This week I am commenting on what is perhaps the most tiresome gambit used to ’shoot the messenger.’
Critics of a status quo are often dismissed with a gambit where the defender of the status quo claims that the critic mistakenly believes that we have left some supposed ideal period to which we must now return. This accusation is so common as to be a cliché, and in our case is a straw argument—a reconstruction of an argument that presents it in such a weak fashion that it is easily knocked over. We have never claimed there was a Golden Age, but simply that the delivery of the liberal arts was better in the past than is now the case. We also pointed out that it is the ideal of the liberal arts that needs to be pursued, and by implication, the reality of its delivery would never fully meet the ideal.
One implication of this gambit is that no one can make any comments on potentially negative social change because, unless it can be proved that there was ‘Golden Age’ (whatever that is), there are no reference points to go by. With no reference points, it follows from this logic that anyone who tries to bring some concern to light that does not meet with immediate public approval is to be treated as a Cassandra (whose warnings are to be ignored). To the extent that attempts to improve social institutions are greeted with this accusation, social change and institutional reform are unnecessarily impeded (in some versions of the mythology, Cassandra’s curse was that her accurate predictions would always be ignored because she was dismissed as unreliable).