- The "Culture" of Academia: Part 2

I recently had an email exchange with one of my shooting buddies, John Derbyshire from National Review. He published a little blurb about the decline of our cultural confidence, which I commented to him on. Both notes can be found here. But what I failed to mention was his response back to me.

It included some unrelated personal stuff, but to paraphrase him on the point, he said that he meant to comment on the arrival of the archetypal “America hating English professor who thinks that the US is responsible for basically all things bad in the world.” It was his thought that people like that didn’t exist in the 50’s and now they seem to be everywhere. I saw his point, but I still disagreed with him.

I think those people were around all along, but they were maybe a little fewer in number. And back in the 50’s ideas like those were considered so far outside the scope of “rational” opinion that no one would give a person who offered them a respectable place from which to preach their view. That would leave them raving at pedestrians from traffic islands and park benches, and trading recipes with the bearded guy in the robes who carries that big “The end is nigh” sign. So I guess I make John’s point after all.

Everyone is entitled to an opinion, and no one believes that more firmly than a guy like me who says so many inflammatory things. Everyone is entitled to think anything they like, but if you think you’ll make your way in the world by feeding off sunshine absorbed through your skin like a green leafy vegetable, you’re going to have consequences to that. (Which will probably involve substantial weight loss). So long as you feel those consequences in real and verifiable ways, they will go a long way toward shaping and improving your decision-making processes. And if others also observe them, then it might help them tune their decision-making processes as well.

Mistakes are important because we learn from them, and hopefully make fewer, or at least different mistakes in the future. But if the consequences to being wrong are eliminated, then that particular learning process stops cold. Rather than being in an ever-tightening orbit around the truth, we shut off the gravity and fly off tangentially into the cold darkness.

For most people, that isn’t much of an issue because the real world doesn’t particularly care if you’re aware of your consequences or not. In the military for instance, if you make a mistake on the battlefield it can cost you your life. In business, if you make a poor decision, it could cost you your livelihood. But for academics and members of the media, our modern society has made things so easy that the consequences to being wrong about something have all but been eliminated.

I recently wrote another essay which was the precursor to this piece. It turns out that it had been linked on an academic website that receives a lot of traffic, and it spawned a very lively discussion over there. When I found out about it I was thrilled. The whole idea of this blog was to put some of my writing in a venue, which might be accessed by people who usually wouldn’t have a chance to see it. But I found it very telling that all but one of the comments about my piece was posted somewhere else where I was unlikely to see it and respond.

Most of the comments were of the “what is this guy smoking” genre of reasonless assertion that can only be voiced in an echo chamber where everyone already agrees. But even the people who tried to make substantive comments on my piece were doing so in the thinnest of ways. Rather than addressing the heart of my argument they would use deconstructive logic to whittle at the edges of it. Typical criticisms were things like “None of the examples he talks about are truly free markets” or “I object to his characterization of southerners”.

The former comment states an obvious fact since the only totally free market is a theoretical one, and I was using real world examples. But my broader point was the same one made countless times by Dr. Freidman, that when like is compared to like, a more free market improves the lives of everyone more effectively than a less free one. There were several criticisms of my style of saying it, but no one even tried to discount the central point. As for the second comment about southerners, I thought it was perfectly clear that I had very carefully qualified my statement in that regard. If you could only find two people in all of the pre-civil was south who felt the way that I speculated they might, then what I said, as stated is certainly true.

And this is what I find it’s generally like to discuss things like this with academics. They will run you around using deconstructive logic to address the minutiae of your commentary until they find a tiny crack. Sometimes it can be as small as a spelling error. If they find one, then they’ll claim that it invalidates your entire argument, and if they don’t, then they call you a nazi, and the discussion is over. Either way it’s usually best not to expect a fair fight, or an open debate in the field of ideas.

Anyway, I think both the issue of the hyperbolic posturing from academia, and the unwillingness to defend their positions in open debate are directly related to the insulated, and literally “inconsequential” environment that has grown up there in the last 40 years. Because we have allowed the academy to become an environment where poor reasoning is without consequence, many people there have lost the skill for it; giving rise to the Ward Churchill’s of the world. And since they know deep in their hearts that they are on thin ice in terms of objective evidence to support their views, they are generally unwilling to state their case in an environment where they might be contradicted.

I don’t mean to say that those are the only people left in academia, or even that the lines are partisan somehow because I don’t believe either of those things. But when we look at much of the thinking that’s coming from our major universities in recent years we see at least as much objectively verifiable nonsense as anything else. The most extreme views have become commonplace, and what before might have been certifiable behavior has now become viewed as just extreme. And since there are no concrete and observable feedback mechanisms to help everyone discern good reasoning from bad, the whole degradation process has been accelerating.

In my last piece I said that “No serious economist thinks that the results of a tax increase will help anyone over the long term”, and I was subsequently dismissed in the academic echo chamber for marginalizing people who disagree with me. Well I suppose on this one issue they have a small point. What I should have said was that “no economist who is taken seriously by people with something to lose on the issue thinks that a tax increase will help anyone in the long term.” The evidence has been in for decades in the “real” world, and the debate is long over among people who have to bet their lives on their decisions. But in the static void that is the academic world, apparently the debate still rages on. Maybe someone can ping me when they get that 2+2 imbroglio resolved once and for all.

I don’t mind at all that the people who read my stuff would rather write to each other and not confront me directly. I did that sort of thing myself for years on Free Republic and it can be a great way to solidify your feelings on an issue especially if you’re in the minority. But I’m still concerned about the societal results of having so many people in positions of authority who have lost the ability to reason. In the near term I think it’s responsible for much of the worst nonsense at the more remote ends of the partisan divide, but in the longer term I’m afraid that my friend “The Derb” might be right about our culture and society.

As Dr. Freidman said, “we are all a product of the thinking of the day”, and much of what’s stewing right now in academia doesn’t smell very good. It won’t stand up well when it’s taken out of the hothouse and people try to apply it to real life. And the consequences of that might be broad enough to affect people other than the true believers.

The best illustration of my fears that I can think of is Timothy Treadwell, the man who went to live with the bears on the Alaskan peninsula to “protect” them. He had nothing but love for those bears, and he believed that his affection would somehow be transmitted to them and they would reciprocate. He embraced all the silliest most esoteric ideas available with regard to the vegan animal rights movement, and believed them so fervently that he was willing to bet his life on them. But those ideas were wrong, and in the end, the bears ate him.

Ideas have consequences in the real world, and should have them in academia as well. Or our entire culture and society may have a big hungry bear in our future.