Mission Statement

So anyway I realized that there was no point in going to graduate school. I'm too old ever to have a career, and even much younger people already in graduate school and recently-credentialed PhD's are not very optimistic about their own futures, which are in any case much brighter than mine would be.

Economics and practicalities aside, there are good reasons why I haven't gone to grad school already. (This is in fact at least my fourth graduate-school non-go, the others having been in about 1968, 1981, and 1991.) I have always been wary of the methodological paranoia, forced specialization, and professional infighting which rule the academic world, and I am peculiarly inept at the kind of networking and conniving which seem to be at the heart of the academic career.

In one sense this all seems odd, since I am pedantic by nature and quite comfortable with the bookish, backward-looking, intellectualizing aspect of academic life. Furthermore, while I tend toward classicism and can fit in with the old school -- sort of -- I am interested in many topics which fit into the expanded post-modernist multi-cultural canon. "The Political Theory of Genghis Qan", anyone? Or how about "Sunyata and the Philosophy of Science"?

But, as I've been told, you always have to watch your back. The academic world can be pretty harsh. Decades ago a man at the end of his career concluded that most of his writed seemed to have been written for paranoid idiots. First you say what you're going to say, and then you say what you're not going to say, and then you say what you say, and then you defend what you said, and then finally you repeat what you said. Then someone stands up and says the opposite, and you argue. At times this process ends up producing a refined and superior thesis, but more often it ends up going around in circles and coming to nothing.

And what I really am is a generalist anyway. I have wide and varied interests which often cross-fertilize. In the modern university, generalism is thought to be impossible and probably undesirable. (True, you have a fair number of interdisciplinary fields, but these fields are normally standardized as new specializations narrower than either of the component fields -- and interdisciplinary work is by and large not much respected anyway.)

To me the villain in all this is the attempt to professionalize the humanities on the positivist model. The attempt to transform the humanities into sciences has produced nothing but little tiny piss-poor sciences of no great interest to anyone. Whatever advantages the humanities have lies in their inclusiveness -- the willingness to make the aesthetic and ethical dimensions central, to discuss questions which are not immediately decidable, to deal with complex systems and an open future, to suggest connections which are not provable, and to be inclusive and comprehensive rather than limited, exact, and certain.

Generalists are usually regarded as opportunistic mediocrities by professional specialists. But there are specialist mediocrities out there too, and specialists do have one vice that generalists are immune to. Everyone has his or her intellectual blind spots, but disciplinary methodologism ("enforcing the paradigm") writes blind spots into the very definition of the profession, thus allowing specialist experts to take pride in their areas of ignorance. "As an X-ist, of course, I do not ask that kind of question" -- said with a kind of ersatz modesty by someone not usually characterized by modesty.

Generalists ask different, bigger questions and get bigger, vaguer answers. Whatever a specialist comes up with, if it's any good, is raw material for the generalist. The specialist movement of analysis (reducing the topic and defining the methodology until exactness and certainty can be attained) is necessary and valuable, but in today's university it is grossly overemphasized compared to the (virtually-forbidden) synthetic movement of the generalist. And without synthesis what we have is the totally irrational production of dozens and hundreds of incommensurable fields and subfields, each with its own subject-matter and paradigm -- a proliferation of bureaucratic pigeonholes reminiscent of the pointless intricacies of canon law or the Austro-Hungarian civil service.

For a variety of reasons, the humanities are in crisis. (Link below). To me a move toward generality and a more inclusive definition of scholarship (more accepting of non-professionals) would seem like a goal worth striving for. Not only would scholarship then become more valuable for citizens and for anyone trying to define and attain "the good life" (or, in Rorty's memorable sneer, "sophomores trying to figure out who they are"), but I am convinced that some of the "objective" goals of scholarship would also be better reached under a less paranoid disciplinary regime.

Not everyone will agree. But the beautiful thing for me is that nobody has to. If I were an academic scholar, my published writings would be read by a few dozen or a few hundred people, and I would be paid nothing. With the internet, I can achieve this goal entirely on my own.

Humanities in the University Today

Can I afford a Humanities PhD?

Forget the BA