Academics are often rewarded for discovering novel ways of criticising and condemning Western societies. This generates lots of biased, one-sided scholarship.
Very helpful, and I suspect even more-so for those of us no longer (or never having been) in the “academy.” I thought your closing point particularly salient: “Just as numerous forms of oppression and victimisation are not legible to commonsense observation, members of Western societies benefit in countless ways from hidden mechanisms of cooperation and coordination.” There are, for example, many important ways in which our institutions, like public health, run in the background, with the good they do unnoticed and therefore unappreciated.
Another example is financial mechanisms, about which Krugman recently interviewed Nathan Tankus: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/nathan-tankus-part-ii Early in the interview, Tankus comments: “We really emphasized that what the DOGE people are messing with at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service is literally the ability to make treasury payments. And in fact, what they're doing is so catastrophic that making treasury payments is kind of the least of the concerns. That'll be the most immediate thing, but like, you know, not getting money in the hospitals, not being able to collect taxes… It’s hard to wrap your mind around this because it's so big, it’s kind of beyond a fiscal heart attack. Just, like, making the fiscal machinery of government completely break down.”
Who among us has ever heard of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, let alone know what it does?
We need a whole lot more education on and appreciation for what it takes to make a government as large as ours run.
This is the most compelling and cogent argument I’ve read for why I left my PhD program in English after getting my Master’s degree. The groupthink and esoteric/opaque jargon among many of my fellow grad students (who were parroting the language of the academy they aspired to enter) was not only off-putting, it was no fun. I started studying literature — and Shakespeare in particular — because I loved the beauty of the language and the genius of his craft. A perfectly formed sentence or line of verse brings me JOY. I wanted to continue my literary studies in grad school in pursuit of that joy — and ultimately to someday be able to help my students cultivate it as well. While critical theory and cultural studies provided interesting ways of approaching and understanding the canonical texts I was studying, there was no interest in the artistry and craft of the writer. In fact, it seemed that even bringing up such antiquated concepts was a kind of tacit endorsement of the hegemony that my classmates and professors were trying to undermine. It became clear to me that the academy didn’t want the kind of “old-fashioned” work (close-reading and textual analysis) that I wanted to do. And so I left grad school and never really looked back.
"Of course, this raises the question of why the humanities are a left-wing monoculture."
I've noticed that nearly all private organizations that receive government funds end up becoming left-wing. I'm not sure what the exact dynamic there is, but this seems to be a commonality.
Intra-elite competition in the business world is common, but there is usually no ideology involved. Perhaps the competition for government grants encourages motivated reasoning to view humans as blank slates, and that all inequalities are due to social factors which can be fixed.
Academia is sort of like going to a Chiropractor. They never actually fix anything, but have some really interesting theories about what is wrong with you.
There is much, alas too much, that rings true to me. Though you focus on the humanities, the same analysis applies to much research and writing in the social sciences and education. Let me add two points: 1. the fondness for “arcane vocabularies” derives in part from the attempt to emulate their colleagues in the physical and biological sciences; in part from admiration for European social theorists whose style is often opaque and difficult to penetrate. (If their own writing is opaque and difficult to penetrate, that must be taken as a sign of its brilliance.) 2. One reason many students and faculty, especially those at elite institutions, embrace these modes of discourse, is their wish to be involved in scholarly activities which--as they see it—will contribute to remedying some of the profound inequities they rightly perceive in our society. If they, themselves, come from privileged backgrounds, they may feel a strong personal need to “speak” on behalf of the less fortunate.
All that said, I am worried that political right wingers here in the United States may find in your analysis reason to destroy institutions of higher education rather than attempt to reform them.
Academics don't often discuss humans as mammals, who like mating, eating, and basic human functions. There has to be abstract terms and complex language for ordinary events. So language confuses the academics as well as the public. One of my pet peeves is the excessive use of "free" before a term, such as free market, free sex, freedom, free thought. Nothing is "free". Everything has consequences and complexity. Another pet peeve is the lionizing and worship of Socrates and Plato, which got started in the Renaissance and really picked up speed in 19th century England.
When I read The Trial of Socrates by IF Stone, I sensed a wholly different view of the Greeks and the worship of abstraction. Alcibiades comes to mind as the real product of Greek culture, along with the failed expedition to loot Syracuse, seeking a repeat of the mythic Trojan War. I described to my sons that the Iliad was an ode to a struggle to have the first choice of captured Trojan women between Achilles and Agamemnon. Nothing like what my high school texts suggested. My point: academics often smear abstract ("noble") ideas that confuse students and older people over ordinary and mundane acts. The Trojan war was not noble, it was a looting expedition, common in human history. Free Trade or neoliberal economics was a con job about international business relationships that were abstracted, idealized and abnormal. Some abstract ideas infect political and social relationships and confuse people about what is human, how to act, and consequences.
Very helpful, and I suspect even more-so for those of us no longer (or never having been) in the “academy.” I thought your closing point particularly salient: “Just as numerous forms of oppression and victimisation are not legible to commonsense observation, members of Western societies benefit in countless ways from hidden mechanisms of cooperation and coordination.” There are, for example, many important ways in which our institutions, like public health, run in the background, with the good they do unnoticed and therefore unappreciated.
Another example is financial mechanisms, about which Krugman recently interviewed Nathan Tankus: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/nathan-tankus-part-ii Early in the interview, Tankus comments: “We really emphasized that what the DOGE people are messing with at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service is literally the ability to make treasury payments. And in fact, what they're doing is so catastrophic that making treasury payments is kind of the least of the concerns. That'll be the most immediate thing, but like, you know, not getting money in the hospitals, not being able to collect taxes… It’s hard to wrap your mind around this because it's so big, it’s kind of beyond a fiscal heart attack. Just, like, making the fiscal machinery of government completely break down.”
Who among us has ever heard of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, let alone know what it does?
We need a whole lot more education on and appreciation for what it takes to make a government as large as ours run.
Yes, great point - completely agree.
This is the most compelling and cogent argument I’ve read for why I left my PhD program in English after getting my Master’s degree. The groupthink and esoteric/opaque jargon among many of my fellow grad students (who were parroting the language of the academy they aspired to enter) was not only off-putting, it was no fun. I started studying literature — and Shakespeare in particular — because I loved the beauty of the language and the genius of his craft. A perfectly formed sentence or line of verse brings me JOY. I wanted to continue my literary studies in grad school in pursuit of that joy — and ultimately to someday be able to help my students cultivate it as well. While critical theory and cultural studies provided interesting ways of approaching and understanding the canonical texts I was studying, there was no interest in the artistry and craft of the writer. In fact, it seemed that even bringing up such antiquated concepts was a kind of tacit endorsement of the hegemony that my classmates and professors were trying to undermine. It became clear to me that the academy didn’t want the kind of “old-fashioned” work (close-reading and textual analysis) that I wanted to do. And so I left grad school and never really looked back.
That's sad to hear in a way, but completely understandable. Thanks for sharing.
"Of course, this raises the question of why the humanities are a left-wing monoculture."
I've noticed that nearly all private organizations that receive government funds end up becoming left-wing. I'm not sure what the exact dynamic there is, but this seems to be a commonality.
Intra-elite competition in the business world is common, but there is usually no ideology involved. Perhaps the competition for government grants encourages motivated reasoning to view humans as blank slates, and that all inequalities are due to social factors which can be fixed.
Academia is sort of like going to a Chiropractor. They never actually fix anything, but have some really interesting theories about what is wrong with you.
There is much, alas too much, that rings true to me. Though you focus on the humanities, the same analysis applies to much research and writing in the social sciences and education. Let me add two points: 1. the fondness for “arcane vocabularies” derives in part from the attempt to emulate their colleagues in the physical and biological sciences; in part from admiration for European social theorists whose style is often opaque and difficult to penetrate. (If their own writing is opaque and difficult to penetrate, that must be taken as a sign of its brilliance.) 2. One reason many students and faculty, especially those at elite institutions, embrace these modes of discourse, is their wish to be involved in scholarly activities which--as they see it—will contribute to remedying some of the profound inequities they rightly perceive in our society. If they, themselves, come from privileged backgrounds, they may feel a strong personal need to “speak” on behalf of the less fortunate.
All that said, I am worried that political right wingers here in the United States may find in your analysis reason to destroy institutions of higher education rather than attempt to reform them.
Academics don't often discuss humans as mammals, who like mating, eating, and basic human functions. There has to be abstract terms and complex language for ordinary events. So language confuses the academics as well as the public. One of my pet peeves is the excessive use of "free" before a term, such as free market, free sex, freedom, free thought. Nothing is "free". Everything has consequences and complexity. Another pet peeve is the lionizing and worship of Socrates and Plato, which got started in the Renaissance and really picked up speed in 19th century England.
When I read The Trial of Socrates by IF Stone, I sensed a wholly different view of the Greeks and the worship of abstraction. Alcibiades comes to mind as the real product of Greek culture, along with the failed expedition to loot Syracuse, seeking a repeat of the mythic Trojan War. I described to my sons that the Iliad was an ode to a struggle to have the first choice of captured Trojan women between Achilles and Agamemnon. Nothing like what my high school texts suggested. My point: academics often smear abstract ("noble") ideas that confuse students and older people over ordinary and mundane acts. The Trojan war was not noble, it was a looting expedition, common in human history. Free Trade or neoliberal economics was a con job about international business relationships that were abstracted, idealized and abnormal. Some abstract ideas infect political and social relationships and confuse people about what is human, how to act, and consequences.