Presidium Podium

… yeah.

My dad sent me an article about a main job-hunting avenue for thousands of Ph.D. candidates in philosophy in this country.

Must say, it makes for quite a sad read for me. The crux of the sadness seeming to be tied up in:

The competition is so intense that many applicants consider themselves lucky to get any kind of tenure-track job, even if it is a poorly paid job teaching critical thinking to prospective refrigerator repairmen in rural Oklahoma.

In general, compared to almost any other industrialised “Western” nation, the U.S. is abysmally impoverished in its ability, and especially its willingness, to meaningfully support the development of its truly educated — specialists in the arts and humanities.

The U.S. is by far the most illustrative example of an economy and a universe that adheres most closely to Marx’s dictum that cultural life in a society is a rather literal projection of its productive relations — in a word, blind economic imperatives that cater to the lowest common denominator.

There is something about the nature of the relationship between academia/higher education and the hoi polloi that makes the former inordinately sensitive to the vicious hostility of capitalism (and whatever “democratic’ inner compulsions may be ascribed to its marketplace dynamics, the authenticity of which as suchly characterised I am generally moved to question) to the intellectual achievements of world culture, and places it in the precarious position of needing a conscious and concerted subsidy.

I am not, in general, persuaded by counterarguments that don the thin veneer of “democratic” pretensions in their suggestion that the state of affairs for scholars is simply a reflection of a system that elicits the maximum expression of human “freedom” in that it gives people to organically make choices about the appropriation of their share of the social product — for good or ill. And if it’s ill and adversarial to the fruition of intellectual life of the society, the fault lies nowhere but with its own constituents.

As the worldview — which strikes me as incredibly simplistic and overly technocratic — captured by this statement would have it, subsidising scholastic work in a way that makes it tenable to build a career of it is an imposition of an “artificiality” upon the realities of market supply and demand. The claim is that the threadbare “demand” for it indicates its marginal value to the whole of a society, and thus that any attempt to tinker with the results amounts to some form of “coercion,” “liberal elitism,” “big government knows best,” and so on.

The first problem is rather obvious, and I will plead guilty to a certain “liberal elitism” in this area as charged. Most of society — especially inasmuch as a large part of it consists of lazy, narrow-minded and unthinking consumers — is ill-educated and does not have sufficient perspective to make intelligent decisions about the role, and indeed, the indispensability, of higher education to its own well-being.

This is not really spoken from intense contempt for the common man; I am still an optimist about people overall, believe their motives to be basically good, and their collective intelligence quite capable if given the proper resources.

However, the structure of this society, the self-perpetuating socio-economic dynamics present therein, and the power inequalities that obtain widely act strongly to preempt the exercise of that capability, and its provision with what I have chosen to term “proper resources.”

This aside, the more sophisticated and recondite critique is structural, although it is enourmously brought to bear on the significance of the last sentence.

As turning one’s profession into a survival strategy that includes a sustainable compensation plan is concerned, the inner compulsion of capitalism is toward the remuneration of things of relatively simple goods and services that have the immediacy of perceptible commercial or hedonistic-subjective value. Basic economics even accounts for some of this in a variety of mundane areas in its treatment of “negative externalities,” although what is typically underemphasised is that so many of them result from the inherent shortsightedness of the profit motive, strengthened by the nature of competition to drive the long-term sustainability of certain practices down to the lowest common denominator. Oft-invoked examples of this include pollution, unsustainable agricultural practices, the depletion of natural resources, logging, etc.

The appreciation of purely scholastic work and high culture is even more capricious and exacting in this regard — and thus, when unfulfilled, more vulnerable — than the environment, I would venture to say. Much of the “output” of the liberal arts lacks any of the immediacy associated with economically transformative activities in that it cannot be commodified and readily applied or “experienced” as a good and service, and indeed, lacks even the most rudimentarily quantifiable properties of anything persuasively construed as a “good long-term investment” whose immediate benefit is not “readily” obvious.

It is just one of those things that is extremely socially necessary, and indeed foundationally supports much of the development of human society in ways readily evidenced from even a cursory examination of the pedigree of human understanding, but you can’t affix price tags to it, nor show how to a refrigerator repairman in rural Oklahoma its obvious and fathomable “benefits.” Not that there is any shortage of attempts to try to shoehorn it into some sort of economic model, but such misconstructions fundamentally pervert the very fabric of academic work.

In short, it doesn’t work like that. You can’t just give the “social benefit” of an English professor or a philosophy student or an artist or a specialist of music theory a “value” and put it on the shelf at Target.

The humanities are not a “market datum.” They do not have verifiable or measurable quantities, they do not send “pricing signals,” they do not earn “investor confidence,” and do not produce “feedback.” It seems to me that it is by an ontological virtue that they participate outside the sphere of market activity; they are not “products.” Yet what we have done, for the most part, is precisely to subordinate them to those metrics, for which they cannot possibly be more ill-suited, and then wave our hands with great pep and vigour and sing encomia to our consummation of “freedom.”

Somewhere, somehow, higher and exclusive wisdom has had to step in to rescue our world from its seemingly suicidal — or at least misanthropic — propensity, however “elegantly organic” or “democratic” the mask you want to paint over the terrifying physiognomy of the process, to descend into the abyss of ignorance and cultural stagnation.

Of course, the process has always been explainable — dare I say justifiable in the eyes of the applicable contemporary proponents — in the terminology, language, and cosmological assumptions of the socioeconomic order fashionable in the time.

You’ll have to forgive me if that doesn’t make me feel any better. Surely you’ve read about the Dark Ages.

Also, although I understand being annoyed at construction and utility noise very well, I do not think this is a moral or constructive way to deal with it.