Consider the drift that will happen when reality-testing is absent. Theory must become ever more absurd for it to 'gain ground'. Simply adhering to older theory, as say in the liberation sequence attends no gain in status for a professor of that theory. Theory must push boundaries, and since there are no reality boundaries, is there any direction for theory to evolve but toward the absurd? Eventually the victim stack will be so finely parsed as to actually apply to individuals - which ironically enough puts us right back to Rousseau.
I think you're right, and that the reason is because academia is committed to novelty. The mutations themselves will happen at random, and so in theory can as well be useful as be harmful – but the one selective pressure is that they be novel, and most wisdom isn't novel.
Effectively we're looking at an evolutionary process, run at speed, without the corrective pressures of:
1. natural selection; and (even more importantly)
2. the fact that in the wild any innovation must piggyback on the 99.9999% of genes which didn't mutate into the new generation.
Even cancer isn't as extreme as that. And ultimately even a cancer has to be able to support itself. In this case it looks like all that is left is cutting funding, whether directly or in terms of stopping other revenue sources. Brutal, but not if the alternative is the cancer killing the host.
Government involvement always distorts market signals. We need to end the student loan programs as well as the research funding (DEI sinecures). If we do thus, we'll quickly see how inorganic all this bullshit is, as it bankrupts the universities that fail to address the needs of the market.
In the above disruptive academic paper graph it is quite rational that evidentiary fields like the hard sciences would narrow since with time and technology gains the field of unknowns closes.
However in that would result is the speculation over unknowns growing into the fantastic. This is indeed what has happened - Sabine Hossenfelder has called out the "quantum BS" in her field, and unfortunately paid a professional price for it exactly as per the article.
“French theory” is an American invention. It arose from a need in the late 70s and early 80s for a way to distinguish “brilliant” academics from those who “don’t get it.” Moreover, it allowed a space for intellectual creativity in a rather slow and boring intellectual environment. And granted authority to those who could pretend to understand. However, those theorists that were chosen as a marketing blitz were working from within a very different context. France’s much richer intellectual culture produced resonances that were usually mistranslated by American scholars. Spivak admits to barely knowing enough French to translate Derrida. The original texts (by Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault, Deleuze, etc), were inventive and playful, but also rigorous in their intellectual lineage. It was not “anything goes”, but rather an attempt to show how frameworks of knowledge are produced and evolve. Many were extremely critical of Marxists and Freudians.
Yep. Another Anglo-American academic status game. It is why I talk about adaptations from French Theory.
More generally, it is often not what the original thinker actually said or wrote but what people adapt/took from that which resonates and so replicates.
As a French I wonder why you think our intellectual culture is richer. We have not produced anything worthwhile for quite a while.
I think you are mistaking the legacy of the enlightenment with the current reality.
Many of the bullshit theory grown in the US actually have roots in French « intellectuals ».
The authors you cited produced some of the worse lies one could think of and their pretend rigorousness is only the result of rampant French elitism where how you present is way more important than what you are actually saying.
To me it looks like the US actually has a better self-correcting feedback loop. Meanwhile in France we persist with those absurd ideas and there is one politically arguing to remove the power of the obese National Education, even as we become poorer.
For full disclosure, I am a professor and f French literature. I studied in the U.S. and in France. There are many problems with both societies and education systems. France is definitely losing its edge. However, the Grande École system has, until recently, been very good at selecting the best and creating a competitive elite—though as Marc Bloch wrote long ago (L’étrange défaite), this creates other issues. The height of what passes for French Theory came about in the late 1960s when marginalized intellectuals were trying to negotiate a space for thinking outside of Hegel and Marx (Deleuze and Derrida’s “difference” and “différance” were ways to think outside of dialectics), outside of Freud, and outside of simplistic American scientism. The result showed that structuralism (Lévy-Strauss et co) could only create more and more elaborate excuses for the emptiness at its center, what we see later replicated in string theory. More eccentric thinkers like Virilio (a practicing Catholic) and Baudrillard created provocative writing that pushed people to think outside of power structures and reaffirmed what their values are. These were never meant to be taken literally. More recently, Jacques Rancière has rejected Althusser’s scientific Marxism and has pointed out the antidemocratic tendencies of neoliberalism. Barbara Stiegler has shown how management discourse misreads evolutionary theory. Catherine Malabou combines neuroscience and philosophy. Moreover, there are whole universities “on the right” in France (Paris Dauphine), and disagreement is a valuable tradition that is just not tolerated in the Anglo-American world.
Very interesting perspective and much of it is new for me here. Thank you. You particularly gained my respect by mentioning the abortive string 'theory' - which is more insightful than majority of the US physicists are capable of - which is exactly the point. It was a stupid idea with a cult following of most mathematically inclined - meaning for 5 decades it was - if you don't believe it you just aren't smart enough to get it. Right on.
An economic system consisting of property rights, rule of law, and freedom of contract led to “the wealth of nations” and was a sound foundation for peace between nations as well.
Personal virtues such as hard work, perseverance, ingenuity, initiative, self-discipline, personal responsibility, good manners, and wholesome living could put any individual on the path to a life in which he or she could become “healthy, wealthy, and wise,” or at least relatively prosperous.
While each proposition represented mainstream thought in the United States and Britain in the nineteenth century, for the next hundred years most of the intellectual and pedagogical activity of university professors in the humanities and social sciences was dedicated to undermining respect for those ideas.
At no point were those propositions ever disproved by evidence. Instead, a deep tribal animosity developed among intellectuals through which ridicule, slander, and libel became accepted as adequate grounds for rejecting the insights that had made Britain and the U.S. the first societies in human history in which the masses were prosperous.
This century-long attack on important truths that benefit humanity, replacing them with contradictory information, constitutes one of the greatest crimes against humanity ever committed. "
There's a lot of good here. Support your larger point. I do think you need to separate strands of critical theory. More on that below.
First though, In the "what to do" section, the call to "stop funding ANY activist scholarship—that is, scholarship based on moralised cognitive assets or the generation thereof" will catch a lot of good scholarship, including mine, on African American literary history, because there is no definition that will capture historical, archival scholarship. In the last 20 years there are a lot of scholars who have worked under the radar and any fix has to see them. There is excellent scholarship amidst the terrible.
Second -- the dominance of certain theories, such as intersectionality, is so baked into LLM training data, that the effect on high school students asking questions is bigger than you think. Ask your LLM about Kimberle Crenshaw and intersectionality and you will get answers that are more muscular than any university critical theorist. Seriously try it. The LLMs aren't dominated by Derrida or Lacan but they are by Crenshaw and Foucault and mostly Crenshaw. If you ask your LLM for three arguments rebutting intersectionality, you'll see what I mean. That's your real problem right there.
What we need is a good definition of activist scholarship that captures having preset conclusions, so that scholarship subordinated to politics and political visions is not being funded.
Your point about LLMs is a powerful one. Pre-biasing the output is clearly what the CCP wants and is likely why the Biden Administration was attempting to set up a managed AI cartel.
I've thought a lot about this, and I really believe that the modern left (and its apotheosis, academia) is primarily a function of excessive comfort and privilege, and class disconnection. The beliefs are sincere (for the most part) but they only become THE beliefs because they either generate material gains for the elite class, or because they flatter their psychological identities. Such ridiculous notions are able to fester because we have a huge group of people effectively insulated from both the natural world and the world of human struggle. They only have the barest (and easily dismissed/reframed) encounters with crime, scarcity, aggression, and competition. They are living in a dreamworld, and nowhere is that truer than on campus.
It's ironic because within 10 miles of nearly every selective private school in the United States are desperate ghettoes and diminished working class slums. You'd think these idealistic revolutionaries might want to put their ideas into action, like the SDS did back in the 1960's. But I guess that's scary.
The old Pater saying - “all art constantly aspires to the condition of music” has a correlate, “all inquiry constantly aspires to the condition of physics”.
Virtually all “academe” tries desperately to be empirical but ends up collapsing into consensus practice, like hairdressing or car repair, law or marketing, and today’s academic consensus practice has a phrase - science mimicry.
Virtually all of what you survey is a manifestation of ever escalating desperation for legitimacy and protection from criticism - a mimicry of pure science and philosophy much like trans is a mimicry of sex.
Sontag calls this effect in a different domain “piety without religion”, as in “I practice religion” being equivalent to “I speak language”. “I study theory” is the telegraphing statement, but of course the actual practice as you allude to is “bullshit”.
There is also a humorous problem most people never recognize in higher education, the “Declarative University”. The US was rich for a period in teaching schools for trades - agriculture, education, law, nursing, accounting, medicine - but there was a spark to inflate schools into colleges and then Universities - inflation is a cosmological constant in pseudo-academia.
When one writes “academe” in the US they actually mean the teaching staff - “faculty” - of glorified trade schools.
Princeton by contrast is a University, and has no trade schools - no Law or Business school, no Medical or Journalism, compared with Stanford, which is a glorified business school.
I would expect philosophy, classics, language, pure sciences in “academe”, not “studies” level coursework. One doesn’t study Classics “theory” really.
I find a retreat to the Bogeymen of Marx and Foucault a bit like the worry about Nietzsche in the earlier part of the 20th century. Marx, Freud, Chomsky, Heidegger, Sartre, Adorno, dead-ends famous for being famous at something, yet not persistent at anything actually.
The issue is very poor quality ideas which resonate between mirrors in trade schools desperate to mimic proof of “a theory”, any theory, legitimizing them as creating thoughts as penetrating as those produced by a Kant or Einstein.
The quench is as you point out is to stop funding them.
The production of meaninglessness is a big industry though. There are very few academic disciplines which have collapsed - after all divinity schools are still alive and kicking.
Agreed. This is all a sea of bullshit with less value than actual bullshit.
While they pretend otherwise this is exactly like religious nonsense but the major difference is that at least the taxpayer isn’t forced to pay for the religions.
They are just the left arm of the state, desperately trying to justify its existence and ever growing weight, just like the clergy was as a means to give power/legitimacy to kings back then.
They should be thrown out but alas everyone is too busy working to pay for their nonsense.
When you are arguing about unprovable phenomena there is no evidentiary mechanism to "reality test", hence the only proof available is social proof. This is all identical to theological arguments about angels fitting on a hairpin, or Bolsheviks arguing about which strain of Marxism was right about some esoteric point.
Some time ago I found a great article delineating precisely the opposite - experiences of someone who attended Oxford and describes exactly how the old ways have preserved intellectual rigour:
Very excellent article. Here in backwater Brasil, I live in an upscale gated community surrounded by miles of Berlin wall and electrical fencing, safe from crime, garbage, vandalism, flooding and landslides, environmental degradation, overcrowding, poor ventilation, bad smells, poor people and wild dogs. My neighbors are JUDGES, POLICE COMMISSIONERS, PROSECUTORS, UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS, POLITICITIANS and HIGH LEVEL BUREAUCRATS. Thank God we are ALL SAFE!
Finally got a chance to read this. Did not disappoint. I wish it were forced into every brain with Western European ancestry. It's hard not to look at them as imbeciles.
You should carry this argument further. There are ostensibly-scientific areas of the social sciences, like polling, that have no accountability mechanisms. Election polls at least have to meet reality every few years (and are sometimes exposed as being woefully wrong). But polls on "issues" and public opinion never face any accountability. Your argument isn't just about harebrained Lit Theory and CRT. It should also embrace those areas of social science that enjoy a superficial objectivity.
One criticism: Gaddis is not a reliable critic of IR theory. I admire and assign Gaddis' work, but he is often dogmatically close-minded about political science in a way that blinds him. IR Theory (critiqued in the excerpt you cite) has often maintained that the Cold War would have happened because of the postwar distribution of power, regardless whether or not the Soviet leadership in fact believed its own ideology. Gaddis, I think, sometimes misrepresents that idea in order to discredit political science. He commits a similar error in Landscape of History. He lambasts political scientists for making "generalizations," and stubbornly refuses to admit that historians are also resting their arguments on generalizations. Gaddis' critique of social science is in fact much less sophisticated than the one you present here.
Excellent points. I am not familiar with Gaddis’s work, so thank you for the extra information. He referred to something I have long disliked about the Realist school of IR, so it resonated with me.
Going back to the trainee/apprenticeship model would also likely improve the staffing levels in hospitals and might even reduce the costs as one could justifiably pay trainees less - I'm sure student nurses 40-50 years ago were not paid as much as RNs. And it might even improve retention. And it would mean many countries could stop bringing in so many immigrants to fill these posts if the trainees were working from day one.
I'm a strong believer in returning to the apprenticeship training model - and there are manifold reasons for it well beyond the article's claims. And I'm saying that as someone with postgrad study. In my own lifetime I remember a Supreme Court judge appointed who never did a law degree but was one of the last generation of article-trained lawyers.
The major benefit is that the prior generations gained the job first and subsequently got the training - this has been turned upside down with thousands of students pouring into fields they have no hope ever getting a job in, front-loading their lives with debt and a wasted 3-4 years. This has got to be one of the greatest wastes of public resources in history.
I would love to see a uni funding model where the tuition fees/govt funding are only payable to the institution in return for placing the graduate in employment. The repercussions would be quite staggering - and hence will not happen.
A fascinating article and without a doubt the clearest explanation for the insanity we have been living in the last couple decades. I will be reading it over again, likely several times and sharing widely!
How dare you write a beautiful and brilliant essay!
Thanks for writing, the research and sharing.
Towards the end I was reminded of a conversation I had at the end of my undergrad studies with my tutor (studying politics and int relations), where I felt defeated and asked why it was that so much of what we were studying was bullshit, aka not applicable to the real world. I don't remember much of his reply, except that he did use the word bullshit and did admit that it was so. My estimation of him as a human went up after the conversation.
In terms of your conclusions, something to consider is the way we have socially engineered the perception of the importance of a university degree. While working I've come to appreciate technical diplomas are much more valuable than university degrees, which at top universities really means access to a networking club, while "know how" is often learned either while working or at technical short courses. Unfortunately this is a tough nut to crack and plays to our unconscious love of hierarchies and (I'll use Marxist language because I know you're so fond of it) class signifiers. The aristocracy likes to have different tastes to distinguish itself.
And all the French thinkers weren't bad, even though it was thanks to CIA funding that we got their (and the Frankfurt's school) rise to occupy an unhealthy amount of space in our heads. I still think Foucault's analysis of power helps us understand the world better, although I'm totally with you on the critical theory criticisms. And I enjoy Bourdieu.
Basically we need hard times to burn off all the rotten bullshit that's clogging our lives.
I think we also need new theories to propose different orderings of society, and then some experiments to see what works. Otherwise we're basically stuck between false capitalism masquerading as liberalism and false tyranny masquerading as socialists. Neither of these two alternatives are any good and both are rehashed reheated bullshit. If we had wise authentication mechanisms society would probably develop more efficient and generous welfare systems than exist today, and beyond the wildest imagination of all the failed communist tyrannies, suitable to allowing everyone to lead healthy and fulfilling lives, while keeping unnecessary bureaucracy and rules in check and allowing people to creatively pursue their ambitions (without unnecessarily infringing on others health). Wishful thinking!
Networking, status signifiers and credentiallism have absolutely inflated the appeal of, and misdirected the content of, university degrees. The disastrous SCOTUS “disparate impact” decision in Briggs v Duke Power had a magnifying effect.
Foucault’s historical characterisations were not worth much, but historian Stephen Kotkin found his conversations with Foucault enlightening about the everyday and ordinary operations of power, which makes me think better of Foucault. Kotkin’s online lectures and discussions are gems of the internet. (So are Timothy Snyder’s but only on things east of the Hajnal Line, where he has done the actual archival work.)
The bits of Bourdieu I have come across did not impress me, mainly because I found his notion of capital unimpressive. Riffing off Bourdieu’s concept of capital is easily the worst aspect of Musa al-Gharbi’s otherwise enlightening ‘We Have Never Been Woke’.
Thanks very much for the complimentary and enlightening comment.
Bourdieu has produced some of the dumbest bullshit I have ever read. His pretend classification of class signifier already had little statistical power back in his days and are completely wrong in today’s richer world.
It’s insane someone saying things so dumb ever got airtime. I recently watched a French archive interview of him and the man was just full of himself, unable to answer the most basic questions in a clear no-nonsense way.
He is just the result of the French education system that rewards obedience (particularly communist adjacent ideologies) and stupid hard work instead of actual quality/correctness.
It’s the legacy of the French Revolution and further solidification of communist ideals that happened after WW2.
Since France cannot let go of those highly dubious ideologies it is now in terrible economic position, on the brink of collapse.
I'll chase down Kotkin and al-Gharbi, I'm not familiar with their contributions.
In terms of Bourdieu, even though my anthropologist friends have told me his ideas had been surpassed, I always found his theory of Habitus to be simple and well thought out (it's the structuralist view in sociology), the gist being how our social context influences our views and values. In much the same vein, perhaps simplistically, but riffing off what you wrote, I've found Foucault's identification of power as something inherent in our interpersonal relationships and between groups to be useful in analyzing social dynamics. In my postgrad studies (2008) I veered off into trying to understand how the slums were cleared out of the city center in New Delhi (India) in preparation for the Commonwealth games (India was trying to emulate the success of the Shanghai Olympics of 06), my hometown lol, and was surprised to discover an entire narrative had been crafted around the word "nuisance" (of slum dwellings), which got so bad that it literally turned into a frenzy of demolitions, at the height of which anyone from a well to-do neighborhood could file a court petition asking for the demolition of slum dwellings near their home (regardless of whether they themselves were legit property owners; we're talking about India lol) and the next day the police would turn up with demolition equipment and tear down the shacks (without due diligence), even if said shacks had been for years and in some cases decades. It was an eyeopener in terms of seeing a narrative transform itself into reality so glaringly. I have a feeling that given the mythology around 1968 people like Foucault, who undoubtedly made some valid contributions, were elevated up into being idols. Recently I read somewhere that like many folks from that French milieu he was into changing age consent laws, which if true (and probably is) would devalue him in my opinion. That said, even the classical luminaries among the Greeks weren't exactly my cup of tea in terms of their proclivities, but I still read Plato, etc.
Foucault was a pedophile (as where many others like Sartre and Beauvoir). Anything you read from him should be met with high skepticism. I doubt there is much of value to be found.
Great writing Lorenzo! You always have such a way with words when you get right to the core of the problems with the modern 'academic' (unscientific) way of thinking.
Doesn’t the publication of the Revolt of the Elites written in the early 90s suggest your thesis that the gulf between elites and normie concerns only dramatically widened after communism fell? He was writing from long observations of what went before not after the fall of the Wall
Consider the drift that will happen when reality-testing is absent. Theory must become ever more absurd for it to 'gain ground'. Simply adhering to older theory, as say in the liberation sequence attends no gain in status for a professor of that theory. Theory must push boundaries, and since there are no reality boundaries, is there any direction for theory to evolve but toward the absurd? Eventually the victim stack will be so finely parsed as to actually apply to individuals - which ironically enough puts us right back to Rousseau.
Nicely put.
I think you're right, and that the reason is because academia is committed to novelty. The mutations themselves will happen at random, and so in theory can as well be useful as be harmful – but the one selective pressure is that they be novel, and most wisdom isn't novel.
Effectively we're looking at an evolutionary process, run at speed, without the corrective pressures of:
1. natural selection; and (even more importantly)
2. the fact that in the wild any innovation must piggyback on the 99.9999% of genes which didn't mutate into the new generation.
Even cancer isn't as extreme as that. And ultimately even a cancer has to be able to support itself. In this case it looks like all that is left is cutting funding, whether directly or in terms of stopping other revenue sources. Brutal, but not if the alternative is the cancer killing the host.
Government involvement always distorts market signals. We need to end the student loan programs as well as the research funding (DEI sinecures). If we do thus, we'll quickly see how inorganic all this bullshit is, as it bankrupts the universities that fail to address the needs of the market.
Spot on.
In the above disruptive academic paper graph it is quite rational that evidentiary fields like the hard sciences would narrow since with time and technology gains the field of unknowns closes.
However in that would result is the speculation over unknowns growing into the fantastic. This is indeed what has happened - Sabine Hossenfelder has called out the "quantum BS" in her field, and unfortunately paid a professional price for it exactly as per the article.
“French theory” is an American invention. It arose from a need in the late 70s and early 80s for a way to distinguish “brilliant” academics from those who “don’t get it.” Moreover, it allowed a space for intellectual creativity in a rather slow and boring intellectual environment. And granted authority to those who could pretend to understand. However, those theorists that were chosen as a marketing blitz were working from within a very different context. France’s much richer intellectual culture produced resonances that were usually mistranslated by American scholars. Spivak admits to barely knowing enough French to translate Derrida. The original texts (by Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault, Deleuze, etc), were inventive and playful, but also rigorous in their intellectual lineage. It was not “anything goes”, but rather an attempt to show how frameworks of knowledge are produced and evolve. Many were extremely critical of Marxists and Freudians.
Yep. Another Anglo-American academic status game. It is why I talk about adaptations from French Theory.
More generally, it is often not what the original thinker actually said or wrote but what people adapt/took from that which resonates and so replicates.
As a French I wonder why you think our intellectual culture is richer. We have not produced anything worthwhile for quite a while.
I think you are mistaking the legacy of the enlightenment with the current reality.
Many of the bullshit theory grown in the US actually have roots in French « intellectuals ».
The authors you cited produced some of the worse lies one could think of and their pretend rigorousness is only the result of rampant French elitism where how you present is way more important than what you are actually saying.
To me it looks like the US actually has a better self-correcting feedback loop. Meanwhile in France we persist with those absurd ideas and there is one politically arguing to remove the power of the obese National Education, even as we become poorer.
For full disclosure, I am a professor and f French literature. I studied in the U.S. and in France. There are many problems with both societies and education systems. France is definitely losing its edge. However, the Grande École system has, until recently, been very good at selecting the best and creating a competitive elite—though as Marc Bloch wrote long ago (L’étrange défaite), this creates other issues. The height of what passes for French Theory came about in the late 1960s when marginalized intellectuals were trying to negotiate a space for thinking outside of Hegel and Marx (Deleuze and Derrida’s “difference” and “différance” were ways to think outside of dialectics), outside of Freud, and outside of simplistic American scientism. The result showed that structuralism (Lévy-Strauss et co) could only create more and more elaborate excuses for the emptiness at its center, what we see later replicated in string theory. More eccentric thinkers like Virilio (a practicing Catholic) and Baudrillard created provocative writing that pushed people to think outside of power structures and reaffirmed what their values are. These were never meant to be taken literally. More recently, Jacques Rancière has rejected Althusser’s scientific Marxism and has pointed out the antidemocratic tendencies of neoliberalism. Barbara Stiegler has shown how management discourse misreads evolutionary theory. Catherine Malabou combines neuroscience and philosophy. Moreover, there are whole universities “on the right” in France (Paris Dauphine), and disagreement is a valuable tradition that is just not tolerated in the Anglo-American world.
Very interesting perspective and much of it is new for me here. Thank you. You particularly gained my respect by mentioning the abortive string 'theory' - which is more insightful than majority of the US physicists are capable of - which is exactly the point. It was a stupid idea with a cult following of most mathematically inclined - meaning for 5 decades it was - if you don't believe it you just aren't smart enough to get it. Right on.
Academia as the World's Leading Social Problem,
"Nineteenth-century liberals believed that:
An economic system consisting of property rights, rule of law, and freedom of contract led to “the wealth of nations” and was a sound foundation for peace between nations as well.
Personal virtues such as hard work, perseverance, ingenuity, initiative, self-discipline, personal responsibility, good manners, and wholesome living could put any individual on the path to a life in which he or she could become “healthy, wealthy, and wise,” or at least relatively prosperous.
While each proposition represented mainstream thought in the United States and Britain in the nineteenth century, for the next hundred years most of the intellectual and pedagogical activity of university professors in the humanities and social sciences was dedicated to undermining respect for those ideas.
At no point were those propositions ever disproved by evidence. Instead, a deep tribal animosity developed among intellectuals through which ridicule, slander, and libel became accepted as adequate grounds for rejecting the insights that had made Britain and the U.S. the first societies in human history in which the masses were prosperous.
This century-long attack on important truths that benefit humanity, replacing them with contradictory information, constitutes one of the greatest crimes against humanity ever committed. "
https://jamesgmartin.center/2012/08/academia-the-worlds-leading-social-problem/
Great essay, thanks for pointing it out to me.
There's a lot of good here. Support your larger point. I do think you need to separate strands of critical theory. More on that below.
First though, In the "what to do" section, the call to "stop funding ANY activist scholarship—that is, scholarship based on moralised cognitive assets or the generation thereof" will catch a lot of good scholarship, including mine, on African American literary history, because there is no definition that will capture historical, archival scholarship. In the last 20 years there are a lot of scholars who have worked under the radar and any fix has to see them. There is excellent scholarship amidst the terrible.
Second -- the dominance of certain theories, such as intersectionality, is so baked into LLM training data, that the effect on high school students asking questions is bigger than you think. Ask your LLM about Kimberle Crenshaw and intersectionality and you will get answers that are more muscular than any university critical theorist. Seriously try it. The LLMs aren't dominated by Derrida or Lacan but they are by Crenshaw and Foucault and mostly Crenshaw. If you ask your LLM for three arguments rebutting intersectionality, you'll see what I mean. That's your real problem right there.
What we need is a good definition of activist scholarship that captures having preset conclusions, so that scholarship subordinated to politics and political visions is not being funded.
Your point about LLMs is a powerful one. Pre-biasing the output is clearly what the CCP wants and is likely why the Biden Administration was attempting to set up a managed AI cartel.
I've thought a lot about this, and I really believe that the modern left (and its apotheosis, academia) is primarily a function of excessive comfort and privilege, and class disconnection. The beliefs are sincere (for the most part) but they only become THE beliefs because they either generate material gains for the elite class, or because they flatter their psychological identities. Such ridiculous notions are able to fester because we have a huge group of people effectively insulated from both the natural world and the world of human struggle. They only have the barest (and easily dismissed/reframed) encounters with crime, scarcity, aggression, and competition. They are living in a dreamworld, and nowhere is that truer than on campus.
It's ironic because within 10 miles of nearly every selective private school in the United States are desperate ghettoes and diminished working class slums. You'd think these idealistic revolutionaries might want to put their ideas into action, like the SDS did back in the 1960's. But I guess that's scary.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-progressive-agenda-as-pure-class
That was a whalloping big essay.
The old Pater saying - “all art constantly aspires to the condition of music” has a correlate, “all inquiry constantly aspires to the condition of physics”.
Virtually all “academe” tries desperately to be empirical but ends up collapsing into consensus practice, like hairdressing or car repair, law or marketing, and today’s academic consensus practice has a phrase - science mimicry.
Virtually all of what you survey is a manifestation of ever escalating desperation for legitimacy and protection from criticism - a mimicry of pure science and philosophy much like trans is a mimicry of sex.
Sontag calls this effect in a different domain “piety without religion”, as in “I practice religion” being equivalent to “I speak language”. “I study theory” is the telegraphing statement, but of course the actual practice as you allude to is “bullshit”.
There is also a humorous problem most people never recognize in higher education, the “Declarative University”. The US was rich for a period in teaching schools for trades - agriculture, education, law, nursing, accounting, medicine - but there was a spark to inflate schools into colleges and then Universities - inflation is a cosmological constant in pseudo-academia.
When one writes “academe” in the US they actually mean the teaching staff - “faculty” - of glorified trade schools.
Princeton by contrast is a University, and has no trade schools - no Law or Business school, no Medical or Journalism, compared with Stanford, which is a glorified business school.
I would expect philosophy, classics, language, pure sciences in “academe”, not “studies” level coursework. One doesn’t study Classics “theory” really.
I find a retreat to the Bogeymen of Marx and Foucault a bit like the worry about Nietzsche in the earlier part of the 20th century. Marx, Freud, Chomsky, Heidegger, Sartre, Adorno, dead-ends famous for being famous at something, yet not persistent at anything actually.
The issue is very poor quality ideas which resonate between mirrors in trade schools desperate to mimic proof of “a theory”, any theory, legitimizing them as creating thoughts as penetrating as those produced by a Kant or Einstein.
The quench is as you point out is to stop funding them.
The production of meaninglessness is a big industry though. There are very few academic disciplines which have collapsed - after all divinity schools are still alive and kicking.
Agreed. This is all a sea of bullshit with less value than actual bullshit.
While they pretend otherwise this is exactly like religious nonsense but the major difference is that at least the taxpayer isn’t forced to pay for the religions.
They are just the left arm of the state, desperately trying to justify its existence and ever growing weight, just like the clergy was as a means to give power/legitimacy to kings back then.
They should be thrown out but alas everyone is too busy working to pay for their nonsense.
When many people say you don’t need to finish school to run a business, they aren’t far off.
When you are arguing about unprovable phenomena there is no evidentiary mechanism to "reality test", hence the only proof available is social proof. This is all identical to theological arguments about angels fitting on a hairpin, or Bolsheviks arguing about which strain of Marxism was right about some esoteric point.
Some time ago I found a great article delineating precisely the opposite - experiences of someone who attended Oxford and describes exactly how the old ways have preserved intellectual rigour:
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/5-ways-to-stop-ai-cheating?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2Feducation%20oxford&utm_medium=reader2
A very worth while read.
Very excellent article. Here in backwater Brasil, I live in an upscale gated community surrounded by miles of Berlin wall and electrical fencing, safe from crime, garbage, vandalism, flooding and landslides, environmental degradation, overcrowding, poor ventilation, bad smells, poor people and wild dogs. My neighbors are JUDGES, POLICE COMMISSIONERS, PROSECUTORS, UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS, POLITICITIANS and HIGH LEVEL BUREAUCRATS. Thank God we are ALL SAFE!
Finally got a chance to read this. Did not disappoint. I wish it were forced into every brain with Western European ancestry. It's hard not to look at them as imbeciles.
Terrific piece.
You should carry this argument further. There are ostensibly-scientific areas of the social sciences, like polling, that have no accountability mechanisms. Election polls at least have to meet reality every few years (and are sometimes exposed as being woefully wrong). But polls on "issues" and public opinion never face any accountability. Your argument isn't just about harebrained Lit Theory and CRT. It should also embrace those areas of social science that enjoy a superficial objectivity.
One criticism: Gaddis is not a reliable critic of IR theory. I admire and assign Gaddis' work, but he is often dogmatically close-minded about political science in a way that blinds him. IR Theory (critiqued in the excerpt you cite) has often maintained that the Cold War would have happened because of the postwar distribution of power, regardless whether or not the Soviet leadership in fact believed its own ideology. Gaddis, I think, sometimes misrepresents that idea in order to discredit political science. He commits a similar error in Landscape of History. He lambasts political scientists for making "generalizations," and stubbornly refuses to admit that historians are also resting their arguments on generalizations. Gaddis' critique of social science is in fact much less sophisticated than the one you present here.
Excellent points. I am not familiar with Gaddis’s work, so thank you for the extra information. He referred to something I have long disliked about the Realist school of IR, so it resonated with me.
Going back to the trainee/apprenticeship model would also likely improve the staffing levels in hospitals and might even reduce the costs as one could justifiably pay trainees less - I'm sure student nurses 40-50 years ago were not paid as much as RNs. And it might even improve retention. And it would mean many countries could stop bringing in so many immigrants to fill these posts if the trainees were working from day one.
I'm a strong believer in returning to the apprenticeship training model - and there are manifold reasons for it well beyond the article's claims. And I'm saying that as someone with postgrad study. In my own lifetime I remember a Supreme Court judge appointed who never did a law degree but was one of the last generation of article-trained lawyers.
The major benefit is that the prior generations gained the job first and subsequently got the training - this has been turned upside down with thousands of students pouring into fields they have no hope ever getting a job in, front-loading their lives with debt and a wasted 3-4 years. This has got to be one of the greatest wastes of public resources in history.
I would love to see a uni funding model where the tuition fees/govt funding are only payable to the institution in return for placing the graduate in employment. The repercussions would be quite staggering - and hence will not happen.
A fascinating article and without a doubt the clearest explanation for the insanity we have been living in the last couple decades. I will be reading it over again, likely several times and sharing widely!
How dare you write a beautiful and brilliant essay!
Thanks for writing, the research and sharing.
Towards the end I was reminded of a conversation I had at the end of my undergrad studies with my tutor (studying politics and int relations), where I felt defeated and asked why it was that so much of what we were studying was bullshit, aka not applicable to the real world. I don't remember much of his reply, except that he did use the word bullshit and did admit that it was so. My estimation of him as a human went up after the conversation.
In terms of your conclusions, something to consider is the way we have socially engineered the perception of the importance of a university degree. While working I've come to appreciate technical diplomas are much more valuable than university degrees, which at top universities really means access to a networking club, while "know how" is often learned either while working or at technical short courses. Unfortunately this is a tough nut to crack and plays to our unconscious love of hierarchies and (I'll use Marxist language because I know you're so fond of it) class signifiers. The aristocracy likes to have different tastes to distinguish itself.
And all the French thinkers weren't bad, even though it was thanks to CIA funding that we got their (and the Frankfurt's school) rise to occupy an unhealthy amount of space in our heads. I still think Foucault's analysis of power helps us understand the world better, although I'm totally with you on the critical theory criticisms. And I enjoy Bourdieu.
Basically we need hard times to burn off all the rotten bullshit that's clogging our lives.
I think we also need new theories to propose different orderings of society, and then some experiments to see what works. Otherwise we're basically stuck between false capitalism masquerading as liberalism and false tyranny masquerading as socialists. Neither of these two alternatives are any good and both are rehashed reheated bullshit. If we had wise authentication mechanisms society would probably develop more efficient and generous welfare systems than exist today, and beyond the wildest imagination of all the failed communist tyrannies, suitable to allowing everyone to lead healthy and fulfilling lives, while keeping unnecessary bureaucracy and rules in check and allowing people to creatively pursue their ambitions (without unnecessarily infringing on others health). Wishful thinking!
It was a great read. Thanks again 🙏🏼
Networking, status signifiers and credentiallism have absolutely inflated the appeal of, and misdirected the content of, university degrees. The disastrous SCOTUS “disparate impact” decision in Briggs v Duke Power had a magnifying effect.
Foucault’s historical characterisations were not worth much, but historian Stephen Kotkin found his conversations with Foucault enlightening about the everyday and ordinary operations of power, which makes me think better of Foucault. Kotkin’s online lectures and discussions are gems of the internet. (So are Timothy Snyder’s but only on things east of the Hajnal Line, where he has done the actual archival work.)
The bits of Bourdieu I have come across did not impress me, mainly because I found his notion of capital unimpressive. Riffing off Bourdieu’s concept of capital is easily the worst aspect of Musa al-Gharbi’s otherwise enlightening ‘We Have Never Been Woke’.
Thanks very much for the complimentary and enlightening comment.
Bourdieu has produced some of the dumbest bullshit I have ever read. His pretend classification of class signifier already had little statistical power back in his days and are completely wrong in today’s richer world.
It’s insane someone saying things so dumb ever got airtime. I recently watched a French archive interview of him and the man was just full of himself, unable to answer the most basic questions in a clear no-nonsense way.
He is just the result of the French education system that rewards obedience (particularly communist adjacent ideologies) and stupid hard work instead of actual quality/correctness.
It’s the legacy of the French Revolution and further solidification of communist ideals that happened after WW2.
Since France cannot let go of those highly dubious ideologies it is now in terrible economic position, on the brink of collapse.
You're welcome, thank you.
I'll chase down Kotkin and al-Gharbi, I'm not familiar with their contributions.
In terms of Bourdieu, even though my anthropologist friends have told me his ideas had been surpassed, I always found his theory of Habitus to be simple and well thought out (it's the structuralist view in sociology), the gist being how our social context influences our views and values. In much the same vein, perhaps simplistically, but riffing off what you wrote, I've found Foucault's identification of power as something inherent in our interpersonal relationships and between groups to be useful in analyzing social dynamics. In my postgrad studies (2008) I veered off into trying to understand how the slums were cleared out of the city center in New Delhi (India) in preparation for the Commonwealth games (India was trying to emulate the success of the Shanghai Olympics of 06), my hometown lol, and was surprised to discover an entire narrative had been crafted around the word "nuisance" (of slum dwellings), which got so bad that it literally turned into a frenzy of demolitions, at the height of which anyone from a well to-do neighborhood could file a court petition asking for the demolition of slum dwellings near their home (regardless of whether they themselves were legit property owners; we're talking about India lol) and the next day the police would turn up with demolition equipment and tear down the shacks (without due diligence), even if said shacks had been for years and in some cases decades. It was an eyeopener in terms of seeing a narrative transform itself into reality so glaringly. I have a feeling that given the mythology around 1968 people like Foucault, who undoubtedly made some valid contributions, were elevated up into being idols. Recently I read somewhere that like many folks from that French milieu he was into changing age consent laws, which if true (and probably is) would devalue him in my opinion. That said, even the classical luminaries among the Greeks weren't exactly my cup of tea in terms of their proclivities, but I still read Plato, etc.
Foucault was a pedophile (as where many others like Sartre and Beauvoir). Anything you read from him should be met with high skepticism. I doubt there is much of value to be found.
This is brilliant. Thanks much.
Great writing Lorenzo! You always have such a way with words when you get right to the core of the problems with the modern 'academic' (unscientific) way of thinking.
Doesn’t the publication of the Revolt of the Elites written in the early 90s suggest your thesis that the gulf between elites and normie concerns only dramatically widened after communism fell? He was writing from long observations of what went before not after the fall of the Wall
There were lots of causes that reached back prior to 1991. My point was more the moderators were taken off.