As an academic-in-training, I take a particular interest in the worldwide conservative movement against the culture of the Enlightenment. Since academics as a profession is essentially a parasitic existence, and since it does require a certain amount of aloofness from the rest of society in order to be pursued in as objective a fashion as possible, it is among the professions most vulnerable to outright thuggery.
As an example of how vulnerable the culture of the Enlightenment is to outside attack, I would remind you that the West's preeminence in the fields of science and mathematics is a recent phenomenon. Let's not forget that while the Inquisition burned Bruno at the stake, Arab and Persian mathematicians were busy proving theorems based upon work done by Hindu mathematicians and astronomers such as Aryabhata during the thousand years previous, which was after Greek mathematicians had proven remarkable theorems used to this day, etc. The Arab world's experience illustrates the vulnerability I am alluding to - a culture of scholarship destroyed by appeals to overt religiosity at the exclusion of everything else, a culture of remarkable openness and respect for all religious faiths (at the official levels of power at least) marred by a particularly virulent strain of anti-secularism.
Today, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad provides a telling example of this overt anti-academic fervor that has cost Arab and Persian culture so much (from the AP via New York Times):
TEHRAN, Iran (AP)-- Iran's hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Tuesday for a purge of liberal and secular teachers from the country's universities, urging students to return to 1980s-style radicalism.
''Today, students should shout at the president and ask why liberal and secular university lecturers are present in the universities,'' the official Islamic Republic News Agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying during a meeting with a group of students.
I bring this up not because I want to add yet another strike against the Iranian president - while the vast the majority of us do not want war with Iran we are certainly well aware of the horrible nature of its president's rhetoric, since after all his enemy is us liberals - but because it is a wonderful illustration of just how true it is that places like Iran and Somalia are the logical endpoints for where the conservatives in our own country plan on taking our society. I really believe that this is the most underreported story there is in all of the current Western experience.
To leave you with an example of just how similar our own home-grown conservatives' rhetoric is to Ahmadinejad's, here's a piece from the website of People for the American Way:
Robertson waxed glowingly about the book which he says sheds light on the radical academics at American universities claiming, however, that it is just a "short list" of the "thirty to forty thousand" left wing professors who he calls "termites that have worked into the woodwork of our academic society and it's APPALLING."
I ask you - where's the difference? How is American conservatism any more safe than the "fascism" (to borrow a by-now well-worn term) of the Iranian president? We need to bring this up more often if we are going to make our fellow citizens understand the clear and present danger the current incarnation of the the Republican Party is to the Enlightenment.
Here's to all of you who still believe in the culture of the Enlightenment and who believe that it is a liberal society's mission to secure to every person the right to seek the truth.