There is a recurring joke amongst anyone who works with primary source historical materials of any kind, including even the hansard: "As you can see, our generation was not the first to live with the delusion that academic learning reached its zenith when we ourselves were teenagers, too jejune to question the acumen of our professors, and that it has then declined ever since." The snide insinuation being that the perception of historical decline is, in fact, a shadow cast by the observer's emergence from the primordial ignorance of youth: the wisdom of our elders, once unquestioned, becomes questioned, and then the quality of learning amongst experts appears to be in decline.
A Buddhist monk once told me, "People cannot respect us for what we do, or some service we offer the community, they have to respect us for what we are: for the lifestyle we live as such." English was not her first language: I confess I am "punching it up" a bit, and making her turn of phrase more Mazardian by degrees in the process of paraphrasing.
In the context of a totally unrelated conversation today (not worth paraphrasing) I remarked in passing that I have never known anyone who was well read in political philosophy, ancient or modern, East or West, and I went on to specify that I am including people with PhDs —or that I am especially thinking of the people I have known at various stages of having PhDs at elite universities. Of course, I could extend the scope much further, beyond people I've known face to face: none of the political analysts or social commentators I've known "parasocially" are well read in the manner I've just specified. On the contrary, I'm continually confronted with the embarrassing extent of their ignorance on the very subjects they pretend to comment upon.
There are several factors unique to our era worth stating.
Nobody can make any significant amount of money writing a book anymore —especially not if we're talking about "hard" nonfiction.
Look at how little effort Bob Dylan put into his first album and how much money he made out of it. Look at how little effort any given stand up comedian of the 1960s put into a comedy album and how much money they would stand to earn from it. An incentive structure evolved around this possibility: not every musician could have a hit album, nor every stand up comedian, but nevertheless large numbers of people were paying their rent through these arts —and larger numbers could earn some money while aspiring to one day earn enough to pay the rent.
There was a similar structure to book publishing: not everyone could publish a hit book on the topic of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire —but dozens of people could fail while earning a tidy profit for themselves and the publisher alike. Paper was cheaper than vinyl. Sitting alone over a typewriter for a whole month was cheaper than employing a team of audio engineers in a recording studio for a single hour.
That has changed: the incentive structure for publishing has changed, the incentive structure for research has changed, the incentive structure for being an intellectual (or even trying) has changed.
Everyone I knew with a PhD regarded the learning they had accomplished as a teenager (en passant) as adequate for the rest of their lives. A few lectures they had heard casually, as a teenager, about Northern Myanmar, would serve as the basis for lectures delivered authoritatively (to teenagers) for 40 years thereafter, without one finger being lifted to see if research had challenged any of the earlier work (thus) being recycled from one generation to the next. The professor in question happens to meet me, and I inform her (in an entertaining conversation, I might add, not at all confrontationally or reproachfully) that everything she has been teaching about Myanmar (and Sri Lanka) is utterly fictional, that it always was, and that I could debunk it for her offhand within a few minutes of cocktail party banter, backed up with footnotes.
She found this conversation fascinating and said so. She followed up on none of it. She did zero reading, zero research, and continued to teach the same debunked nonsense to the next class of students to come under her power in the next semester, and so on.
There is a very deep conviction that all areas of human learning are equivalent to dentistry: that you can learn this set of objectively real skills once, in your teenage years, and then spend the rest of your life as a professor, repeating the same lessons again and again without doing any new learning whatsoever. Either you know how to drill teeth or you don't: there's no room for self-doubt, no need to challenge and overturn the assumptions that became ossified in one's own youth.
In brief, those who teach do not learn.
These two factors alone: it is impossible to exaggerate the breadth and depth of the change they entail for our civilization.
I once picked up a paperback book (in a second hand bookstore, in Toronto) that could have been published in the 1980s (or earlier) with the memorable title, "Do I have to be myself today?" (Googling now I can find no trace of it.) I had no idea what to expect, based on the title, but it was a set of self-indulgent reflections from an economics professor (and if it wasn't economics, please forgive me, this is from memory) who offered utterly fatuous remarks on how the behavior and attitude of his students toward him would be changed, from day to day, depending on what clothes he wore when giving his lecture —I suppose various generalizations about "social psychology" were the justification for these observations being grouped together from one chapter to the next. Just looking at the book, it was obvious that someone at some publishing company had decided that this would make money —and it's quite possible that it did. This book was not published as a charity: it was a for-profit venture. It reflected a time when the idle byproducts of being an intellectual had a decent chance at generating a few bucks and being on the bookshelves of a few hundred (or few thousand) fans. Even if that book didn't make money, the editorial department that took a gamble by greenlighting it probably published works from a dozen other eccentric intellectuals that same month: if half of them turned a profit, they'd be laughing all the way to the bank. There was pulp fiction, and there was pulp nonfiction. Failure was individual; success, industrial.
Money, fame, power, respect, sex. Not necessarily in that order. There were incentives, in the past, that compelled people to develop beyond the repetitious remit of the instructor in dentistry: there were both tangible and intangible rewards for challenging what you'd learned about Myanmar as a teenager. No longer.
Yes, to some extent, intellectual virtue always was voluntary, but it is now more voluntary than ever before. Benjamin Franklin fucked whores: he was fat, he was ugly, and he traveled around the world being celebrated for his scientific discoveries, sleeping with prostitutes and occasional groupies. Would he have engaged in those scientific experiments if he couldn't have published them? Would he have written about politics, etc., or continued to challenge himself and learn more (and write more, etc.) his whole life long without the (considerable) incentive structure that surrounded him in Philadelphia? From my perspective, Benjamin Franklin was an imbecile, but my perspective doesn't matter here: he's an example of someone who had almost zero formal education and who compensated through informal education that included a network of book-reading clubs, and being very directly engaged in ("amateurish") research and publishing of many different kinds. And he was motivated, at every stage, by money, fame, power, respect, and sex —both when he was young and when he was old. His evils were considerable but, at least, he is an example of a man who never stopped learning. He did not regard political philosophy as dentistry.
Who, now, will respect "us" (the real intellectuals, public or private, who deal with politics philosophically, and deal with philosophy politically) not for what we do, but for who we are —not for some public service, but for the process of our ongoing learning. Who will be the whores trying to corrupt our monastic order?
Nobody. Nobody at all. You're better off doing stand up comedy. There will never be another Benjamin Franklin.
