IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY FOR THE XXIst CENTURY

 

Speech by Professor Mark Eyskens, former Prime Minister of Belgium, during the conference of the International Association of University Presidents on 12 July 1999.

If the title of my talk, ‘Idea of a University for the XXIst century’, contains a reference to a very famous inscription. This is done not with the intention of rewriting the unequalled essay by John Cardinal Newman; an essay which this great British intellectual published almost 150 years ago now. My goals are much more modest. I will seek to do no more than analyse a few aspects of what is a multi-facetted university ‘problems polygon’. More specifically, I will focus on those aspects which are concerned with scientific competence, intellectual independence and ethical commitment.

I. THE CHANGING NATURE OF CHANGE

1. Clearly, no university can be seen in isolation from its societal setting in the broadest sense. And that setting has never before been subject to such rapid and such far-reaching change as it is today. The juncture at which we find ourselves today is much more than a historical ‘pivot’, a transition or a discontinuity in the curve of history. What we are witnessing is nothing less than a fracture, a complete break from and with the past. We are on the threshold of a turning point, which is likely to be as far-reaching and as revolutionary as the Renaissance in the XVIth and XVIIth centuries, the Enlighten- ment, the First Industrial Revolution, Liberalism and the French Revolution in the second half of the XVIIIth century and the Second Industrial Revolution at the end of the XIXth century.

The only constant in our contemporary history is the phenomenon of change. We are experiencing a change in the nature of that change, which causes contemporary history to resemble ‘the second derivative’ of itself, to use a mathematical image. This gives rise to uncertainty about what is to come and anxiety about the future in an unpredictable environment. The present fin de siècle is ‘an age of anxiety’. ‘Le futur n’a plus d’avenir’, as the French say. The past provides no examples, the present offers no guarantees, the future generates no confidence.

What makes up the current tide of change, and can we detect any cohesion in it?

2. The post-industrial revolution (PIR) is creating a network of information and knowledge which elevates human creativity, powerfully supported by the computer – the magical prosthesis – to the most important production factor.

The post-industrial revolution is the most influential structural fracture taking place at the end of this century, but it is less recognisable than the other great changes in the past because it operates at a deep level and manifests itself in so many different guises.

The core of this process is the breakthrough of ‘informatively’ organised knowledge as the most important production factor, based on creative scientific research and development and backed up by information technology, telematics, networks, satellites, telephony, robotics, cybernetics and a galaxy of new methods of communication. In the midst of this dazzling array of technological development, the computer – with all its paraphernalia – has arisen like a magical, mythical fairy tale creation. The availability of global, interconnected networks multiplies astronomically the human creative ability. Multimedia, information superhighways and ‘infoproducts’ are conquering the economic landscape and the consumer markets.

The post-industrial revolution is bringing about a new kind of scientific and technological revolution, whose primary effect is to enhance the capabilities of the human mind, the memory, the ability to process information and the capacity to be creative. This is in marked contrast to the first and second industrial revolutions, which above all boosted the physical methods of production and mobility – the first thanks to the steam engine, the second thanks to electricity. The computer revolution has made possible unimaginable breakthroughs in every single scientific field.

With the post-industrial revolution our post-industrial society is very evidently contributing in a major way to what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin fifty years ago termed the creation of a global no-osphere – a worldwide community of knowledge and ideas and information processing.

The post-industrial revolution is nothing other than the interaction between computerisation and intellectual creativity, as a result of which the most essential component of the production process is dematerialised.

3. The creation of a new economic system: ‘informationism’.

The demise of Communism and the need to create a large single European market are two totally different phenomena, yet both were determined in part by the implications of the sustained scientific and post-industrial revolution.

3.1. From the 1970s onwards the Soviet Union was defeated on all fronts by the United States, and lost the space race. And ultimately Communism itself collapsed like a house of cards, leaving behind ruin and destruction. Because it had become apparent that, as soon as ‘computerised’ knowledge and creativity became the most important production factor under the influence of the post-industrial revolution, a Marxist policy of collectivism and nationalisation became counter-productive. Of course, Karl Marx could not foresee in the nineteenth century that a hundred and fifty years later, ‘capital goods’ – the machines – would be overshadowed as a production factor by computer-backed human creative knowledge, a largely intangible production factor. How can creative knowledge be expropriated, ‘de-individualised’, converted into ‘common property of the people’, and thus nationalised, in accordance with the Marxist-Leninist philosophy? It is this impossibility, together with the inefficiency of the central planning model, the unaffordable arms race and the ethnic tensions, which precipitated the spectacular implosion of Communism as an economic system, as a political regime and as an ideological doctrine.

On top of this, the post-industrial revolution is making labour a less and less important factor in the production process and is consequently robbing the ‘worker’ (proletarianised by Capitalism and mythologised by Marxism) of his role as the principal personage in the societal system. In addition, the continuing steep decline in the amount of time spent at work (currently 1,650 hours per year in a country such as Belgium) is reducing the societal importance of physical work.

3.2. The changing face of Capitalism.

It is not only the decline of Communism that can largely be attributed to the post-industrial revolution. The swelling tornado of scientific and technological innovations is also replacing Capitalism as an economic system with what we might term informationism. It is no longer the machine and capital which dominate the socio-economic arena and thus the entire societal system, but knowledge and information.

The post-industrial revolution is also blowing like an avenging wind through the legal system of the modern State, based on the rule of law. Capitalism has eagerly exploited the concept of private ownership which derives from Roman law. And the post-industrial revolution happens to be totally incompatible with the collective ownership which is defended by Marxists and communists. But the post-industrial revolution and ‘informationism’ are equally incompatible with the narrow concept of private ownership. Networks, across which almost boundless communication is possible, are hard to keep completely private.

According to some political scientists, such as Francis Fukuyama, the collapse of Communism and the changing nature of Capitalism are bringing about the end of history, the end of ideology, the end of politics... This may well be an over-hasty conclusion, but the university as an institution must acquit itself adequately in the multidisciplinary study of the far-reaching systemic changes which are taken place before our very eyes..

4. The evaporating national sovereignty of the State

There is too little awareness of how much the post-industrial revolution reduces the national sovereignty of states, because the communications revolution is of course an international cross boarder phenomenon and because multinational companies operate in an international market. Only a ‘union of States’ embedded in something like the European Union can offer a sufficiently democratic and efficient counter to this by carrying out a policy of competition and imposing an international rule of law.

The post-industrial revolution is ‘deterritorialising’ influence and power in the world and freeing more and more people from local or geographical constraints. It is not the conquering of territory which is important, in terms of geopolitics, but the control of communication networks. The revolution of information technology and communication is then the ideal vehicle for universalisation and globalisation. The world has become our village. The creation of that ‘global village’ is of course accompanied by the spread of far-reaching international cooperation (such as all ways of economic, monetary and political integration), by the breakthrough of new concepts and practices in international law, such as the right of humanitarian intervention, the supranationalisation of human rights, the founding of an International Criminal Court, preventive diplomacy and multilateral ‘peace-keeping’ and ‘peace-making’ – and the list goes on – as well as by the dominance of powerful multinational companies and the growth, by a process of trial and error, of the multicultural society. All these phenomena have a revolutionary influence, including on the institution of the university.

5. Symptoms of rejection.

The reactions to this avalanche of changes have been equally pronounced, however, and this places the intellectual and therefore the university community before a major challenge. The symptoms of rejection of post-industrial revolution are called nationalism and particularism, cultural and economic protectionism, religious fundamentalism and, in its paroxysmal forms, xenophobia and racism right through to ethnic cleansing, as we have seen most recently in the tragedy of Kosovo. The dynamics of change and internationalisation lead to a confusing experience which many citizens are unable to define. Hence they produce a reaction based on fear, which causes them to hanker for security, the warmth of the nest, group egotism, ethnic clannism. ‘The world isn’t our village; our village is the world’ is the despairing cry of the frustrated and the complex-ridden. Such a ‘reactionary’ attitude is understandable, but is nevertheless unjustifiable for anyone with a future-oriented and ethic view of the new world community which must arise in the XXIst century. Providing the building blocks for a genuine and cooperative international democratic community, featuring the rule of international law and by doing so following the example of the constitutional ‘State of Law’, which developed in the democratic nations in the XXth and even the XIXth centuries – will be one of the great intellectual tasks facing the democratic intelligentsia - and thus also the university community - throughout the world during the coming decades.

II. A TANGLE OF CONSEQUENCES

The consequences of the post-industrial revolution are extremely diverse, tangled, unclear and still largely unpredictable. Only a partial and incomplete analysis is possible within the scope of this paper.

1. The white world is losing its innovatory monopoly

Invention and innovation - as distinguished by J. Schumpeter - have become multiculural, multidiscipolanry and multipolar throughout the world.

At the end of the XVIIIth century the first Industrial Revolution took place in Western Europe. It was completely European. From the second Industrial Revolution (end of the XIXth), this situation began to change. A growing proportion of scientific discoveries took place in the US, generally with the help of immigrant European scholars, while the industrial applications of those discoveries also increasingly began to occur in America. This ushered in the phase of the Americanisation of the European dynamics of progress. The Third Industrial Revolution in which we are now engaged has largely brought internationalisation of inventions, with the Asian – and particularly Japanese and Chinese - contribution becoming increasingly large in terms of researchers employed, even though the majority of laboratories are still in the ‘white’ world. For their part, the technological innovations – the industrial application of inventions and discoveries – are taking place on an increasingly large scale in Asia: industrial progress is also being partially Asiatised.

2. Heliotropism outmoded

The famous heliotropism, the westward shift of technological civilisation and of civilisation in general – an idea in which Western Europeans gladly luxuriated – appears to be due for revision. If we allow history to begin with the invention of writing and the first forms of population sedentarisation (the founding of villages and towns), then history begins – and prehistory ends – in the ninth millennium BC, somewhere in the Indus valley ( Mohenjo-Daro). Thereafter civilisation gradually shifted towards the West, as if drawn by the movement of the sun: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Israel and the Near East, Greece, Rome, Western Europe and, in the XVth century AD, the great leap across the Atlantic ocean to America, to end on the coasts of California. Of course this view is not entirely congruent with the facts, but does exhibit a certain amount of historical pertinence.

Today, as a result of the post-industrial revolution, this heliotropism of civilisation appears to have come to an end. The westward migration of progress – at least expressed in economic terms – is being replaced by a ‘push to the Orient’ ‘Der Drang nach Osten’, as the germans say), which in this case means the Far East. The white world is reluctantly having to give up its scientific and technological monopoly. At the same time, this leads to a shifting of the continents, at least in the field of industry. For the university as an institution this is ushering in a change of mentality – at least in Europe and North America – which demands the abandoning of many prejudices.

3. From geo-politics to high-technology geo-economics

Another consequence of the post-industrial revolution – at least de facto – is that geo-politics is being replaced by geo-economics and, to an even greater extent, by geo-finance, which dominate world political relations. This explains the enormous importance of things such as the GATT agreements, the foundation of the WTO and the commitment to economic unification and cooperation: the European Union, NAFTA around the USA, APEC in Southeast Asia, Mercosur in South America, the CIS around Russia, and so on. Even more spectacular than the geo-economy is the global expansion of geo-finance. The development of world trade and the freeing up of capital transactions and the movement of funds have created a monetary galaxy – the money bubble – which spans the globe. Every day on the international money markets, the equivalent of one trillion (or a thousand billion) dollars is traded.

4. A cybernetic society: the binomial ‘market economy+democracy’

The changing of system under the influence of the post-industrial revolution, which led to the destruction of Communism and is currently profoundly affecting Capitalism, is reflected in the increasing and worldwide success of the market economy and the pluralistic democracy. Market economy and democracy are proving to be closely related and are evolving almost everywhere in the world, certainly in the longer term, into a binomial phenomenon: the market democracy. Only the People’s Republic of China currently appears to want to distance itself from the symmetrical complementarity of the free market economy and the pluralistic democracy. An interesting historical experiment, athough due to fail in one way (by evolving towards full democratisation) or another (by reestablishing a collectivist and centrally planned economy). The global spread of the binomial market+democracy is a positive development, though one which gives rise to problems. Parliaments and governments are losing their influence on events and the population is demanding more direct control and input. A world economy is evolving based on computerised networks, dominated by the laws of the market and mass democracy, subject to sometimes irrational impulses. Human values are too frequently being commercialised and marketed. Democracy is becoming ‘cybernetic’ and is greatly influenced by the audio-visual media. The law of entropy – of decay – dominates the market economy to the extent that competition is eroded by the formation of monopolies, oligopolies and exaggerated concentrations of power in the hands of multinational companies. But entropy also threatens democracy through demagogy, corruption, inefficiency, lack of safety and the capriciousness of voter preferences. There are signs of crisis in the representative democracies in many countries with a long parliamentary tradition. This crisis is being heightened by one of the paradoxes of the computerised society: the knowledge society also generates ignorance and incompetence. This paradox faces universities with an unexpected challenge.

5. Towards a different employment

The binomial ‘democracy+market economy’ is bowed under the weight of a number of problems which, thanks to the global spread of the media, affect the majority of citizens. There are problems which generally appear insoluble: the persistent and widespread unemployment in many countries, the emergence of a dual society with a growing social division between the educated and the uneducated, the erosion of the living environment, urban lack of safety, the underdevelopment of a number of third-world countries, the phenomenon of immigration, and so on.

Let us look for a moment at the issue of employment and unemployment. Contrary to what we might expect, they are not necessarily two sides of the same coin: more employment can perfectly well be accompanied by higher unemployment if the supply of labour increases more quickly than demand. In a country such as Belgium, there has never been a time when more people were in work than today, and yet unemployment is at its highest level since the end of the Second World War.

Unemployment is a particularly complex phenomenon; we must also dispose of a number of misunderstandings. High unemployment is not due primarily to the introduction of new technologies – as America, Japan and parts of Asia have shown. High unemployment is above all a specifically European phenomenon.

Competition from low-wage countries and delocalisation may test certain sectors in Europe, but they too are not the main cause of unemployment. A country like Belgium generally operates at a trade surplus vis-à-vis low-wage countries, and inward investment in Belgium is twice as high as Belgian investments abroad.

I lack the time and space to look in depth at the phenomenon of unemployment here. But it is clear that Europe encounters more obstacles in the creation of additional jobs, due to a lack of flexibility, and also has more difficulty in employing people with a lower - or low - level of education than, say, the United States or Japan. But this does’ nt prevent these countries from showing a much higher degree of poverty.

Fighting unemployment is not in the first place a question of economic growth and economic policy. The main cause of unemployment lies in the unsuitability for work which ensues from the professional or psychological inability of workers to meet the high demands and increasing flexibility of the production process.

Thinking about a different employment and about responsible policy measures aimed at reducing structural unemployment in the dual society is one of the essential tasks facing the university today.

6. Operationalism is becoming a goal in itself

The post-industrial revolution, with its worldwide promotion of competition and development of the market economy, raises efficiency and thus the chasing of profits to a compelling, all-encompassing objective. Economists are convinced that efficiency in the use of scarce goods is an absolute precondition in organising the bid to satisfy human needs as fully as possible. But there is no escaping the impression that maximisation of profits, of satisfaction and efficiency, minimisation of costs and expenses, optimisation of productivity and sales figures are becoming goals in themselves. The question is no longer – or too seldom – what ends profits, revenues, added value, growth are intended to serve. This creates a widespread operationalism. Economic rationality becomes the objective and aspiration of the entire societal and human striving. Profit and loss have become more important than good and evil. Friendship becomes a network of useful relationships. Beliefs are shaped by the job a person does. Ethics are a function of the situation in which a person finds themselves. Politics is becoming a chess or poker game. War is diplomacy pursued with different means, and vice versa. The end always justifies the means. Young people brought up in this spirit will never see society as a community of people, but as a football field for their ambitions.

7. A diminishing ‘happiness fraction’

In a market society there is an insidious tendency towards declining individual and collective satisfaction, a phenomenon which can be symbolised by a ‘diminishing happiness fraction’. If we assume that happiness is largely dependent on the satisfaction of human needs in the broadest sense, we can construct a ‘happiness fraction’. The numerator expresses the means of satisfaction and the denominator represents the needs. The two variables can be made comparable by expressing them in monetary terms. Naturally, the fraction becomes larger as the means in the numerator increase: people become more prosperous, which often enables the level of welfare to be increased. This rise of happiness meets the materialistic/productivist growth model. However, there is a second method of increasing the happiness fraction: reducing people’s needs, so that the value of the denominator decreases. This behaviour meets the ascetic, sober model. However, reality shows that a third model not infrequently occurs, in which growing means of satisfaction are continually caught up and passed by increasing needs, driven up among other things by aggressive sales practices. When this happens the happiness fraction becomes smaller, in spite of the increasing production and growth. This is the hypermaterialism model, which is also accompanied by structural and collective dissatisfaction; and by a blasé attitude which is not uncommon among the university elite.

8. The paradox of discontent and dissatisfaction

The diminishing happiness fraction I have just described, is not the only cause of the prevailing discontent and dissatisfaction, particularly among the young. The absence of external threats since the end of the Second World War and the Cold War, fear of change brought on by the post-industrial revolution, uncertainty on many fronts, problems with employment, the enlargement by the media of everything which is going wrong in the world, the frustrated urge for justice and failing attempts to help build a better world, a lack of ideals, cynicism and hypocrisy on the part of older generations are just some of the many causes of the disaffection among the young. Universities, too, are confronted head-on with this phenomenon.

However understandable it may be, in an ‘age of anxiety’ the prevailing discontent and malaise is a huge paradox. Because the average citizen of Western Europe and North America has never had it so good, at least if we look back to the previous generation, barely 50 years ago. During the XXth century in the Western world, the average level of prosperity (real disposable income) of the population has increased sixfold, while working hours have fallen over the course of the average career by a third. Poverty in the societies of Western Europe has been reduced to 6% (in Belgium and the Netherlands), a revolution compared with the situation at the end of the XIXth century. And, as the icing on the cake, it must also be noted that the life expectancy of the ‘mortals that we are’ has increased by almost 20 years thanks to the impressive achievements of the medical sciences and professions. Not to mention the unbelievable improvement in the quality of goods and comfort of life, the increased travel possibilities, the educational and information resources. Finally, it should be noted that peace has reigned in Western Europe for more than half a century, where in the past this continent was ravaged at regular intervals by always bloody and sometimes world wars. The shadow cast by the Kosovo drama is very long, but the conflict does not directly affect Western Europeans, a fact which actually nevertheless increases their reponsability and duty of solidarity. Should the critical mind, which the university by definition ought to awaken, necessarily separate out dissatisfaction, or is it imaginable that a critical attitude can also set societal satisfaction against the scepticism of conventional wisdom?

9. Not all change is progress

Everything is changing more and more, but not all changes are for the good. The post-industrial revolution is neither ethical nor unethical. Rather, it is amoral. The key question is what it is used for. It turns man into a modern Prometheus, who has stolen the fire of knowledge from the gods. All the scientific and technological inventions and innovations created by mankind were and are irreversible, because once an invention or discovery has been made, ‘the genius is out of the bottle’, for good or ill.

Given the cascade of changes, the question is growing more and more as to what is good and evil in matters of innovation and change, as to the ethical assessment of what is new, the ‘bonum et malum rerum novarum’. The most important and most essential question facing society in the years ahead has to do with the ethics of change. Are the changes which are taking place, good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable? And how can the good changes be promoted and the bad ones eliminated or avoided? But it is not only the ethics of the objectives and goals which are at stake. The ethics of the means also have to be considered. Thus ethical questions arise surrounding the finality of certain scientific discoveries, of technology and its application. What should we as a society do with the greatly increasing prosperity, how should it be distributed and with what aims? Moral questions arise in connection with the very functioning of the economy, of the political system and by necessity of the relations between countries, nations and peoples. And these are just a few examples from an almost inexhaustible pool.

The most fundamental task for the future is to provide an answer to the following question: ‘How can the changes, which are overwhelming us, be converted into real human progress?’ It is a question which also challenges the universities in their existential motivation. There is a greater need for an ethics of change than for a change of ethics. The question of what ‘human progress’ means at the start of the XXIst century is situated at the crossroads of belief and hope, but also of knowledge and thought.

III. THE UNIVERSITY AND THE PARADOXES OF THE KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY

It is precisely this crossroads of thinking and knowing, located at the epicentre of the knowledge society and the network society, which through a strange sort of dialectic also leads to unwanted crowding-out effects. For example, it can be claimed that the knowledge society also produces a great deal of ignorance. Here, the university, as the centre of knowledge acquisition and development of understanding, faces an unnerving challenge.

1. The law of diminishing relative knowledge

The emergence of the network society as a result of the worldwide exchange of information is leading to an unprecedented accumulation of knowledge. In this connection, the network society is rightly spoken of in the same breath as the knowledge society. 95% of all scholars and scientific researchers who have ever worked on the planet earth, are currently alive and actively working in their disciplines. Creative knowledge, backed by information technology, has developed into the most important production factor.

 

* The law of diminishing relative knowledge has taken a hold on our society. The known increases in a linear way – to use a mathematical image – but the knowable – what we could and ought to know – evolves in accordance with a geometrical series, i.e. exponentially. The result is a ‘gap’ between what is known and what is knowable. It is a very frustrating feeling which also leads to very far-reaching misunderstandings in all kinds of fields, and which also lies at the basis of the emergence of the dual society with a growing discrimination between the ‘knowers’ and the ‘non-knowers’.

* Another important trend – perhaps a fad – which has a major impact on the teaching and learning task in society, has its recent origins in post-modernism (cf. F. Lyotard) and a link back to Kantian epistemology (‘das ding an sich ist ein unbekanntes’). Certain conclusions from quantum physics also have consequences when it is claimed that reality issues forth from the contact of consciousness between the subject and an object. The gnoseology which ensues from this can be summarised as follows: reality is limited to the knowable; the knowable is limited to the sayable. There are thus several insurmountable boundaries, which set finite limits to the ability of mankind to know reality. It is then stated that wanting to know what is unknowable and wanting to express what is unsayable are pointless desires.

This immediately puts a damper on the ‘great tales’ of scientific theory, the intellectual desire of scientific research, the conquering of new fronteers and on the ability to formulate a great ideals. Exit ambitious science, great theories, far reaching endeavours, but exit too emotions, poetry and a great deal of literature.

 

* Attaching to this phenomenon are the ‘technocratisation’ and ‘complexification’ of society and social phenomena - something which contributes to the societal illiteracy of many people. The average citizen, do what he will, understands an ever smaller part of the reality around him, and as a result acquires a distorted vision of that reality. A combination of intellectual myopia, presbytism and strabism places demands on the universities as the main centres of training or at least of explanation.

* A related phenomenon is what I would like to call ‘they-ification’ or ‘one-ification’. The ‘cyber society’ is a great network within which the individual is depersonalised. The authority is ‘they’. They govern, decide and administer in London, Brussels, Washington: an impersonal administration, almost abstract, without a face or profile, above the heads of the citizen. This social ‘they-ification’ occurs in all organisational structures: in hospitals, in a large social organisations such as trade unions, in political parties, big companies, in universities, in all kind of techno-structures, as J.K. Galbraith called them.

* In addition, the largely visual ’mediafication’ of social phenomena usually shows only the superficial and negative aspects of reality. Only bad news is news. Over-information and telecracy lead to disinformation, which increases the collective ignorance and lack of understanding, and which moreover makes it easy to confuse the essential with the accidental.

* Even more important is that our society is evolving to a state in which job training, income differentials and social strata are aligning ever more closely with the statistical distribution of the intelligence quotient (IQ). The gifts of well informed and creative intellect are the most important factor in determining the future jobs of young people in society. The university, too, fulfils the role of a selection mechanism which selects the cleverest minds for the best positions in society. And after all, society needs the most able people for the most important and most difficult tasks. However, the dominance of such a selection criterion threatens to give rise to a sort of dictatorship of IQ. A great many people come up against what they experience as the intellectual wall, cause of an unrelenting discrimination.

Indeed, the social differences and discriminations are increasingly the result of the IQ distribution among the population. People with a high IQ ‘make it’, find interesting and well-paid jobs, often with international responsibilities. Those with lower IQs end up in manual jobs, while those with the lowest IQ fall into the lowest social strata and populate the underbelly of the ‘dual society’. In fact, the dual society is a multi-layered society based on the degree of intellectual ability and inability. Here we have touched on the most important cause of long-term unemployment.

This state of affairs today fosters somewhat irrational-sounding but understandable calls for the promotion of EQ, the ‘emotional quotient’, which, it is argued, should be given a place alongside IQ when measuring people against society’s criteria.

The ‘technification’ and ‘technocratisation’ of the world, civilisation and society make the image of the world too mechanical and deterministic. Human beings at the end of the twentieth century sometimes see themselves as apprentice sorcerers, but more often as enchanted elves. They often see themselves as exiles in their society and as orphans of God. And how does the university student feel in all this?

IV. METHODOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES FOR THE UNIVERSITY

The present evolution of the cognitive processes and their application in the knowledge and network society force the universities to review the relationship between specialisation and general training, between analysis and synthesis and, even more fundamentally, between a scientific enquiry which focuses only on the how, and an intellectual approach which also asks why and which does not reject a value assessment of thought and action.

1. Specialism and generalism

The only statement in my doctoral thesis on economics, which I wrote many years ago, which proved to be really important was not one of my own sentences but one written by John Stuart Mill. This British economist, who lived from 1806 to 1873, using a premeditated lofty idiom, stated that, ‘A man is not likely to be a good economist if he is nothing else’.

This declaration of principle has followed me, surrounded me and besieged me for the last 36 years. Because either you try to look out over the parapets which surround the ‘vegetable garden’ of your knowledge, in which case you are derisorily termed a ‘generalist’, a dabbling dilettante, someone who knows less and less about more and more. Or you dig ever more deeply into the soil of your own vegetable garden, and then you are referred to sarcastically as a narrow-minded specialist, someone who knows more and more about less and less.

2. Creative originality or ‘conventional wisdom’?

The young researcher, driven by the ambition of pushing back boundaries and breaking new ground, faces a terrible dilemma. Either he formulates something new and arrives at an original result or innovative insight; in that case there is the maximum risk that the result of his research is completely wrong and false. Or he builds a scientific argument the conclusion of which convinces through pertinence and hypothetical-deductive and mathematical-logical correctness, and then there arises a maximum probability that his research is not original, and that he is parading old ideas as new ones. As a consequence, the young researcher faces a forked road that, whichever choice he makes, will plunge him into a bottomless fatum: either his thesis is correct but sadly banal, or it is original but hopelessly false.

3. Every science aspectualises

Allow me to build up my reasoning now from the basis of my experience as an economist. From that experience, I perceive how great the need is to become aware that economics are only one aspect of reality, which forms a holistic whole and in which the different aspects must be viewed in their mutual interrelationship, if we wish to obtain a more or less reliable insight into that reality.

The globalisation of the economy has created a sort of ‘economic reductionism’ of reality and the world of experience in the way people and things are perceived. And the same applies for all disciplines.

For many years I gave talks under the provocative title ‘There are no economic problems’, in which I sought to protest against this economic reduction of reality, because in my view it mutilates that reality. It is my conviction that only complex human and social problems and phenomena occur, in which, however important it may be, the economic aspect is only one aspect alongside many others.

Economic reductionism – what we could also term economism – consists in the ‘substantification’ of one aspect of reality (reifying it by turning it into a ‘res’). In my view this economic reductionism is unacceptable for two reasons: in the first place, reality is de facto not exclusively economic in nature, and secondly reality cannot be viewed exclusively through economic eyes, because of the danger of mutilating it, misunderstanding it and as a consequence basing wrong policy measures on wrong analysis. This immediately focuses attention on an obvious statement: the economic and the social aspect are two facets of reality which we can distinguish intellectually but we cannot separate in real terms. This reasoning can be applied mutatis mutandis to all scientific disciplines.

There is a saying that a social paradise cannot be maintained in an economic graveyard, but just as obvious is the saying that no economic orchard can thrive in a social desert.

4. Science and meta-science

But there is more. It seems to me to be absolutely essential to go beyond economic thinking, since it is becoming ever more clear that no science is free of values, particularly when it comes to its application or when it is located in the social arena. This observation applies for all positive and human sciences: there is a need to transcend a purely legal, psychological, historical, physical or biological approach to reality. Is there a more striking expression in this connection than ‘meta-physics’? Even though those familiar with the history of science know that this term simply refers to the ordering of the works of Aristotle. The concept creates scope for a necessary normative perspective, an ethical questioning, in which conviction and responsibility, world concepts and philosophical paradigms, ethics and morals become unavoidable dimensions.

5. Rearranging the puzzle: from analysis to synthesis

Reality is a multifaceted polygon. The angles of that polygon make the connections with the successive sides of a holistic, societal issue. The history of science demonstrates that human knowledge can only achieve progress through abstraction and de-individualisation of particular situations. Every science specifies itself by determining its formal object. In the exact sciences this ‘aspectualisation’ can go much further, because it can be made tangible through laboratory experiments. The human sciences often have to limit themselves to thought experiments or extrapolations based on statistical data which generally assume the repeatability of the observed phenomena. In both the exact and the human sciences, however, the determination of the specific angle of approach leads to specialisation and analysis. It could be said that every science, whether it studies the reality outside human beings – what is then seen as the ‘objectivity’ of the exact sciences – or the reality of and within human beings – as in the human or ‘Geisteswissenschaften’ – involves the deconstruction of a complex reality. Specialisation – and thus analysis – of reality in its peculiar aspects is a condition for the progress of science.

And yet it is becoming ever clearer that, in addition to the analysis and deconstruction of reality through the various sciences and subdisciplines, there is ultimately a need for synthesis, cohesion and manageability. The great breakthroughs in science have ensued from the comparison, combining and intertwined processing of the results of different scientific disciplines.

In addition, the carrying out of leading functions in the majority of professions and fields not only calls for specialist skills and an analytical mind on the part of senior managers, but also, and to a greater degree, on their synthetic understanding, their ability to assimilate the various aspects of a problem and their talent to distinguish the essential from the inconsequential. What it comes down to, therefore, is reconstructing the jigsaw puzzle which has been pulled apart into hundreds of pieces by the various sciences, in order to create a global picture which only appears once the puzzle has been wholly or at least largely put back together again.

This task of assemblying, I believe, is on one of the greatest challenges facing universities in the coming period.

6. Multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity

This raises a fundamental question: how can the various sciences contribute to the creation of a reconstructed and synthetic insight into reality? It may be that we will have to wait until the present post-modern deconstructivism, with its desire to put everything into relativistic and limited perspective, has blown over. When that happens, the time will come – and it is close at hand – that attempts will be made together with the other sciences once again, to create a ‘great tale’ for the reflective human being, a story which presents a cohesive image of reality.

The answer to the question of how cohesion and synthesis can be promoted is a dual one: by developing multidisciplinary research and thinking on the one hand, and by promoting synthetic insights in an interdisciplinary context on the other.

A multidisciplinary approach assumes that a problem or phenomenon is approached and explored from different disciplines. An interdisciplinary approach, by contrast, goes a step further in integrating the contributions of the various disciplines into a global, synthetic view.

Multidisciplinary research and theorising are indeed only fully productive if the parallel results are processed to form a synthetic – and thus interdisciplinary – insight. This creates a task of a totally different nature: how can synthetic insight be generated, promoted, if possible, taught and learned , within the context of education and training? The need felt by many intellectuals to break out of the confines of their discipline and to inoculate themselves against the pernicious disease of narrow-minded specialism is growing. The success of the ‘Lessons for the XXIst century’, launched by the Catholic University of Leuven (KULeuven) in 1993, demonstrates this amply, now that students from all 12 faculties at the university can include the ‘Lessons for the XXIst century’ in their study programme as a full option.

But the ten thousand dollar question remains how this synthesising skill can be honed in an education system which from top to bottom (compare the renewed secondary education system in Belgium) is geared to the acquisition of specialist knowledge using analytical methods?

Moreover, the promotion of synthetic reflection is not the end of the matter. There is after all little chance of developing much synthetic insight if one proves incapable of separating the essential from the inessential. This creates a new obstacle for the intellectual hurdler. Every scientist is overwhelmed in his field by successive floods of information, publications, studies, reports and all manner of documents which come flooding in without interruption via the surrounding networks of the newest civilisation. This leads to over-information, which in turn leads to disinformation, because it becomes ever more difficult to find the needle which is the core of the problem in the haystack that is the mass of documentation and data. This disinformation caused by over-information applies for all fields in which the human mind is active. It is only an apparent paradox that the knowledge society also produces a great deal of ignorance and is spreading conventional wisdom aggravated by common nonsense..

At the same, the media have evidently begun to apply Gresham’s law of economics – ‘bad money drives out good money’ – to communication by stating de facto that ‘bad news drives out good news’, thus colouring the gathering of news in a censorshiplike way.

And that is to say nothing about what I will touch on later in this paper: the law of diminishing relative knowledge, which explains the creation of a knowledge gap in the midst of the knowledge society. The era of the encyclopaedic minds, the omniscient and intellectual millipedes such as Leonardo da Vinci or Pico della Mirandola is long past. Today, it is not only ignorance which separates the social classes of the ‘knowers’ from the ‘non-knowers’. Even among the highly educated, there are many who lose ‘the thread of Ariadne’, are no longer able to keep up and become ignorant fumblers ans Beotians as soon as they are forced to leave their own narrow field.

7. In search of a mental synthesiser: history of civilisation and philosophy ?

What can be done to cultivate a sense for the important and a spirit of synthesis, especially among the coming generation of university students, whose task it will be to lead the society of tomorrow? This is a ‘colossal’ task, which ought to be carried out by a policy as to both media and education, at the level of their structure and organisation and their program and content. The official radio and TV broadcast in many countries of the EU receive billions of euros in subsidies from the taxpayers. The question can justifiably be asked whether these investments produce a sufficient return when viewed from the standpoint of their cultural, generally informing and socially educating result. Is it such a foolish idea to make an effort for the founding of a European TV channel that would address the general knowledge deficit of European citizens by transmitting programs which are a mix of the arts, education, discovery, scientific vulgarisation, geography and which would program regular debates on the great social challenges of the end of the XXth century? A good example is perhaps Arte, the German-French TV channel. We have also to bear in mind here the spectacular progress in speech technology, which in a few years’ time will increase very greatly the opportunities for simultaneous translation, safeguarding the smaller languages as long as high-quality programmes are produced.

Even more fundamental, it seems to me, is education policy, which from secondary education onwards and a fortiori in higher education, must make attempts to sharpen the ability of students to understand reality from a synthetic as well as an analytical point of view. Two disciplines lend themselves especially well to this task: history and philosophy. Not the study of historical of dates or of battles and royal family trees, but rather a comparative history of civilisations, in which attention is also given to the economic, cultural and social aspects, as well as to the political dimension. The recruitment of capable teachers is not a simple task for a job which is very demanding both intellectually and educationally, and that in a society which greatly undervalues the teaching profession. It may be that teaching, particularly of a subject such as the history of civilisations, will have to lean more on the techniques of the learning society than on those of the teaching society; but this transition too, which was accomplished long ago in the Anglo-Saxon countries, places very heavy demands on both teachers and students. Motivating both sides is therefore a precondition. It is also important, when teaching history, not to fall back on simplisms and to argue that the Anglo-Saxon method of the case study and discussion lectures is the only way forward. The development of a sense for synthesis requires precisely that the cohesion of events and developments is first of all made clear by the teacheror the professor.

In addition to the comparative history of civilisations, philosophy is also of crucial importance because it is a discipline which encourages students to ask the right questions and thus to make a distinction between the essential and the accidental and the inconsequential. It may be that our education system in the past has planted too many exclamation marks and sown too few question marks, with the result that students need to be taught how to scatter question marks. The truth emerges from questioning and enquiry. And belief arises thanks to doubt about its own doubts.

In a more utopian vision, the ideal would be the creation of a course ‘philosophy of civilisations or culural philosophy’ in which a study of the history of civilisations wouild be used as a basis for discussing the great existential questions of man and mankind.

8. Tempering IQ with EQ?

The contemporary education system, becoming increasingly demanding in terms of analytical training, subjects students to an examination method – usually based on multiple choice questions – which de facto measures their IQ. Ultimately, social recruitment is based on the selection made by the education system. This creates a danger of a society in which social discriminations – based on IQ differentials – become much more uncompromising than those prior to the French Revolution. Because inequalities which ensue from the asymmetrical distribution of income or wealth can be eliminated through taxation and social security benefits. Equalising IQs, by contrast, would plunge us into an extreme ‘brave new world’ of biogenetic manipulation. But how are we to escape the IQ dictatorship, if we know that for reasons of social efficiency the most able have to be selected out by the education machine? One proposal is that EQ, the emotional quotient, should be integrated in our social and educational value scales. And indeed, it is an exaggeration to claim that a high IQ is demanded for all social functions, whereas often in life qualities of heart and character – which are often economically undervalued – prove to be of vital importance. This reasoning naturally has to do with our value judgements about who we regard as the ‘most able’ in society. They are value judgements which themselves depend on our view of society, our conception of the general well-being, on what indivi-dual citizens think about good and evil for themselves and others. Once again, an ethical judgement is unavoidable.

V. THE UNIVERSITY IS CONFRONTED WITH TILTING VALUE SCALES

 

A frustrating awareness is growing that human beings cannot live from bread (market economy) and participation (democracy) alone. But what do human beings live from, then, and how can this need for a ‘plus est en vous’, for a human added value, an ideal and a utopia, for a meaningful existence be met? How can this need be ameliorated if the value scales tilt? The point of being human may lie in the search for meaning which in turn is giving meaning to human existence, even though we find no definitive answers. Post-modernism, which breaks with the ‘great stories’ and ideals spreads a qualifying scepticism which de facto gives expression to the shifting of the value scales and the erosion of a certain value awareness .

1. A shifting world concept

 

* The image of the world has been desenchanted and stripped of its magic (the Entzauberung already announced by Max Weber), because God is dead (F. Nietzche) and the mystery of being is a projection of our temporary – but soluble by science – ignorance. That is the standard view. There is no definitive mystery of being. The death of God naturally affects the vertical paradigm on which the entire concept of reality is based in European and Western civilisation. And, on the rebound, contemporary man feels like an orphan of God and an exile in society.

* Man has been dethroned as the lead player in the story of creation, because he’s not a fallen angel but an ape who has crawled to the vertical position and walks straight and who is himself the biogenetic result of chance and coincidence. Evolution is a determinism. Any other illusion is doomed. Neither the earth nor the sun are at the centre of the universe. The universe we know may well be no more than a ‘cluster’ in a multiverse. Man is become shrunken to a grain of stardust.

* Science has been devalued and strips away the gloss, now that it has enabled mankind to destroy humankind itself and to make an end to a human story which has erroneously been told and retold as a great story – among other things in the Bible – by generations who knew no better. Science is sometimes the evil spirit that escapes from the bottle. Thanks to his ‘ABC’ weapons – atomic, bacteriological and chemical – mankind can cause the mushroom of the final judgement to descend over the earth and eradicate human beings as a species.

* The return to the past in the form of nationalism and protectionism demonstrates just how ‘flexible’ the value scales of society and individuals have become at the end of the XXth century. The post-industrial revolution (PIR), which is the paroxysm of modernity and modernism, gives rise to a contestation of that modernity and what it has brought into being. The Western paradigm – the fundamental framework of thought – which has modelled European and Western civilisation for centuries, is tilting. This paradigm was the result of (1) the Judaeo-Christian tradition; (2) the anthropocentrism of the Renaissance and thus of Graeco-Roman classicism; and (3) the Enlightenment and its scientific rationalism. These three pillars of the European civilisation project are demonstrably in full crisis.

2. The network society: from verticalism to horizontalism

Informationism is creating a global network society, which is replacing the old traditional vertical paradigm of authority and order with the horizontalism of the spontaneous organisation, which evolves organically, outside pyramidal authority structures. The market economy and the pluralist democracy, thanks to their flexibility and decentralised nature, are proving to be the ideal vehicles to carry this course of events.

The network society is replacing the vertical social and thought structures with a ‘horizontalism without borders’. Pyramidal authority structures, for instance in companies, are being replaced by forms of confederal consultation and decision making; democracy is being introduced at grass-roots level (direct democracy); the market economy is decentralising economic decision-making and is irreconcilable with forms of vertical economic and political dictatorship. The individual, the societal microcell, is gaining ground from family, group and collectivity.

 

The network society, by definition, a cross-border, international and global phenomenon, is raising horizontalism to a world image and concept. The ongoing technological revolutions are causing the space on earth to shrink and disappear. Distance is no longer an obstacle, and nor are the response times, which shrink to zero. The earth is becoming flat once again!!! A flat village! The world is a flat village!

3. The ‘horizontalisation’ of the planet, which has indeed also become our village, has far-reaching consequences for our ‘Weltanschauung’.

* Horizontalism is fragmenting the vertical image of the world, which has been embedded very deeply in the human consciousness and subconscious since time immemorial.

The humanoid man- ape has become an ape-man by standing upright three million years ago and looking upwards. The shift in the centre of gravity in the body of the hominid made possible the development and expansion of his brain. Once he had begun standing upright, he unconsciously began regarding the vertical dimension as the dimension of his rise, his completion, his connection with the mystery of being, which goes beyond him, and evokes the transcendental. A Platonic world image of super-individual ideas and dualistic oppositions could be integrated in the theology in the first centuries of Christianity. Man lived on earth but looked at the heavens. Religion laid a bridge between the two. The verticalist paradigm also fed the idea of authority in the Church and autocracy among the absolute rulers, the bourgeois regimes in post-revolutionary France and of course in the fascist or communist dictatorships.

It is only very recently that the birth of the global network society has begun to ‘block’ the authoritarian verticalism through the development of a horizontal view of people and things. Authority has been replaced by cybernetics, by spontaneously operating organisational mechanisms and systems, such as the Internet. In this rather over-simplistic interpretation, the market economy, robotics, telematics, computerisation¼ have a horizontalising effect. In companies, too, the pyramidal organigram is being replaced by a system of decentralisation. A large company is often a federation or confederation of relatively autonomous business units. Democracy, too, is becoming increasingly horizontal and is being taken closer to the citizen by appealing directly to him through all manner of consultations, televoting and referenda. At the same time, the traditional vertical authority structures in the majority of organisations are being eroded, while the moral or ideological authority of churches, political parties, trade unions, governements, universities ... is also crumbling. We are seeing the development of a ‘crisis of representative democracy’, which is being replaced by forms of direct democracy.

* The breakthrough, still partially subconscious, of this network horizontalism also explains the shift in the traditional value scales, among other things as regards family structures, marital morals and parental authority. An egalitarian ideology is emerging which, in addition to positive aspects, unavoidably leads to a paradoxical flattening - everybody wants to be as unequal as the others - , although the celebrity cult is exercised in the extreme by the media and people. This does not however prevent ‘outstanding’ elites from being strongly contested and criticised. It is not the smallest paradox that, in politics of all places, those politicians who managed to persuade the voters of the merits of an anti-elitist programme go on to acquire a power which propels them ‘onto a track’ around and in the middle of the ruling but critical elite. It is a strategy of fertilising nest-fouling.

* The network society not only shows a tendency to replace the vertical paradigm by all manner of forms of horizontalism. Another essential consequence is related to the fact that the network society replaces the hierarchical He-idea (the father, God, the boss, the government¼ ) with the ‘we’-idea of human fellowship and solidarity. This creates scope for new forms of cooperation, peacemaking and marginalisation of conflicts (particularly on the ideological plane). The ‘we’-culture – we are the people - shouted the dissidents in the streets of Berlin in 1989 – breaks with the antagonistic Platonic dualism, which for 2,500 years has forced people in the West to make constant choices.

* Examples of the deeply rooted dualism in Western civilisation are numerous: heaven and earth, God and the devil, heaven and hell, life and death, spirit and matter, soul and body, good and evil, culture and nature, the Aristotelian distinction between the materia prima and the species impressa, he and I, man and woman, black-and-white interpretations, left-right views in politics..., and so I could go on. Western thought has for centuries functioned on the basis of an ‘either-or’ logic, which forces the drawing of conclusions in science, too, whereas the ‘we’-idea is much more closely allied to Eastern philosophies, which preach a ‘and-and’ logic. The breakthrough of the network society has brought about a fundamental change in what for centuries has been the most essential aspect in the philosophical foundations of Western civilisation. This explains why the dualistic oppositions referred to above are blurring rapidly. At the same time, it shows why Asiatic civilisations, with totally different, less vertical paradigms, find it easier to adapt to the network society. With the exception of China, which has imported Marxist communism from the West, a typical Western ideology, full of verticalism and authoritarian ‘He’-ideas. Quantum physics also contributes to the breakdown of the intellectual platonic dualism, as this theory concludes i.a.that light consists simultaneously of waves and particles (quantums). In this connection Niels Bohr formulated the famous ‘principle of Copenhagen’: contraria complementa sunt.

* The fostering of the ‘we’-idea, via the comunication and information technology and its networks, is becoming a powerful lever for all forms of cooperation – in a virtually organic way, because it does not take place in a politically organised manner – which results in a powerful drive towards unification. The world has entered the phase of its unification on all fronts, by trial and error, with setbacks and accelerations, with a latent or open tension between universalism and particularism.

Since the invention of microchips and microcircuits, in a society already ploughed open by television, a global revolution has been going on for barely a couple of decades, which is generating a structural break in our human thought and action. The breakthrough of informationism is as trend-breaking and revolutionary as the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, though as a phenomenon it is of a totally different order. A new society is being born. And what is the old university doing?

4. Henceforth, mankind will determine his own evolution and thus his own future

Finally, there is a last aspect of the hurricane of change which is raging through Western society and large parts of the world. For the first time in the history of homo sapiens, it is becoming clear that man is destined to be a self-evolving, an ‘auto-evolutive’ being, i.e. a being which determines its own evolution. Since his arrival on earth, man has constantly fought against his environment and attempted to rule it by conducting an uninterrupted battle of survival. In this way he has succeeded in fighting ‘free’ of all manner of environmental factors, in a way which today perhaps appears to have gone too far, particularly as regards the erosion of the environment. The emergence of agriculture, sedentarisation, urbanisation, the great scientific discoveries and inventions and the building up of an artistic culture are the important stepping stones of this evolution. Thanks to culture, mankind has attempted to conquer nature and subject it to his own will. This process has progressed a very long way, perhaps too far. Man has always been a creative being, on penalty of his own elimination, and has achieved this thanks to his wonderful self-awareness, the awareness that he is a person who is distinct from the anonymous herd. But it is only during the last few decades that the realisation has grown that man is capable of very much more: he can recreate himself, remould the human race, create elementary particles of his consciousness (the collapse of the wave function in quantum physics), experiment with what he calls artificial intelligence, conquer his own process of change. Naturally, the intoxicating idea that man is capable of steering his own evolution as a living being has to do with the fabulous discoveries in biology and genetics. The fact that these discoveries also give rise to anxiety (all kinds of genetic manipulation up to and including cloning) is yet another demonstration of the understandable fear of change which dominates the present fin de siécle.

V. THE UNIVERSITY IN THE NETWORK SOCIETY

 

‘Converting change into human progress and using it to determine the future’ is an almost superhuman task for an self-evolving mankind – all the more so because mankind forms a mass in which only a small elite is capable of giving leadership – for better and for worse – in shaping and accommodating the changes.

What is the role of the university in this breaking point of the times?

* In the first place, the university is incorporated in the constraints of the network world: the world is our village, there is and will be delocalisation of the provision of education, more learning than teaching will develop, the technological elimination of language differences (speech technology) will< progressively occur, scientific research becomes strongly complementary with that of the business world, internationalisation and globalisation will grow, permanent education and training will dramatically increase, multiculturalisation will spread. But also a fomrmidable need of teaching tolerance, tolerance, tolerance will emerge.

* The social role of the university, in the midst of an international knowledge society, is placed in a changed light. More synergy between policymakers and universities, and between politicians and scientific research, is highly desirable in a society in which policy is becoming increasingly depoliticised and is having to take more and more account of scientific, technological and economic factors. The ending of the great ideological debate between collectivist Communism and capitalist Liberalism makes it possible to develop the relationship between government – less State means above all a different State – and private initiative, in this case at university level, in such a way as to replace subsidiarity with creative partnership. The network society with its organic but abrasive spontaneity demands – otherwise there is a danger of its sinking into chaos – the rebuilding of politics: democracy, defense of human rights and of the rule of law, in accordance with the principles of internationalism, humanism and legalism. Contributing to the development of a worldwide fabric of solidarity and its legal structuring, in order to bring about an international rule of law, is perhaps the most challenging task facing the universities of tomorrow.

* More fundamentally, the universities will only be able to remain ‘centres of excellence’ to the extent that they seek to be more than merely excellent teaching and research institutes. As stated earlier, training the development of synthetic reasoning and stating the existential questions on the meaning of being human is an essential task for the university of tomorrow. Not only the ‘how’ questions and the complex ‘what’ questions, but also the questions of meaningfulness and the sense of existence must be raised in and by the university community. The university can no longer afford to adopt a cautious and reserved stance in the face of fundamental ‘why’ questions, in which the finality of man and things, of action and thought, have to be taken out of the taboo sphere. This must happen without reverting to dogmatism or proselytism. But it must happen if the universities wish to train young people and to make them capable of accepting the challenge of their ‘self-determination’ and ‘self-realisation’.

* In a democratic society which is delegating more and more responsibility to the citizen, university training to create social insight and motivation to commitment is also an essential task. Ultimately, it comes down to interpreting the traditional concept of ‘general well-being’ and public interest using the possibilities offered by the various scientific disciplines. However, drawing a distinction between what is good, less good and bad for humans and mankind is an unavoidable task. The university may not and cannot evade the questions prompting the formulation of value judgements. But this immediately presents the university community with a formidable ethical challenge.

* The self-evolving human being, determined to an ever decreasing extent by his environment, more and more determining his own being, his own future, his own environment, the future of the planet and, increasingly, the future of the solar system, no longer learns what he must do from the open book of nature. Human culture has conquered deterministic nature. It is only to the extent that man dares to ask questions about good and evil that he has an opportunity to protect his own evolution against dehumanisation and thus tragic failure. ‘To be human or not to be human? That is the question’. A dehumanisation which as a result of the modern means of individual and collective egotism, aggression, exploitation, war ¼ can lead to the elimination of humankind as a phenomenon. If the universities were not to raise their voices in the face of this urgent problem, they would be de-universalising, de-actualising and de-responsiblising in the most ignominious way.

 

Not the selection of the intellectually strongest but of the morally best people is needed to the survival of mankind.

* By posing the question of how change should be shaped into genuine human progress and what the ‘general and individual well-being’ and public interest mean at the beginning of the XXIst century, the university is putting forward a problem which adds verticality to the sometimes exaggerated horizontalism of the network society. The public interest and the common good (common wealth) ares more than the sum of individual interests. The definition of what is good or bad cannot be left to what the majority thinks or to the arbitrariness of personal feelings and evaluations. The supra-individual dimension of ethics gives it a vertical dimension which cannot be tested empirically.

The network society, with its fabulous civilities, must be used for the good. It can make a considerable contribution to the liberation and prosperity of mankind. It reinforces the binomial ‘democracy+market economy’ (even the trinomial: democracy+market+rule of law), though this is not an end in itself. The university cannot escape the need to adjust the current post-industrial revolution in a way which guarantees more humanity.

* It has to be realised that the value commitment of every university, worthy of the name, also impels it to supplement its own scientific attitude with – horesco referens – a normative dimension. This normative dimension turns economics into meta-economics, politics into meta-politics, and physics - perhaps - into meta-physics.

* How to apply scientific inventions and discoveries, insights and theories to foster human progress is a question which cannot ultimately be subjected to a democratic decision-making process. As soon as we ask who decides what is good and bad, we create a problem which affects the whole of society. Just as the majority does not decide what is beautiful or ugly, what is true or false, so the majority can also not make pronouncements about ethical issues. This latter statement is however not popular in the democratic era in which we live today, where it takes courage to de-democratise ethical issues. But if the majority cannot decide about good and evil, who or what can? Individual conscience? But will that not lead to situational ethics, in which human beings are accepted as they are in their historical and cultural context, even if they believe in human sacrifice or, even worse, if they believe they have to eradicate the members of the rival tribe (cf. Rwanda)? The conscience is a compass, but can it function without a signpost? And if not, who will provide that signpost? It would be going too far for me to analyse this fundamental question any further here. Suffice it to say that, at the start of a new millennium, I believe that the university cannot escape a reflection on the foundations of ethics.

* The information and creation network of today and tomorrow must be supplemented and substantiated by a ‘human network and a fabric of humanity’. That means solidarity, human fellowship and living together in a society where the communications network tends to favour individualism. On this front too, the universities have a special responsibility, even if only in the battle against new forms of sometimes extreme intolerance, such as nationalism and fundamentalism.

* Goodness, charity, justice, a sense of truth and beauty – ‘virtues’ which are not natural laws – lead to the greater humanisation of the ex-animal which homo sapiens is. It is that humanisation which according to traditional religious insights opens up the prospect of divinisation (blessing, resurrection, heaven, final judgement, the promised land, nirvana¼ ). In a more modern version, this becomes a perspective of going beyond the contingencies of time and space, of suffering and death. As long as man had to fight against his own environment in order to survive, egotism, the Darwinist struggle for life and a commitment to self-interest were means of maintaining himself as an individual and a species. However, now that man has become a being which determines his own evolution and dominates the nature within and outside him, egotism and the fostering of self-interest have become much more dangerous because their self-protective aim (survival) has become defunct. This is made all the more pertinent by the fact that modern weapons of mass destruction are capable of wiping out mankind several times over. In the modern network society, survival, good and better living, demand cooperation and forms of altruism, charity and human fellowship, which must moreover serve every individual. Only this humanist message, whether or not inspired by religion, can give substance and strength to the university of tomorrow. Everyone is somebody!!!

* * *

We have to realise that, with a little effort, there are enough goods and services present in the world – and especially in our society – to meet people’s needs, but that there will never be enough to satisfy their greediness. The university must be an example of what a human community based on solidarity can be in the world of today and tomorrow.

In the knowledge society utopia – literally ‘not being placed’ – and realistic idealism are more than ever the modus existendi of the university, in the realisation that we do not necessarily need to replace society but that, together, we most definitely have to change society. This sustained critical reformism by the intellectual community, believing in the improvement of men and things and thus promoting ‘meliorism’, also assumes tolerance, in the knowledge that thinking differently does not necessarily mean thinking wrongly.

Only in the defence of liberty is extremism not a vice. Only in the defence of justice is moderation not a virtue. In all other aspects of societal and personal life, it is better to build bridges than to throw up obstacles - although obstacles and objections are necessary in order to sustain the dialectic of the societal debate in a democratic manner and to break through the absolutist attitude of those who believe they have a monopoly on truth and rightness. Without bridge-builders, the train of mankind is in danger of plunging into the abyss. In this sense and in that spirit, the universities can become bridgeheads for bridge-builders and by doing so make a powerful contribution to the unification of the world community in an atmosphere of solidarity. There can be no greater task for them.

Mark EYSKENS

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