Stoner logic in academia

The first time I realized my journey into higher ed would not be what I hoped.

After recently reading this piece, which offers an explanation for “Why Foucault is our most cited public intellectual”, I was reminded of a terrible realization I had during a class in undergrad. The realization was that many of my teachers—if I let them—would send me out of higher education as dumb or dumber than when I entered.

I was in my mid-twenties when I went to university, having spent many years after high school working in agriculture and living as a sort of stoner autodidact. I was always reasonably intelligent and had a high need for cognition, so I would read a lot of philosophy and social science for fun.

However, my philosophy operated on vibes and stoner-logic, given my lack of education in quantitative methods and actual science. For this reason I found myself drawn to Foucauldian critiques and postmodern philosophy. As Shako notes in the piece linked above, this is likely a common factor of Foucault’s popularity, even in actual academia:

Foucault is also a way to escape the fact that many academic theorists are innumerate. Modern empiricism is fundamentally quantitative and difficult. Reading statistics and critiquing them requires a baseline ability most of these academics lack. If it turned out though that they are all built on a fundamentally racist understanding of knowledge, then it becomes easier to dismiss them out-of-hand. This would probably be too uncharitable, if I hadn’t seen it first hand in the departments of sufficiently prestigious Political Science departments.

---

---

In my mid-twenties I decided that, given my natural propensity for learning, I would return and get my degree, and maybe pursue post-graduate studies. It was around this time I was realising that my stoner lifestyle and hardcore progressivism was disempowering and unsatisfying, and that self-learning could only teach me so much—I needed some rigorous education from people smarter than I.

I imagined going to university and being surrounded by smart people, learning valuable technical knowledge, and being confronted by complex ideas I’d never considered.

Thus, I began a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology. At my university, the BA had a core curriculum of compulsory papers which you had to take in order to graduate, as many universities do. It was in one of these classes that I had a terrible realization.

This class was sold as a rigorous paper, in which we would be challenged to ‘think critically’ and undergo a complex examination of society and of our assumptions about ourselves, our identities (“identity”, I now know, is a warning sign), and the world.

In the first class, the lecturer (highly esteemed, I should note) launched into a shallow Foucauldian analysis of the Panopticon as it applied to the university. He went on and on with a sort of smug self-awareness, like he thought he was delivering gold and absolutely blowing our minds (I should note here that this lecturer is really likeable, and is genuinely nice).

Look at this classroom, he said. Look at how the very structure of this classroom exerts power. You are all on one side, stepped-up in auditorium seating so I can see all of you, but you can only see me, not each other. You are kind of forced to look at me and listen.

The construction of this lecture theatre exerts a system of power, and ensures the self-perception of you—the students—as lacking knowledge, and sets me up to be the distributor of knowledge, and thus it conveys power and authority. These systems of power are everywhere hidden in the architecture and the systems of our society, and designed to maintain the continuity of power.

I remember being thoroughly unimpressed. This was the exact kind of simple, fact-free, intuitive analysis that I and other high-school graduates had arrived at around a bong many times. And it wasn’t even accurate.

I remember thinking that, given that class sizes tended to be small at our Uni, 90% of the lecture theatres were not these stepped-auditorium type rooms—they were smaller, flat, office-like rooms perfect for egalitarian discussion-oriented classes. The only rooms with this inherent “power structure” were the few theatres intended to be used to host large audiences. And the constraints of such large audiences means that, for acoustic and communicative purposes (one could lean on actual science of physics and acoustics here), stepped-seating and a room designed for the conveyance of information from one to many required such an architecture. Not because, as the lecturer essentially asserted, our neoliberal overlords wanted to cheaply inculcate into us undergrads some sort of pliable consciousness, lest we threaten “systems of power”.

Additionally, there was a knowledge differential between us and him (at least there was supposed to be). We were there, as young people with less knowledge, to be educated by a more knowledgeable teacher. I couldn’t see how pointing out this dynamic was supposed to be a mind-blowing revelation of some hidden system of power.

Importantly, while he had an issue with the hidden power structure “inherent” in the architecture of the lecture theatre and other systems in society, he apparently had no issue with the overt power required to force students to pay for a core curriculum of courses he helped to design, that he teaches (job security, anyone?), and for which we had to buy the compulsory textbook that he edited and co-wrote!

Not to mention, the course itself (despite its veil of “critical thinking”) was really just a subtle attempt to indoctrinate students with the simplistic but intuitively satisfying thinking of a progressive, leftist-orthodox worldview. It was this level of analysis he applied to all sorts of sociological and psychological topics.

---

During that lecture and the many others that followed (and in many different classes—anthropology may have been the worst), I realised that far from entering the academy and graduating to a level of analysis above my old stoner-intuition, I was going to be taken back to that level of thinking. One that fundamentally “relies more on analogy than empirical evidence”.

(A great example of this argument by analogy is the feminist idea that sky-towers are symbolic penises which reflect the inherent sexism of built environments):

Again, I was literally hearing lecturers say things as dumb-but-intuitive as things I’d heard said by stoned 16-year-olds.

As Shako says:

I remember when studying this stuff being told that reading these texts was subversive. It’s unclear in what way, but the professor certainly believed it. There is this aesthetic to the argument where you’re being let in on a secret….

On the other hand, I’ve never felt any sort of dopamine hit reading marginal effects statistics from panel regressions in Political Economy journals. Whereas critiquing an entire field as arising only from maligned or biased power and knowledge structures has a feeling of being let in on forbidden knowledge.

So many of the lecturers were teaching us to use emotionally satisfying, simplistic analyses as “shortcuts to insight” which are the “opposite of the intensely empirical way of understanding reality”.

They tell students that

The world is not endlessly complex, requiring painstaking empirical decomposition of cause and effect. Rather: It’s simple, but they wouldn’t have you think so, for they have poisoned your well of knowledge. After all, a framework for thinking that lets you avoid a decade of studying statistics, reading, learning to code… and instead gives you that all for free up front is going to be endlessly popular for an intellectually lazy researcher and student alike.

---

---

For this reason, I dropped out of the Arts, and switched to a Bachelor of Science (still majoring in psych) so that I wouldn’t be forced to pay for courses and textbooks that had negative utility, and which—despite their apparent opposition to power and indoctrination—were the most explicitly indoctrinatory classes on offer. I took instead some biology, economics, and a lot of statistics.

Subsequently, as soon as I learned some econ, philosophy of science, and statistics (I am still an absolute mid-wit in this domain), learned about the replication crises, and about the political and ideological bias in social science, my entire worldview shattered.

So many students in the humanities and social sciences are trained to rely on intuition, the vibe that they are entertaining subversive, radical theory, the sense that this thinking is complex and rigorous. And it all relies on a scientific literature that is often simplistic, motivated, fraudulent, ideological, unreplicable, and sustained by citation laundering.

The ascendancy of Foucault and his anti-empirical descendants means that, for activists’ purposes, most students graduate having learned little, except to let their thoughts flow like water, down the most intuitively-satisfying path of least resistance¹.

1. Don’t get me wrong, I eventually found complex, empirical courses, I eventually found true academics and thinkers in academia, and I eventually found real, good bodies of work. But most students wont, without a concerted effort. And most are prevented from ever realizing the problem.