Knowledge and Democracy
A think piece for the ESPAS 2016 conference by Michael Ignatieff (@M_Ignatieff), President and Rector Central European University
This contribution is adapted from Professor Ignatieff’s inaugural address as Rector of the Central European University. It was delivered on 21 October 2016 in Budapest.
Our democracies have a common life — but there is much disorder in it — the cultivation of suspicion towards foreigners, the manipulation of fear and the knowing disregard for truth. If our democracies were in healthier shape, we could face the challenge of resurgent authoritarianism with confidence, but there are few democracies, whether in the Central European region or elsewhere, that are in good shape. There is so much inequality and injustice; so much corruption and self-dealing, so many unanswered attacks on the independence of institutions, from the courts to the press.
Our societies have never deluged with so much information and never been in greater need of knowledge.
There are moments when it becomes easy to believe we will never bring order to our common matters. There are moments too when the work that universities do seems beside the point, and our research seems too obscure to be of any use.
We need to rededicate ourselves to what universities uniquely do; this is even more so the case for the Central European University.
The one thing we must teach all our students, if our societies are to remain free, is to know what knowledge truly is. For without knowledge, without respect for research, science and reason, democracies cannot bring order to our common life.
Our societies have never deluged with so much information and never been in greater need of knowledge. From our smart phones and computers, a torrent of data deluges us every day. We are more confused than ever because we have wandered from the continent of truth. A university is the guardian of that continent of truth. We need to teach that some things are true. Some are false. Some ideas take us forward toward deeper understanding of reality, while others take us back into darkness and confusion. Some ideas have survived the test of falsification while others have been rightly discarded.Of course, we must not set ourselves up as a knowledge elite. We need to be humble guardians, aware of how often universities have abused their authority and proclaimed truths that turned out, upon examination, to be false.
Even a humble guardian, however, must keep faith with the history of our sciences. We must believe that over time, after inconceivable effort, and many backward steps, we have made progress. The continent of certainty grows slowly larger. Expanding its boundaries and defending the core of what we know to be true are the essential work of universities in bringing order to our common life.
Democracies cannot solve their problems if demagogues and populists are allowed to despise the hard-won knowledge of experts, if the facts of climate change, migration, racial discrimination, inequality can be conjured away by the dark technologies of political illusion.
A university dedicated to a free and open society has one function, to graduate men and women who are citizens, citizens who know that our common life has no order without knowledge. However much we may dispute the content and meaning of knowledge, democracies cannot dispute that it exists, and that once established as such, knowledge must be the lodestar that guides us to accept the legitimacy of what we decide together — on the basis of what we know together.
