164 Ethics in Higher Education: Values-driven Leaders for the Future
were neither scientific nor true. By 1870, we had social Darwinism
which helped to shape more empire mythologies from the Europe to the
US and Canada.
The combined narratives ruled Africa up to now. Europeans insisted
that their principles in particular were universal. The details of
universality as mediocrity are always fascinating. They make sense
because behind them lie the European national imperial schools of
philosophy which are still “put” and anchored around the world in
THEIR (meaning “OUR) universities... taught as universal. Their
narrative of history, cuisine, of civilization, of fashion spread wide
during the violence of colonization – all apparently universal.
Educational curricula were filled with these absurdities. They then went
to mount attacks on indigenous cultures and peoples and demean them
by banning languages, cultures, rituals and all things spiritual. The
illegal, unethical moral acts followed. Myriad laws regulations and
administrative structures were created and amended in order to install a
legal infrastructure and punishment, both social and economic (Saul
2014, Memmi 1965).
Reason began abruptly to separate itself and to outdistance the other
more or less recognized human characteristics – spirit, appetite, faith
and emotion, but also intuition, will and most important – experience.
This gradual encroachment of the foreground continues today. It had
reached a degree of imbalance so extreme that the mythical importance
of reason obscures all else and has driven the other elements into the
marginal frontiers of doubtful respectability (Saul 1993).
Through this imaginative strategy of difference, European
universities created an artificial construct of humanities and spread it
throughout humanity (Memmi 1965) leaving behind multiple legacies of
trauma, fear and dread. No ecology, no culture, no people and no psyche
remained untarnished. The technology of social control and oppression
remained everywhere. The damage inflicted on the national and