"The guillotine became so prevalent and so routine that the narrator observes it became a symbol of a pseudo-religion. He observes, 'It superseded the Cross. Models of it were worn on breasts from which the Cross was discarded, and it was bowed down to and believed in where the Cross was denied.' ...."
I reckon philosophical fashion alternates roughly every half-generation, so for instance you see LW getting some of his own medicine from Oxford's very own Sarsons-specialists, people born in, say the 1870s (and more wedded than he was to a neo-scholasticism about language). And then there's Williams's nice remark abt Hare's over-rationalism: Hare was born ten years before him. A Procrustean thought, but hey, mebbe encouraging abt the future. Am rereading Parfit at the mo, so what went round certainly comes around 40 years on. Funnily or something enough, one of the less public school-y places at St A' s was Logic and Met, I - as a comp product - thought. I remember interesting grammar school/redbrick maths/science types on the staff. And not as rebarbative as it was ten years later. Somebody once got gently upbraided for failing propositional logic n > 2 times. But they had been around for an awfu' lang time ...
Ma'am - a few years back, when you were still at Sussex Uni, we had a dialogue re the collapse of humanities in Academia. I posited as a tax payer time had come to put an end to the endless nonsense and nastiness now pouring out of "academia" by pulling the plug in courses such as "gender studies". You said you felt that it was the job of academia to do deal with its current crisis, and that it would.
Well, a few years on, I have to say I am right. Everything you write about* makes me think "And I pay for this nonsense?". It would be good to know, for example, that "Gender studies" actually contributed to society, or even to the economy. Fat chance. "Gender studies" is meaningless to the vast majority of the nation, it does not enlighten us or make us better people, indeed, like great swathes of the humanities, it now seems to be disappearing up its own fundament.
Shame really. And I say that as a humanities BA Oxon, 1972. I know the value of humanities; that academia should destroy that, and that is taxpayers should be funding said destruction makes me sad and very very angry.
* what you write is spot on and beautifully written. The subject, sadly, not so.
Hmmm. No response. So here's a precis of what's happening in the Humanities, which is the greatest taxpayer funded circle jerk in history, with no relevance to 99.9% of society, ordinary working people.
HI Jeremy. Sometimes I don't answer because I'm not sure what I think, and this is one of those cases. I certainly think that some of the humanities as currently practiced is utter dross.
Ah well, some movement - last time we spoke you believed academia could heal itself. At least that's changed, as clearly a) it can't and b) it doesn't want to. Exit taxpayer...
The first of which starts off with an incisive quote to the effect that universities are now "madrassas for woke stupidity".
Somewhat apropos of which and of "Gender Studies" in particular, you might "like" a review of Koertge's & Patai's "Professing Feminism", this passage in particular:
"The authors, however, demonstrate that these problems have existed since their ideology’s inception, and were particularly common within Women Studies programs. The authors wrote of the isolationist attitude that dominates many of the programs, along with a virulent anti-science, anti-intellectual sentiment driving many of the professors, staff and students."
"[virulently] anti-science and anti-intellectual sentiments", indeed.
Along the same line of which, you might also "like" Koertge's essay on the "feminist repudiation of logic":
"Unfortunately, the predominant feminist response has been to attack logic and other traditional canons of rationality as sexist. .... I wish I could end the story of the feminist critique of logic on this happy note. Unfortunately, however, some feminists have claimed that not just the homework exercises but the very enterprise of characterizing the formal structure of logical inference cannot be separated from sexism, racism, and totalitarianism. .... To tell a young woman to resist logic because it is a tool of domination and will poison her mind is to put yet another barrier in her path."
UK and Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan argues or suggests that part of the underlying problem there is that "feminism" is less a philosophy than a political project:
"Does feminist philosophy rest on a mistake?
The objection I have in mind is that feminist philosophy rests on a mistake: namely, a conflation of epistemology and politics. Philosophy, at least on the conventional understanding, is an epistemic project, a project oriented toward truth or knowledge, and thus committed to the kind of unfettered inquiry that is conducive to the acquisition of truth and knowledge. Feminism meanwhile is a political project, a project oriented toward the emancipation of women and the dissolution of patriarchy. ...."
A political project which I've argued elsewhere is little short of outright Lysenkoism - the "deliberate distortion of scientific facts or theories for purposes that are deemed politically, religiously or socially desirable":
Ha! Her Mum and I sadly misguided by SOAS's honourable past as an academic institution of the highest order, suggest that her daughter, a very bright lass indeed, might like to go there to study Arabic. What she actually attended was half Madrassa/Half hard left propaganda unit. Out of her mouth pours authentic Woke gibberish (pace, Blazing Saddles...)
Four years of that completely scrambled her brain, and it still is scrambled. Basically incapable of work or complex reasoning. Cost to taxpayer? c£60k. For WHAT? Had we known we'd have made sure she did not go to Uni, rather sought a career in the real world.
My condolences on your daughter's scrambled brains, I can sympathize ... 😉
Particularly about careers with some practical value. Somewhat apropos of which, a rather brilliant tweet from Heather Heying - who herself had a run-in with the woke mob at Evergreen State College in the US:
"Many of my students had done manual work before college. Generally but not always men; experienced in carpentry, forklift operation, roofing, more—they were almost always deeply insightful, rigorous thinkers. They had experience in physical systems that gave ungameable feedback."
That "ungameable feedback of physical systems" has to be one of the most brilliant and insightful comments I've had the pleasure of running across, particularly from an academic. Particularly as my own claim to fame and fortune, such as it is, is due to having an associate degree in computer technology, cybernetics in particular, the root word of which "comes from Greek κυβερνητική (kybernētikḗ), meaning 'governance' ..." 😉
Profoundly important principle, but maybe I'm somewhat biased ... 🙂
But far too many of our so-called academics - "free-loaders" in fact, living in a Shangri-la of ivory towers paid for with the blood, sweat, and tears of the work-a-day world - haven't got a clue about the concept, that all of their airy-fairy "theories" aren't worth a pinch of coonshit if they're not grounded in brute facts.
As T.E. Huxley put it,
"The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."
Sadly, far too many in the "humanities" departments, "Women's Studies" and "Gender Studies" in particular, haven't got a clue about the utility of that perspective and principle, and are more engaged in making fetishes, dogmata, and religions out of their half-baked "hypotheses" - being charitable.
I expect, almost hope, that pretty much every last academic on the planet - from "land's end to john o'groats", at least all those in the "humanities" - is likely to wind up on the streets or in bread-lines - come the revolution. Might wind up having a bit more appreciation for the "grim meat-hook realities" of life - as J.D. MacDonald once put it. But maybe even the threat of that will help to "sharpen their minds wonderfully" ... 😉
Though it's clearly not just "American life" and culture - it includes the UK, Canada (where I hang out a shingle), Australia, New Zealand (which is more or less a basket case with its endorsement of Maori "other ways of knowing 🙄" as science), Europe; pretty much all of Western "civilization".
Moot exactly where that rot starts from, although there seems to be something of a "seismic shift" happening these days, maybe partly due to Covid - silver lined clouds and all that. Arguably, maybe part of that shift is Kathleen's more or less commendable effort to take a hard look at some of the dogma and quite "risible absurdities" undergirding much of "feminism":
No or few reports yet on how that is being received in the hallowed halls of Academia, although one might reasonably see it, somewhat hopefully, as "the apostles disputing Jesus", of Darwin and his bulldog arguing in favour of evolution, of Galileo's "E pur si muove".
But that "apostles" quip is from Barbara Tuchman's "The Proud Tower" - which was also something of an end of an age tale, circa 1900. Highly recommended, by the way; a brilliant exposition of the "perfect storm" of that era which culminated in World War I, and in the subsequent "massive disillusionment" and necessary recognition of "humanity's limitations". A great many parallels with our current travails.
However, as much as I wish Kathleen well in her endeavors, in the nailing of her "heresy" to the doors of Academia, I'm not entirely sure that she doesn't have more than a few questionable "articles of faith" of her own that might well vitiate her best efforts. Time will tell ...
I see Jonathan Haidt is one of the "babel" authors; big fan of his work. Been reading a lot on the collapse of Liberalism of late. Lasch another good on that matter. Fukuyama's "End of history" has of course been proved to be wrong, though I gather (never bothered to read it) that he had a coda, that Western Liberalism contained with in the seeds of its own destruction. As it does.
Read any Roger Scruton? The late English Conservative (as in the philosophy not the irredeemably hopeless "Conservative" Party) philosopher. I'm a big fan - reading him articulated for me my inner conservative impulses. This a sample - you'll need to scroll down as the Hungarian translation precedes the English piece
Woke has infected the West, in the form of the Anglosphere. We seem to be uniquely prone to it, which is odd, given that England is in reality the progenitor of the notion of "human rights", and also that of individual liberty. Now thanks to Red Guards 2.0, we're busy chucking it all away.
Tuchman! Am reading her "A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century" as I write, and very fine it is too. I didn't study history at all at Public School (private secondary school) so am catching up now, and reading a lot on the early 19th and late 18th century. especially the geopolitics of WW1. Highly recommend Adam Tooze's "The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916–1931" on this matter. He has an interesting Substack.
Canada. What the hell happened? The software firm U worked for was based in Toronto (Geac by name, an early HP offshoot, we builr our own shit hot fast machines, with our own C like language and interpreter based language for the screen handling. Used to go over for a couple of weeks every two years or so, and always had a ball. Am amazed that Canada, Oz and NZ (my wife's a Kiwi) all fell to Woke just like that; I thought the colonies sturdier than that, but this is a generational thing.
Sun is out in rural Somerset, and I have me a garden calling ... later!
Re Kathleen - she is for sure fighting the good fight with all her might, and righteously so. But I think to be so embedded in what is happening risks one's peripheral vision, so to see. Ivory Towers and all that. One thing I did know when I graduated was that I would never ever be an academic (or a teacher).
Yes. Brilliant. Ha! I was a very bright kid and ended up at Oxford late 60s studying Eng. Lit. & Lang. However, all three of us boys were told, on returning home from school at the age of 16, that in the holidays, we worked and paid board and lodging. Am so grateful for that, and my ex and I did the same for our four. All physical labour, working on building the M56 motorway (near Manchester), building work and many happy years working at Robinson's Brewery in Stockport (still independent and family owned) doing all sorts of manual tasks. Hopping the barrels. Preparing them in the racking back to go up to the loading bay; steam washing barrels (all wood back then, and we still had coopers; I'd go and watch them to have a quick fag, so fine was their workmanship). So that "ungameable feedback of physical systems" is very meaningful for me, and the nature of manual labour an unmissable experience.
Thanks for the links. Tip of the hat to Ms. Heying!
Stepdaughter, bless her - we fought as all stepkids and step parents do, but get on fine :-)! Happily, all my four kids from my first marriage (all schooled mostly at Steiner schools ill the government closed 'em all down (too much independent thinking go on, I suspect - the core of Steiner education being to produce free and responsible adults)) went straight into work from school, all deciding Uni was not for them. Three went abroad to work. Eldest did in fact go to uni, as a mature student, to study the Baroque Flute (so so much sweeter a sound than the modern flute, IMO) at the Royal Academy of Music. All self-supporting by the age of 21. The bloating of university entrance has been a disaster - the old three tier format (which West Germany took up after the war with huge success) of technical (colleges), skilled (polytechnics) and academic (university) mirrored the differing capabilities and needs of kids - so they junked it and now everyone HAS to go.
Parents or stepparents and kids - something of an age-old battle methinks. 🙂
Reminds me of Mark Twain's quip: 😉
“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
Had occasion to quote that at my father's "celebration of life" as something of a needle directed at my siblings who were somewhat late to appreciate that perspective. 🙂
But quite agree on the "bloating" - something that an article I'd linked to earlier had discoursed on in some quite damning detail:
And likewise agree on the "three tier format". I had headed off to university myself - something of an abortive effort, only managed a couple of years before taking a decade hiatus in the work-a-day world - clerical, pipefitting, welding.
Though I have to concede that university gave me a welcome introduction to some math, physics, language (Russian) and philosophy that stood me in good stead when I went back to get a technical diploma (2 years) in computer technology - followed by some 30 years before the mast in the field. 🙂
Ha! Mr. Clemens has a way of getting to the heart of such matters, bless him. I treasure his remark on giving up smoking - "Easy. I do it every day". Yup! Oxford late 60s disappointed me - I had had a remarkable English teacher at school (Colin Wilcockson, Norther Irish, who would often commence a lesson by jumping on his desk and spouting poetry and Shakespeare at us). With some honourable exceptions the lecturing dons seemed tired of their subjects.
I skimmed my degree. 3.3. Clive James (that's another story) said to me that there were only two Oxford degrees worth having - a Summa Cum Laude, the best of the best, which is present to the recipient in a hall full of Dons, standing and applauding, and the 3.3, the "Gentleman's" Degree. My problem was that The Grateful Dead turned up in the UK during finals term, and as I had been waiting five years to see them, they were not to be missed. But I got that degree and then thought - I've had enough of books, and did manual labour for some years - building work, learning enough with the maintenance team at Exeter College (after a month convincing them I **really** wanted the job) which taught me bricklaying, glazing, roofing, plastering and some plumbing, enabling me to completely gut and rebuild the interior of my first house, some years later. Then delivering booze for an upmarket Offie in Oxford, with a lovely old Irishman (my old man was a Dubliner, so...) whose route always produced a drink wherever we delivered (mostly colleges). Hmmm.
The working in a co-op printing press in Oxford, then a milkman for 6 months whilst waiting to start a TOPS (thanks Maggie!) course in programming; a mortgage and three kids meant I had to earn more, and whilst I really did not want to work in an office, programming seemed accceptable. As it was, back in the day one could still turn up in the summer in shorts, sandals and a t-shirt, and work whatever hours as long as you got the job done. 20+ years working on library systems (perfect for a bibliophile) and the last 10 or so working on special software for the OU, TCD and the National Library of Wales, putting access to their immense stacks online. I just loved that work. Buggered off just after we'd paid our mortgage off as for the first time in my career I had a manager I could not get on with. Had had ones I did not like, but were good managers. This guy a useless accountant with no knowledge of software and running software projects. I thought - I'd rather be poor and happy than work for this guy, decided to hand my notice in to find the very next day they were looking for redundancies. Up went my hand ... now happily retired in rural Somerset gardening and hanging with my wife and hounds. But that period of working with my hands and working with ordinary working folk was invaluable in forming my approach to life. And of course, all us middle class folks were working class at one point; my Mum's family jumped in two generations. I have a copy of my maternal grandparents marriage certificate (Manchester Parish Church. I.E. The Cathedral!) in which my ex blacksmith great grandpa lists his profession as "Gentleman" :-)
My best return from Oxford was my Old English tutor, with whom a shared a huge love for the middle English poem, "Sir Gawayne and The Green Knight", set in the North West, and one I had studied (along with lots of Chaucer, who I am returning to and enjoying again just as much) at school. We were stretched. It was good. Took me along time to return to serious literature, as Oxford's surgical dry work put me off, but lockdown provided a perfect oppo to revisit many classic - Paradise Lost, Fitzgerald's Iliad and Odyssey, a truly wonderful translation of The Divine Comedy by Clive James, and finally at the third attempt, Joyce's Ulysses which I adored, having not previously made it further than half way before. It does need reading in huge chunks to get the ebb and flow.
I did some Russian for 'O' Level, but failed- the only language I struggled with. Learnt it as a result of this.... and in 1968 spent 6 weeks in the USSR whilst unbeknownst to us, the tanks rolled towards Prague. This is my account, written fifty years later.
Put me off Socialism and all its mutations for life...
And "academia beyond salvation" is what I have been putting to Ms. Stock. I fear for all her valiant efforts, the Humanities have in that rather fine term, "jumped the shark". How does it serve society? It doesn't any more, just serves itself. Fine. But why should I pay for it?
If I may be so bold – not yet "deplatformed" ... – as to raise a finger, or even a hand ...
Generally a great essay, at least on a something of a quick skim; many points certainly deserve a more detailed response. But, to start the ball rolling, nice analogy with "cocooning philosophy" and consequential follow-up by pointing out that few budding philosophers will transform into "butterflies", even if of the hot-house and ivory-tower variety.
But something of a more or less damning indictment of Academia, academic philosophy in particular. ICYMI, in the same vein, you might "enjoy" several salvos on the same front, to wit:
Michaelle Robillard's "How I Left Academia, or, How Academia Left Me", his opening "Universities are madrassas for woke stupidity” (Delingpole) being worth the price of admission in itself:
As all three of you apparently emphasize in rather damning detail, there are any number of quite serious "systemic" flaws in the whole edifice of education. Which seems now less institutions to promote the acquisition of knowledge, much less wisdom, and more ones to provide job security, and to flatter its denizens’ and devotees’ “pretensions to infallibility”. Arguably the rather too ubiquitous rot characterizing not just religions but also too many “sacerdotal corporations and schools of philosophy”, as T.E. Huxley put it:
However, while I sincerely wish you, and others, the best of luck in "cleaning out those Augean stables", in that Herculean task, I can't leave without raising the somewhat delicate question as to a few of your own questionable if not contentious and quite problematic "unexamined assumptions", "untenable premises", and "prior commitments". To wit, your rather bold assertion about:
"still perfectly functional understandings of 'woman' and 'man' in terms of 'adult human female' and 'adult human male'. ..."
No doubt there is at least some utility in some of those "functional understandings". At least if one understands that genitalia and karyotypes constitute only something in the way of "proxy variables", or "accidental properties", which correlate in useful ways to the primary variable and essential properties of the category "female".
But while the implications and consequences of that statement of yours may appear somewhat obscure, I really think the issue is anything but "academic", that the consequences are pervasive and pernicious, that it underwrites the odious and pigheaded "ignorance" which Huxlely called "one of the chief sources of evil: "toxicity" from hell to breakfast.
And that is no more evident that in what some have called the "Ideological Bias in the Psychology of Sex and Gender", and undergirds what the reviewers of "Professing Feminism" called the "virulent anti-science, anti-intellectual sentiment driving many of the professors, staff and students" in the deluded if not demented Woman Studies programs in the backwaters of Academia.
No doubt there is some merit in the "feminist project", and I see that you're no particular fan of feminism in general. But far too many feminists betray what Huxley called the "spirit of scientific investigation", although they're hardly unique in that regard, which leads many of them, including Maya Forstater, to the "risible absurdity" that "biological sex in humans is immutable":
You might think that's just a trivial issue or aspect, but a great deal of justification – see Jane Clare Jones' "bun-fight over some mythic essence", for example – to argue that it undergirds, lies at the rotten heart of far too much of "identity politics", from Academia, to Science, to Religion, and Politics itself. Delenda est, indeed.
We all have those type of "unexamined assumptions" – which are, sadly but quite often, merely the pretexts to "pretensions to infalliblity"; everyone but me and thee, of course. But while they are also often the "bedrock" on which our professions and livelihoods, if not our psyches are founded, I really don't think we or society in general are going to have much success in that Herculean task unless we're all willing to take an honest look at them.
It’s insane that people like Robin Dembroff complain of discrimination from their offices at Yale! My guess is that they have been rewarded for their identity and political positions, not hindered by them. It’s interesting that they identify as “trans” when they read as standard issue butch lesbian. Regardless of their reason for identifying this way, the outcome is undoubtedly good for their career, despite their ridiculous claims of “oppression”.
The detail in all this that surprises me the most is the rule that you cannot debate the statement that “trans women are women” in philosophy discussions. How can people accept being told what to think, when the idea in question requires accepting clearly debatable definitions and philosophical positions? And why trans women in particular? Why not a ban on discussing positions offensive to most of us regarding race or the inferiority of women? The hyper focus on trans issues is bizarre and I still don’t understand how we got here.
Well, the knitting at least has a historical precedent
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricoteuse
Brilliant
🙂 "La Guillotine! La Guillotine!" 😉
"The guillotine became so prevalent and so routine that the narrator observes it became a symbol of a pseudo-religion. He observes, 'It superseded the Cross. Models of it were worn on breasts from which the Cross was discarded, and it was bowed down to and believed in where the Cross was denied.' ...."
https://www.storyboardthat.com/lesson-plans/tale-of-two-cities-by-charles-dickens/theme-symbol-motif
Arguably what's happening, with a great deal of justification, with the "Respect my sex if you want my X" campaign in the UK:
https://sex-matters.org/take-action/respect-my-sex/
I reckon philosophical fashion alternates roughly every half-generation, so for instance you see LW getting some of his own medicine from Oxford's very own Sarsons-specialists, people born in, say the 1870s (and more wedded than he was to a neo-scholasticism about language). And then there's Williams's nice remark abt Hare's over-rationalism: Hare was born ten years before him. A Procrustean thought, but hey, mebbe encouraging abt the future. Am rereading Parfit at the mo, so what went round certainly comes around 40 years on. Funnily or something enough, one of the less public school-y places at St A' s was Logic and Met, I - as a comp product - thought. I remember interesting grammar school/redbrick maths/science types on the staff. And not as rebarbative as it was ten years later. Somebody once got gently upbraided for failing propositional logic n > 2 times. But they had been around for an awfu' lang time ...
That is a consoling thought..
Ma'am - a few years back, when you were still at Sussex Uni, we had a dialogue re the collapse of humanities in Academia. I posited as a tax payer time had come to put an end to the endless nonsense and nastiness now pouring out of "academia" by pulling the plug in courses such as "gender studies". You said you felt that it was the job of academia to do deal with its current crisis, and that it would.
Well, a few years on, I have to say I am right. Everything you write about* makes me think "And I pay for this nonsense?". It would be good to know, for example, that "Gender studies" actually contributed to society, or even to the economy. Fat chance. "Gender studies" is meaningless to the vast majority of the nation, it does not enlighten us or make us better people, indeed, like great swathes of the humanities, it now seems to be disappearing up its own fundament.
Shame really. And I say that as a humanities BA Oxon, 1972. I know the value of humanities; that academia should destroy that, and that is taxpayers should be funding said destruction makes me sad and very very angry.
* what you write is spot on and beautifully written. The subject, sadly, not so.
Hmmm. No response. So here's a precis of what's happening in the Humanities, which is the greatest taxpayer funded circle jerk in history, with no relevance to 99.9% of society, ordinary working people.
HI Jeremy. Sometimes I don't answer because I'm not sure what I think, and this is one of those cases. I certainly think that some of the humanities as currently practiced is utter dross.
Well, "utter dross" seems to be overly charitable if not criminal negligence ...
Ah well, some movement - last time we spoke you believed academia could heal itself. At least that's changed, as clearly a) it can't and b) it doesn't want to. Exit taxpayer...
"... endless nonsense and nastiness now pouring out of 'academia' ...."
Indeed; amen to that. In case you missed my earlier comment on the sad state of Academia, see:
https://michaelrobillard.substack.com/p/how-i-left-academia-or-how-academia?s=r
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/academia-beyond-salvation
The first of which starts off with an incisive quote to the effect that universities are now "madrassas for woke stupidity".
Somewhat apropos of which and of "Gender Studies" in particular, you might "like" a review of Koertge's & Patai's "Professing Feminism", this passage in particular:
"The authors, however, demonstrate that these problems have existed since their ideology’s inception, and were particularly common within Women Studies programs. The authors wrote of the isolationist attitude that dominates many of the programs, along with a virulent anti-science, anti-intellectual sentiment driving many of the professors, staff and students."
https://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2009/07/27/professing-feminism-noh/
"[virulently] anti-science and anti-intellectual sentiments", indeed.
Along the same line of which, you might also "like" Koertge's essay on the "feminist repudiation of logic":
"Unfortunately, the predominant feminist response has been to attack logic and other traditional canons of rationality as sexist. .... I wish I could end the story of the feminist critique of logic on this happy note. Unfortunately, however, some feminists have claimed that not just the homework exercises but the very enterprise of characterizing the formal structure of logical inference cannot be separated from sexism, racism, and totalitarianism. .... To tell a young woman to resist logic because it is a tool of domination and will poison her mind is to put yet another barrier in her path."
https://philpapers.org/rec/KOETFC
UK and Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan argues or suggests that part of the underlying problem there is that "feminism" is less a philosophy than a political project:
"Does feminist philosophy rest on a mistake?
The objection I have in mind is that feminist philosophy rests on a mistake: namely, a conflation of epistemology and politics. Philosophy, at least on the conventional understanding, is an epistemic project, a project oriented toward truth or knowledge, and thus committed to the kind of unfettered inquiry that is conducive to the acquisition of truth and knowledge. Feminism meanwhile is a political project, a project oriented toward the emancipation of women and the dissolution of patriarchy. ...."
https://users.ox.ac.uk/~corp1468/Research_files/Does%20Feminist%20Philosophy_KCL%20talk.pdf
A political project which I've argued elsewhere is little short of outright Lysenkoism - the "deliberate distortion of scientific facts or theories for purposes that are deemed politically, religiously or socially desirable":
https://medium.com/@steersmann/wikipedias-lysenkoism-410901a22da2
""... endless nonsense and nastiness now pouring out of 'academia' ...." Indeed; amen to that. In case you missed my earlier comment on the sad state of Academia, see: https://michaelrobillard.substack.com/p/how-i-left-academia-or-how-academia?s=r https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/academia-beyond-salvation The first of which starts off with an incisive quote to the effect that universities are now "madrassas for woke stupidity".
Ha! Her Mum and I sadly misguided by SOAS's honourable past as an academic institution of the highest order, suggest that her daughter, a very bright lass indeed, might like to go there to study Arabic. What she actually attended was half Madrassa/Half hard left propaganda unit. Out of her mouth pours authentic Woke gibberish (pace, Blazing Saddles...)
Four years of that completely scrambled her brain, and it still is scrambled. Basically incapable of work or complex reasoning. Cost to taxpayer? c£60k. For WHAT? Had we known we'd have made sure she did not go to Uni, rather sought a career in the real world.
My condolences on your daughter's scrambled brains, I can sympathize ... 😉
Particularly about careers with some practical value. Somewhat apropos of which, a rather brilliant tweet from Heather Heying - who herself had a run-in with the woke mob at Evergreen State College in the US:
"Many of my students had done manual work before college. Generally but not always men; experienced in carpentry, forklift operation, roofing, more—they were almost always deeply insightful, rigorous thinkers. They had experience in physical systems that gave ungameable feedback."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heather_Heying
https://twitter.com/HeatherEHeying/status/1177009042251583488
That "ungameable feedback of physical systems" has to be one of the most brilliant and insightful comments I've had the pleasure of running across, particularly from an academic. Particularly as my own claim to fame and fortune, such as it is, is due to having an associate degree in computer technology, cybernetics in particular, the root word of which "comes from Greek κυβερνητική (kybernētikḗ), meaning 'governance' ..." 😉
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics#Etymology
Profoundly important principle, but maybe I'm somewhat biased ... 🙂
But far too many of our so-called academics - "free-loaders" in fact, living in a Shangri-la of ivory towers paid for with the blood, sweat, and tears of the work-a-day world - haven't got a clue about the concept, that all of their airy-fairy "theories" aren't worth a pinch of coonshit if they're not grounded in brute facts.
As T.E. Huxley put it,
"The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."
Sadly, far too many in the "humanities" departments, "Women's Studies" and "Gender Studies" in particular, haven't got a clue about the utility of that perspective and principle, and are more engaged in making fetishes, dogmata, and religions out of their half-baked "hypotheses" - being charitable.
I expect, almost hope, that pretty much every last academic on the planet - from "land's end to john o'groats", at least all those in the "humanities" - is likely to wind up on the streets or in bread-lines - come the revolution. Might wind up having a bit more appreciation for the "grim meat-hook realities" of life - as J.D. MacDonald once put it. But maybe even the threat of that will help to "sharpen their minds wonderfully" ... 😉
And Evergreen. If anything were to symbolise the apparent total collapse of US Academia, it has to be Evergreen.
Amen to that. Though it's not just Academia - ICYMI, a rather damning article at The Atlantic:
"Why The Past 10 Years Of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
It’s Not Just A Phase."
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/
Though it's clearly not just "American life" and culture - it includes the UK, Canada (where I hang out a shingle), Australia, New Zealand (which is more or less a basket case with its endorsement of Maori "other ways of knowing 🙄" as science), Europe; pretty much all of Western "civilization".
Moot exactly where that rot starts from, although there seems to be something of a "seismic shift" happening these days, maybe partly due to Covid - silver lined clouds and all that. Arguably, maybe part of that shift is Kathleen's more or less commendable effort to take a hard look at some of the dogma and quite "risible absurdities" undergirding much of "feminism":
https://kathleenstock.substack.com/p/lets-abolish-the-dream-of-gender?s=r
No or few reports yet on how that is being received in the hallowed halls of Academia, although one might reasonably see it, somewhat hopefully, as "the apostles disputing Jesus", of Darwin and his bulldog arguing in favour of evolution, of Galileo's "E pur si muove".
But that "apostles" quip is from Barbara Tuchman's "The Proud Tower" - which was also something of an end of an age tale, circa 1900. Highly recommended, by the way; a brilliant exposition of the "perfect storm" of that era which culminated in World War I, and in the subsequent "massive disillusionment" and necessary recognition of "humanity's limitations". A great many parallels with our current travails.
However, as much as I wish Kathleen well in her endeavors, in the nailing of her "heresy" to the doors of Academia, I'm not entirely sure that she doesn't have more than a few questionable "articles of faith" of her own that might well vitiate her best efforts. Time will tell ...
I see Jonathan Haidt is one of the "babel" authors; big fan of his work. Been reading a lot on the collapse of Liberalism of late. Lasch another good on that matter. Fukuyama's "End of history" has of course been proved to be wrong, though I gather (never bothered to read it) that he had a coda, that Western Liberalism contained with in the seeds of its own destruction. As it does.
Read any Roger Scruton? The late English Conservative (as in the philosophy not the irredeemably hopeless "Conservative" Party) philosopher. I'm a big fan - reading him articulated for me my inner conservative impulses. This a sample - you'll need to scroll down as the Hungarian translation precedes the English piece
https://www.roger-scruton.com/articles/276-the-need-for-nations
Woke has infected the West, in the form of the Anglosphere. We seem to be uniquely prone to it, which is odd, given that England is in reality the progenitor of the notion of "human rights", and also that of individual liberty. Now thanks to Red Guards 2.0, we're busy chucking it all away.
Tuchman! Am reading her "A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century" as I write, and very fine it is too. I didn't study history at all at Public School (private secondary school) so am catching up now, and reading a lot on the early 19th and late 18th century. especially the geopolitics of WW1. Highly recommend Adam Tooze's "The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916–1931" on this matter. He has an interesting Substack.
Canada. What the hell happened? The software firm U worked for was based in Toronto (Geac by name, an early HP offshoot, we builr our own shit hot fast machines, with our own C like language and interpreter based language for the screen handling. Used to go over for a couple of weeks every two years or so, and always had a ball. Am amazed that Canada, Oz and NZ (my wife's a Kiwi) all fell to Woke just like that; I thought the colonies sturdier than that, but this is a generational thing.
Sun is out in rural Somerset, and I have me a garden calling ... later!
Re Kathleen - she is for sure fighting the good fight with all her might, and righteously so. But I think to be so embedded in what is happening risks one's peripheral vision, so to see. Ivory Towers and all that. One thing I did know when I graduated was that I would never ever be an academic (or a teacher).
"ungameable feedback of physical systems"
Yes. Brilliant. Ha! I was a very bright kid and ended up at Oxford late 60s studying Eng. Lit. & Lang. However, all three of us boys were told, on returning home from school at the age of 16, that in the holidays, we worked and paid board and lodging. Am so grateful for that, and my ex and I did the same for our four. All physical labour, working on building the M56 motorway (near Manchester), building work and many happy years working at Robinson's Brewery in Stockport (still independent and family owned) doing all sorts of manual tasks. Hopping the barrels. Preparing them in the racking back to go up to the loading bay; steam washing barrels (all wood back then, and we still had coopers; I'd go and watch them to have a quick fag, so fine was their workmanship). So that "ungameable feedback of physical systems" is very meaningful for me, and the nature of manual labour an unmissable experience.
Thanks for the links. Tip of the hat to Ms. Heying!
Stepdaughter, bless her - we fought as all stepkids and step parents do, but get on fine :-)! Happily, all my four kids from my first marriage (all schooled mostly at Steiner schools ill the government closed 'em all down (too much independent thinking go on, I suspect - the core of Steiner education being to produce free and responsible adults)) went straight into work from school, all deciding Uni was not for them. Three went abroad to work. Eldest did in fact go to uni, as a mature student, to study the Baroque Flute (so so much sweeter a sound than the modern flute, IMO) at the Royal Academy of Music. All self-supporting by the age of 21. The bloating of university entrance has been a disaster - the old three tier format (which West Germany took up after the war with huge success) of technical (colleges), skilled (polytechnics) and academic (university) mirrored the differing capabilities and needs of kids - so they junked it and now everyone HAS to go.
Parents or stepparents and kids - something of an age-old battle methinks. 🙂
Reminds me of Mark Twain's quip: 😉
“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/78468-when-i-was-a-boy-of-14-my-father-was
Had occasion to quote that at my father's "celebration of life" as something of a needle directed at my siblings who were somewhat late to appreciate that perspective. 🙂
But quite agree on the "bloating" - something that an article I'd linked to earlier had discoursed on in some quite damning detail:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/academia-beyond-salvation
And likewise agree on the "three tier format". I had headed off to university myself - something of an abortive effort, only managed a couple of years before taking a decade hiatus in the work-a-day world - clerical, pipefitting, welding.
Though I have to concede that university gave me a welcome introduction to some math, physics, language (Russian) and philosophy that stood me in good stead when I went back to get a technical diploma (2 years) in computer technology - followed by some 30 years before the mast in the field. 🙂
Ha! Mr. Clemens has a way of getting to the heart of such matters, bless him. I treasure his remark on giving up smoking - "Easy. I do it every day". Yup! Oxford late 60s disappointed me - I had had a remarkable English teacher at school (Colin Wilcockson, Norther Irish, who would often commence a lesson by jumping on his desk and spouting poetry and Shakespeare at us). With some honourable exceptions the lecturing dons seemed tired of their subjects.
I skimmed my degree. 3.3. Clive James (that's another story) said to me that there were only two Oxford degrees worth having - a Summa Cum Laude, the best of the best, which is present to the recipient in a hall full of Dons, standing and applauding, and the 3.3, the "Gentleman's" Degree. My problem was that The Grateful Dead turned up in the UK during finals term, and as I had been waiting five years to see them, they were not to be missed. But I got that degree and then thought - I've had enough of books, and did manual labour for some years - building work, learning enough with the maintenance team at Exeter College (after a month convincing them I **really** wanted the job) which taught me bricklaying, glazing, roofing, plastering and some plumbing, enabling me to completely gut and rebuild the interior of my first house, some years later. Then delivering booze for an upmarket Offie in Oxford, with a lovely old Irishman (my old man was a Dubliner, so...) whose route always produced a drink wherever we delivered (mostly colleges). Hmmm.
The working in a co-op printing press in Oxford, then a milkman for 6 months whilst waiting to start a TOPS (thanks Maggie!) course in programming; a mortgage and three kids meant I had to earn more, and whilst I really did not want to work in an office, programming seemed accceptable. As it was, back in the day one could still turn up in the summer in shorts, sandals and a t-shirt, and work whatever hours as long as you got the job done. 20+ years working on library systems (perfect for a bibliophile) and the last 10 or so working on special software for the OU, TCD and the National Library of Wales, putting access to their immense stacks online. I just loved that work. Buggered off just after we'd paid our mortgage off as for the first time in my career I had a manager I could not get on with. Had had ones I did not like, but were good managers. This guy a useless accountant with no knowledge of software and running software projects. I thought - I'd rather be poor and happy than work for this guy, decided to hand my notice in to find the very next day they were looking for redundancies. Up went my hand ... now happily retired in rural Somerset gardening and hanging with my wife and hounds. But that period of working with my hands and working with ordinary working folk was invaluable in forming my approach to life. And of course, all us middle class folks were working class at one point; my Mum's family jumped in two generations. I have a copy of my maternal grandparents marriage certificate (Manchester Parish Church. I.E. The Cathedral!) in which my ex blacksmith great grandpa lists his profession as "Gentleman" :-)
My best return from Oxford was my Old English tutor, with whom a shared a huge love for the middle English poem, "Sir Gawayne and The Green Knight", set in the North West, and one I had studied (along with lots of Chaucer, who I am returning to and enjoying again just as much) at school. We were stretched. It was good. Took me along time to return to serious literature, as Oxford's surgical dry work put me off, but lockdown provided a perfect oppo to revisit many classic - Paradise Lost, Fitzgerald's Iliad and Odyssey, a truly wonderful translation of The Divine Comedy by Clive James, and finally at the third attempt, Joyce's Ulysses which I adored, having not previously made it further than half way before. It does need reading in huge chunks to get the ebb and flow.
I did some Russian for 'O' Level, but failed- the only language I struggled with. Learnt it as a result of this.... and in 1968 spent 6 weeks in the USSR whilst unbeknownst to us, the tanks rolled towards Prague. This is my account, written fifty years later.
https://www.pushkinhouse.org/blog/2018/9/26/back-in-the-ussr-recollections-and-pictures-of-six-weeks-in-the-soviet-union-fifty-years-on
Put me off Socialism and all its mutations for life...
And "academia beyond salvation" is what I have been putting to Ms. Stock. I fear for all her valiant efforts, the Humanities have in that rather fine term, "jumped the shark". How does it serve society? It doesn't any more, just serves itself. Fine. But why should I pay for it?
If I may be so bold – not yet "deplatformed" ... – as to raise a finger, or even a hand ...
Generally a great essay, at least on a something of a quick skim; many points certainly deserve a more detailed response. But, to start the ball rolling, nice analogy with "cocooning philosophy" and consequential follow-up by pointing out that few budding philosophers will transform into "butterflies", even if of the hot-house and ivory-tower variety.
But something of a more or less damning indictment of Academia, academic philosophy in particular. ICYMI, in the same vein, you might "enjoy" several salvos on the same front, to wit:
Michaelle Robillard's "How I Left Academia, or, How Academia Left Me", his opening "Universities are madrassas for woke stupidity” (Delingpole) being worth the price of admission in itself:
https://michaelrobillard.substack.com/p/how-i-left-academia-or-how-academia?s=r
And, here on the "other side of the pond", Liel Leibovitz' "Time for the Academy To Put Its Pencils Down: American academia is beyond salvation":
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/academia-beyond-salvation
As all three of you apparently emphasize in rather damning detail, there are any number of quite serious "systemic" flaws in the whole edifice of education. Which seems now less institutions to promote the acquisition of knowledge, much less wisdom, and more ones to provide job security, and to flatter its denizens’ and devotees’ “pretensions to infallibility”. Arguably the rather too ubiquitous rot characterizing not just religions but also too many “sacerdotal corporations and schools of philosophy”, as T.E. Huxley put it:
https://mathcs.clarku.edu/huxley/CE4/
"Delenda est", indeed.
However, while I sincerely wish you, and others, the best of luck in "cleaning out those Augean stables", in that Herculean task, I can't leave without raising the somewhat delicate question as to a few of your own questionable if not contentious and quite problematic "unexamined assumptions", "untenable premises", and "prior commitments". To wit, your rather bold assertion about:
"still perfectly functional understandings of 'woman' and 'man' in terms of 'adult human female' and 'adult human male'. ..."
No doubt there is at least some utility in some of those "functional understandings". At least if one understands that genitalia and karyotypes constitute only something in the way of "proxy variables", or "accidental properties", which correlate in useful ways to the primary variable and essential properties of the category "female".
But while the implications and consequences of that statement of yours may appear somewhat obscure, I really think the issue is anything but "academic", that the consequences are pervasive and pernicious, that it underwrites the odious and pigheaded "ignorance" which Huxlely called "one of the chief sources of evil: "toxicity" from hell to breakfast.
And that is no more evident that in what some have called the "Ideological Bias in the Psychology of Sex and Gender", and undergirds what the reviewers of "Professing Feminism" called the "virulent anti-science, anti-intellectual sentiment driving many of the professors, staff and students" in the deluded if not demented Woman Studies programs in the backwaters of Academia.
No doubt there is some merit in the "feminist project", and I see that you're no particular fan of feminism in general. But far too many feminists betray what Huxley called the "spirit of scientific investigation", although they're hardly unique in that regard, which leads many of them, including Maya Forstater, to the "risible absurdity" that "biological sex in humans is immutable":
You might think that's just a trivial issue or aspect, but a great deal of justification – see Jane Clare Jones' "bun-fight over some mythic essence", for example – to argue that it undergirds, lies at the rotten heart of far too much of "identity politics", from Academia, to Science, to Religion, and Politics itself. Delenda est, indeed.
We all have those type of "unexamined assumptions" – which are, sadly but quite often, merely the pretexts to "pretensions to infalliblity"; everyone but me and thee, of course. But while they are also often the "bedrock" on which our professions and livelihoods, if not our psyches are founded, I really don't think we or society in general are going to have much success in that Herculean task unless we're all willing to take an honest look at them.
It’s insane that people like Robin Dembroff complain of discrimination from their offices at Yale! My guess is that they have been rewarded for their identity and political positions, not hindered by them. It’s interesting that they identify as “trans” when they read as standard issue butch lesbian. Regardless of their reason for identifying this way, the outcome is undoubtedly good for their career, despite their ridiculous claims of “oppression”.
The detail in all this that surprises me the most is the rule that you cannot debate the statement that “trans women are women” in philosophy discussions. How can people accept being told what to think, when the idea in question requires accepting clearly debatable definitions and philosophical positions? And why trans women in particular? Why not a ban on discussing positions offensive to most of us regarding race or the inferiority of women? The hyper focus on trans issues is bizarre and I still don’t understand how we got here.