Community Comments - What Happened to Academia?
Postmodernism, Immanuel Kant, and moral degradation.
I’ve gotten an interesting response so far from Tuesday’s post about academia.
Read it here if you haven’t already:
In the article, I made two observations:
A lot of people in academia are ideologically captured.
Academic journal articles nowadays are written terribly—they’re generally garbled messes of other peoples’ ideas with no comprehensible point to make any of them worth reading.
Since then, I’ve had some really interesting discussions about this, and I’d like to bring it all together and share what I’ve learned.
First of all, as
points out, there is something seriously wrong—and, while I’m sure some people elsewhere may disagree, on here, there was a consensus.Another thing, which absolutely blew my mind, is that while we’re seeing a lot of the fallout now, the perversion of the Western mind has been going on for a really long time.
To illustrate this,
referenced Immanuel Kant. This was absolutely shocking to me, because in my initial post, I had implied that this degradation had happened within the last century.Here are some highlights, but I strongly suggest you read the whole thread.
Essentially, the argument here is that the degradation of values—of beauty, of the divine, of the integrity of truth itself—can be traced back to Kant. Call him the ‘grandfather of the postmodernists,’ if you will. Or don’t. Either way, it makes sense that he provided the “intellectual blueprint to undermine values.” Once you come after god and beauty and truth itself, there’s basically nothing you can’t twist for your purposes.
(I apologize if I’m butchering this, by the way. I haven’t actually read a word of Kant. If I’m wrong about anything, please correct me in the comments.)
Anyway, Michael can explain the whole thing better than me. He wrote a great article about it, which you can read here.
And I think it’s interesting, because he basically articulates how everything that was once held as sacred has been turned on its head, warped into its polar opposite. This has implications in academia, but also other things, notably art:
Interestingly, this reminded me of a different comment on a different post (this week’s Think Tank about prisons, which you can read here). The comment was by
, and it tackled some similar themes:He’s looking at it from a Christian lens, but the cultural criticisms are the same—conscience has been replaced with moral relativism; moral degradation follows.
Turns out, Ian has been talking about this for some time, and I just haven’t really pieced it all together. Look at the comment he left on this post a few weeks ago:
Anyway, here are some of my takeaways from all this:
The Enlightenment (ironically, given the name) was the beginning of the end of ‘enlightened’ art—and basically enlightened thought in general.
Immanuel Kant is a big player in this.
Part of the reason why people accept so much of what he says as truth is because he’s basically impossible to read—it’s easy to stomach vile thoughts when you hardly understand what they mean.
Part of the reason the world has been in the mess it is in is because these ideas have spread like wildfire.
Cue
, and the comment that inspired this post:He doesn’t reference Kant, but his comment reminds me of Kant, in that it references writing that masks insidious thoughts by being completely unreadable. I think he’s right—after all, a lot of thinkers who have had a terrible impact on the world are virtually impossible to read (take Karl Marx, for example). And he’s spot on—this is the most insidious type of manipulation imaginable, and there are certainly people at very high levels doing this intentionally. (Why? That could be a whole separate discussion.)
It makes me wonder, though—how many people, when writing this stuff, are simply saying what they think they're supposed to say, and devolve into this garbled writing style because speaking plainly would betray the absurdity of those concepts immediately? How many people believe that they’re right, and are fooling themselves as well as their readers with this nonsense?
This whole thing is starting to feel really Orwellian, which I say hesitantly, as earlier this week, my entire opinion of Orwell was challenged by Demi Pietchell of
.I haven’t been the same since, but new suspicions about George Orwell’s integrity aside, this entire discourse on academia is starting to really remind me of “Politics and the English Language,” particularly this quote:
“[Language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
and this one:
“Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.”
and this one:
“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.”
Although I could use just about all of Orwell’s quotes in “Politics and the English Language” (hereby turning this post into an amalgamated mess of someone else’s words worthy of publication in an academic journal), I’ll summarize his point instead—people say and write meaningless statements riddled with obscure terminology and euphemism as an attempt to deceive (either hiding their nefarious intentions, or the fact that they have no idea what they’re saying at all). Thus, harmful thoughts can sneak their way into seemingly benign statements, where they then spread uncontrollably as more and more people keep parroting the same ‘intelligent’-sounding nonsense.
Of course, this is referring to political speech, but the sentiment works just as well for our purposes. In fact, this time period itself being referred to as the ‘Enlightenment’ strikes me as the most insidious sort of euphemism. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that we were ‘enlightened’ before, and that these degenerative ideas were a fall from grace?
Nevertheless, in this postmodern abyss, words mean their opposite.
Looks like I have a lot of reading to do. By no means is this a coherent, finished thought, but I hope it sparked some thought.
I’d like to say a sincere thank you to everyone whose comments inspired this post. Interacting with people on Substack has been both humbling and enlightening—I’m learning so much from all of you.
Great piece!!
"Nevertheless, in this postmodern abyss, words mean their opposite."
Thus, my moniker POST post moderm~ I'm on a mission to create the world anew, with a return to Reason, Beauty and the Laws of Nature!
Great post Melissa. Really underscores how academia’s been poisoned and also suggests (to me anyway) that there are other not so intelligent agencies at work behind these scenes.