Who knew?

… Anti-Education by Friedrich Nietzsche review – why mainstream culture, not the universities, is doing our best thinking | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Nietzsche’s achievement was as a genealogist of morality, and his observations on the origins of liberal values are peculiarly resonant today. As a pioneering classical scholar, he knew there was nothing liberal about ancient Greek culture. Emerging in a long and difficult process that included Europe’s wars of religion, a liberal way of life was an offspring from Jewish and Christian monotheism – a fact our “new atheists” prefer to ignore. One can value this way of life without being religious, but that doesn’t mean all human beings want to live it. If people lose interest in free expression – as seems to have happened in some sections of higher education – there is no argument that can persuade them of its importance. What they want may be freedom from the dangerous business of thinking.