Stardate 20030430.1803

(On Screen): Continuing to think about Jane Galt's encounter with the pomos, I remembered an essay I'd seen online quite a while ago. It was written in 1991 by a software engineer who actually looked into what postmodern lit-crit was about and lived to tell the tale. He describes it in terms the rest of us can then understand. Here's a key section:

The really telling factor that neither side of the debate seems to cotton to, however, is this: technical people like me work in a commercial environment. Every day I have to explain what I do to people who are different from me -- marketing people, technical writers, my boss, my investors, my customers -- none of whom belong to my profession or share my technical background or knowledge. As a consequence, I'm constantly forced to describe what I know in terms that other people can at least begin to understand. My success in my job depends to a large degree on my success in so communicating. At the very least, in order to remain employed I have to convince somebody else that what I'm doing is worth having them pay for it.

Contrast this situation with that of academia. Professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies in their professional life find themselves communicating principally with other professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies. They also, of course, communicate with students, but students don't really count. Graduate students are studying to be professors themselves and so are already part of the in-crowd. Undergraduate students rarely get a chance to close the feedback loop, especially at the so called "better schools" (I once spoke with a Harvard professor who told me that it is quite easy to get a Harvard undergraduate degree without ever once encountering a tenured member of the faculty inside a classroom; I don't know if this is actually true but it's a delightful piece of slander regardless). They publish in peer reviewed journals, which are not only edited by their peers but published for and mainly read by their peers (if they are read at all). Decisions about their career advancement, tenure, promotion, and so on are made by committees of their fellows. They are supervised by deans and other academic officials who themselves used to be professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies. They rarely have any reason to talk to anybody but themselves -- occasionally a Professor of Literature will collaborate with a Professor of History, but in academic circles this sort of interdisciplinary work is still considered sufficiently daring and risqué as to be newsworthy.

What you have is rather like birds on the Galapagos islands -- an isolated population with unique selective pressures resulting in evolutionary divergence from the mainland population. There's no reason you should be able to understand what these academics are saying because, for several generations, comprehensibility to outsiders has not been one of the selective criteria to which they've been subjected. What's more, it's not particularly important that they even be terribly comprehensible to each other, since the quality of academic work, particularly in the humanities, is judged primarily on the basis of politics and cleverness.

He concludes that the professors and academics in these fields are lost in an intellectual jungle, due to the fact that their work is not being subjected to any kind of reality check. In 1991, when this was written, he concluded that they didn't really represent any kind of threat. Their work was intellectually empty, and influenced no one and nothing.

The events of the last two years make clear that there actually was a threat. Those who have participated in this have also been moving to try to take political power within academia and to indoctrinate students with their world-view. They've also become politically aligned, more or less with neo-Marxism. It's been pointed out that there's a natural antipathy in some parts of academia to capitalism because it's viewed as rewarding crass utility instead of inherent merit. It's viewed as rewarding people for what they do instead of for what they are, and that's bad because they themselves are good but don't do much which is good. For people like this, the Marxist socialist state has attractions because it would be ruled by an elite chosen on the basis of inherent merit (i.e. them).

They're trying to take over the campuses. They've been instituting speech codes and trying to create an environment on many campuses where only certain points of view are permitted to be expressed. They actively censor conservative points of view and persecute those holding them, and do so in the name of free speech. The logic is rather convoluted. It's an extension of the same logic which drives them to believe in admission quotas and other forms of coercive affirmative action. Basically, the only way there is equality is when the results are equal. Equality of opportunity isn't true equality; only results matter, and this is judged on the basis of groups and not individuals. ("Identity politics" and the basic idea that groups are the only thing which truly matter are part of this.) Thus quotas are necessary in order to make sure that the right number of people of each group are represented in each graduating class so as to "break the self-perpetuating hold of the privileged class on power".

Likewise, they perceive the conservative voice as having what they think is a disproportionate presence in the public discourse in the nation as a whole. In order for their own hard-leftist point of view to overall get its "fair share" it's necessary to turn university campuses more or less into reservations for that voice, by suppressing all others. Thus by active censorship and repression they actually see themselves serving the principles of free speech, by making it so that the overall mix of ideas in the body politic is "more fair".

Much of this was below the radar but the onset of war forced them, like everyone else, out in the open because the political issues were too large and too important to ignore. They couldn't stand silent.

But that also means that they had to come out of their caves and attempt to apply their ideas in the real world. Instead of dealing only with themselves and with powerless students, they had to deal with fellow citizens over whom they had no coercive power. Whether they agree or not, students are forced to parrot the professor's line because otherwise they won't graduate. But out here in the real world, these academics have no ability to force fellow citizens to listen at all, let alone to listen respectfully and to nod their heads in passive agreement without any argument.

They had to try to persuade other citizens to their point of view (opposing the war, opposing nationalism as such and America in particular, opposing capitalism and globalization, and all the other opposings we've come to know and love about the academic left's political activism). It means that their ideas, previously developed and spread largely in hermetic isolation, were necessarily subjected at long last to empirical test, and didn't pass that test.

And they failed miserably. It's hardly surprising; after 20 years of intellectual masturbation they didn't produce any babies. Their ideas were revealed as being empty. What they mostly reaped was ridicule. Their proposals didn't pass the horselaugh test.

But as a result of this, they're also out in the open, and they are now revealed as being a pernicious force in this nation who have tried to hijack the educational system to colonize the future by indoctrinating young people into their own political beliefs. The backlash is already beginning and it's only going to get stronger now, because critics are no longer letting themselves be shouted down and silenced and because the general population of the US has now taken note of what they've been doing.