BMOC (Big Man On Campus)
In our high schools and colleges you will often find that the BMOC is a student engaged in the central attraction of that institution. On the campus where football is king the BMOC is a football player, on the campus where basketball is king the BMOC is a basketball player, on the campus where scholarship is king the BMOC—wait a minute, who ever heard of a campus where scholarship is king. This is, perhaps, a slight exaggeration, I am sure such a campus must exist, somewhere.
In the 1920s the campuses where “the most far-reaching revolution of the twentieth century was born in an idyll: a picturesque park in Copenhagen, a quiet side street in Berne, the shore of the island of Heligoland, the meadows and tree-shaded river at Cambridge, the…†In these European campuses the young geniuses of physics, the BMOCs of the century, gave birth to “the tremendous transformation of the scientific view of Nature could only be compared with the change of outlook brought about by Copernicus.†The age of the atom was midwifed by this small group of geniuses.
If a high school or college were to shift emphasis from football to basketball, over night the BMOC would change. I think that we Americans, and probably others, need to shift emphasis from what Kuhn identified as Normal Science to those domains of knowledge that are commonly called the Social Sciences. Physicists have been our BMOC but I claim that we need to develop a climate that fosters public concern upon what is known as communicative action rationality.
Communicative action rationality is about the form of rationality needed to help agents to join together to develop consensus about social normative goals.
I am informed that many social scientists have accepted the notion that ‘value judgments’ or ‘moral questions’ are rationally undecidable. As such, most social theorists “simply assume that any agent, who acts on the basis of a moral principle, or a social norm, is not rationally justified in doing so. This is what underlies the widespread tendency among social theorists to assume that instrumental action is the only form of rational action, and that norm-governed action must have some kind of nonrational source, such as conditioning, socialization, or habit.â€
I am not schooled in the social sciences but I have spent some time trying to learn these ideas about which the social sciences deal. I know enough about these matters to conclude that our society needs to put much greater emphasis in these domains of knowledge. Our focus seems to be entirely on the natural sciences and that emphasis is reveled in the success of these sciences. However I think we overemphasize the natural sciences at the expense of the social sciences.
Society needs to reevaluate our value systems in order to create a consensus about how to reevaluate our value systems, i.e. we need to make social scientists our new BMOCs.
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