Thought for the Day Folgen

24 APRIL 26

During my many years of teaching undergraduates I always invited my honours students to give an oral presentation on a chosen topic. In a particular course that explored a variety of social and ethical questions, a young female student asked if she could do her presentation on abortion. She said, I come from a Christian family and don’t believe that abortion is moral.’ I told her she had every right to argue and defend her position as long as she was prepared to be challenged by her peers - including other Christian students who might well hold very different views – I remember the discussion after her presentations as one of the most respectful but intellectually robust – the best of what a university should be. We want universities to be places where knowledge and freedom of thought is prized and nurtured. Perhaps this is the goal of the new freedom of speech complaints system which comes into force in England's universities in the next academic year. The system will allow academics and other staff to take their complaints directly to the Office for Students if they feel their freedom of speech or academic research has been stifled. And if they fail to protect speech, universities could face fines of up to half a million pounds. But I wonder whether this kind of state intervention might have the unintended consequence of politicising not only free speech but learning itself. Regulations and penalties can force compliance but can’t guarantee a commitment to critical thinking. Rather than becoming places of greater freedom, universities might become even more risk averse, curating and managing what can be said and heard in invisible and insidious ways. If that shift happens, something deeper is lost. Learning becomes narrower. Thinking becomes strategic. And the university loses its edge as a place where knowledge is valued for its own sake. Knowledge matters—not only for what it gives us, but for what it demands of us. To know something isn’t simply to possess information; it’s to be changed by it. This is why the Islamic tradition sees learning as a trust, connecting the pursuit of knowledge to prayer and even the afterlife in scriptural texts such as ` Lord increase me in my knowledge’ and `Whoever travels a path in search of knowledge, God will make easy for him a path to Paradise.’ It may sound idealistic but for me, the purpose of a university isn’t to echo the world as it is, but to question and imagine what it might become.

Good morning. Desmond Morris the zoologist, tv presenter and best-selling author who died at the weekend at the age of 98, owed his fame to his book, The Naked Ape. The book was published close on 60 years ago and was a runaway success - it was translated into at least 23 languages and sold more than 20 million copies. Not everyone loved it - though controversy is never bad for sales - and Morris himself used to like to tell the tale of a heated confrontation with a group of clergyman in Canada over whether humans and/or chimpanzees possessed a soul. Morris's slogan was that 'man is a risen ape and not a fallen angel' and certain Christian groups were said to have burnt the book. The funny thing about that slogan is that it is certainly no part of mainline Christian teaching that humans are fallen angels. The person most often thought of in such terms is the devil, and even that notion was a fringe one - ironically perhaps, some of the outliers who seem to have thought that the devil and humans might be fallen angels, such as the Cathars, were themselves burnt as heretics, with or without any books. So if we take away the false dichotomy in Morris's slogan, we are left with the assertion that 'man is a risen ape'. But as I look around me at the world we humans are making, I'm not sure how risen we are - in fact the main problem for our self-understanding is not that Darwin and his later followers have caused us to think too little of ourselves, but that in spite of Darwin - and in fact in spite of Christian teaching too - we are still inclined to think too much of ourselves. The most central and crucial affirmation of the myths of creation in the book of Genesis is that humans - along with everything else in the cosmos - are creatures. We talk about bringing someone who is getting a bit high and mighty down to earth - and the line in Genesis chapter 2, 'the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground', is meant to do just that. No hint of angelic origins here - we are made from the stuff that we wash from our feet and swill down the drain. Humility - originally from the Latin, humus, for ground or earth - is the right disposition for someone who knows the stuff from which they are made. Apes we may well be, but we are the only apes who, with an overweening sense of our own capacities lord it over each other and over the rest of the created order, bending them and it to our purposes, producing political dystopias on the one hand, and threatening environmental disaster on the other. It turns out in fact, then, that Desmond Morris was not doing us humans down, but perhaps sugaring the pill - we are not so much risen apes as fallen ones.