Shall we save civilization?

I am preparing a short talk to present at the forthcoming annual conference of the National Association of Scholars. Here is the proposed text:


Western civilization is doomed. Unless we find the character and courage to fight for the culture of freedom, our day is done. History’s greatest store of truth, beauty, and goodness shall disappear beneath the sands of time.

Military might cannot save us. Force of arms alone cannot preserve for our posterity the legacy of freedom given us by our fathers’ sacrifice.

To save civilization, we must wage cultural war. Undefended rights inevitably perish, and we have failed to give our youth the understanding of and love for civilized values that inspire them to defend their legacy. Freedom lives only when people will die for it.

As usual, Thomas Jefferson said it best: "the nation that expects to be both ignorant and free expects what never was nor ever shall be."

So, the real danger is not the blood-soaked, tyrannical evil that masquerades as a great religion of peace while flattening our towers and attacking the foundations of freedom. Our true enemy is ignorance and our only real danger, cowardice, a shameful lack of moral certainty.

Without the courage to even name the evil that destroys us, we cannot survive. My name is Mark Draper and I am one of a small band of scholars making a stand. We are raising up in our time the greatest school of all time. We shall build a great new temple of truth where the free and open, passionate pursuit of truth, knowledge, and wisdom is held sacred and fiercely defended.

We must wage cultural war. We must raise up an army of intellectual warriors who, fighting with no weapons save words, defend for all humanity, the foundations of freedom.

We believe but one force can save us -- universal education. Academia is incapable of reform. We must start anew.

To this end, we shall build history’s greatest school, Librescu University, the first of the great Third Millennium schools that will define our age. We name this school to honor the professor who lay down his life for his students at Virginia Tech. Our first mission is to offer the world a superb liberal arts education delivered at a price the poorest man on earth can afford.

To do this, we will use three tools. First, is cutting edge technology – intelligent tutoring systems, latent semantic analysis, speech recognition, computer vision, and open-source content and learning management systems. Artificial intelligence will automate all routine teaching tasks. The vital human component will be provided largely by a robust and dynamic global
community. Every student will have and become a mentor encouraging lifelong learning.

Second, we will exploit the best concepts and best practices from the fields of knowledge management, modern management theory, behavioral psychology, and constructivist pedagogy. The result will be the establishment and aggressive defense of an intellectual milieu that fosters trust, innovation, communication, collaboration and productivity.

Third, we will build this great temple of truth on a foundation of the best thoughts of the greatest minds of all time. Here the free and open quest for truth shall reign supreme, unlimited civil reasoned discourse defended as humanly sacred. Here the most outrageous and unpopular ideas are expressed freely with no fear of consequence.

If I am right, this is the hour of destiny. But two paths lay before us. One leads to light and life. The other to darkness and doom. Which future shall we create?

In potential, we are quivering on the very brink of the greatest era of all time, an era of astounding achievements, amazing new glories, the attainment of vast intellectual heights. These magnificent ideas and ideals will mean the elimination of poverty, crime, disease, hatred, fear, violence. We can create an earthly paradise. If I am right, future historians will mark our day as the beginning of the Neo-Renaissance.

But if we refuse to face a frightening reality, if we continue to embrace a poisoned false tolerance, we not only disgrace ourselves, we fail to play our part in the outmarching of human destiny. Most shameful of all, we deny to our posterity the glorious legacy of freedoms with which our fathers entrusted us!

The question of our time is this: Do we have the faith and courage, the will to prevail? Do we love the truth enough to fight and die for it?

Join me and show the world we do. Let us act boldly to create the future that humanity deserves! Let us prove in this dark hour that we are worthy of freedom! Do not fail the dreams of our fathers. Do not deny the dreams of our children. Take my hand and let us step forward into that new and brighter day in which around the world, the light of freedom shines!