative. The university, as an institution seeking and utilizing the concepts of infinity for its own stability, assumes this same quality. Thus anything that is produced through, by, within, because of, as a consequence of the university is imbued in this duality. It would seem logical, even necessary, that the positive aspects, creations, ideas, products, etc...of the university must equal the negative, as in the true concept of infinity. This, however, has not come to be.

As a system the university has been directly responsible for visiting destruction and oppression and tyranny and death upon the world, in ways and means that would, without such an institution, be unimaginable and even less attainable.

The advent of Nuclear weapons and rocket technology originated as mere ideas in the minds of professors and researchers. As ideas, equations, essays, discussions, thoughts these objects were harmless. In abstraction the implosion of a plutonium core does not level Hiroshima. Nor does statistical analysis firebomb Tokyo. Political ideologies as lecture material do not conscript Gestapo. White papers and editorials do not invade countries.

In this great intellectual laboratory we find that even the most benevolent and peaceful pursuits often produce suffering on a grand scale. Unbounded by any system; moral, ethical, political, ideological, the university drives forward in search of knowledge.

But Knowledge is circular. What counts as knowledge or how knowledge is gained can only be determined through the body of current knowledge, which in and of itself is validated by its own history. "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past," as Rage Against the Machine put it. Knowledge is built by the dominant social, political, economic systems, i.e. power. And power is sustained and strengthened through the knowledge that it validates. In essence, we find a vicious circle.

And vicious in more ways than one. Firstly, it is a self fulfilling prophecy, the knowledge that will be found and validated can only be that knowledge which has been circumscribed as such. Secondly, the knowledge that is created will only be useful as long as it serves to buttress existing power structures. Thirdly, the search for knowledge must be validated by knowledge itself and by the assumptions and actions of existing power structures; logic, the scientific method and so forth.

The most important point is the second point, for the purposes of this discussion, because it is here the knowledge truly becomes co-opted. It is through the mechanisms of power that knowledge and research, which at their origin are devoid of normative value, are shaped into the weapons and tactics of learned civilizations. Here is the point, the pivot, the nucleus, of transformation; from abstract to material, from real to reality. Knowledge must meet the demands of power.

Through this matrix of power and knowledge we find that creation is used to destroy. Knowledge is no longer the noble endeavor of curious and inventive minds, instead it is the play thing of the power hungry and the ambitious. This transformation leads us back to our origin. The pursuit of knowledge brings the growth of power. Power, in the context of the modern world, is situated in the state and the economy. Thus knowledge contributes to their growth and in doing so loses the neutrality that it professes and the hope of infinite discovery becomes the fear of ultimate destruction.