When I were a lad, science
was, well, science and politics was for politicians, almost all of whom knew
next to nothing or more than nothing about science. Nowadays we have political science which
looms large in higher education and even larger in the media and government.
But an article in the LSE
blog tells us that while science, economics and other things move on, reform
and revise in a changing world political science is stuck in the past and this is all too apparent in its reaction to the recent
crash and its causes.
In the days when politics
was a disregarded subject that was driven to recruit hearties and theatricals
to make up the numbers in back stairs departments out there in the real world men, and rare women who drifted into politics
and allied trades had other qualifications regarded as better and more
sensible.
The forced growth in
student numbers had led to political science becoming a major area for all
those extras. A result has been that
politics has become limited to professional students cum politicians who now
are dominant in Parliament, government departments, lobbying and related
activities.
As they believe very
firmly that Political Science is the master of all sciences, if only because
they are political scientists, this means they can make decisions about and
govern things of which they are entirely ignorant and dominate and despise
anyone incautious enough to disagree with their prejudices and opinions.
Which explains a lot of
the trouble at present, if not all of it.
We have a situation where a few are making decisions for the many because those few believe their knowledge, education and expertise is greater and the many are letting them on the promise of doing so will give all something for nothing. However common sense dictates that the opposite is true and that everything has a price yet by allowing this situation to exist and grow is seeing the transmogrification of democracy into oligarchy and multiples ones at that. The end result will be that we will have a complete statist, authoritarian, centrally controlled society and economy. We know from the abundant evidence past and present where that will take us and what the consequences will be. Not pleasant.
ReplyDelete"Which explains a lot of the trouble at present, if not all of it."
ReplyDeleteI agree. The problem with politics is that those who go in for it aren't actually very good at it.
Most would never have been much good at anything else either, but if they had adopted a lower profile career, they may have carried it off. As it is, their deficiencies are all too obvious.