Excellent essay. I think the distinction between lying and simply not caring whether something is true is the really important insight here.
It also brought immediately to mind something I wrote recently about Lee Shoemate, who somehow managed to become a psychiatry resident at UNC despite never having attended medical school. Different era, different circumstances, but there is an eerie family resemblance: the credential, the institutional imprimatur and the appearance of legitimacy came to substitute for the underlying reality they were supposed to certify.
I might push your argument one step further, though. Perhaps “they don’t care” because our institutions increasingly reward people for maintaining the approved narrative much more reliably than they reward them for discovering whether it is true. Once that incentive structure is established, you don’t need a conspiracy and you scarcely even need conscious dishonesty. The institution begins selecting for people who are very good at knowing what must be said, and rather less interested in whether it corresponds to reality.
That, to me, is where your use of Sartrean bad faith really lands. Everyone need not believe the fiction. They merely have to understand that acknowledging the obvious may be considerably more dangerous than participating in it.
The difficulty, as you say at the end, is that reality eventually gets a vote.
"The difficulty, as you say at the end, is that reality eventually gets a vote."
By that point, it doesn't matter. By the time that even the neocons admitted that just maybe Iraq was not chockfull of WMDs, it didn't matter. The neocons had already gotten the war that they wanted and there was no turning back now.
Needless to say, those same neocons are to this day hailed as Serious Thinkers And Foreign Policy Heavyweights. None of them suffered in the slightest, not personally, not professionally, even though precisely none of their rosy predictions came to pass.
And yes, they were consciously lying the entire time.
Those who spoke out against the war were case into Outer Darkness, even as that war went worse than the worst naysayers foresaw.
Yes, the euroelites know full well what a War On Russia means. Since they personally won't be fighting, they don't care.
Those who might actually care have been disarmed or have disarmed themselves. The absence of retribution in the political environment allows this weed of elite carelessness to flourish, spread and choke out fruitful growth.
Gresham's Law (bad money drives good money out of circulation) applies to more than just monetary economics.
Finster's Fourth Law readeth thusly: "All games eventually degenerate into sociopath games, because the only way to beat someone who will do whatever it takes to win is to respond in kind."
This is why Russia can be attacked with total impunity, while nobody would dream of doing the same tot he United States. Because the Americans would not hesitate for a second to go nuclear.
The distinction between lying and not caring has been analyzed by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt in his book _On Bullshit_. He does not attempt to offer an historical or sociological account of the rise of bullshit, but there definitely has been a rise. Bullshit may always have existed, but it has become an ever more widespread and dominant tendency in the anglophone world (including India). My impression is it has not advanced quite so far everywhere in Europe, and in some places, e.g. Russia, almost not at all. I’ve seen it quite clearly take over in my own discipline, anthropology, which is definitely the most bullshitified of the social sciences. Because I have been an anthropologist for a long time, and have always made a practice of reading “out of date” journal articles from decades and by anthropologists few of my professional peers find worth their time (or are even aware of), I can date the inflection point from which bullshit began to take over. It was the end of the Cold War. The intellectual trends that gave much bullshit its initial (appearance of) heft—e.g. the French poststructuralists—precede this inflection point by decades, but they did not cause it. They were taken up and, initially, used to justify it. Now we’ve reached the point that no one feels any need to justify it, because they are not even aware that there is an “it”; bullshit is all they have ever known. That there was ever a concern with such virtues as coherency of argument, evidence, falsifiability, etc., has been forgotten. It’s a bit like Macintyre’s argument about morality. It no longer exists, and no one knows it.
"The CIA Reads French Theory: On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left" by Gabriel Rockill
"...The agency responsible for coups d’état, targeted assassinations and the clandestine manipulation of foreign governments not only believes in the power of theory, but it dedicated significant resources to having a group of secret agents pore over what some consider to be the most recondite and intricate theory ever produced."
You are getting increasingly waspish and while there is much in what you say, it fails to throw much light on this tragedy, because it is a tragedy for us all that (and here you are correct) has not suddenly appeared but evolved. Paying for 'education' and the decline of scholarship has something to do with it as has our 'celebrity' society and the need to 'promote' universities in order to attract students and funding.
Jason Arday was used as a poster boy to promote 'acceptable' vitrues at Cambridge and when he became a liability, he was dumped and a pile-on followed that monstored him that DID involve blatant racism. And so the view that your observation 'And I wonder whether his suicide, after being found out as eventually he was going to be, wasn’t a last desperate attempt to control the future discourse' completely fails to understand the despair of the suicidal mind but is one you should rephrase or discard.
I have had some experience where people were promoted to positions in which they were clearly unprepared for or in which they were eminently qualified with original research, but resented by an old guard that felt time had passed them by. Both ended badly but the overwhelming tragedy was that the organisations (and you admit this) that placed them failed proper oversight. Jason Arday killed himself not because he was a 'failure' but because clear inconsistencies in his record were highlighted in a way that overpowered every other part of him. And then those that have an axe to grind piled in. I have seen it with both race and gender and may have contributed to it by failing to understand just how dangerous it is to stray from competence and scholarship. I have know senior people who were hopeless at the same time as being wonderful, and junior people who were immensely talented and just needed a good manager to polish them a bit and teach them what to say to 'get on', but never went anywhere.
Note: 'He was eagerly elevated as a symbol, ruthlessly scrutinized as an anomaly, and callously discarded as a liability. His rise and fall expose the moral bankruptcy of a system that wants the appearance of racial progress without the work of structural change'.
Oxbridge is riddled with people who take glee in undermining their contemporaries. The mark of a worthy academic is to avoid such people and such talk.
Agree entirely with your statements "Oxbridge is riddled with people who take glee in undermining their contemporaries" and "(Aurelien's) observation 'And I wonder...' is one you should rephrase or discard."
This world is brimming with fear, despair and cruelty. Enough.
The people who elevated Jason Arday so that they could see themselves, and be seen, as 'virtuous', have had to take no responsibility for their part in this affair. That is yet another injustice and one day it will be repaid.
Thank you for saying this. Aurelien is pretentious and cruel. He will probably take delight in someone saying that. This phrase you cite is beyond the pale.
It seems to me that Aurelien is simply more concerned about the state of academia, education, and Western society as a whole than about the fate of a man who is a proven fraudster. You find that cruel? I don’t.
He was appointed to a professorship at Glasgow which he used as a stepping stone to Cambridge. His CV should not have got him an interview for a lecturing position at Russell Group university
A long discourse on "bullshit" and the French theorists and the difference between "truth" and "knowledge" is just so much mental masturbation.
The idea that Cambridge either didn't know, or didn't care to find out the truth of Arday's various claims is nonsense. Of course they knew, but they didn't care not because they were sitting around going "well, who can say what is true anyway?" but because there was only one truth that mattered - Jason Arday was black. That's it.
And to suggest that Arday killed himself in an attempt to control "the discourse" posthumously is the kind of immature, cruel and fatuous comment that I would expect from an insecure sixth-form edgelord desperate to get attention and show everyone how 'clever' he is.
It's funny how a throwaway comment can often reveal so much more about a person's character than any number of essays...
I wonder if the tendency Aurelien describes, even if in a less outrageous form, is necessarily all that unique.
David Raup, a paleontologist that I was acquainted with (sort of) a few lifetimes ago, had written a fascinating book called the Nemesis Affair back in late 1980s or early 1990s. The science is completely out of date, so no point in reading it if you care about KT extinction event, but the book is mainly about his experience while advocating the hypothesis that there might be an extraterrestrial reason for mass extinctions. Raup was a real scientist, with impeccable credentials, but his specialty was strictly earthly and was mostly fossil-bound. He freely admitted that he had no background in astronomy and he did not touch geology much beyond his undrgraduate years, so he was out of depth when he proosed his ideas. However, he was disturbed that not only were his ideas dismissed completely out of hand, but that his detractors downright lied when they should have known better (ie where and how "shocked quartz" was formed--Raup didn't have formal training in geology in decades; his detractors were actual geologists--the latter basically made shit up to justify dismissing his argument.)
My not-so-successful journey through academic publication is that Raup's experience (and the many tales he relates of skilled "outsiders"--people whom he describes as far more skilled in their not-field-of-msin-expertise than Raup was in geology) is indeed widespread. Academic fields are defined by "conventions" rather than "truths." There are many things that are taken to be "axiomatic truths," whether they are actually true or not. There are conventionally accepted methodologies that putatively "measure" X, whatever that means. There are methods of arguments that are considered valid--and straying outside these boundaries is not looked upon favorably. Outsiders, by definition, do not know these conventions and, whether what they say is "true" or not does not matter (and "insiders" who does not abide by the conventions are boubd to have short careers.)
To be fair, has there ever been a time that "academia," in particular, has been free of this tendency? Truth is hard to identify, after all. The core of Kuhn's argument was that it takes a lot of stuff accumulating for a group to recognize that the conventions and the truths are incongruent. Academia, in particular has suffered from these because too many things we deal with are not reliably measurable so as to furnish a counterexample to the conventions,
Now, this is not really the problem with truth-by-assertionism. The points I raised presuppose that we would change our minds if we see a counteresample that's objectively convincing enough. The truth-by-assertionism is practically (or literally) a matter of faith. Ironically, though, many seemingly "rational" or "scientific" claims fall into this category: "Two times two equals four is mathematics. Try arguing with that," in words of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor. The statement is, of course, not "science," but simply a statement of commonly accepted convention--there's joke about the Axiom of Choice and Banach-Tarski paradox in there. If you gain prestige of what people think constitutes "science" simply by controlling what pasees as "commonly accepted convention," why bother with the actual "science" bit?
The bottom line here is that this has always been going on, probably all the way back to Socrates' time, at least. The real change might just be that those perpetrate these are far more open and shameless. That seems to be a slightly different problem.
They [those in-charge at the universities] "care only for their own careers" because those careers are based on fakery and they are terrified of exposure. Higher Ed has become just another form of racketeering — of getting something for nothing.
There is a fantastic scene in the movie "Don't look up" (probably the most important commercial US movie of the decade) that illustrates perfectly the point of this essay. Two astronomers (played by Leonard diCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence) detect an asteroid that has changed course and is coming to hit Earth in a few months, thereby destroying humanity and all life with the possible exception of cockroaches. They have proof, they have all the data. They convince a mid-level Government specialist (Rob Morgan) who takes them to see the President (Meryl Streep). But in the White House, the President and all his aides simply do-not-care, because all they think about are polls, elections and the like. It takes weeks for them to wake up, and then only because the media starts pressing them. Their "solution" will be to delegate the problem to the "private sector", a Bezos-Musk like oligarch (Mark Rylance).
Oh, 'Aurelian', you have really outdone yourself this time.
All this hand-wringing about "intellectual sins" is another empty performance, quite as wearisome as all the weaponized wokedom.
Arday was used. He was chosen (if not created) so that there would be a diversionary scandal.
Your precious universities originated as "lie factories" for the rulers. They still perpetuate the pomp and puffery so well exemplified in your writing.
1. "But I think that ours is the first society in history where the ruling classes genuinely don’t care about truth and knowledge, and so don’t give either much importance. They are not actively hostile to either truth or knowledge: they just haven’t found either to be particularly useful or necessary in their own lives and careers. They are happy—indeed eager—to make use of them for political advantage, and to pretend to take them seriously for tactical purposes, but no more."
The elites care about truth and knowledge, solely to the extent these things can be weaponized. Because they care only about results, only about doing whatever it takes to get themselves ahead.
Because that is what matters. Not intellectual consistency, not ethics not values.
A lot of ink is spilled, lamenting the fact that the universe is at best indifferent to human morality.
2. Similarly, Jason Arday was lionized for a while, not as a result of some post-structuralist view of truth, but for much simpler reasons: he told the goodthink set the stories that they wanted to hear, and therefore nobody wanted to ask whether these stories were too good, too pat, too neatly tied in a bow, to be true.
Epistemology never had anything to do with it, any more than the people who invest in an obvious Ponzi scheme are justifying their folly based on a more nuanced reading of Derrida or whatever.
They want to believe, in this case, that they are getting something for nothing. Nothing more.
It's not like this began with Jason Arday, either. Overeducated europeans fell for the J.T. LeRoy scam, hook, line and sinker. He told them what they wanted to hear, as did Jerzy Kosinski. Or that guy who wrote about the inbred hicks of rural Minnesota for "Bild", a magazine normally famous for its laborious fact-checking. But he told the dumb europeans what they wanted to hear about American bumpkins, so they bought it wholeheartedly, when anyone with Google and five minutes worth of curiosity could have debunked the entire thing. The writer never visited the towns he wrote about.
3. " Already, the Bad Faith excuses are out. “Everybody does it.” No, everybody doesn’t do it, and it’s an insult to suggest otherwise. If they did, it would be a terrifying conclusion about the intellectual probity of British, and probably western universities. "
And? You really believe in the probity of british universities? Yes, sweet summer child, scams and charlatanism are *everywhere*. Everything, everywher,e all the time. Even british universities, LOL.
"The actual problem is much vaster. Right now, the entire British university sector is kept afloat by roughly three quarters of a million international students. They’re here because Tsinghua is hard to get into and Cambridge isn’t, and we’re happy to have them. We’ll let them exist in an unofficial parallel system, where they get to take lectures in a language they barely understand and cheat on an industrial scale, because the last thing we want is to scare away the money. For the moment it works, bosses in Shenzhen are still impressed by an international degree. "
"But the domestic students are the same. Have you been in a university lecture theatre lately? Go: it’s fine, everyone’ll just assume you’re a particularly unfortunate-looking mature student. Sit at the back. At the far end of the room there’s a little person trying to talk about textuality, performance, and production; meanwhile the space in between is a glowing, rippling sea of laptop screens. Every single one of these students is scrolling through pictures of jumpsuits on Shein. When they need to submit an essay they get ChatGPT to print one out for them. And frankly, the academics aren’t any different themselves."
Back to the case the ancient Greek philosophers made for the importance of truth. Hurrah!
Just yesterday I made an observation in hospital. The standard way a nurse is allowed (?) to convey a preliminary diagnosis is "I think that ..." When in my dad's case none of the two nurses who used that phrase had probably done any of the thinking to the matter at all.
Let's wait and see how many of the (blue-haired menopausal female) academics at Cam U who recommended Arday for the Professorship are fired -- because they are the real racists in this sad tale, the responsible individuals who failed in the execution of their duties. Let's wait ... and wait ... and wait ... and wait ....
This. Is anybody going to be punished? Nobody is. I defend this not for Arday's sake, but because they promote wokeness and are plainly incompetent. Heads should roll.
Maybe I missed an indirect inference but I find it quite disturbing how the essay and prior comments miss even the possibility that most everything officially stated regarding the safety and effectiveness of Covid19 mRNA vaxgenes was a lie. Are the subsequent increases in all cause mortality regarded as coincidental? The rise in cancer rates? The sudden deaths and massive amyloid protein blood clots found by morticians and pathologists on at least 3 continents? Is the author not aware that this is now published information in peer reviewed medical literature? Are other readers and commentors not aware? Anthony Fauci invoking the 5th Amendment 111 times during a Senate hearing? His advisor, confidant, and now disavowed friend David Morens pleading guilty to conspiring to destroy evidence related to the origins of Covid19? Are Anthony Fauci and all those who followed with authority bastions of truth?
Let me add something here which I hope you find scary. I see you still have faith in Science, in this area of lies and distorting mirrors.
The fact is that Science is in the same state. Quantum theory is mainly useless waffle when it comes to making decisions that affect people. But that mathematical physics was used from the 1920s onwards to provide support for major policy decisions on the basis that physicists know what they talking about and mere mortals cannot argue since they are not mathematically literate. As it stands now, all government decisions are made or supported by physics graduates. These people are often VERY STUPID and have no serious qualifications. The current top man in radiation protection has a degree in chemistry from Kingston Polytechnic. 1983. This would be amusing if it were not for the fact that the legislation he administers and advised on has probably killed 300million individuals from cancer in the last 50 years, when this legislation risk model was devised.
Excellent essay. I think the distinction between lying and simply not caring whether something is true is the really important insight here.
It also brought immediately to mind something I wrote recently about Lee Shoemate, who somehow managed to become a psychiatry resident at UNC despite never having attended medical school. Different era, different circumstances, but there is an eerie family resemblance: the credential, the institutional imprimatur and the appearance of legitimacy came to substitute for the underlying reality they were supposed to certify.
I might push your argument one step further, though. Perhaps “they don’t care” because our institutions increasingly reward people for maintaining the approved narrative much more reliably than they reward them for discovering whether it is true. Once that incentive structure is established, you don’t need a conspiracy and you scarcely even need conscious dishonesty. The institution begins selecting for people who are very good at knowing what must be said, and rather less interested in whether it corresponds to reality.
That, to me, is where your use of Sartrean bad faith really lands. Everyone need not believe the fiction. They merely have to understand that acknowledging the obvious may be considerably more dangerous than participating in it.
The difficulty, as you say at the end, is that reality eventually gets a vote.
"The difficulty, as you say at the end, is that reality eventually gets a vote."
By that point, it doesn't matter. By the time that even the neocons admitted that just maybe Iraq was not chockfull of WMDs, it didn't matter. The neocons had already gotten the war that they wanted and there was no turning back now.
Needless to say, those same neocons are to this day hailed as Serious Thinkers And Foreign Policy Heavyweights. None of them suffered in the slightest, not personally, not professionally, even though precisely none of their rosy predictions came to pass.
And yes, they were consciously lying the entire time.
Those who spoke out against the war were case into Outer Darkness, even as that war went worse than the worst naysayers foresaw.
Yes, the euroelites know full well what a War On Russia means. Since they personally won't be fighting, they don't care.
Cassandra comes prominently to mind.
Those who might actually care have been disarmed or have disarmed themselves. The absence of retribution in the political environment allows this weed of elite carelessness to flourish, spread and choke out fruitful growth.
Gresham's Law (bad money drives good money out of circulation) applies to more than just monetary economics.
Finster's Fourth Law readeth thusly: "All games eventually degenerate into sociopath games, because the only way to beat someone who will do whatever it takes to win is to respond in kind."
This is why Russia can be attacked with total impunity, while nobody would dream of doing the same tot he United States. Because the Americans would not hesitate for a second to go nuclear.
The distinction between lying and not caring has been analyzed by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt in his book _On Bullshit_. He does not attempt to offer an historical or sociological account of the rise of bullshit, but there definitely has been a rise. Bullshit may always have existed, but it has become an ever more widespread and dominant tendency in the anglophone world (including India). My impression is it has not advanced quite so far everywhere in Europe, and in some places, e.g. Russia, almost not at all. I’ve seen it quite clearly take over in my own discipline, anthropology, which is definitely the most bullshitified of the social sciences. Because I have been an anthropologist for a long time, and have always made a practice of reading “out of date” journal articles from decades and by anthropologists few of my professional peers find worth their time (or are even aware of), I can date the inflection point from which bullshit began to take over. It was the end of the Cold War. The intellectual trends that gave much bullshit its initial (appearance of) heft—e.g. the French poststructuralists—precede this inflection point by decades, but they did not cause it. They were taken up and, initially, used to justify it. Now we’ve reached the point that no one feels any need to justify it, because they are not even aware that there is an “it”; bullshit is all they have ever known. That there was ever a concern with such virtues as coherency of argument, evidence, falsifiability, etc., has been forgotten. It’s a bit like Macintyre’s argument about morality. It no longer exists, and no one knows it.
A clip of Harry Frankfurt discussing his book (4:46):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0MF8HMUmIk
"The CIA Reads French Theory: On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left" by Gabriel Rockill
"...The agency responsible for coups d’état, targeted assassinations and the clandestine manipulation of foreign governments not only believes in the power of theory, but it dedicated significant resources to having a group of secret agents pore over what some consider to be the most recondite and intricate theory ever produced."
https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-reads-french-theory-on-the-intellectual-labor-of-dismantling-the-cultural-left/
Bullshit has advanced because it works.
yeah… what he said…
You are getting increasingly waspish and while there is much in what you say, it fails to throw much light on this tragedy, because it is a tragedy for us all that (and here you are correct) has not suddenly appeared but evolved. Paying for 'education' and the decline of scholarship has something to do with it as has our 'celebrity' society and the need to 'promote' universities in order to attract students and funding.
Jason Arday was used as a poster boy to promote 'acceptable' vitrues at Cambridge and when he became a liability, he was dumped and a pile-on followed that monstored him that DID involve blatant racism. And so the view that your observation 'And I wonder whether his suicide, after being found out as eventually he was going to be, wasn’t a last desperate attempt to control the future discourse' completely fails to understand the despair of the suicidal mind but is one you should rephrase or discard.
I have had some experience where people were promoted to positions in which they were clearly unprepared for or in which they were eminently qualified with original research, but resented by an old guard that felt time had passed them by. Both ended badly but the overwhelming tragedy was that the organisations (and you admit this) that placed them failed proper oversight. Jason Arday killed himself not because he was a 'failure' but because clear inconsistencies in his record were highlighted in a way that overpowered every other part of him. And then those that have an axe to grind piled in. I have seen it with both race and gender and may have contributed to it by failing to understand just how dangerous it is to stray from competence and scholarship. I have know senior people who were hopeless at the same time as being wonderful, and junior people who were immensely talented and just needed a good manager to polish them a bit and teach them what to say to 'get on', but never went anywhere.
An illuminating article on Jason Arday is this:
https://paulddf.substack.com/p/who-killed-jason-arday
Note: 'He was eagerly elevated as a symbol, ruthlessly scrutinized as an anomaly, and callously discarded as a liability. His rise and fall expose the moral bankruptcy of a system that wants the appearance of racial progress without the work of structural change'.
Oxbridge is riddled with people who take glee in undermining their contemporaries. The mark of a worthy academic is to avoid such people and such talk.
Agree entirely with your statements "Oxbridge is riddled with people who take glee in undermining their contemporaries" and "(Aurelien's) observation 'And I wonder...' is one you should rephrase or discard."
This world is brimming with fear, despair and cruelty. Enough.
The people who elevated Jason Arday so that they could see themselves, and be seen, as 'virtuous', have had to take no responsibility for their part in this affair. That is yet another injustice and one day it will be repaid.
Thank you for saying this. Aurelien is pretentious and cruel. He will probably take delight in someone saying that. This phrase you cite is beyond the pale.
It seems to me that Aurelien is simply more concerned about the state of academia, education, and Western society as a whole than about the fate of a man who is a proven fraudster. You find that cruel? I don’t.
It offends people these days to establish facts. Then they resort to name calling and ad hominem attacks like a 5th grader.
He was appointed to a professorship at Glasgow which he used as a stepping stone to Cambridge. His CV should not have got him an interview for a lecturing position at Russell Group university
Finally someone else gets it!
A long discourse on "bullshit" and the French theorists and the difference between "truth" and "knowledge" is just so much mental masturbation.
The idea that Cambridge either didn't know, or didn't care to find out the truth of Arday's various claims is nonsense. Of course they knew, but they didn't care not because they were sitting around going "well, who can say what is true anyway?" but because there was only one truth that mattered - Jason Arday was black. That's it.
And to suggest that Arday killed himself in an attempt to control "the discourse" posthumously is the kind of immature, cruel and fatuous comment that I would expect from an insecure sixth-form edgelord desperate to get attention and show everyone how 'clever' he is.
It's funny how a throwaway comment can often reveal so much more about a person's character than any number of essays...
I wonder if the tendency Aurelien describes, even if in a less outrageous form, is necessarily all that unique.
David Raup, a paleontologist that I was acquainted with (sort of) a few lifetimes ago, had written a fascinating book called the Nemesis Affair back in late 1980s or early 1990s. The science is completely out of date, so no point in reading it if you care about KT extinction event, but the book is mainly about his experience while advocating the hypothesis that there might be an extraterrestrial reason for mass extinctions. Raup was a real scientist, with impeccable credentials, but his specialty was strictly earthly and was mostly fossil-bound. He freely admitted that he had no background in astronomy and he did not touch geology much beyond his undrgraduate years, so he was out of depth when he proosed his ideas. However, he was disturbed that not only were his ideas dismissed completely out of hand, but that his detractors downright lied when they should have known better (ie where and how "shocked quartz" was formed--Raup didn't have formal training in geology in decades; his detractors were actual geologists--the latter basically made shit up to justify dismissing his argument.)
My not-so-successful journey through academic publication is that Raup's experience (and the many tales he relates of skilled "outsiders"--people whom he describes as far more skilled in their not-field-of-msin-expertise than Raup was in geology) is indeed widespread. Academic fields are defined by "conventions" rather than "truths." There are many things that are taken to be "axiomatic truths," whether they are actually true or not. There are conventionally accepted methodologies that putatively "measure" X, whatever that means. There are methods of arguments that are considered valid--and straying outside these boundaries is not looked upon favorably. Outsiders, by definition, do not know these conventions and, whether what they say is "true" or not does not matter (and "insiders" who does not abide by the conventions are boubd to have short careers.)
To be fair, has there ever been a time that "academia," in particular, has been free of this tendency? Truth is hard to identify, after all. The core of Kuhn's argument was that it takes a lot of stuff accumulating for a group to recognize that the conventions and the truths are incongruent. Academia, in particular has suffered from these because too many things we deal with are not reliably measurable so as to furnish a counterexample to the conventions,
Now, this is not really the problem with truth-by-assertionism. The points I raised presuppose that we would change our minds if we see a counteresample that's objectively convincing enough. The truth-by-assertionism is practically (or literally) a matter of faith. Ironically, though, many seemingly "rational" or "scientific" claims fall into this category: "Two times two equals four is mathematics. Try arguing with that," in words of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor. The statement is, of course, not "science," but simply a statement of commonly accepted convention--there's joke about the Axiom of Choice and Banach-Tarski paradox in there. If you gain prestige of what people think constitutes "science" simply by controlling what pasees as "commonly accepted convention," why bother with the actual "science" bit?
The bottom line here is that this has always been going on, probably all the way back to Socrates' time, at least. The real change might just be that those perpetrate these are far more open and shameless. That seems to be a slightly different problem.
They [those in-charge at the universities] "care only for their own careers" because those careers are based on fakery and they are terrified of exposure. Higher Ed has become just another form of racketeering — of getting something for nothing.
There is a fantastic scene in the movie "Don't look up" (probably the most important commercial US movie of the decade) that illustrates perfectly the point of this essay. Two astronomers (played by Leonard diCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence) detect an asteroid that has changed course and is coming to hit Earth in a few months, thereby destroying humanity and all life with the possible exception of cockroaches. They have proof, they have all the data. They convince a mid-level Government specialist (Rob Morgan) who takes them to see the President (Meryl Streep). But in the White House, the President and all his aides simply do-not-care, because all they think about are polls, elections and the like. It takes weeks for them to wake up, and then only because the media starts pressing them. Their "solution" will be to delegate the problem to the "private sector", a Bezos-Musk like oligarch (Mark Rylance).
Of course. People of infleunce and authority know that consequences are for the poors.
Oh, 'Aurelian', you have really outdone yourself this time.
All this hand-wringing about "intellectual sins" is another empty performance, quite as wearisome as all the weaponized wokedom.
Arday was used. He was chosen (if not created) so that there would be a diversionary scandal.
Your precious universities originated as "lie factories" for the rulers. They still perpetuate the pomp and puffery so well exemplified in your writing.
1. "But I think that ours is the first society in history where the ruling classes genuinely don’t care about truth and knowledge, and so don’t give either much importance. They are not actively hostile to either truth or knowledge: they just haven’t found either to be particularly useful or necessary in their own lives and careers. They are happy—indeed eager—to make use of them for political advantage, and to pretend to take them seriously for tactical purposes, but no more."
The elites care about truth and knowledge, solely to the extent these things can be weaponized. Because they care only about results, only about doing whatever it takes to get themselves ahead.
Because that is what matters. Not intellectual consistency, not ethics not values.
A lot of ink is spilled, lamenting the fact that the universe is at best indifferent to human morality.
2. Similarly, Jason Arday was lionized for a while, not as a result of some post-structuralist view of truth, but for much simpler reasons: he told the goodthink set the stories that they wanted to hear, and therefore nobody wanted to ask whether these stories were too good, too pat, too neatly tied in a bow, to be true.
Epistemology never had anything to do with it, any more than the people who invest in an obvious Ponzi scheme are justifying their folly based on a more nuanced reading of Derrida or whatever.
They want to believe, in this case, that they are getting something for nothing. Nothing more.
It's not like this began with Jason Arday, either. Overeducated europeans fell for the J.T. LeRoy scam, hook, line and sinker. He told them what they wanted to hear, as did Jerzy Kosinski. Or that guy who wrote about the inbred hicks of rural Minnesota for "Bild", a magazine normally famous for its laborious fact-checking. But he told the dumb europeans what they wanted to hear about American bumpkins, so they bought it wholeheartedly, when anyone with Google and five minutes worth of curiosity could have debunked the entire thing. The writer never visited the towns he wrote about.
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-carrion-eaters
3. " Already, the Bad Faith excuses are out. “Everybody does it.” No, everybody doesn’t do it, and it’s an insult to suggest otherwise. If they did, it would be a terrifying conclusion about the intellectual probity of British, and probably western universities. "
And? You really believe in the probity of british universities? Yes, sweet summer child, scams and charlatanism are *everywhere*. Everything, everywher,e all the time. Even british universities, LOL.
To quote the Sam Kris article:
"The actual problem is much vaster. Right now, the entire British university sector is kept afloat by roughly three quarters of a million international students. They’re here because Tsinghua is hard to get into and Cambridge isn’t, and we’re happy to have them. We’ll let them exist in an unofficial parallel system, where they get to take lectures in a language they barely understand and cheat on an industrial scale, because the last thing we want is to scare away the money. For the moment it works, bosses in Shenzhen are still impressed by an international degree. "
And another one-shot:
"But the domestic students are the same. Have you been in a university lecture theatre lately? Go: it’s fine, everyone’ll just assume you’re a particularly unfortunate-looking mature student. Sit at the back. At the far end of the room there’s a little person trying to talk about textuality, performance, and production; meanwhile the space in between is a glowing, rippling sea of laptop screens. Every single one of these students is scrolling through pictures of jumpsuits on Shein. When they need to submit an essay they get ChatGPT to print one out for them. And frankly, the academics aren’t any different themselves."
I was as hopeful as you that this will bring some sense of urgency…the problem is that it is treated, well…here is one example, from many others: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/8/18/tens-of-thousands-mourn-jason-arday-in-london-blaming-press-for-his-death
Needs a sound-track.. I suggest Eric Bibb/Habib Koité - "We Don't Care" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLfAejjSqc4
Back to the case the ancient Greek philosophers made for the importance of truth. Hurrah!
Just yesterday I made an observation in hospital. The standard way a nurse is allowed (?) to convey a preliminary diagnosis is "I think that ..." When in my dad's case none of the two nurses who used that phrase had probably done any of the thinking to the matter at all.
Curious way to go about.
My feeling is that the Universities have become the new Monasteries and are destined for the same fate.
They’ve already developed their own version of the Inquisition.
Isn’t that where they came from in the first place? From dust you were born and unto dust you shall return …
Let's wait and see how many of the (blue-haired menopausal female) academics at Cam U who recommended Arday for the Professorship are fired -- because they are the real racists in this sad tale, the responsible individuals who failed in the execution of their duties. Let's wait ... and wait ... and wait ... and wait ....
This. Is anybody going to be punished? Nobody is. I defend this not for Arday's sake, but because they promote wokeness and are plainly incompetent. Heads should roll.
Maybe I missed an indirect inference but I find it quite disturbing how the essay and prior comments miss even the possibility that most everything officially stated regarding the safety and effectiveness of Covid19 mRNA vaxgenes was a lie. Are the subsequent increases in all cause mortality regarded as coincidental? The rise in cancer rates? The sudden deaths and massive amyloid protein blood clots found by morticians and pathologists on at least 3 continents? Is the author not aware that this is now published information in peer reviewed medical literature? Are other readers and commentors not aware? Anthony Fauci invoking the 5th Amendment 111 times during a Senate hearing? His advisor, confidant, and now disavowed friend David Morens pleading guilty to conspiring to destroy evidence related to the origins of Covid19? Are Anthony Fauci and all those who followed with authority bastions of truth?
After reading https://bettbeat.substack.com/p/the-majority-hordes-only-disperse?r=fui13&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I have the impression that maybe you are missing something?!
Let me add something here which I hope you find scary. I see you still have faith in Science, in this area of lies and distorting mirrors.
The fact is that Science is in the same state. Quantum theory is mainly useless waffle when it comes to making decisions that affect people. But that mathematical physics was used from the 1920s onwards to provide support for major policy decisions on the basis that physicists know what they talking about and mere mortals cannot argue since they are not mathematically literate. As it stands now, all government decisions are made or supported by physics graduates. These people are often VERY STUPID and have no serious qualifications. The current top man in radiation protection has a degree in chemistry from Kingston Polytechnic. 1983. This would be amusing if it were not for the fact that the legislation he administers and advised on has probably killed 300million individuals from cancer in the last 50 years, when this legislation risk model was devised.
See:
https://share.google/hhOrbGAMUy5SK2mXn