The trends which are destructive of liberal education ideals must be understood not as aberrations, but rather as tendencies that have always been inherent in educational institutions. As Bertrand Russell remarked, ‘a certain percentage of children have the habit of thinking; one of the aims of education is to cure them of this habit.’ Recognising this, we need to ensure that the primary task of university education is not to make students job-ready, but to create critical, informed, and humane citizens, and a society in which the ideals of free inquiry are themselves the main measure of relevance.

Sam Harris, the hero of the New Atheists, suggests that ‘anyone who cares about the fate of civilisation would do well to recognise that the combination of great power and great stupidity is simply terrifying’. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens are full of praise for Harris’ sanctimonious rhetoric suggesting that ignorance and religious credulity ‘should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency’. These highbrow thinkers pick, however, an easy, perhaps even irrelevant, target, since the real danger to the world arises more from the secular and educated intellectuals like themselves – a proposition for which there is ample evidence, as we will see. Religious belief that is unfounded is less culpable than belief that is refuted by overwhelming evidence known to the believer. We must ask whether the ‘ancient stupidity’ of religion that Hitchens says ‘poisons everything’ can conceivably compare with the moral lapse of apologists for our own vast crimes.

[N]ot to have tried to see through the whole apparatus of mystification – was already criminal. … For being in a position to know and nevertheless shunning knowledge creates direct responsibility for the consequences – from the very beginning. Albert Speer quoted in Ellsberg (1972: 275) Intellectual and political emancipation Peter Gay (1966: 33) notes […]