Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, formerly Pope Benedict XVI, likes to tell a story from Jewish tradition.  When the Enlightenment was in full swing, the story goes, a young man full of evangelical fervor for the new learning set out to argue with an old, distinguished rabbi.  When he burst through the rabbi’s door, the young man found the old man pacing around the room, reading a book and deep in meditation.  As the young man was about to launch into his harangue, the rabbi merely glanced at him, held up a finger, and said “yes yes, but… what if it’s true after all?”  He then went back to pacing the room while the young man, stunned, sank to his knees from the force of sudden doubt.

Y’all need to understand that the vast majority of people inside the academic-industrial complex have been there their entire lives.  For most of them, this is one of the keys to their entire psychology.  Unlike the young man in Ratzinger’s story, they’ve never met the rabbi.  They’ve never had any doubts.  They’ve never heard the other side’s argument.  Indeed, they are metaphysically certain the other side doesn’t actually have an argument, just a collection of prejudices.

I know that seems difficult to accept.  But think about your own college days, if you had them.  If your college experience was what all the brochures say it is — you know, with the glorious rainbow of diversity on the front cover and the attentive students in intimate classrooms — you probably did experience a whole variety of new viewpoints.  But for the vast majority of us, I’d wager, we pretty much hung out with like-minded people, pretty much all the time.  Stoners hung out with stoners, party kids hung out with party kids, pre-med guys did…. whatever the hell they did for all those hours in the library while the rest of us were partying and smoking out, and comp-sci guys spanked it alone in their rooms.

Professors did that, too.  Only they were the ones who actually showed up to those weird club meetings advertised at the most obscure corners of the notice board at the student union.  And then they went to grad school, which is basically one of those club meetings 24/7/365.  And then they became professors, whose paycheck, lifestyle, and very identity depends on being in that club.  So where are they going to get exposed to contrary perspectives?  At work?  Most people don’t talk politics at work, but for professors, work is politics, and vice versa.  Through the internet?  We all know that the internet just reinforces preconceived ideas (not to mention making us objectively dumber) — think of all the clowns who are still out there in this, anno domini 2015, claiming that Obama grew the economy, cut taxes, and shrunk the deficit.

Surely they’re not going to get it from their intellectual pursuits.  I touched on this in the “Radicalism” post, but Theodore Dalrymple says it so much better, with such biting irony:

According to [leftwing intellectual George Lakoff] people view the world through the lens of their metaphors, which he thinks provide them with the framework of their thought. Since the 1980s, liberals have allowed conservative metaphors to take over their own metaphoric framework, so that all discussions or arguments about social policy are carried out on conservative terms. Liberals waste their time and effort in arguing from the evidence (conservatives, of course, can have no evidence); they should instead be working to get conservatives to accept a different metaphoric framework.

Note the bit in parentheses — indeed, conservatives can have no evidence, because Lakoff’s theory is explicitly designed to deny them any.  Stripped of all its polysyllabic mumbo-jumbo, Lakoff’s “frames” idea simply states that liberals have evidence, conservatives have rhetoric.

In other words: Conservatives are suffering from “false consciousness,” which is what leftists have been saying since the middle of the Nineteenth fuckin’ Century. The phrase itself comes from Georg Lukács and his apes, Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse, but the idea has been central to Marxism from the start.  I want y’all to take every word in this next sentence 100% literally: Marxists know their beliefs are the objective, scientific truth.  When Marx writes about capital-H History requiring this or that, he really means it — there is an anthropomorphic Force out there called History, and it has conscious designs, and things will unfold just as Marx says they will.  The fact that it hasn’t all gone according to plan isn’t due to a flaw in Marx’s theory — remember, it’s not a “theory,” it’s stone-cold scientific fact — but because some other Force has gotten in the way.  Just as the cult leader’s prayers have kept the world from ending on the exact date he specified, so “false consciousness” has impeded — but not cancelled! — the inevitable glorious revolution.

Again: I am NOT kidding.  Yes, this is infantile.  Yes, this “argument” has more holes than Swiss cheese, and more stolen bases than Rickey Henderson.  Yes, these people are doing exactly what they accuse bitter clingers of doing, and yes, they damn sure know it.  Because yes, this is a religious dogma, full stop, and they damn well know that, too.

Consider what that means.  Think what would happen if they actually met the rabbi, like the young man in Ratzinger’s story.  We’re not told what happened to him, but it’s easy to imagine it.  His whole life would have to change.  Maybe he didn’t become a believer — that ambiguity is one of the wonderful things about the tale — but he most definitely would have to reorient his entire life.  He’d doubtless lose all his friends.  How could he stand to be around them, with their dogmatic certainty, and their unshakeable belief in their own superior intellects?  How could they stand to be around him, a brilliant young scholar who couldn’t even handle a superstitious old crank?  He’d have to leave town, change jobs, and maybe even change his name, lest the tattered remnants of his once-brilliant reputation shame him wherever he went….

That’s IF they ever met the rabbi, mind you.  Most of them don’t, and never will, and everything about their daily existence is designed to make sure they won’t.

And that, my friends, is another reason profs believe their own bullshit.

In case you’re wondering, this is why I write these things.

Every so often, a liberal tells the truth.  It’s rare, but it happens.  It’s wonderously rare that a liberal is actually right about something… but again, it happens every once in a blue moon.  Jonathan Chait just had one of those moments:

But it would be a mistake to categorize today’s p.c. culture as only an academic phenomenon. Political correctness is a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate. Two decades ago, the only communities where the left could exert such hegemonic control lay within academia, which gave it an influence on intellectual life far out of proportion to its numeric size. Today’s political correctness flourishes most consequentially on social media, where it enjoys a frisson of cool and vast new cultural reach. And since social media is also now the milieu that hosts most political debate, the new p.c. has attained an influence over mainstream journalism and commentary beyond that of the old.

[The link is from Ace of Spades, by the way].

The stuff I’m giving you in the “Explaining Academia” series may be new to you (and if it’s old hat, let me know; I’ll stop), but most of this junk has been around since the early 90s.  It has always been toxic, but in the low-tech environment of academia — and professors are the most conservative people on the planet about everything except Marxism — the pathogens were largely contained.  Thanks to grads getting on social media, as Chait writes, containment has been broken.

It was ever thus.  As I explained here, I’m wary of Religious History analogies — most people don’t know it; those that do tend to want to argue about it — but the professoriate = clergy comparison is apt.  Twitter is to “trigger warnings” and “microaggressions” what the printing press was to Luther’s 95 Theses — Luther himself referred to his proposition as a dispute among monks; he was horrified by what the peasants made of his doctrines; and he urged the swift and brutal annihilation of the rebels by princes of whatever faith.

You can extend this out as far as you like, for as far as your Religious History goes.  Luther, at least, had formal training in theology.  Once John Calvin — a lawyer — got ahold of it….

In case it isn’t clear: I believe that most academics know, in their secret hearts, that what they teach is destructive, dyscivic nonsense.  That’s one of the reasons they make no effort to actually practice what they preach — the short-haired lady with the ¡Viva la Revolución! bumper sticker on her late-model Escalade would be beaten to a pulp by pissed-off campesinos should she actually drive out to the fields and canneries and slaughterhouses to harangue them about solidarity, just as the African-American Studies faculty lives in the whitest gated community they can find.  Radicalism is just a parlor game, played for fun and profit and the occasional mate-swapping opportunity.  They have no intention of letting this stuff out into the real world.

But, alas, they have no choice.  They’re not very bright, and they’re dogmatically ignorant, and so technology — which would’ve caught up to them in any case — has caught them utterly flat-footed.  Chait may not consciously know it — ignorance of basic history being liberalism’s flux capacitor — but somewhere deep down he senses what inevitably happens when doctrinal disputes spill over to the masses.  He’s getting ready to bolt, and with this article, he’s alerting the more socially attuned rabbits that the wolf is just over the horizon.

Another part of the answer to “why do profs believe their own bullshit?” lies in the realm of group psychology.  We could use a few different metaphors here.  We could say it’s kinda like Reverse Stockholm Syndrome — you can force kids to parrot your opinions back to you as if they were facts, and if you do that long enough, you lose sight of the fact that they are opinions.  Or we could liken life in a college town to a cult’s milieu control — the College Republicans have about three members, everyone knows what “ayurvedic” means, and you have to go to the supermarket in another town to get milk that comes from cows.

Or we could talk about Metallica.

Back in 2003, the heavy metal band Metallica was struggling with the creative process.  Their longtime bassist had just left / been driven out of the band, and they were forced to audition a new member while writing a new album, dealing with their lead singer’s crippling alcoholism, and battling burnout.  So their management team called in a shrink, “performance-enhancing coach” Phil Towle, to help them resolve their issues and get on with the record.  Filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky were also on hand, documenting the whole thing.  Their film, Some Kind of Monster, was released in 2004.

Go watch it.  You’ll understand academia a whole lot better.

You’ll notice, for instance, that the members of Metallica are in their 40s, and have been full-time professional rock musicians since they were 18.  But not just any rock musicians.  To this day, Metallica pretty much is heavy metal — the film’s opening title card says they’ve sold nearly 100 million records, and I’d bet they’re still one of the few, if not the only, heavy metal bands most people could name off the tops of their heads.

It’s not just a job, in other words.  It’s an identity.  Garth Brooks has sold more records than anyone, including Elvis and the Beatles, but nobody apes his style.  Hell, I’d be willing to bet most people couldn’t pick Garth Brooks out of a police lineup.

That’s why he wears the hat

Again: this man has outsold Elvis, but you could easily find yourself shooting the shit with him on line at the DMV and be none the wiser.  But anyone can recognize a metalhead…. and Metallica is largely responsible for that.

So…. what do you do when your entire identity involves teenage rebellion, but you’re no longer a teenager?  When you are, in fact, middle-aged, and worth a small nation’s GDP?  The members of Metallica haven’t had the kind of problems their fans have since about 1986, but their entire lives are centered around acting as if they do.  It’s a fascinating train wreck of a conundrum, and you can watch it all unfolding.

Singer James Hetfield used to compensate with alcohol — he supposedly drank a bottle of Jagermeister a night for years — and his decision to get sober causes much of the film’s tension.  Drummer Lars UIrich (of Napster infamy) has a very, very, very expensive art collection — one controversial scene shows him making about $7 million in a half an hour auctioning part of it off at Christie’s — but he doesn’t seem to know the first thing about art.  Guitarist Kirk Hammett comes off as the normal, well-adjusted one, and he once said (in a scene that didn’t make the movie, alas) that coming home from touring feels like having PTSD, because now he has to do things like take out the trash.  Ulrich and Hetfield were best men at each others’ weddings, but they hardly seem to even know each other, let alone actually like each other.  It’s bizarre.

Again, this is a metal band.  These guys aren’t intellectual giants (though Ulrich certainly seems to think he is).  But their world is so different from everyone else’s, and their lives are so caught up in a particular identity that MUST not chage, that the only real parallel is… academia.

Think about it.  What could you even talk to James Hetfield about?  Work?  He’s never done anything remotely like a 9-5 job, so how could he relate to yours?  And if you ask him about his, well, that’s an interview, and that’s part of the job, too.  He doesn’t have any hobbies.  How could he?  He was either playing music, writing music, or getting blitzed his whole adult life.  Relationships?  His wife was Metallica’s costume designer, and I’m willing to bet you’ve never nailed even one anonymous groupie. Kids?  Sports?  Movies?  I’m sure rock stars do those things, but not in the normal way.  You’re just a fan in the stands.  He’s James Hetfield, the Metallica guy, and “being James Hetfield” has been his real job for three decades.

Professors aren’t rock stars, of course, but there’s one very important parallel — their identities are their jobs, in ways we can’t really grasp.  I don’t have to pretend to be intellectually omnicompetent to do my day job, and I don’t get pointed out on the street.  People aren’t weirded out when they see me at a bar or run into me at the grocery store.  If you’re a prof in a college town, though, that kind of thing happens.  A lot.  You can never just kick back and be yourself, the way James Hetfield can’t just kick back and be himself.  You’re always “Professor So-and-So,” the way he’s always “The Metallica Guy.”

Which brings us to this dude.  The guy in the Cosby sweater is Phil Towle, the shrink Metallica’s management brought in to help them get St. Anger recorded.  Now, if the Metallica guys were to ask me to take a crack at their dysfunction, I’d say something like “Y’all are profoundly fucked-up individuals.  A lot of that isn’t your fault, but a lot of it is.  The first thing you have to figure out is, why are you recording this in the first place?  Do you even want to be a rock band anymore?  And if not — and I suspect not — you’ve got to find some other identity for yourselves.  You know, husband, father, art critic… that kind of thing.  Get some hobbies and interests that don’t involve smashing guitars and screaming about killing people.”

Towle doesn’t do any of that.  Instead, he teaches them a new way to communicate: In psychobabble cliches.  They’re still putting on the same victim role that got them to this point (in both the positive and negative senses), but now they’re verbalizing it like freshmen at a mandatory sexual harassment seminar.  And an interesting thing happens — the more Metallica starts to sound like Towle, the more Towle starts to sound like Metallica.  At one point he’s even suggesting lyrics for a new song, and there’s a scene where the musicians discuss the proper way to let him know he’s not really in the band.

What you’ve got, in other words, is four people with no real identity cloaking themselves with fifty-cent words.  Towle doesn’t know what he’s doing any more than Metallica does, but they’re all damn sure it’s big and important and meaningful, because they describe it with words like “paradigm.”

Sound familiar?

There’s one last scene that’s worth mentioning.  At the end of the film, Metallica auditions three or four guys for their new bassist.  Most of them have sufficiently metal pedigrees, but one dude — long-haired and tattooed like the rest — lists his main credential as “Alanis Morissette.”

You oughtta know her….

Obviously a gig’s a gig to a working musician, right?  Playing bass on songs like “Isn’t it Ironic” pays the bills, no doubt.  But…. this guy’s auditioning for Metallica.  The greatest, biggest, most genre-defining metal band of all time.  And they’re perfectly ok with it.  He doesn’t get the gig, but they’re just as happy jamming with him as with the other guys from hardcore acts.  They can relate to him, because gigging is about the only thing they can relate to.  Being on the Jagged Little Pill tour gives him far more in common with the guys who wrote Kill ‘Em All than any normal person could ever have.

That’s the weird, hermetically-sealed little world of academia in a nutshell.

Further to Morgan’s piece, here, I can tell y’all a few inside-baseball things about the academic-industrial complex.  I live in a college town; I interact with profs and grad students all the time; I once made the mistake of entering a graduate program.

Short version: Yes, they really are that dense.  About all kinds of stuff.  Much of that is on purpose.  But a lot of it isn’t.  This post (which will perhaps become a series if y’all are interested) will hopefully help explain why.

Today’s topic: Theory.

Normal people consider the word “theory” more or less synonymous with “hypothesis.”  I have a theory that Napoleon ate some bad frog legs on the morning of the Battle of Waterloo, and that’s why he lost.  The records to prove this might no longer exist, alas, but in principle it’s demonstrable.

That’s not what “theory” means in the liberal arts, though.  Take “gender theory,” for instance.  Here’s a reasonably clear explanation:

Gender is a socially constructed interpretation of human behavior patterns. Specifically, gender refers to the ascription (by self or others) of differential social statuses based upon shared understandings of what constitutes masculine and/or feminine behavior. As such, gender typically involves two interrelated components built upon the acceptance or rejection of societal norms concerning masculinities and femininities. First, gender may refer to an internal feeling that one is a male, female, both, neither, and/or somewhere in between or beyond these categories. Because gender is dependent upon behavioral expectations and norms, once individuals know those expectations and norms, the individual can adopt behaviors that project the gender he/she wishes to portray. One can think of this side of gender like a role in a theatrical play – there are specific behaviors and norms associated with genders just like there are lines and movements associated with each character in a play. Adopting the behaviors and norms of a gender leads to the perception that someone belongs in that gender category.

On the one hand, all this is perfectly true.  This paragraph is (among other things) spelling out what we mean when we say “Social Justice Warriors sure are a bunch of pussies.”  We have a set of cultural expectations of manhood — straightforwardness, steadfastness, ability to use logic — that they’re either not meeting, or deliberately subverting.  In other words, this:

It’s also obvious that these expectations change over time — think of the early-imperial Romans’ sneering dismissal of Christianity as a religion for women and slaves.

So far, so good.  This is calm, reasonable, even useful — if you want a naturalistic explanation of how Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, part of that explanation must include the change in attitude from “a religion for women and slaves” to “a religion for manly legionaries.”

Problem is, this calm, reasonable, useful stuff also contains a bait-and-switch: The key terms are open-ended.

“Ascription.”  “Construction.”  “Perception.”  “Performance.”  Those could mean anything, everything, or nothing.  “Gender” basically becomes a verb, and indeed, ivory tower types frequently use it this way — I can’t tell you the number of academic papers I’ve had to read titled “Engendering X,” where X is a social process, or even an inanimate object.  If “gender” is only this — a performance, an attribution, a construction — then everything can be gendered.

For instance: I’m a man, and I’m explaining concepts to you.  How typically male!  How patriarchal!  I am the active doer — my knowledge penetrates you — and you are the passive receiver.  I have put you in the “subject position” by writing this.  By acting as if my interpretation of gender theory is the only one, I am forcing you to accept it.  I am, in prof-speak, “reifying patriarchy” with this post.

Except… I’m a woman.  I’m not explaining things to you; we’re collaborating.  We’re producing knowledge together.  Each of us brings our own unique perspective, and we share.  That’s what the comments are for!

In practice, then, “theory” becomes a kind of get-out-of-evidence-free card.  I can’t prove that Napoleon’s dodgy frog legs lost him the Battle of Waterloo, but I can sure as hell “prove” that he fought the battle in the first place because the Duke of Wellington questioned his manhood.  And that’s History, a discipline that still at least kinda sorta has to make a nod to facts.  It’s far, far worse in Literature, or any of the “Studies” departments, which have been fact-free zones from jump street.

Feel the patriarchy

As I said at Morgan’s place, the irony of this is: It’s purely commercial.  In the academic racket, one only gets tenure by publishing, and only original “research” gets published.  This isn’t a problem for the sciences, or even humanities like archaeology (though those guys have to dig up a new pharaoh or something).  But what about the liberal arts?  There’s only so much you can say about Shakespeare or the Civil War, right?  So you don’t.  You take your pet obsession and “theory” the shit out of it, and pretty soon you’re getting paid to claim that dressing up like a chipmunk and cruising leather bars “raises provocative questions about the performance of gender.”

I wish I was kidding.