Today, I'm going to dismiss 98 percent of all current intellectual activity in academe in the space of about 800 words. And after I've thoroughly depressed you, I'll end on a sort of vague hopeful note. I may do an optimistic (OK, not optimistic; that's not my thing; how about acid neutral) piece on that hopeful note next time. Here goes.
A few years ago I was having lunch with an older (older than me at any rate) geophysicist of some renown. I asked him what he was up to. He gave me a wry grin and said, "Trying to figure out what to do after plate tectonics." I nodded. Plate tectonics was discovered in the 1960s. Basically from that time on, we've known how the earth works. There was a little mopping up in the 1970s, but since that time geophysics and most of geology as an intellectual field of knowledge has been dead as a doornail.
I was reminded of this when I was a visiting scholar at my old Ph.D. institution. It represents a fair bit of the cutting edge in the earth sciences. I hadn't been back in a dozen years. Much to my surprise, everyone was doing pretty much the same stuff they did way back when. It was a little more refined, kind of like comparing a 2010 Accord to a 2000 Accord. But really, a 2000 Accord is a fine car. So was the state of knowledge in geophysics in 2000. Basically, its been a big zero in terms of advancement.
In my own field of hydrology, the advent of the computer and the mass spectrometer kept the field going strong until about 1983, give or take a few years. Since that time, it's been a big zero intellectually as well.
That said, there are people still doing research in the earth sciences. About 10,000 of them descend upon San Francisco at the annual American Geophysical Union convention every year. They are working on the third or fourth decimal place in our state of knowledge.
I don't mean to pick on the earth sciences. Physics and chemistry are working on the sixth or seventh decimal place. Biology got a shot of life with the advent of PCR techniques, but most non-genetic aspects of biology have been dead for decades. The Ph.D.s and profs are essentially doing boring mop up work after Darwin.
Move outside of the sciences and it gets worse. The humanities? Please, what can possibly be discovered of any real value in the humanities that wasn't already discovered hundreds of years ago? Is someone suddenly going to interpret Shakespeare significantly better than in the past? How about the Bible? After you've read Rashi and Maimonides, even Spinoza seems lame.
It's no wonder that literature departments have turned into popular culture departments. There's nothing left that can be said with originality that concerns the classics. Literary criticism has been dead for a long, long time. Don't believe me? Ask Mark Bauerlein an English professor at Emory. He'll say much the same thing and has even written a book about it, Literary Criticism: An Autopsy. No I haven't read the book. I did ask him once how it was received. He said he got his share of nasty emails saying he was a neanderthal who didn't understand the humanities. Apparently, people in the humanities don't like to be reminded that they are obsolete.
How about the social sciences? Economics has given up on big theories - they don't work - and instead has found life running regression models on obscure data that have little to do with economics. Political science at least has current events to argue over, but really there is no science there; it's a debate club that thinks it's a field of knowledge. Sociology is still mopping up after Max Weber.
Oh I forgot about history. At least we keep making more of it. But no we don't need more analyses of WWII or the Civil War, please. They've been done countless times. As for the most recent events, historians are so desperate for something new that they've become the equivalent of ambulance chasing tort lawyers.
Whew! There I've done it! Dismissed all but a few bits of current academe as a mix of mental masturbation and field gleaning. It wasn't hard at all to do this, believe me.
The good news is that intellectual discovery had a glorious run in the 19th and 20th centuries. There were breakthroughs upon breakthroughs for a century or more. The bad news is that in most fields of study much of what can be discovered of intellectual value has already been discovered. Yet we have teams upon teams pretending they are doing something of major intellectual value that are housed in universities around the world.
It's as if the intellectual world found a great mine about 200 years ago. The rocks in that mine were filled with nuggets of gold. As time went on, all the easy stuff was found. Mining got harder. The grade of the remaining ore declined and declined. In this century, we're mining tiny, tiny flakes. It sounds silly that we do this. It is silly. But it does serve a purpose. It really does. I might discuss that next post.
4 comments:
Yes, most academic research amounts to making itsy-bitsy statues (to borrow a phrase from Thomas Merton via Annie Dillard). (Incidentally, I don't exempt my own research, which is still coming out even though I resigned my postdoc last spring. This very week, I have a paper in PNAS, which cost me a ridiculous amount of effort and is definitely an itsy-bitsy statue.) However, I don't think it's because there aren't important problems or because they can't be addressed. For example, we're still very far indeed from understanding the neurological bases of human cognitive traits; really, we've barely even started on this. Besides the fact that original thinking is difficult, I think the reason most academic research is so vapid is that academia is, to put it bluntly, suffocatingly conservative and insanely preoccupied with status. You've written here about the aversion of funding agencies to making anything but the safest bets (http://fortyquestions.blogspot.com/2009/10/why-were-so-damn-good-at-science.html). More generally, the much vaunted freedom of academics to work on whatever they want is severely compromised in two ways. First, as a junior academic, your survival depends heavily on winning the approval of your elders, who edit the journals and sit on the review panels and tenure committees and write or don't write recommendations of you. And the elders don't tend to be a progressive lot; as Max Planck (or perhaps Paul Samuelson) remarked, science often progresses funeral by funeral. (Speaking of plate tectonics, as I recall, its initial reception was chilly.) Second, as a senior academic, you're apt to have dependents: students, postdocs, and technicians. It may not matter to you personally whether your next grant proposal gets funded, but it may matter plenty to them. In such a situation, it makes sense to play it safe. To some extent, this accounts for the chronic fixation on status and its trappings - grant dollars, publication counts, etc. - rather than intellectual achievement per se, which reminds me of the tendency among denizens of Silicon Valley to make much over how much venture capital a company has raised and the "pedigree" of its founders instead of how many people are willing to pay for its products. My conclusion, after over a decade in academia, is that my own best hope of doing anything interesting in science lies in becoming financially independent, so that I can work on what interests me without all the nonsense that would continually distract and frustrate me if I remained an academic.
I agree with 99.9% of this. It may even spur me on to write a Part 2!
"Please, what can possibly be discovered of any real value in the humanities that wasn't already discovered hundreds of years ago?"
Before or after postmodernism absolutely ruined the field? Postmodernism. The crab grass of philosophy of science.
Theory testing is incremental, slow, and laborious. What's new? Dispensing with formative constructs and working reflective constructs. Looking at constructs as multidimensional instead unidimensional.
Unfortunately, the only people who work on theory are PhD students and acolytes of the people who created theory. As Don Lehman once remarked, a theory is only viable as the number of PhD graduates who study under the faculty member.
I am rambling.
I'd offer nano-tech and bio-engineering as two fields that are still relatively new and have room for exploration. But even in these fields I'm not sure how much of the basic science remains unsettled.
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