In the comment-thread of our previous post, J.M. Smith discusses status in academia:
I’m a professor of human geography, a discipline that lurched left en masse. The movement was just starting when I was a graduate student in the 1980s, and was all but completed within twenty years. One reason human geography shifted is that human geography is a relatively low-status discipline, and so thought it would get more respect if it became a hotbed of transgressive Foulcaldian post-structuralism. When I was an assistant professor, I once lunched with two very young women professors in the Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism Science, and they were on fire to make PRTS a hotbed of transgressive Foulcaldian post-structuralism.
Professors want status, just like everyone else, so low-class fields ape high-class fields, and low-class academics ape high-class academics. Of course there are a few cranks, some of whom practice a high-status crankiness, and few of whom practice a low-status crankiness, but academia greatly prefers conformists over cranks.
Not only do professors want status, they acquire status through the peer-review process. This may sometimes select for truth, but mostly selects for conformity. After all, peer-review is just peer-pressure for professors. I’d like to think there are some hard sciences where a maverick professor can have reality on his side, but through most of academia, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the beholder is other professors.
Professor Smith makes an important point:
If I ran a restaurant and the reviewers hated me, I could succeed by appealing to the market of diners. If I were an actor and the reviewers hated me, I could succeed by appealing to the market of movie-goers. If I am a professor and the reviewers hate me, I am a failed tenure case because all my manuscripts were rejected and student evaluations don’t matter.
This is a vulnerability that is, perhaps, unique to academia. One would imagine — naively, as it turns out — that academia ought to be the place, above all, where “truth is great and will prevail”. That the academy is, instead (with the exception of mathematics and the hard sciences), the place where truth is in fact subordinate to ideological faddishness says a great deal about how little of the modern curriculum actually touches upon topics about which there even is objective truth, or at least an objectively correct interpretation of facts.
I realize that I haven’t explained how something like transgressive Foulcaldian poststructuralism becomes high-status…
Most likely it is because it is entropic; it flattens and equalizes and breaks order (structure) into rubble. In doing so, it multiplies opportunities for the exercise of power — and by obliterating all discriminations of quality and merit, it enables the success of resentful mediocrities. This is always at the heart of egalitarian activism: finding a way to get your hand on the collar of your superiors — and if that’s your aim, it helps if you can pretend that there is no basis to consider them your superiors in the first place. It has all the advantages of theft over honest toil.
The universal acid of post-Enlightenment skepsis, which casts such corrosive doubt on everything that no cultural vessel can successfully contain it, has brought us at last to the futile and paradoxical triumph of a doctrine whose central truth is the nonexistence of truth, and which seizes the apex of cultural status by attacking status itself.
- Beautiful Lies
- Beautiful Lies, Cont’d
- Beautiful Lies, And A Vulnerability of Academia
12 Comments
Good analysis.
Let’s add in the overcrowding factor, and we’ve certainly raised up a great many Phds and promised them much: when many hands are clamoring for a prize, the jostling and pushing soon demolishes the award platform.
I am gratified that you found my comment this useful. I’d like to add that there are really are no grounds to the popular notion that scientists of any description have an extraordinary love of truth. I don’t mean to veer in the other direction and accuse them of extraordinary dishonesty, but only to say that scientists’ love of truth is on par with the love of truth one finds in the professional class generally. Set them against lawyers, doctors, engineers and businessmen, and you’ll find the love of truth is a dead level (I would say the same thing about intelligence).
But this needs to be qualified by the fact that most scientists have sophisticated definitions of truth. I’m using the word scientist in the broad sense of anyone who claims to be a knowledge producer, and the word sophisticated in the original and pejorative sense of slippery. Sophisticated definitions of truth are more common in the soft sciences and humanities, where “truth” is always “problematic,” but the positivism of the hard sciences is itself a sophisticated and potentially slippery definition of truth.
To put this in a nutshell, many scientists (broad definition) are truthful in much the same way that Bill Clinton is truthful.
There is nothing in academic recruitment and training that selects for persons with an extraordinary love of truth. We would think twice about admitting a graduate student who had been expelled from his undergraduate college for academic dishonesty, but academic dishonesty seldom leads to expulsion and lesser sanctions seldom enter the student’s permanent record. I give the big lecture on academic dishonesty to our incoming graduate students, and I do my best to instill a moral horror of plagiarism, falsification, partiality, etc. I also give a vivid and in some respects imaginary description of the outer darkness into which malefactors will be cast. But this is just one lecture and it mainly serves, like corporate “ethics training,” to show new recruits how much they can get away with.
So the professoriate is made up of people with a normal love of truth, but whose normal love of truth has been more or less sophisticated by tendentious epistemologies, and whose fidelity to the truth has been nicely calibrated by definite knowledge of what they can get away with. Academia does expel flagrant liars, but even politicians do that! And I daresay some of these lying and disgraced academics (like some of those lying and disgraced politicians) have made themselves obnoxious in other ways.
JMSmith,
Thanks for your comments, both here and on the previous post. It’s always helpful to have reports from the “belly of the beast”.
Both of my parents were scientists. (My father was actually quite a renowned one, who was short-listed several times for the Nobel Prize.) I will say — and I’m sure that to some extent I am motivated by filial piety — that I believe both of them were, in fact, looking for objective truth in their research. In immunology, my father’s field, you don’t have much choice — the task is really a kind of engineering, and as all engineers know, reality is unforgiving.
This is not to quibble with your point above; I’m sure that what you say is, in general, true, at least as you get farther away from those disciplines that compel acknowledgement of objective truth.
I think you are correct that propositions tested by tight feedback loops are most likely to be truthful because bridges designed by madmen do fall down.
Does academia even expel “flagrant liars”? My impression is that entire disciplines–Whiteness Studies, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Social Work, Sociology, Human Geography–are based on flagrant lies. For example, the field of Gender Studies appears to be based on the axiom that a man can be a woman, and merely in virtue of saying things like “I know I’m a woman” and appearing to be sincere. Sure, some of these people are simply insane, and some tiny minority suffer from a very rare medical condition. So those ones are not lying. But many others are telling flagrant lies. “I am a woman” is a flagrant lie coming from Bruce Jenner, for example. And for others to then say “Bruce is now a woman” on the basis of his flagrant lie is another flagrant lie.
Similarly, when “scholars” tell us that all human groups are exactly the same in their natural or evolved dispositions, that’s very obviously untrue.
I’m pretty sure that many “scholars” are well aware that all this stuff is nonsense, and flagrant nonsense. So it seems to me that the humanities and social sciences at this point have almost no function except the promotion of flagrant lies.
Hi Jacques,
Well, there are two possibilities here: either the claimant knows he is not a woman, and says he is anyway (as you say Bruce Jenner is doing), or his subjective experience is indeed that of being a woman — which is a tragic mental disorder, but there it is.
The first case is, of course, lying, plain and simple. In the second case, though, what matters is whether we believe that there is any objective truth beneath subjective experience. (Sure, there’s anatomy, but it is only the consciousness that can experience subjectivity, and if subjectivity is all, then there’s no lie there.)
It seems an obvious absurdity to place the subjective above the objective in this way, but that is exactly the triumph of the “transgressive Foulcaldian post-structuralism” that JMSmith refers to. And a Bruce Jenner will always get the benefit of the doubt, because only he (not subscribing to this nonsense, I can’t bring myself to call him “she”) is privy to that subjective experience.
The academic humanities have been slain and gutted by a savage and merciless intruder who now wears their skin as a suit.
Jacques @ Most disciples of the various postmodern isms are not liars in any simple sense of that word. Indeed most that I have known have been exceedingly earnest because of a strong conviction that they bore a saving truth. I suppose you might say that they are mad, but then so would be every man and woman who has a conviction that is not universally acknowledged. At one time the humanities served to teach students that the human spirit is not uniform, and I think this was a very good lesson to learn. But we now see that it has hazards, since appreciating other cultures sometimes alienates a student from his or her own culture, and stimulates an attitude of resentment. I’m getting off topic, but I think this comes of carrying the war on bigotry too far.
As for plain old liars, academia has them in about the same proportion as the other professions. I once had a good friend who turned out to be a plain old liar. He just made up the publications on his c.v., and wasn’t caught for many years. When he was caught they threw him out, but that sort of brazen effrontery is rare.
Hi Professor Smith,
I’d like to dispute this:
“I suppose you might say that they are mad, but then so would every man and woman who has a conviction that is not universally acknowledged.”
You are assuming (I think) that being out of step with the opinions of others is the only basis for judging that someone is mad. People who think that men in dresses are women can count as mad, on this view, only because it’s not universally agreed that men in dresses are women. By this criterion, socialists are also mad, simply because not everyone agrees with socialism. People who disagree about the history of ancient Egypt would be mad, given merely that they disagree.
Is that the idea? If so, this is a bad criterion for madness. Madness is not simply a matter of having unpopular or not-universally-accepted beliefs. It’s a matter of being out of touch with reality. If a large group of people are badly out of touch with reality then, of course, they may all be mad and the rare individual who dissents may be the one who is not mad.
What makes it absurd and irrational to believe that a man can be a woman just in virtue of saying so is not the fact that some other people don’t hold the belief. Rather, it’s absurd and irrational because such a belief is either incoherent or else flatly inconsistent with obvious facts. Even those who try or pretend to hold this belief can’t offer any coherent account of its content, or how it is supposed to square with their other beliefs. And that’s because the distinction between men and women is (obviously) not grounded purely in facts about what people feel or believe. (Note that I am talking about men and women here, not the words “man” and “woman” or whatever new meanings that people might stipulate for those words.)
I do think–though I can’t prove, of course–that the people who come up with ideological nonsense like this tend to know deep down that what they’re saying isn’t true. The ones at the top know, even if the academic drones whose job is to propagate the mind virus may not know; maybe I should allow that those ones are mad rather than being liars. The ones who invent these nonsense theories are not motivated by any interest in truth, and they know that on some level. They’re motivated by resentment and power lust, and they know that too. For example, people like Judith Butler. She’s simply a liar. That seems like the most natural explanation to me, anyway, given that what they’re saying is so absurd that only lunatics could believe it. And these top “intellectuals” are not lunatics.
Jacques @ I have many eccentric opinions. I believe they are true and do not believe I am mad, so “the masses are asses” just about sums up my attitude to popular opinion. At the same time, I recognize that this places me at a disadvantage in public debate. I may be fully convinced that I have unique insight into the nature of reality and reason, but this obviously makes me mad in the eyes of the majority. This is true whether majority means the hoi palloi or the majority of experts in my field. There was a time when reality was what God saw and reason was the way God’s mind worked, but our reality is just what most people see and our reason is just the way most people’s minds work.
I once met Judith Butler and would say that she is mad, but that she is also smart enough to understand that there is a market for her madness. So she’s a little like a sideshow freak who is also its own shrewd manager.
Sure, having opinions at odds with the academic masses or other masses will make you appear mad to them. Still, thinking that Bruce Jenner is a woman simply because he says he is (or whatever) is madness regardless of what anyone thinks of such an attitude. Regardless of how it appears to the academic masses or anyone else. Would you agree?
I don’t know what you mean when you say “our reality is just what most people see and our reason is just the way most people’s minds work”. Is this another claim about how things appear? You’re saying that what appears real (to the masses) is what most people see, and what appears reasonable (to the masses) is whatever conforms to how most people think? If so, I guess I’d agree to that. On the other hand, reality and reason are real, and distinct from mere appearances. Bruce Jenner just is a man, and it’s unreasonable to believe that he could stop being one by giving an interview in Vanity Fair. So unreasonable that anyone who claims to have this belief is (probably) insane or dishonest or else not really thinking about the meaning of their words. Do you think a reasonable person could believe this?
Jacques @ I think it is reasonable and realistic to say that Bruce Jenner is a man who is suffering from a rare but hardly unique form of mental illness. I think it may be best to humor men which the delusion that they are women, but that humoring should be voluntary subject to withdrawal if the deluded become nasty. It is good to help cripples of all sorts, but a cripple can become a tyrant if you let him.
My point about reason and reality is this. I cannot appeal to reason if my audience has a different definition of reason, and I cannot appeal to reality if my audience sees reality differently than I do. I can certainly think for myself and draw my own conclusions, and I can dismiss majority opinion with a laugh or a sneer. But the reason and reality to which I must appeal when arguing with the majority is the reason and reality of the majority.
My point may be clearer if we consider an appeal to morality. I like to think that some acts are really right and others really wrong, and that my morality has an objective existence. But I must live among men and women who operate under a very different morality, which they also regard as objective. If I wish to make a moral appeal to these men and women, I must appeal to their morality, not mine.
What all of this comes down to is that it is not effective to call a man unreasonable or deluded if the whole world agrees with him, not you. He and the whole world may be mad, but your saying so will not persuade them.
We’re talking at cross purposes then. I wasn’t talking about persuasion but rather what’s true. Jenner is not a woman. People who claim that being a woman is simply a matter of how one feels are speaking nonsense. Given that we live in a society where important truths and the very idea of truth are under sustained attack, it’s important to maintain these distinctions: appearance vs reality, consensus vs truth, reason vs how most people actually think. But I agree with your purely dialectical claims, of course.