Opinions, art, debate
People live in a different reality:
At Klara’s school, they have two days a year when they are allowed to bring technology and use it without WiFi. Other than that, it would be scandalous if anybody even tried. Students are also not allowed on the premises unless they are dressed modestly.
These horror stories people tell about kindergartners massively on iPads don’t even sound true. How do they all have iPads? How do parents allow them to be brought to school? It all sounds invented.
In academia it’s undeniably true. I had to learn to keep mum regarding my insights into how to publish more, keep running the lab when the budget is halved, make documents accessibility-compliant within minutes and without having to attend workshops, and so on. Nobody wants to know. Or they do but they want to be able to complain about life even more. So I shut up and make compassionate noises when people go on and on about problems that have a clear solution.
I often think that academia exists as a place where people compete in the art of complaining.
The American legal system is complicated and fascinating. It is not surprising, then, that its intricacies have given rise to a vast number of legal mysteries and courtroom dramas. I love this genre and have read extensively in it. If I have to name my favorite courtroom drama, however, the choice is extremely easy. Normally, this is not the type of book that you want to reread because, once the mystery is solved, there is not much point to revisiting the book. Guilt by John Lescroart stands out because I have reread it several times even though I remember the plot in great detail. This, too, is unusual given that I erase all of the non-essential readings from my mind completely almost immediately after I finish such a book.
Guilt was published in 1998 and there is something to it, an ambience, a flavor that is so perfectly the 1990s in a way that could not possibly be recreated today. It’s like Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl but for men and about men. At this point I know parts of it almost by heart but I still want to drop everything and go reread it. Aside from the deeply enjoyable legal intricacies, this novel introduces several different male types that are fascinating to observe. One might say that the novel is a study of different ways of being a man.
Like all of Lescroart’s novels, Guilt is set in San Francisco. This is, of course, the San Francisco of 30 years ago. Even then, though, San Francisco was way ahead down the road that we all walked since then. I don’t want to say more because I’d rather not spoil the pleasure of reading for those of you who decide to attempt this novel. I do want to reiterate that this is an outstanding representative of the courtroom drama genre.
I noticed one post with a ridiculous take on education, and now the algorithm only shows me posts from out-of-touch “public education advocates” like this one:
Standardized tests are politicized by the use of the word “not.” Now I’ve truly heard every excuse.
Forget what Bezos said. Why does he look like that? Dude suddenly started looking like his grandpa. I’m very worried because such sudden aging isn’t a good sign.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Clarissa's Blog 