ChristianityTodayLibrary.com: "Lewis's statements concerning the purpose of the Oxford University Socratic Club, of which he was the president from 1942 to 1954, shed additional light on his involvement in the apologetic enterprise.Clearly Lewis lived before the advent of Hate Speech Codes and politically correct "sensitivity". As noted in the post preceding this one, Harvard is so unaccustomed to debate that faculty nearly swoon when confronted by opinions that differ from their own.
'In any fairly large and talkative community such as a university,' he explained, 'there is always the danger that those who think alike should gravitate together into coteries where they will henceforth encounter opposition only in the emasculated form of rumour that the outsiders say thus and thus. The absent are easily refuted, complacent dogmatism thrives, and differences of opinion are embittered by group hostility. Each group hears not the best, but the worst, that the other groups can say.'
Lewis perceived that each side misunderstood the other's position because the two sides never had a truly honest encounter with each other."
Lewis is prophetic, describing the general feel of academia in our time: "The absent are easily refuted, complacent dogmatism thrives, and differences of opinion are embittered by group hostility."
1 comment:
staralfur,
I think the average religous student on a secular campus is far more familiar with opposing views than secular faculty, cloistered in an illusory world of tenured control of all they survey.
Similarly, the average American is far more familiar with Islam and the world in general than the average Muslim in say, Syria or Saudi Arabia. The reason is simple: Free Press.
The analogy holds. Most college campuses resemble a police state with hate speech rules and codes of conduct that make open debate a fearful proposition. The more enmeshed in campus culture a person becomes, the more likely that they will live in the safe and boring world of censorship.
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