Sultan Knish
The study of any philosophy is doomed eventually to the solipsism of the
idea as the real world falls away and is replaced by the construct of
the world. When Buckley favored being governed by the first 2,000 people
in the Manhattan phone book than the faculty at Harvard, he was on
solid ground.
The
first 2,000 people in the phone book, good or bad, are more likely to
live in the real world than in some strange construct of the real world.
And that experience will endow them with some sense of how things
actually work. Some of the faculty of Harvard may live in Manhattan, but
it is an imaginary Manhattan whose social and economic laws differ
drastically from those of the world.
Academics are good at
theory, not just the theory of riding a bicycle as opposed to the
physical act of riding one, but of inhabiting a universe entirely based
on that theory. An academic can create a theory in which bicycles cannot
be ridden or in which cars have no mass and exist indefinitely in that
world. If his theory is trendy enough, if he recruits enough students
who become faculty who recruit more students into his peculiar world,
the theory will spill over into the real world and begin to affect it.
Some
insane obsessions that can exist only in academia stay there. The
taxpayers finance them, but they rarely have to hear about them except
when a tabloid looking for a few inches of column outrage reveals how
many millions are being spent on studies on why lesbians drink too much
or a professor who has spent his entire career writing papers on the gay
subtext of Sears catalogs from the 1950s.
Others don't stay
there. Our modern obsession with racial subtext is largely the work of
academics. Sociology has done more damage to American society than crack
cocaine, economists who make a living telling government officials that
money can be printed infinitely are a political disease and anything to
do with the climate has been so thoroughly contaminated with bad
motives and bad science that it might as well involve JFK assassination
or moon landing conspiracy theories.
Americans got used to the
idea that academia was an eccentric place full of wacky professors who
occasionally came up with brilliant ideas. This was a convenient myth to
cultivate because it obscured the more problematic fact that outside
the sciences, the professors were rarely brilliant and their
eccentricity wasn't an individual habit, but a collective political
reality distortion field.
Even setting aside the influence of
the left, the fields that were meant to serve as storehouses of
knowledge and learning instead became wonderlands of strange theories
that came to life and took them over until the fields no longer studied
anything real, but only found ways to sort facts from the real world
into their theory world.
American Studies, now on the receiving
end of a good deal of unexpected attention after its clumsy boycott of
Israel, has very little to do with studying America and a great deal to
do with academics studying a world made out of their own theories that
has as much in common with America as Wonderland had with Dodgson's
Oxford.
Academia has become an alternate world where human
relations exist in a mechanical universe governed entirely by identity
politics, where the world is always on the verge of a Green Apocalypse
and the only way to make anything work is to route it through the
foundational theories of existence. This magical world continually
changes in response to new theories bubbling up from trendy
publications. The very laws of the universe can be gendered and every
historical event can be rewritten by viewing it through the lens of
class.
Academia is a magical world where nothing is truly fixed
and everything exists on belief. Change the belief and you change the
reality. It's a meta-world that has a certain fanciful appeal for
intellectuals, but little relevance to the real world where things do
not change because the theory does and where outcomes are hard and real
and the consequences of a bad theory can mean lives lost.
The
behavior of literary characters can allow for endless perspectives,
because they are both human and unreal. Economics however cannot be as
infinitely elastic. Nor can any more practical field. And the infinite
elasticity of literary reinterpretations is destructive because it turns
the interpretation into the center of the story. The work becomes
secondary and the perspective becomes primary. The words of Twelfth
Night fall away and are replaced by an academic's clever perspective on
it instead.
But it seems churlish to complain about something as
wholesome as that when Twelfth Night, Shakespeare, English literature,
the Western Canon and the written word have long ago ceased to exist as
anything other than footnotes and references in a paper on not merely
gender, class or race, but some perspective on a theory on all three.
It's Alice in Wonderland's rabbit hole and the only thing on the other
end is more of the same. It's Academics in Wonderland all the way down.
Academia
is dedicated to its own theories. The real world is a reference point
in an unreal world the way that an inhabitant of Plato's cave might
point at the shape of a shadow as evidence in a ghost story that he is
busy telling. And it might be fitting to leave the lunatics in this very
expensive asylum if academia had not long ago begun calling the shots
in the real world.
Every society needs ideas and those ideas
rarely come from politicians, generals and CEOs. The men at the top are
good at getting to the top. They're usually not as good at coming up
with things to do once they're there except listen to their favorite
experts who are usually leaders in the field of being experts who have
their own experts whom they listen to and so on, like Swift's fleas, ad
infinitum.
There's a reason that Obama has recycled many of the
policies of the Clinton and Bush administrations. It's because unless a
little fairy from the Center for American Progress whispers a policy
proposal into his teleprompter, he has no idea what to do next except
take another vacation. The Center for American Progress fairy gets its
ideas from a bunch of reprocessed papers that culminated in a book whose
bad ideas were simmering in academia for decades beforehand.
Thus
the lunatic idea from a paper that is written entirely in unreadable
Marxist gibberish and dismissed as irrelevant by any sane person is
dressed up, popularized and taken around town by people who know how to
translate its specialized language into something readable by the sort
of people who will then turn it into dishonest slogans and market the
whole thing as sound common sense that we ought to adopt right now to
invest in our future and save our children.
What we have
developed is a production process that takes the gibberings of a lunatic
hermit in a cave and slowly translates them by a series of interpreters
into convincing speech that capture the consciences of kings. The
process is part Marxist-Leninism and part Madison Avenue and as a result
of it we have a country that runs as well as any university-- that is
badly, in debt and delusional.
The insane are leading the blind off a cliff that the blind can't see and that the insane insist isn't there.
Our
ideas of how society ought to run come from people who live in an
imaginary world, but who are at the center of systems that make their
ideas seem sensible and workable with tricks of propaganda. The United
States of America would not only do better being governed by the first
2,000 names in the Manhattan phone book, all of whom happen to be Adams,
but by people who believe that we are being abducted by space aliens or
that the pyramids were spaceships so long as they were able to confine
their eccentricity to that one area, and dwell otherwise in a real world
of hard realities.
Academia tells us how everything ought to be,
based on their foundational theories, with little regard for how the
world is. Incompatible results, whether in climate science or social
sciences, are buried and suppressed, ridiculed away or blamed on the big
business boogeyman or Ronald Reagan. There is no honest attempt to
engage with any of the disasters left behind or any of those coming up
ahead.
And
that's the attitude for fields where there are actually results. These
are the exceptions, not the rules. Much of what passes for academia now
no longer has results or any external context. There is an internal
structure of ideas and rules with little relation to the outside world.
There are no results to be had from running everything through the
broken photocopier of race, class and gender, not only because it's a
childish waste of time, but because it's not the thing itself that is of
interest but the lens.
Academia has become a world of lenses, a
vast optometrist's office with no patients, a telescope that sees the
flaws in its lens when it thinks that it's looking at Martian canals and
builds up an entire tale of a dying Martian race on a planet that is
running out of water and then, even when the probes have shown that the
canals do not exist, moves that tale over to earth and warns that global
warming will turn Earth into another Mars or Venus and builds an entire
theory based on an imaginary catastrophe.
The lens everywhere
has become more important than the thing being looked at. Things are
knowable facts and so not very interesting. A rock will eventually prove
to be a rock. A word will have a meaning. But a theory, a lens, a
perspective is an eternal joy because it can be reconfigured and played
with endlessly, like magic it can be waved over everything to transform
the real world into an academic wonderland where nothing has substance
and everything can change on a whim.
Academia has become the endless voyage into an imaginary world with no thought of destination.
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