Ivory Tower Or Tower Of Babel?

The history of the ivory tower is a unique and
interesting one. What makes university institutions to be referred to as the ivory tower includes the culture of pursuit of truth or knowledge with deep conviction and not solely for bread.
Devotees of that culture, which may also be called the cult of convinced knowledge, rarely fear the sword and can lay down their lives to uphold what ideals they consider sacred. Such devotees are not always found in university institutions but, like Socrates, Aristotle, Martin Luther and several others, they can be mobile teachers with large followers.
In corrupt societies, ivory tower radicals are rarely “friends of government” or those who wield or pursue political power. Often, they are considered as security risk.
When Martin Luther (1483-1548) challenged what was going on in the Church during his time, he became a security risk and a heretic who must either recant his ideas or face the inquisition. In those days, “heretics” were burnt alive at the stake, but Luther had many supporters who secretly provided protection and security for him. Now, we know what resulted from Luther’s Reformation Movement. Personal conviction backed by truth usually triumphs even amidst threats of lynching.
Social transformation movements usually start from the activities of radical devotees of the ivory tower principle of personal conviction. However, along the line, there can emerge fifth columnists as internal subverts, as well as external strong opponents. Thus such movements can be destroyed before they grow strong or they become mere doctrinaire radicalism.
Social transformation movements which survive and grow strong face other problems such as infiltration and eventual take-over by later day heroes, creating schism and the scramble for positions which can split the movement.
It is usually in the process of scrambles for power and positions that commitment to the ideal of truth suffers and the ivory tower becomes “tower of babel”.
When devotees of the cult of convinced knowledge scramble for material lures, they soon become like “salt” which has lost its value. They stray from their ideals and things rarely remain the same thereafter. The reason behind such failure arises from a schism in the human brain as a result of a change in the line of devotion of attention. It remains true that no one can serve two masters with equal zeal.
Not many people know the operational mechanism of the human brain. As the seat of the intellect or objective, sensory perception, the brain also provides a gate-way to intuitive perception. Thus, there are two zones, spheres or lobes in the brain, namely: cerebrum and cerebellum, frontal brain and back brain, or left and right hemispheres. Each of the two sections deals with different but specific human needs, but both are meant to work in synergy and harmony. When one section becomes over-dominant there is a problem arising from one-sidedness or lop-sidedness.
Currently, there is the “Brain Dominance Theory” which says, in summary, that “people who are scripted deeply in the logical, verbal, left-brain thinking will discover how totally inadequate that thinking is solving problems which require a great deal of creativity. They become aware and begin to open-up a new script inside their right-brain. It is not that the right-brain wasn’t there; it just lay dormant. The muscles had not been developed, or perhaps they had atrophied after early childhood because of the heavy left-brain emphasis of formal education or social scripting. When a person has access to both the intuitive, creative and visual right-brain, and the analytical, logical, verbal, left-brain, then the whole brain is working”.
There are some people who can be described as having crippled brain; among them are fanatical dogmatic and conceited people. They engage in activities that demand the sagacity and cleverness of the intellectual, frontal brain, with little resort to the rich resources of the right or back brain which adds ethical values to human, thinking.
In politics, as a game of wits, numbers and intellect, ethical values count little. We know the link between politics and economic, and so, die-hard adherents of ivory-tower principles rarely fit into politics in its “dirty” version; no patronage!
Devotees of the cult of truth and conviction who cannot stand faithful to the ideals of integrity often visit political lords at night to pledge loyalty and beg for favours which include the post of vice-chancellorship. Thus the ivory tower becomes a political tower of babel where you can find quota and political professors with no books to their names or any worthy ideals to profess with conviction. You can find over five dozens in one single institution, especially with the lure and juice of retiring at 70 with full salary, fringe benefits and prospect of buying over official house for peanuts. Scrambles and quality rarely go together.
Dr. Amirize, a retired lecturer, writes from Port Harcourt.