“Islands in an intellectual vacuum”

Det er slik man kan føle det her i Thailand og muligens mange steder i Østen hvor skolesystemene for en stor del baserer seg på utenatlæring (learning by rote). Mitt inntrykk er at mange mennesker her er så gjennomsyret av ønsket om å unngå konflikter at forferdelig mye bare roter seg fullstendig til, at øyentjeneri, smisking, korrupsjon, løgn, bakvaskelser blir den allment aksepterte regelen, ikke unntaket, i den sosiale omgangen mellom mennesker både på offentlig og privat nivå. (DETTE VAR STYGT SAGT, ATLE. MENER DU VIRKELIG DETTE? – JA! (men med det forbehold at jeg ikke har forstått noen ting av det som foregår rundt meg, noe som selvsagt er en mulighet…)

Overskriften er hentet fra Karl van Wolferens bok ”The Enigma of Japanese Power” fra 1993 og sitatet nedenfor er hentet fra s. 311-12 i samme bok. Interessante betraktninger med betydelig relevans når det gjelder å forstå japanske intellektuelle.

”Throughout the centuries, political arrangements have deprived the Japanese people of that intangible but very important cultural achievement: a free universe of discourse. I know Japanese who think very clearly and make intellectual discoveries, and there must have been many in history who obeyed the human urge towards philosophical speculation. But the crucial thing to remember is that each of them had to create his own intellectual world. There was no grand intellectual tradition to hold all the speculation together, to serve as a framework of reference; no body of philosophical speculation that might be attacked or added to. Without a locically ordered hierarchy of abstractions, product of long intellectual striving to grasp reality, the relevance, the weight, the proportion and the balance of competing evidence are only haphazardly perceived.

Japanese scholarly debates tend to exist in an intellectual vacuum as tiny, self-contained universes of discourse. The academics who wage them have, moreover, such a dislike of being contradicted that they tend to cloud their contentions to a degree making refutation rearly impossible. Intellectuals are rarely asked to prove or disprove their hypotheses, and consequently are themselves not very good at critical evaluation."