Where the Mind is Without Fear
Last Thursday (Oct 5, 2006) I posted a blog entitled "Science, Government, and Truth" about an effort—Scientists & Engineers for America—to counteract the increasing misuse and suppression of scientific evidence in policy making by some government officials.
A few days earlier, Harry Boyte had sent the text of a speech by Michael Edwards, Director of the Ford Foundation's Governance and Civil Society Unit in New York, and author of the recent book Civil Society (Polity Press/Blackwell, 2004). The speech was the Keynote Address for the 40th anniversary of the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Sussex, UK (www.ids.ac.uk ). It's entitled "Looking back from 2046: Thoughts on the 80th Anniversary of the Institute for Revolutionary Social Science".
I was struck by how the beginning of the speech mirrored the sentiments of the Scientists & Engineers for America effort, albeit in quite a different context. I'm taking the liberty of quoting the first few lines, which in turn quote a poem by Rabindranath Tagore.
"Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high,Where knowledge is free,
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls,
Where words come out from the depth of truth,
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection,
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit,
Where the mind is led forward through ever-widening thought and action into that heaven of freedom,
Let my country awake.�All of us in this room are exploring the “country� that Rabindranath Tagore describes in his poem “Where the Mind is Without Fear�, and we know how difficult and demanding that journey can be. This is especially true today, though here I can be accused of being overly influenced by the context in which I live and work – the US – where facts, objectivity, proof, accumulated wisdom, public debate, accountability, the careful calculation of risks and benefits, and the other pillars of effective policy-making we have been gradually piecing together since the Enlightenment are increasingly up for grabs. Let decisions be driven by ideology, faith, speculation, greed, graft and revenge. Let truths be revealed rather than negotiated. In modern politics, or at least in this form of modern politics, facts are for losers.
The country "where the mind is without fear" is the only country in which true scholarship can engage with the great issues of society. Are we losing that country?