XXV
At the end of Part Five we talked about setting up a program devoted to developing the attributes of wisdom. Why would we want to do that? Because the attributes of wisdom are central to the activities that we’ve subsumed under the term High Culture.
So? One might ask, What do we need High Culture for? The answer is that without both the attributes of wisdom and the values and activities of High Culture mankind won’t make it.
Meaning, culture in general will lapse into barbarism (a process already well underway) and our social institutions, themselves adaptational mechanisms, will suffer severe stagnation and become increasingly dysfunctional and therefore maladaptive.
We also said at the end of Part Five that the participants of such a program would feel a freedom from the immense power of institutional life and would be able to focus on developing the attributes of wisdom that would enable them to solve the many problems that those now running our institutions have caused.
And they have caused those problems not so much because they know nothing about the values of High Culture, though that is true in some cases, but because those who do have openly and aggressively rejected those values for ideological reasons. The results are things like, Cultural Impoverishment and CRT.
And now we’re back to the question we promised to answer about why not only students, but also faculty, seem to know nothing at all about High Culture and the attributes of wisdom, let alone the value referred to as self-criticism without anxiety.
So, now we’ll try to answer that question by taking another look at the University, but this time from a different point of view.
XXVI
The fact is, since WWII, college and university education has been profoundly ineffective, considering the resources at its disposal. Some of the factors for this we’ve already touched on.
The University, not understanding their acculturation problem, continued to yield throughout the second half of the 20th century to the inroads and demands of middle-class culture, which was for the most part, aggressively anti-Elitism, ie; anti-Excellence, and therefore anti-High Culture. In other words, anti-wisdom.
Who alive today could possibly commit themselves to denying the truth of this? I mean, really. All they’d have to do is just look around to have this very unpleasant fact proven on every corner.
In any event, there’s certainly no question that the Corporation was at fault here too (and still is). Namely because of their demands that the University provide them with technologists and because of the Corporation’s failure to understand their nature as a social institution, specifically, as an adaptational mechanism and its potential - good or bad - for the future.
Above all, there’s the Corporation’s failure to see their necessary alliance and dependence upon their ancillary High Culture, a term to which I have attempted to give some empirical and theoretical content. Nevertheless, a lot of the failure of the University is due to the University itself. The University is in fact culturally stagnant and has been for over half a century.
XXVII
The reasons are many and, again, we’ve touched on some.
To name but one to help explain the cultural stagnation of the University, there was the proliferation throughout the 20th century of research and publication carried out according to well-established and professionally validated paradigms.
The key point here is that research and publication carried out according to well-established and professionally validated paradigms is in no way a sign of cultural vitality.
All across the United States university administrators were well aware of this, but to the shame of a truly once great country, their efforts to push the University in the direction of cultural renewal were blocked by the faculties, because the power centers of the faculties are the departments (which is why during the 20th century newly founded colleges didn’t permit departments to be set up; sadly, those colleges were either targeted and bankrupted or taken over by the University as monopoly the way Walmart, and not just Walmart, has worked to destroyed small business).
Before continuing, I can’t refrain from adding at this point that if people really wanted to be ashamed of the United States, here's your reason. Not because of what some brainless ideological fanatic masquerading as a teacher says in a university classroom.
The kind of teacher, moreover, who themselves are a deposit of the very cultural impoverishment that has deprived them of the values of High Culture and the attributes of wisdom. Both of which would have rescued these insufferable pseudo-intellectual charlatans from the insane delusion that whatever they feel is real and whatever they conceive they believe and whatever they believe is true, and whatever they believe to be true should be blindly obeyed by the students they should be teaching, but can’t because they know nothing about the life of the mind and the world of ideas, which is why they are there in the first place.
XXVIII
Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, we were talking about the lack of cultural vitality and the corresponding cultural stagnation of our social institutions in general and the University in particular.
True as that might be, we have yet to get to the real reason for the cultural stagnation within the University, which was then and remains now, a very real problem that has never been addressed.
The bitter truth is that no profession is so destructive of enterprise and talent as the profession of University teacher.
Briefly, there are three factors for this tragic situation.
Teaching
Time
Publish and Perish
Teaching: The fact is the role of a university teacher is unique in that they receive no social validation which can convince them they are doing a good job. To put it bluntly, they don’t know what they are doing; they don’t understand how they do it; and they permit no peer or superior to observe their performance (a matter of relative indifference, since such an observer, themselves a teacher, knows no better what is going on than does the teacher observed). This lack of validation places the teacher in a stand of defensive and guilt-ridden anxiety against which they have virtually no recourse. Not a healthy situation.
Clearly, one cannot set out to be a good teacher. Teaching must be a by-product of intellectual and cultural vitality, and of sustaining that vitality, in the absence of validation, throughout an entire career. If you have a wonderfully rich, complex and informed mind, like I do, it’s kinda hard to be a bad teacher.*
Unfortunately, this does much to explain the virtual explosion of bad teachers that have appeared front and center on the stage of our teaching-learning institutions over the last 50+ years.
The problem of bad teachers, and not just in our universities, is made worse by the fact that they pretend not to know they're bad teachers (though some are so delusional they really don't know).
But they do know that they can't tolerate criticism and they definitely know that, though uninterested in and incapable of continuous learning, change and growth, in short, though uneducable and therefore incompetent, they're still hungry for power. The single largest deposit from this situation of cultural impoverishment was, as everyone now knows - Identity Politics.
The whole point of Identity Politics is to protect select groups from exposure. From there they are free to issue their insane demands to be placed above criticism, loved unconditionally, and blindly obeyed - or else. In short, they squander their power by using it to crush anyone who won't submit to their obvious and obnoxious cultural impoverishment (and the equally obvious incompetence at social management that goes with it), while, of course, sadistically scapegoating anyone who notices just how sick, crazy and stupid they are. A better example of Civilizational Collapse would be hard to imagine.
Be that as it may, and returning to our examination of the University, at this point another factor enters. Time.
XXIX
The University teacher has to be someplace and do something only from six to eight hours a week. The rest of the time they must decide for themselves what to do, and even when they are in the classroom they have absolute freedom of choice over their activity. The point is that the teacher lives an unstructured life.
Now, such a life, given the protection and insulation granted to the university teacher, is clearly designed to permit the maximum degree of problem exposure and solution postponement. The difficulty is that very few people have the personalities to sustain such freedom. Most teachers go in for a kind of pseudostructuring, which does nothing to further their primary job, teaching, but gives the teacher the impression that they’re extremely busy and active. In short, it’s make-work.
Their situation is the situation of High Culture, but in any population only a very tiny proportion operates at that level, and not all of those few are successful. Mass education during the 20th century, however, required thousands and thousands of university teachers. The personalities capable of accepting and profiting from an unstructured life are far fewer than the number needed to fill the teaching positions.
One predictable result was that of Quantity over Quality in our teaching-learning institutions in general and the University in particular, as well as its corresponding and rapid decline, which of course only added to the overall cultural impoverishment. A sad but undeniable fact easily confirmed everywhere you look.
XXX
The third factor was arguably the most vicious of all.
I’m referring to the publish-or-perish policy, better called the Publish-and-Perish policy. It’s been a complete disaster.
It forces individuals to publish who have nothing to say and know it, while on the other hand it forces individuals who have nothing to say and don’t know it to imitate paradigms of intellectual technologies. It forces brilliant young people to violate their minds by committing themselves to print when they know perfectly well they are not ready, and to publish something that in the future they will regret and even be ashamed of, providing their intellectual vitality survives the destructive factors of academic life. Again, throughout the 20th century and into the 21st the contempt for such intellectual technology was unbelievably widespread in the academic world, especially among young people who were active publishers, but such contempt was sooner or later extended to themselves for participating in such activities. The nonpublishers, on the other hand, had been driven into a corner and given no alternatives.
If, in spite of all the discouragements, they did in fact maintain their intellectual vitality - and it was a tiny minority that did - they were not rewarded, but punished. One of the best ways to maintain intellectual vitality, for example, is to give a course one has not given before. If the teacher in the publish-and-perish departments did that and did not publish, there were two consequences. First, they learned more and renewed themselves far better than if they had ground out a publishable article, and second, they were punished for doing so.
These few lines give one but an idea of the deep-seated malaise and intellectual corruption and stagnation of university life that obtained throughout the 20th century and that ultimately led to its current state of cultural impoverishment. An impoverishment that has spread throughout the rest of our social institutions. The result, in part, has been the rise of Cancel Culture and CRT. This is why for PRC the answer to Cancel Culture is High Culture.
Be that as it may, it was clear to many even 50 years ago that the first task of the University would have been to devise a way for identifying and rewarding those faculty members who were able to maintain their intellectual vitality, instead of withering away on the vine, but who were nonpublishers. For most of those teachers who were in their 50’s during the 1970’s, in short, whose entire lives had spanned the spread of this cancer throughout the University, it was already too late, but the University was at that time full of promising young people who were being destroyed.
As Morse Peckham once said in response to this situation, I have watched that destruction growing and spreading for twenty-five years, and it is a sickening sight. And he said that in 1971.
1971! 50 fucking years ago!
XXXI
Again, it was clear to many in both the University and the Corporation that the Corporation would have to step in and do something about this crisis in the University. Why?
Well, as previously stated, the Corporation, to whom the University is ancillary, in truth owns the University. The Corporation’s existence depended then as it does now upon the services of High Culture. Given the fact that they were faced even back in the early 70’s (50 fucking years ago!) with a cultural crisis and a cultural incoherence from which only High Culture could rescue them, they couldn't afford to ignore this intellectual cancer in the University, nor could they afford to permit what they had in part encouraged: the destruction of the University by turning it into a technological institute. But, unfortunately, that’s exactly what they did. Hence the justification for this entry.
To repeat, the Corporation is an astounding social invention. However, not only could it not realize its potential then, it can’t maintain its existence now, without the aid of the values of High Culture and the attributes of wisdom.
Of course, strictly speaking, the Corporation and the University are both still very much with us today. But in what form exactly?
You might get an idea by considering the fact that we’re discouraged from even asking such questions about both institutions, by both institutions. Either way, does anyone think these institutions have our best interest in mind? They might still exist, but do they care whether or not we do? And if we don't continue to exist, can they? The fact that, despite their power, they feel threatened by these questions suggests the answer is No.
I've said it before many times, but will say it again, I don’t expect what I say or write to be automatically believed. So, all one would have to do is take a good look around today and ask themselves if this analysis is at all on the right track.
For years during the second half of the 20th century and even while I was still in college in the mid-80’s, it appeared as if the University was the only institution capable of cultural renewal.
But, unfortunately that didn’t happen for reasons we’ve tried to make clear in this and other entries. So the cancer continued to spread throughout the University and eventually beyond its walls turning the Ivy League into the Poison Ivy League in the process, and continued spreading throughout the rest of our social institutions eventually leading to what we have today - Cancel Culture. Which I prefer to call Cancer Culture - for a reason.
Since the Corporation controlled the University through the latter’s board of trustees, it should have been the task and responsibility of the Corporation to enable the University to revitalize itself, instead of simply exploiting it as a machine shop for spare parts, as it had been doing for decades.
But it didn’t do that because it failed to realize that its strength - that is, its single-mindedness - was also its weakness, in the sense that the information it gathered was preselected by its unitary function of making lots of money producing things no one needs or even wants and with its mastery of advertising rhetoric - doing so in an excessively wasteful and redundant manner.
So, the Corporation blew it. And now it’s obvious that those running the show are not only not at all interested in the values of High Culture or in acquiring the attributes of wisdom, but are actually and aggressively working against both and in every way.
We’re living with the results all around us today, cultural stagnation, cultural impoverishment and societal collapse.
So, since we can scarcely survive without continuous learning, change and growth, and since our most powerful institutions have failed us, the task and responsibility of keeping our social institutions in general and our teaching-learning institutions in particular alive falls with us. Can we do it? And, if so, how?
We’ll attempt to answer those questions in Part Seven.
Until then!
*Made ya look :)
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