I deeply hate this entire mentality. I don’t care about reading groups in school. I hate the idea that we should ditch hierarchies because they hurt feelings. It’s ok for people to know that there are things they can’t do. It’s ok to be excluded. It’s ok to be aware that intellectual limitations exist. It’s ok to know that some people are a lot smarter.
A European Vacation in America
Seriously, people, if you want a European vacation without a long, expensive and grueling flight, come to Quebec. We are in the Laurentides, and it’s blissful.
Here’s the view from the dry sauna that I ran into after plunging into the Nordic shower:
This is the view straight from our room:
The nature is Nordic, the environment is calm, everybody is extremely polite. It’s not hot, and you can get to a European-looking city in an hour.
How Academics Will Write Themselves into a Future
Already over 70% of people teaching in higher education don’t have tenure or any hope of getting tenure. This is not a bad thing. Much of the teaching at the college level is very primitive, and it would make no sense to hand out tenure for it. In addition, most people in higher education have absolutely no interest in reading, writing, or generating ages of their own. As the current cohort of tenured academics reaches retirement, its members are not going to be replaced. We are already experiencing a dramatic reduction of tenure lines everywhere, which, again, is not a bad thing.
In the future where every University will have three to four actual professors in the humanities, we will have a healthier situation than we do now. I have observed that people outside of academia derive enjoyment from seeing something who is sincerely and passionately dedicated to a life organized around reading and learning.
This small remaining handful of professors will have enough to write about because it will take them at least a century to unravel all of the damage inflicted on the humanities in the era of massification.
I believe that all of this is good and necessary.
How Academics Wrote Themselves Out of History
Say, you are intelligent but not extremely brilliant. You want to live the life of the mind. Or, rather, what you imagine that life to be. Mostly, you really want tons of free time and comfortable pay coupled with the status of an intellectual authority. Suddenly, there arose in the West a number of societies wealthy enough that they could afford to have a sizable group living precisely this kind of lifestyle. It was a historical glitch, as we can now appreciate, that so many people could afford to live this kind of life. This is all now going away. And the paradox of the situation is that the group that was able to come into existence and really enjoy this status and material conditions was responsible for putting an end to this glitch.
While the glitch still existed, though, all of these people who wanted to enjoy academic life had to produce articles, books, and conference papers for tenure and promotion. The idea that everything in existence is bad and needs to be subverted offers an endless supply of material. You don’t have to think much or come up with an argument of your own. Take any work of literature, painting, event of history, political system, etc and condemn them for being what they are.
Incidentally, “everything should be constantly subverted and replaced” is one of the foundational ideas of neoliberalism. Academia became the servant class and the wrecking crew doing the demolition work of neoliberal change. Until neoliberalism started saying, “ok, thanks for all the help, but now is the time to replace you, so bye.”
No nation-state means no large middle-class means no mass higher education means we revert to the status quo of before the glitch. The work of the intellect will continue and some people will live the life of the mind but their number will be dramatically reduced. That’s not a bad thing.
What will they think and write about?
Finally, we will get to the answer in the next post.
What Should Academics Write About?
What a great question. It’s one of the best ones I’ve ever received. As all good questions it is not necessarily very easy to answer. Let me try to think it out right here to see if together we can arrive at an answer.
I can roughly subdivide university scholarship in the humanities of the mass-education time period into two eras. These areas would be pre-neoliberal and neoliberal. If you’re tired of this terminology, which I can absolutely understand, let’s refer to them as the pre-1968 and post-1968 eras. By 1968 I refer, of course, to the leftist revolution that swept the world and cleared the path for the grand economic reformatting that began 10 years later and is still ongoing.
In the pre-neoliberal era, university scholarship in the humanities—and again, I repeat, that I am speaking specifically of the era of increasingly mass education that did not begin until the very late 19th century—had two main directions of interest. One was supporting the existence of the nation-state by way of establishing the national literary canon, defining the national history, exploring the specific political structures of the nation-state, etc. The second direction was, to put it in simple terms, figuring out how things work. What makes works of literature enjoyable? Which political system is the most rational? Which events of history had the biggest impact and why? These are very important issues to ponder but their big defect is that their reach is limited. They do not provide an infinite number of people with an infinite amount of work.
At the beginning of the massification era, these two directions managed to provide enough to say, to write, and to publish for the few people in higher education who did research. But then more people wanted to join the field of intellectual endeavor. They needed something to write about. They needed what we today would call a hack that would break open for them an infinite cache of possible subjects of exploration. They found it in the way of thinking that prizes the destruction of every familiar category above everything else. This way of thinking has many names because today it is so dominant and omnipresent that is very hard for us to give it a specific name. It has become part of every single one of us. I call it in neoliberalism. Other people call it cultural Marxism. But there are many other names.
I know how much everybody hates long posts, so I will continue this one later. Thank you, the wonderful person who left the question, because I am really loving it.
The Toilet Dilemma
People can’t leave toilets alone. They keep fussing with the concept of a toilet, arriving at the most bizarre iterations. At a restaurant in Quebec City today, I saw the most insane set-up so far.
You enter the toilet through a door and see that it has some stalls with doors. In the same space where people are waiting for their turn to enter a stall, there are urinals. Here’s what it looks like:
The restaurant is popular, and there’s always a group of women of all ages mulling in front of the stalls, waiting their turn, washing their hands, looking in the mirrors. Can you imagine a man who’d whip out his penis and start using the urinal right there? Why wouldn’t the women call the police? We were at that restaurant with my 16-year-old niece. Who but the most unhinged pedo would use the urinal? Thankfully, everybody at the restaurant was normal and nobody used the urinals. But imagine how bad the situation can get if just one weirdo comes there to eat.
Even without the open-air urinals, the set-up is dumb. Men don’t want to hang out with women in front of the toilet stalls. Women don’t want to emerge from a stall and see men hovering around. As a result, there were no men at all in the vicinity of that toilet. I have no idea what men do for their needs but that restaurant has no accommodation for them.
Just So You Understand
Just so you, folks, understand what I’m dealing with, here’s a real-life story. I have two people at my department who really love a certain classroom. They love it so much that they refuse to teach anywhere else. Every year they drive everybody nuts with their demands to be assigned that particular classroom.
The problem is, they also want to teach at the exact same time. But there’s only one classroom they both insist on having. So today they came up with a plan and unveiled it to the administration. Here’s the plan:
- They will both teach their different courses in that classroom at the same time.
- The classroom is to be split by means of a “portable room divider.”
- An additional teacher’s table with a computer should be brought in.
- An additional screen should be placed on the wall.
- And the pièce de résistance of the whole proposal – prepare for it – the windows in the classroom should be boarded up. Don’t ask why. I didn’t because I’d rather not know. Based on my experience, no joy happens when you start asking why.
You realize, I hope, that many other people teach in this classroom, so apparently, this entire set up should be taken down immediately after this one joint session. And then put up again. And then taken down. And then … And so on in perpetuity.
Welcome to my life, my dear friends.
Quebec City
I haven’t been to Quebec City and completely forgot (or never noticed) how much it resembles San Sebastián, my favorite city in Spain.
I could have come here the whole time instead of traveling so far for the same thing.
Hit the Floor
I’m at my niece’s dance competition in Quebec City. Her team is winning, so we will head over to the showcase in a couple of hours. I’m very fortunate in that her dance is hip hop because it’s the only music I like.
We’ve seen some extraordinary teams today. There are choreographers who are seriously talented. My niece’s team is the best but it’s a very tough competition.
Chekhov’s Novels
I strongly believe that people drop last names of Russian authors because they think this makes them sound more intellectual. Here’s an example:
Chekhov most certainly didn’t write any novels. But “Claire A” doesn’t know this because she never read anything by him. Or, I would guess, by any other author on the list.
As for Madame Bovary, there wouldn’t have been any Anna Karenina without it. It’s a novel that inspired half of the European literature of that era. Not that a silly airhead who loves “Chekhov’s novels” would know any of that.
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