The academic humanities used to have a convincing justification for their existence: these are great works that countless people over the generations have cherished and loved and learned from, and we will help foster that appreciation. The change to “we subvert the power structures” was unfortunate, and has a lot to do with the crisis of confidence: if that’s what you wanted to do, why not study political science and policy, where you could get closer to the levers of power and therefore actually change something?
I know what you mean about Erving Goffman's book, but that's actually a measure of how influential it was. We now take his insights as obvious facts about the world. But they weren't always so.
As usual, this is great. It's on us to defend and protect esoteric knowledge, even if there's no obvious "reason" to do so in capitalism. (Maybe especially because of this.)
This reminds me of the conversations I've had with my husband, who is Taiwanese, and who talks all the time about how Chinese culture is thousands of years old and the methods it uses to self-perpetuate. To him, the answer to "why is Confucius worthwhile" is some sort of evolutionary "because it works to keep our culture/family going over a long period of time". It makes an interesting counterpoint to your sage here, whose answer is something more like "because I personally gain social value from (the appearance of) knowing these things".
Also want to toss in my recommendation for "sociology book that is weirdly really good": Righteous Dopefiend by Philippe Bourgois and Jeffrey Schonberg. Read this 7 years ago for a job and I'm still thinking about it.
Confucius has gone through some major nadirs in Chinese culture! Like basically from the end of the Han Dynasty to the middle of the Song Dynasty, Confucian scholars were really sidelined by Taoist and Buddhist monks and by eunuch officials. It was only with the solidification of the civil service examination system in the middle of the Song dynasty that Confucian knowledge really became the bedrock of Chinese culture again--though even there it's amazing how Confucian scholars crept back into vogue during the Qing conquest dynasty. And there've definitely been times (like during the late Ming empire!) when Confucian scholars seemed to actively undermine and harm the government, weakening the state. Hard to say. When a nation is strong, everything they do looks like a source of strength; when they're weak, everything they do looks like a source of weakness.
Brahminism too has had some nadirs in India--it's pretty impressive that it survived the five hundred years when Muslims ruled India. I don't know that Brahminism really keeps the 'culture' going--I think it just keeps itself going. It creates a certain set of people with a vested, hereditary interest in maintaining these texts, and they've done a great job of, well, maintaining those texts because it maintains their own power.
I enjoy reading your parables, reflections, and jeremiads. This particular parable touches on a couple of issues I’ve been grappling with for a long while. I’m happy to say I have no definitive answers, but I’d like to share a thought or two.
It seems to me that many geographic areas have developed high cultures. It took centuries in every case. It also took some sort of arrangement—social, economic, whatever—that allowed at least some people to have leisure. By leisure, I mean having some time during their waking day to do something beyond surviving. Historically, this arrangement often meant that some people gave up any hope of having leisure themselves so they could make leisure possible for others. It’s still so today. I benefit from an arrangement by which I have leisure—very little money, but some leisure—namely academia. Because of this arrangement, I have been able to spend my life studying and practicing Western philosophy. I’m one of the luckiest of all people in that I have also made a living at it.
Can I justify this life? Maybe. We humans are, by nature, meaning-factories, and we each spend our entire lives gorging ourselves with experiences and cranking out meaningful thoughts, words, actions, and artifacts. From birth, we have an insatiable desire to understand, to know, and to do. Presumably, humans did this before they had a language. They did it in different ways when speech emerged. They did it in still other ways when writing emerged. This process still continues as we build astonishing meaning-generators like calculus from crude meaning-tools like arithmetic. Any social arrangement whereby large groups of humans can transfer meanings to each other and evolve new meanings is what I would call a culture, and some cultures have blossomed into high cultures. Of course, not all cultures evolve in directions that encourage the further growth of meanings. Some cultures stagnate, decline, or expire. High cultures are not inevitable.
You and I are tiny moving parts within humanity. Your dogged reading of great books makes possible some of your thoughts about them (and about much else, of course). Your thoughts make possible some of your writing. When I read your writing, new thoughts become possible for me. Hopefully, my teaching and writing make possible some thoughts for others. Together, we all do what we do because of centuries of unnecessary, unpredictable, highly improbable bootstrapping. But we engage in all this bootstrapping, not because there is some end goal, but because that’s just what humans do. We run away from chaos as fast as our environments let us, and because we do, others may get a little further along by clambering over the meanings we’ve thrown out there.
So here’s what I offer as a justification of academic disciplines like philosophy, dance and performance studies, or comparative literature. There is an arrangement called academia within which we are free to stumble along blindly and without predetermined direction, making and learning from one mistake after another, dragging our civilization with us away from chaos. Thus, our efforts bring about some possibility that those who read or listen to us may not otherwise have had. All of us, because we so furiously do what we do, have made possible whatever will actually happen next in the evolution of meaning. Perhaps some future historian can say whether it was good. Autodidacts participate, too, but academia is an institutional arrangement that guarantees both that some will have leisure to explore (i.e., a tenured faculty) and that there are channels of influence (publications and teaching). Academia is an institution dedicated to the unrestricted desire to know.
Ok, this was hilarious! Beautifully done. Got me to upgrade.
I disagree about Alice Goffman, btw, though it's been a longish time since I thought about the case. I remember reading it, and only somewhat later saying "that Goffman!" SO it's kind of hard not to be cynical all around. Some similar stories about JD Vance, but I digress. My disagreement with Goffman wasn't so much with her work, or even the criminal collaboration, but with that as the appropriate stance for an anthropology of our times. See Navigators of the Contemporary: Why Ethnography Matters (Chicago 2008). No footnotes! I'm unduly proud of that.
I just finished a book, Quixote's Dinner Party, which might appeal to your assistant professor. Currently in negotiation. Some sort of literary non-fiction about these questions. Very much about the loss of nerve, and other things, that you aptly diagnose. But also about bureaucracy, the state, and violence. And friendship. It's kind of a big book!
Anyway, again, well done. You've got a real knack for the funny story as parable. I look forward to more.
Yay thanks! Yes I gather much of the controversy about Goffman was that she did very traditional participant-observer ethnography, where she was the outsider, allowed to come in and opine and study some group of people. But her approach still seems valid! If people aren't allowed to do that kind of ethnography anymore, then surely she shouldn't even have been granted a dissertation or given a job in the first place?
Yes, the problem with dissertations, hiring, and tenure fights -- can be very ugly. But I do not know the details of her case, faculty wars, etc. Uggh. That said, her classicism doesn't bother me ("still seems valid!" as you put it). The question is what do we think cultural anthropology is for, now? Here's a bit about Navigators.
The academic humanities used to have a convincing justification for their existence: these are great works that countless people over the generations have cherished and loved and learned from, and we will help foster that appreciation. The change to “we subvert the power structures” was unfortunate, and has a lot to do with the crisis of confidence: if that’s what you wanted to do, why not study political science and policy, where you could get closer to the levers of power and therefore actually change something?
I know what you mean about Erving Goffman's book, but that's actually a measure of how influential it was. We now take his insights as obvious facts about the world. But they weren't always so.
Definitely a good point!
As usual, this is great. It's on us to defend and protect esoteric knowledge, even if there's no obvious "reason" to do so in capitalism. (Maybe especially because of this.)
This reminds me of the conversations I've had with my husband, who is Taiwanese, and who talks all the time about how Chinese culture is thousands of years old and the methods it uses to self-perpetuate. To him, the answer to "why is Confucius worthwhile" is some sort of evolutionary "because it works to keep our culture/family going over a long period of time". It makes an interesting counterpoint to your sage here, whose answer is something more like "because I personally gain social value from (the appearance of) knowing these things".
Also want to toss in my recommendation for "sociology book that is weirdly really good": Righteous Dopefiend by Philippe Bourgois and Jeffrey Schonberg. Read this 7 years ago for a job and I'm still thinking about it.
Oh man I'll check that one out!
Confucius has gone through some major nadirs in Chinese culture! Like basically from the end of the Han Dynasty to the middle of the Song Dynasty, Confucian scholars were really sidelined by Taoist and Buddhist monks and by eunuch officials. It was only with the solidification of the civil service examination system in the middle of the Song dynasty that Confucian knowledge really became the bedrock of Chinese culture again--though even there it's amazing how Confucian scholars crept back into vogue during the Qing conquest dynasty. And there've definitely been times (like during the late Ming empire!) when Confucian scholars seemed to actively undermine and harm the government, weakening the state. Hard to say. When a nation is strong, everything they do looks like a source of strength; when they're weak, everything they do looks like a source of weakness.
Brahminism too has had some nadirs in India--it's pretty impressive that it survived the five hundred years when Muslims ruled India. I don't know that Brahminism really keeps the 'culture' going--I think it just keeps itself going. It creates a certain set of people with a vested, hereditary interest in maintaining these texts, and they've done a great job of, well, maintaining those texts because it maintains their own power.
I enjoy reading your parables, reflections, and jeremiads. This particular parable touches on a couple of issues I’ve been grappling with for a long while. I’m happy to say I have no definitive answers, but I’d like to share a thought or two.
It seems to me that many geographic areas have developed high cultures. It took centuries in every case. It also took some sort of arrangement—social, economic, whatever—that allowed at least some people to have leisure. By leisure, I mean having some time during their waking day to do something beyond surviving. Historically, this arrangement often meant that some people gave up any hope of having leisure themselves so they could make leisure possible for others. It’s still so today. I benefit from an arrangement by which I have leisure—very little money, but some leisure—namely academia. Because of this arrangement, I have been able to spend my life studying and practicing Western philosophy. I’m one of the luckiest of all people in that I have also made a living at it.
Can I justify this life? Maybe. We humans are, by nature, meaning-factories, and we each spend our entire lives gorging ourselves with experiences and cranking out meaningful thoughts, words, actions, and artifacts. From birth, we have an insatiable desire to understand, to know, and to do. Presumably, humans did this before they had a language. They did it in different ways when speech emerged. They did it in still other ways when writing emerged. This process still continues as we build astonishing meaning-generators like calculus from crude meaning-tools like arithmetic. Any social arrangement whereby large groups of humans can transfer meanings to each other and evolve new meanings is what I would call a culture, and some cultures have blossomed into high cultures. Of course, not all cultures evolve in directions that encourage the further growth of meanings. Some cultures stagnate, decline, or expire. High cultures are not inevitable.
You and I are tiny moving parts within humanity. Your dogged reading of great books makes possible some of your thoughts about them (and about much else, of course). Your thoughts make possible some of your writing. When I read your writing, new thoughts become possible for me. Hopefully, my teaching and writing make possible some thoughts for others. Together, we all do what we do because of centuries of unnecessary, unpredictable, highly improbable bootstrapping. But we engage in all this bootstrapping, not because there is some end goal, but because that’s just what humans do. We run away from chaos as fast as our environments let us, and because we do, others may get a little further along by clambering over the meanings we’ve thrown out there.
So here’s what I offer as a justification of academic disciplines like philosophy, dance and performance studies, or comparative literature. There is an arrangement called academia within which we are free to stumble along blindly and without predetermined direction, making and learning from one mistake after another, dragging our civilization with us away from chaos. Thus, our efforts bring about some possibility that those who read or listen to us may not otherwise have had. All of us, because we so furiously do what we do, have made possible whatever will actually happen next in the evolution of meaning. Perhaps some future historian can say whether it was good. Autodidacts participate, too, but academia is an institutional arrangement that guarantees both that some will have leisure to explore (i.e., a tenured faculty) and that there are channels of influence (publications and teaching). Academia is an institution dedicated to the unrestricted desire to know.
Ok, this was hilarious! Beautifully done. Got me to upgrade.
I disagree about Alice Goffman, btw, though it's been a longish time since I thought about the case. I remember reading it, and only somewhat later saying "that Goffman!" SO it's kind of hard not to be cynical all around. Some similar stories about JD Vance, but I digress. My disagreement with Goffman wasn't so much with her work, or even the criminal collaboration, but with that as the appropriate stance for an anthropology of our times. See Navigators of the Contemporary: Why Ethnography Matters (Chicago 2008). No footnotes! I'm unduly proud of that.
I just finished a book, Quixote's Dinner Party, which might appeal to your assistant professor. Currently in negotiation. Some sort of literary non-fiction about these questions. Very much about the loss of nerve, and other things, that you aptly diagnose. But also about bureaucracy, the state, and violence. And friendship. It's kind of a big book!
Anyway, again, well done. You've got a real knack for the funny story as parable. I look forward to more.
Yay thanks! Yes I gather much of the controversy about Goffman was that she did very traditional participant-observer ethnography, where she was the outsider, allowed to come in and opine and study some group of people. But her approach still seems valid! If people aren't allowed to do that kind of ethnography anymore, then surely she shouldn't even have been granted a dissertation or given a job in the first place?
Yes, the problem with dissertations, hiring, and tenure fights -- can be very ugly. But I do not know the details of her case, faculty wars, etc. Uggh. That said, her classicism doesn't bother me ("still seems valid!" as you put it). The question is what do we think cultural anthropology is for, now? Here's a bit about Navigators.
https://www.davidawestbrook.com/navigators-of-the-contemporary.html