The civilisational disaster of Anglo-American academe

Rallying around what ain’t so.

Contemporary Western democracies face a wide range of challenges and dysfunctions. These include a pervasive loss of trust in our institutions. We have huge difficulties discussing—as societies, rather than as separate information domains—what those dysfunctions even are, let alone what is causing them.

Yes, there are many things we can point to as underlying such dysfunctions: the expanding pathologies of bureaucratisation; the social and emotional dynamics of feminisation; the creation—via civil rights/anti-discrimination/equality law—of legally-empowered networks of people treating the citizenry as perennially hovering on the edge of wrongthink and committing wrongacts, particularly in the work place; the fetishisation of equality; elite imposition of unpopular (and dysfunctional) immigration policies; the toxic unreality of social media; the expansion of the unaccountable classes. Monocausal explanations of our contemporary dysfunctions are to be resisted.

Nevertheless, the difficulties in having broad, coherent debates and discussions across our societies is central to why such dysfunctions are so broad and so apparently intractable. For one of our central dysfunctions is how alienated from so much of our citizenry that mainstream media and academe have become, dominated as they are by views and concerns that are wildly unrepresentative of the wider citizenry.

Source.

After the Cold War

This gulf is a relatively new phenomenon. It was not, for example, a feature of the 1945-1991 Cold War era. Yes, both journalism and academe have long tended to be more left/liberal/progressive than the wider society, but that difference was far from what it has since become. During the Cold War era, what we would now call “normie” concerns dominated media coverage.

It was after the end of the Cold War—with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991—that things began to shift. So much of what now seems so mad to so many people began to take off in academe in the 1990s—for example, via the imposition of compulsory Theory courses. The intellectual roots of those shifts have a much longer history, but it is in the 1990s that various tendencies start to reach critical mass.

A lot of current criticism of the so-called Postwar Consensus does not apply to the Cold War era, but rather to what happened after the Cold War ended. This includes—in many way, especially applies to—how the Hitler-as-Secular-Satan Second World War Open Society mythos came to be mobilised.

This post-1991 mobilisation of Hitler-as-Secular-Satan was greatly helped by the Second World War retreating from shared memory. In part, this was from more and more of those who had lived through the War dying, so the War slid out of living memory. It was also, however, that the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War, meant people no longer lived in a world directly dominated by the consequences of the War.

Folk no longer lived in a Europe, and a world, divided between the victors of the Second World War. Instead, it was a world dominated by the victors of the Cold War. A world that seemed to lack existential threats, at least of the geopolitical form. When the salience of external threats retreats, then the salience of internal differences is elevated. Hitler-as-Secular-Satan could be wielded much more thoroughly against fellow citizens when there was not an external existential threat.

Even after 9/11 and the attack on the Two Towers, the so-called War on Terror entirely lacked the sense of existential threat that the Cold War had generated. After 1991, Western elites became much less concerned with not alienating their working classes.

Not coincidentally, post-1991 is when the discourses of globalisation start taking off. A high point of which was the UN promoting what it was pleased to call replacement migration; importing migrants to replace the children people were not having. It is also when sensitivity about language starts ramping up: a sensitivity that made it easier and easier to functionally exclude working class voices from public discourse, due to their alleged moral vulgarity (racist, sexist, xenophobic, transphobic, etc.).

Source.

When we look at our universities, much of our mainstream media, our artistic and literary worlds, a vicious conformism, dominated by the use of terms of moral abuse, increasingly came to take hold. Looking back, it was in the 1990s that what later became known as cancel culture began to take off—albeit mainly pioneered by activists operating on behalf of Jews—though cancel culture as a broader phenomenon very much intensified from around 2014 onwards.

Source.

Many people have observed that what became known as The Great Awokening represented the politics of academe escaping into the wider society. In a world where much of mainstream media is dominated by graduates of elite universities, and it is within those industries and occupations that so dominate the means by which societies talk to themselves, that this alienated, and alienating, conformism is most marked; it is patterns within academe that we need to examine as a key part of understanding what is going on. Especially given the way social media now links academe, the media, the entertainment and literary-artistic worlds so readily and rapidly.

Blank slate falsities

Our knowledge of genetics, of evolutionary biology, of evolutionary anthropology, is such we now know that blank slate views of humanity are simply false. We know that we cannot expect all human populations, all human groups—even within societies—to have the same distributions of genetic and cultural traits relevant to social outcomes.

We therefore know that differences in average outcomes between the groups are not presumptive indicators of anything. Yet, there are entire industries, disciplines, and realms of discourse, that operate on the basis that differences in outcomes between groups is an automatic moral failure and a presumptive indicator of malicious social forces.

These demonstrably false claims are promulgated—not merely because they have become very useful for various status plays, resource grabs and authority claims—but because the academy is pervaded by ideas fundamentally based on blank slate views of humanity. That is, ideas we know are false. This is especially so with adaptations of French Theory, as evolutionary biology had almost entirely failed to penetrate even French Biology, let alone wider French thought.

Billions of dollars are spent—in academe and in schools—teaching claims about the world that are demonstrably false. Claims that, nevertheless, have great mythic power, have great power to motivate and coordinate. This is dysfunction on a massive scale.

The falsity of these claims matter. You systematically inject false claims about the world—especially on such a massive scale—into public discourse and you create a deeply dysfunctional public discourse. The falsity of the claims matter for the wider society. They matter profoundly.

Their falsity, however, clearly does not functionally matter to, or within, the academy. When was the last time an academic, or academic discipline, was penalised for promulgating false claims about the world? As a discussion of the problems of academe observed:

Another important piece of the puzzle is the lack of one particular kind of incentive: penalties for being wrong, even luminously wrong. As far as I know, no (modern) scholar ever got fined, jail time, or even fired for publishing a genuinely stupid idea. Indeed, in many areas of the academy, such behavior can be richly rewarded. (Working to expose the stupidity of such ideas might be punished, however.) The basic explanation for this is that academics make the rules and they don’t want any that hold them accountable for being wrong. Why would they? Why would anybody?

It's All Academic

Academe does not work on the basis of penalties for falsity, it operates on the basis of gains from approval—and penalties from disapproval—by fellow academics within the various disciplines. That is very much not the same thing. Historian John Lewis Gaddis provides an example of the difference between academic approval and reality-testing:

29:50 When the first documents came out, it was pretty clear that they [the Soviet leadership] really did believe their own ideology. And yet the theorists of International Relations in the West had said the ideology is irrelevant. … And so I can remember going to my Political Science friends and saying, your Theory is not right. We have archival evidence showing that they really did believe the ideology. And my political science friends said, “oh, we don’t want to hear about it. We have to save the Theory. Forget about the archives.”

This is not a laughing matter. Injecting false claims into those being educated to form and carry out foreign, military and diplomatic policy is serious. It is potentially catastrophic.

Getting approval, and avoiding disapproval, by one’s fellow academics matters. As sociologist Musa al-Gharbi observes:

… the fact that tenure provides a lifetime appointments cuts two ways: it’s a fantastic arrangement if you’re liked, respected, and well-integrated in your academic community. A lifetime appointment is pretty miserable, however, if you’re widely reviled and socially isolated within your institution or field.

Inserting “Culture” Into the Culture Wars

Protecting cognitive assets

Entire academic disciplines are built on mastery of Theory. Such Theory being wrong is not merely epistemically awkward, it is career catastrophic. Mastery of Theory is a cognitive asset that an academic’s social, institutional and career standing are built upon. Academics are hugely motivated to protect such cognitive assets. Hence jokes about Science progressing one funeral at a time.

Now, turn that cognitive asset into a moral asset as well, such that adherence to the belief becomes a marker of being a good person. The incentives to protect that now moralised cognitive asset are greatly increased. Not only that, those incentives are not merely individual incentives, they are shared incentives. They are shared among everyone for whom the claims are cognitive and moral assets.

This creates entire networks of people who share a deep interest in protecting those cognitive and moral assets: including protecting them from inconvenient truths. Not only that, they are powerfully motivated to develop, and then adopt, techniques for protecting—and promulgating—the authority of those cognitive and moral assets.

What you then get is selection for ideas with mythic power: ideas that motivate; that coordinate; that have strong rhetorical power, but not for truth. But it is worse than that, as falsity can become an advantage. How so? Because the more one has to rationalise away, to ignore, to not notice, to not question, in order to maintain the shared moral and cognitive asset(s), the stronger the commitment to the shared status game one displays.

Willingness to accept what has to be protected from inconvenient facts and concerns—to engage in such rationalisations and evasions—becomes a mark of mutually-supporting soundness. Conversely, asking the wrong questions, noticing the wrong things, becomes a mark of threatening unsoundness. Such threats to the moral and cognitive assets those within such networks are attempting to protect motivates people to penalise anyone who does so via inconvenient questioning, noticing, facts.

By these mechanisms, academe become not merely prone to over-valued (including false) beliefs, but potentially prone to what clinicians call extreme over-valued beliefs or be a vector for the development of such beliefs:

An extreme overvalued belief is one that is shared by others in a person’s cultural, religious, or subcultural group. The belief is often relished, amplified, and defended by the possessor of the belief and should be differentiated from an obsession or a delusion. The belief grows more dominant over time, more refined and more resistant to challenge. The individual has an intense emotional commitment to the belief and may carry out violent behavior in its service.

The most salient grotesque display of these dynamics are in matters Trans and the required denial of biological realities. It is not, however, remotely the only area. However horrible the damage Trans has done to the mutilated and sterilised bodies of minors and adults, the way economists have dramatically over-valued their efficiency/transactions-focused analysis of immigration—and failed to consider connection, social resilience and cultural difference issues—is clearly doing much broader social and fiscal damage and running serious social risks that economists, hiding behind their mastery of Theory, are blind to. (How many economists grapple with mass rape and sexual abuse as a cost of culturally-incompatible immigration?)

Noticing systematic differences between men and women is another. As these denials of reality are moralised, we end up with: if you criticise men, it’s feminism; if you criticise women, it’s misogyny.

It is surely relevant that claims about immigration have become highly moralised: that supporting immigration has become a sign of moral worth, of broad moral generosity, while criticising immigration is very much not. This dynamic that has much to do with how the “grooming gang” problem in the UK got so bad. (Australia, which has always taken immigration policy much more seriously than the UK—including as a costs and benefits public policy issue—dealt with the same issue much more effectively.)

The protection of cognitive assets and the use of cognitive assets—especially moralised cognitive assets—as status and authority claims readily generates networks of conformity. The larger a network, the greater the benefit of belonging to it and the cheaper it is to add an extra member. This network effect thus has an inherent tendency towards monopoly or, in the case of shared cognitive assets—especially moralised cognitive asset—a tendency towards conformity. Not merely conformity, but policed-by-social-sanction conformity.

This is how you get mountains of bullshit—claims promulgated for their rhetorical power regardless of truth—being erected on molehills of truth. This is how you get mainstream media committed to promulgating and protecting the narratives whose acceptance marks one as a good person; a mainstream media that is therefore against inconvenient concerns, noticings, facts. This is how you get societies spending billions—via their universities and schools—promulgating claims that are not true.

All this rests on the pervasive lack of strong reality tests within academe. It rests on there being realms of social action, and various types of claims, that lack systematic penalties for being wrong about reality.

Every cut or bruise is a form of reality test, a form of reality-correction. Various areas of life have built in reality-tests, or authentication procedures.

An authentication procedure is one that tests claims against reality, such that the better they do, the more likely they are to be true. What we have—flowing out of academe—are more abstract claims that lack such immediate feedback from reality. Science is essentially a knowledge machine based on authentication procedures that have been shown to work, especially in the physical sciences.

Creating mountains of bullshit Theory out of molehills of truth rests on large areas of academe having profoundly inadequate authentication procedures. Instead, approval by other academics is used as a substitute for genuine authentication procedures.

As we can see, approval by other academics is not a genuine authentication procedure. On the contrary, preserving shared cognitive assets—even more so shared moralised cognitive assets—creates powerful incentives, not only to accept false claims about reality, but to collectively protect (and promulgate) such claims.

The uses of Critical Theory

Once we understand this, so much becomes clearer. In particular, why so much of what became known as “wokery”, so much of contemporary progressivism, is based (directly or indirectly) on Critical Theory and its derivatives. (A very workable definition of “woke” is the popularisation of Critical Theory.)

For Critical Theory is several things. It is a mechanism for protecting the mythic power of Marx’s ideas from the failures of his economic Theory. That is, it is a mechanism for protecting, developing and promulgating a set of ideas operating as moralised cognitive assets. It thus represents an assembly, indeed an engine, for promulgating such self-protecting claims and the mechanisms to protect such.

Critical Theory also represents the accurate realisation that Marx’s vision predates, and does not require, his economics. On the contrary, his economics serves his vision. This means that Marx’s economics could be, and was, replaced by other derivations of his underlying oppressor/oppressed analytical and visionary structure, using sex, race, sexuality, gender identity, etc., rather than (economic) class.

Critical Theory is also a mechanism for moralising beliefs in a way that gives them great mythic, and rhetorical, power. What makes a Critical Theory a Critical Theory is the commitment to changing (social) reality, not merely describing it. Such commitment to change is very much treated as a moral asset whose authority trumps all other moral claims: a moral asset operating as moral splendours in the heads for those committed to whatever version of Critical Theory.

But Critical Theory has a further key element: the sought profound social change is not positively specified, it is only negatively specified. Critical Theory holds that we cannot know how the transformed society free of alienation and oppression being sought will operate, we can only know how it will not operate. That is, by critiquing and undermining every negative aspect of existing society, the (as yet unknowable) transformed society will emerge.

This a form of Social Alchemy Theory—burn away all the oppressive aspects of the present, and the golden transformative future will emerge, like gold from base metal. It rests on a constant contrast of the ideal—not an ideal with any specified positive content, only a not-this ideal—against the real.

There are several things to note about this. First, there is no good, reality-tested reason to believe any of it.

Second, it generates a huge—if entirely cheap and spurious—rhetorical advantage. Anything humans have actually achieved will have flaws. The imagined future—especially one lacking any specified positive content—will be flaw free. (Or, at least, can be imagined to be such.) So, adherents of the status strategies that flow from Critical Theory can be as sneeringly self-righteous as they like to anyone attempting to defend actual human achievement.

This has been a feature of the politics of the transformational future, all the way back to Rousseau. It is a politics of performative goodness. Simply accept the politics of the splendours in your head, and you have cognitive assets of such moral worth they trump all others.

Such politics of performative goodness have a history of being promulgated by, and attracting, horrible human beings because it is such physically effortless goodness. They were either originally horrible human beings—Rousseau, Marx—or they became so in the course of implementing these ideas.

Studies have brought out what a thin veil of (self) deception is enough to license bad behaviour. The strike-a-cognitive-pose moral arrogance of the politics of the imagined transformative future has proved enough to licence all sorts of cruel, brutal—indeed mass murderous—behaviour.

Critical Theory further refined the techniques for generating moralised cognitive assets. By fully embracing a not-this system of critique, it could be multiplied into every realm of life.

You can literally have a Critical Theory of anything. Any area of life where there are trade-offs, constraints, outcomes people do not like, you can mount a not-this critique and blame whichever group—men, white folk, heterosexuals, heteronormative, abled folk, thin folk—for those disliked outcomes. This means it can be adapted to, and adopted by, any realm where there is significant social “energy”.

Critical Theory allows its adherents to evade all the awkward questions of trade-offs, all the awkward questions of constraints. Even better, it enables its adherents to treat all and any irksome constraint as oppression, so oppression can always be found.

Better still, it allows its adherents to mock and abuse anyone who does seek to grapple with those trade-offs, those constraints. Which includes, of course, anyone who disagrees with the Critical Theorists.

All this makes it a powerful mechanism for generating shared status claims based on social signals. It can, and has, fed into shared social signals adopted and used by folk who have never read a Critical Theorist in their life. People who have never read—have possibly never heard of—Herbert Marcuse have nevertheless being adapting and adopting his repressive tolerance formula justifying censorship, including the misinformation mavens.

For there is a further key element to Critical Theory. This is the claim that the longed for social transformation requires everyone to be on-board with it; that any dissent is illegitimate because it allows the oppressions of the present to continue. Thus, everyone who dissents is blocking the transformation into the golden, oppression- and alienation-, free future. It is righteous to punish dissent, which then confirms that those who affirm the correct beliefs are moral, as those who dissent are clearly immoral.

This is also a thoroughly totalitarian politics. But it is a powerfully motivating and coordinating politics. The mere splendours in their heads gives them a moral standing, a moral authority, over everyone else. It is the ultimate in moralised cognitive assets. Assets whose alleged moral authority has come to be wielded against science itself.

It absolutely empowers folk to defend their moralised cognitive assets by any means necessary. The splendours in their heads frees them from moral constraints: hence the attraction to horrible people. It provides its adherents with moral treats:

The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people that they will have a chance of maltreating someone. … To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’ — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.

Aldous Huxley, Introduction (July 24, 1933), Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1934).

It just needs one thing. A social milieu where such ideas can incubate and spread free of any authentication procedures that might get in the way.

Anglo-American academe has provided precisely that social milieu. When it comes to promulgating trumps-all status games based on splendours in one’s head, the use of approval by fellow academics as the utterly inadequate substitute for genuine authentication procedures has proved to be the perfect milieu for Critical Theory and its derivatives (Critical Race Theory, Critical Pedagogy, Queer Theory, etc.).

Critical Theory and its derivatives have thus provided a perfected form of the politics of moralised cognitive assets. Anglo-American academe has provided the social milieu for its development and spread. Unsurprisingly, academe has become increasingly dominated by such identitarian, moralised cognitive asset, politics.

Critical Theory playing so well to academic status games is why derivatives of Marxism now pervade the academy far more than OG Marxism ever did.

In his We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, sociologist Musa al-Gharbi argues that there has been more than one Awokening:

• the first in the 1920s,

• the second in the late 1960s,

• the third in the late 1980s and

• the fourth in the 2010s (p.51).

Note that, in each case, Marxism, or derivations thereof, provided an organising core of ideas that could be, and were, adopted and adapted to the social-signalling needs of the moment. These organising-discourse ideas came from:

• Marxism in the 1920s;

• Marcusean Critical Theory New Left in the 1960s;

• further developments of the same, particularly incorporating feminism and Standpoint Theory, in the late 1980s; and

• the most recent derivations of Critical Theory, incorporating adaptations from French Theory and built around intersectionality.

This stream of ideas has kept providing organising discourse for such Awokenings because it involves:

• a core of intolerant zealots, who mobilise the power of the intolerant minority;

• a structure of moralised cognitive assets ideal for “splendour in one’s head” status games, especially against incumbents within organisations;

• some version of oppressed/oppressor dynamics that generates trumping moral authority, and rhetorically powerful claims;

• a useful amount of pseudo-sophisticated falsity that generates commitment dynamics;

• a jargonised discourse that allows mutual signalling and coordination, typically based on the pattern of using your vocabulary but not your dictionary (i.e., giving words in general use special meanings—e.g. Diversity means control over selection, Equity means control over resources, Inclusion means control over speech).

Because this stream of ideas is so adapted for networked conformity based around moralised cognitive asset status games, their penetration of the academy has tended to increase over time. The selection pressures have been for versions better and better adapted to academic status games, supplanting old versions—notably OG Marxism. (Though there are still plenty of Marxists around.)

About the social sciences and humanities

Nevertheless, as we can see from the example of International Relations Theory cited above, the problem extends well beyond Critical Theory. Critical Theory and its derivatives have just honed the game and so been available to be adopted and adapted. There are a whole lot of cognitive assets within academe that people seek to protect well beyond, and before, Critical Theory.

As Thomas Sowell notes—when he discusses authentication procedures in Knowledge and Decisions—much of the social sciences lack systemically effective authentication procedures, relying instead on approval by fellow academics as a substitute authentication procedure. Academics who are typically also invested in those same cognitive assets. One of the problems in contemporary Law Schools is their increasing domination by international law scholars whose work is not subject to authentication by the decisions of real courts, so become purveyors within Law Schools of bullshit academic Theory.

I submit that it is a reasonable working hypothesis that the social sciences have made Western societies stupider—with dysfunctional migration policies being a prime, but hardly only, example. (Yes, I am aware Robert Heinlein got there much earlier with Starship Troopers and Frank Herbert with the Bureau of Sabotage/Consentiency stories: but anticipating things is what good SciFi authors do.)

The social sciences have made Western societies stupider in various ways, not least, as an academic friend noted, by

cartoonish versions of history or why people do things….

The academic incentives for the social sciences are not good. As a perceptive observer has noted:

Scholars in the social sciences and humanities face incentives to 1) make a novel claim, 2) that is counterintuitive, 3) without worry that the claim might be false, even obviously false.

It's All Academic

The incentive to make counter-intuitive novel claims that has been combined with treating constraint as oppression is epitomised by Queer Theory and Transactivism. Hence its “problematising” the concept of woman and generation of ridiculous circumlocutions for the same—uterus-owner, birthing person, chest feeder, semen receptacle, womb-possessing, menstruator.

Males and females of sexually-reproducing species have been successfully identifying each other for perhaps a billion years. It takes a truly disastrous set of incentives—and a dramatic insufficiency of reality-tests—to produce the toxic nonsense of Queer Theory and Transactivism.

Why have a lot of “normie” citizens come to have varying degrees of contempt for academics? Amongst other reasons, because academics tried to tell us that a person with a penis was a woman; that the appropriate response to a gender non-conforming child was to hormonally and surgically mutilate and sterilise them; that childhood sexual innocence needed to be “problematised”; and that flooding societies with any number of immigrants—no matter how culturally incompatible—is an unambiguous social gain: that the net benefits exceed the net costs for all residents over all ranges and regardless of the characteristics of the immigrants.

But such is not remotely the only toxic nonsense to come out of academe. That to be a Marxist—the most murderous political philosophy in human history, producing murderous tyranny after tyranny—or adopt ideas openly derived from Marx (the more common contemporary pattern), is intellectually and morally respectable within academe is bad enough. Mass murder and tyranny after tyranny are reality-tests, as is grim economic stagnation, but much of academe has patently been able to ignore or discount them. (Key Critical Theorists—such as Paulo Friere and Herbert Marcuse—were fans of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, for example.)

This is particularly reprehensible when, clearly, to a lot of academics, being a Western conservative is not morally or intellectually respectable.

Marxism, and its derivatives, do not threaten their status games, conservatism does. That tells you what you need to know about such academic status games.

For there is a deeper problem in using approval by other academics as a substitute authentication mechanism. It invites, in a sense it demands, that academics see themselves as moral and cognitive authenticators—indeed, as the moral and cognitive authenticators.

This is delusory arrogance twice over. First, they are not authenticators, they are substitutes for the same. At best, they can be conduits for things that have been reasonably authenticated: not the same thing. Second, viewing themselves as the moral and cognitive authenticators invites, it encourages, a sense of moral and cognitive superiority over their fellow citizens.

Source.

We can see where the status-games based on such a self-image leads in pervasive academic separation from—indeed contempt for—the inconvenient concerns of the wider citizenry or any positive sense of shared cultural heritage. Much of academe has become actively corrosive of a sense of cultural heritage within the societies that pay for them. This corrosion operates in both directions—out to the wider society, inwards to their own disciplines. Hence, the greatest enemy of the Humanities turns out to be Humanities academics operating on the basis of bullshit Theory.

Ironically, along with this cognitive and moral arrogance, comes a deep anxiety, precisely because the operative mechanism is approval by other academics—which can be withdrawn, or worse, if you do not toe the shared status-game line. Academe ends up being pervaded by a morally and cognitive arrogant fearfulness that generates vicious, but pervasively dysfunctional, conformities.

For there is a curious corollary to the moral monopoly effects of networks based on shared cognitive and moral assets. While adding in more people increases the power of the network, it also threatens to dilute the status-gain. This generates purity spirals from the tension between reinforcement-by-inclusion and rationing-by-exclusion.

Since the moralised cognitive assets operate as piety displays, not genuine virtue signals—they are not costly enough to be strong signals and too performative to be virtue—they have to be regularly “updated” to maintain status-through-exclusion. Hence regular “scandals” where things that were perfectly acceptable, even laudable, until just now suddenly become a marker of profound moral failure. While the literary field has been particularly prone to such, they are using ideas and techniques that come from academe.

There is no reality in any of these shifting goal posts. It is purely about status games in social milieus with authentication-by-approval due to the insufficiency of genuine authentication mechanisms. Nevertheless, the effects on individuals can be devastating: hence the fearful arrogant cowardice which has become such a feature of academe (but also the artistic, entertainment and literary worlds).

One is reminded of historian Stephen Kotkin’s observation that the essence of totalitarianism is to get people to use their agency to destroy their own agency.

What to do?

The first thing to do is to stop funding ANY activist scholarship—that is, scholarship based on moralised cognitive assets or the generation thereof.

Do not use education institutions to train anyone for any occupation where there is no strong feedback from the quality of the training, or suitability for occupation, back to the institution. That means, get rid of Education, Nursing and Media Faculties and Schools and go back to an apprenticeship/trainee model for nurses, teachers and journalists.

More generally, tie any taxpayer funding to actual outcomes for students (say, the average employment/income of students 10 years later). Make universities carry the financial can for defaults on student loans.

Do not fund anything based on blank slate conceptions of the human. Insist on scientific consilience: specifically, compatibility with evolutionary biology. This means stop funding research in bullshit disciplines and for bullshit novelty. (It also, by the way, means requiring Medical faculties to take evolutionary nutrition seriously and moving international law out of the Law Schools.)

Stop using peer review as a performance indicator. Stop using citation metrics as a performance indicator. All they show is level of approval by other academics and, as we can see, that is not a reliable authentication device.

Stop attempting to bureaucratise scientific discovery. It clearly hasn’t worked.

Source.

Yes, all this would massively reduce funding for higher education. Given the utter toxic nonsense that academe has been incubating and promulgating, this would be a social and civilisational boon.

ADDENDUM: The Great Helen Joyce explains just how corrosive injecting a lie about a basic feature of the world has proved to be.

ADDENDUM SECUNDUS: So much of the problems of our time are caused, or aggravated, by the growth of parasitic, even predatory, bureaucracy. Universities provide prime examples of this pattern.

ADDENDUM TERTIUS: What is happening in Psychology, and to Therapy, is providing a classic example of how academic status games not only do not provide sound authentication mechanisms, they are overriding the same. It also provides an example of the social sciences making Western societies stupider.

References

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