#the age of the big drain

Some algorithm somewhere has decided that I’m undereducated, for regularly I receive via my internet server invitations to join masters’ courses at universities—at considerable expense to me, be it added. The algorithm appears not to have noticed that I’m past the age at which a further qualification, or pseudo-qualification, will do much for my career (as promised by the invitation) because my career is over.

The latest such offer I have received (for only $15,000) is an on-line master’s course in “Media, Ethics and Social Change,” in which I will “learn the skills to use the power of digital media to bring about social change.” In other words, it’s a course in such arts as agitprop, surreptitious censorship of opposing views, and false insinuation. I don’t think it takes much imagination to guess what kind of ethics or social change will be promoted by the course, and I doubt that much attention will be given on it to the possibility that things can get worse as well as better.

The courses on offer seem to me to be exercises in the purest careerism, both of those who take them and those who offer and run them. They are harbingers of a brave new world in which political correctness comes to rule through the creation of a self-righteous and ruthless bureaucracy that has been trained to believe that it’s working for humanity’s benefit rather than for its own.

It’s for this reason that I do not entirely disregard offers such as the one I received to “learn the skills to use the power of digital media to bring about social change.” The language used in the profile of the teacher may be horribly ugly, it may indicate an inability to think clearly or express ideas well, but neither beauty nor clarity are its aim. , .

- Theodore Dalrymple