Academic philosophy did the same thing to Giorgio Agamben, who was one of their most precious heroes. He was the first (and only that I can think of) major philosopher to speak out on COVID as an excuse for government overreach back when it was first happening. Out of nowhere came all of these oh-so-appalling stories about how he had the audacity to pee on a bush after a night of post-conference drinking. What an old pervert!
Everyone denounced him, the champion of Foucault was now a senile old man who may as well have been Mussolini.
There's been a true, longstanding joke in academic philosophy about how professional ethicists are almost always *horrible* people. I suspect the truth in it comes from the fact that academics tend to separate their work from their lives and the real world; their work is more an academic game vying for prestige than anything connected to real life... and they don't actually care about real life or real morality. It's just all about impressing their institutional comrades. Confas' mistake was being too autistic to realize his "comrades" would never be swayed, lest they themselves become pariahs.
I remember thinking at the time that only Agamben had really "done the reading", as the academic snoots like to say. Everything Foucault said about discourse, the clinic, governmentality, and so on was marching around in gold lame outfits tootling on kazoos during covid and basically no social scientists could see any of it.
I've found that most academic philosophers read incessantly without actually learning anything; they practiced a detached sort of reading, as if it is all intellectual curiosities distinct from anything real. They don't make connections from what they read to reality around them.
It's genuinely sad that Cofnas really believes that there's a way back for higher education in its current form, when it's obvious to anyone paying attention that they need to be defunded and completely discredited as an absolute baseline. He's essentially been excommunicated from a new secular religion, and there's no priest that would risk their livelihood to lift it.
I wouldn't replace it, we absolutely need higher education. But it needs to be defunded by the government and allowed to wither until all the parasites starve to death. The social sciences and other worthless departments only exist because they're subsidized by the taxpayer.
Put another way, intelligence is virtuous if it serves wisdom. Otherwise, it will end up being perniciously destructive. Obviously, intelligence and wisdom are related, but quite different. Wisdom defines the necessary parameters for intelligence to be socially useful. Wisdom depends on value judgement based on long experience about what rules are necessary for a healthy civilization. You need first to know what is “good”, to put intelligence usefully to work. I do not think Cofnas, or people like him, understand this. At least not fully. Being smart is not a substitute for what is right. Otherwise, what is the value of a true statement? We value truth because it works much better than lies for maintaining a functioning civilization. And that is a characteristic of wisdom. People who are not highly intelligent but wise can build a much better civilization than super-smart fools. Wise, smart people can do even better.
Terrific piece! Cofnas should read The Abolition of Man. As you point out, he doesn’t like being vilified by an academic mob for exposing an uncomfortable truth. But if he rejects objective morality, on what basis is his treatment by them unjust? It’s all subjective. Their sensibilities and values may be in conflict with his, but if there can be no arbiter, why is he angry?
The problem with woke, DEI, etc. is the dribble down. If it stayed in the hall of academia it's hardly affect most of us.
I had my annual visit to the clinic the other day and was asked what my pronouns were. I politely replied he, him, whatever. and didn't follow up with my willingness to refer to them with the all inclusive pronoun; she/he/it (Said fast.).
Hey I'll never say to someone that someday may be looking down at my comatose body with a scalpel in their hand anything they may remember as denigrating them!
Most people are driven by a desire for status. If you build things, whether in construction or engineering (as two examples) there is a real world test that plays a key role in your status. Does the building fall down or stand? Does the program work to meet the goal or not?
Academics is not like that. It is a circle jerk. All that matters ultimately are the subjective opinions of other people who are judged the same way. Since academics seek prestige for being brilliant, other people, who want the same prestige, judge them as brilliant or not.
What a perfect opportunity to create a culture completely divorced from reality and sanity. The type of person who excels in such a system is not the person who excels in a system with real world metrics.
I have a theory that all these western institutions are collapsing around us because they've become so complex and cumbersome in structure and bureaucracy, that human intelligence plays no part in its outcomes except to exploit gaps in its function, thus damaging its prestige and credibility even further. Bureaucracy is the devil, even the ancient Chinese knew this, as per the Book of Lord Shang, and how Shang proposed that, to build a militarily competent central government, the population needed to be reined in through a vast, encompassing system of laws and regulations. Of course this failed and the Qin dynasty only lasted a few years. The point is, the more complex a thing is, the more moving parts and therefore the more points of failure. The latter point is salient when the system is oppressive: either conform or operate within its points of failure or die; morality cannot possibly exist from within the system as writ, because natural social behavior isn't legalistic and cannot be neatly contained in labeled boxes. I suspect Cofnas' peers may very well be bright and even, under normal circumstances, morally sound, but the institutional machinery by which they operate is so total and so oppressive that they have no rational choice but to either conform to its irrational, ideological whims or to exploit its gaps themselves, kind of like how just about every professional athlete has to take PEDs to compete no matter what their moral stance on it is. Consider that as many athletes probably can't find stable careers outside their sport, neither can many academics find careers outside academia. How many do you suppose actually want to produce real, quantitative and actionable research or at least duplicate existing research, but simply can't due to grant seeking pressure or because they expect their peers to discredit them or retaliate? The whole thing is broken, and I don't believe academia can be reformed or rehabilitated. Honestly, it needs to be destroyed. Turn the clock back to the Renaissance with humanist studies or something, I dunno
Excellent article. However, I do believe, that you would rank higher than the sociology professor as per the Cofnas valuation system based on intelligence quotient. Most fields of the humanities in our century are not populated by the naturally meritorious.
“Cofnas would pull a drowning sociologist out of a river over an HVAC guy on the grounds that the professor contributes more to humanity; the sociologist would call out for assistance in holding Cofnas’ head under water and a gaggle of adjuncts would no doubt swoop in to help.”
Academic philosophy did the same thing to Giorgio Agamben, who was one of their most precious heroes. He was the first (and only that I can think of) major philosopher to speak out on COVID as an excuse for government overreach back when it was first happening. Out of nowhere came all of these oh-so-appalling stories about how he had the audacity to pee on a bush after a night of post-conference drinking. What an old pervert!
Everyone denounced him, the champion of Foucault was now a senile old man who may as well have been Mussolini.
There's been a true, longstanding joke in academic philosophy about how professional ethicists are almost always *horrible* people. I suspect the truth in it comes from the fact that academics tend to separate their work from their lives and the real world; their work is more an academic game vying for prestige than anything connected to real life... and they don't actually care about real life or real morality. It's just all about impressing their institutional comrades. Confas' mistake was being too autistic to realize his "comrades" would never be swayed, lest they themselves become pariahs.
I remember thinking at the time that only Agamben had really "done the reading", as the academic snoots like to say. Everything Foucault said about discourse, the clinic, governmentality, and so on was marching around in gold lame outfits tootling on kazoos during covid and basically no social scientists could see any of it.
I've found that most academic philosophers read incessantly without actually learning anything; they practiced a detached sort of reading, as if it is all intellectual curiosities distinct from anything real. They don't make connections from what they read to reality around them.
it is fitting. Cofnas exposed arday as a man whose life was a fraud and for doing that he was then fired by a man whose gender identity is a fraud
It's genuinely sad that Cofnas really believes that there's a way back for higher education in its current form, when it's obvious to anyone paying attention that they need to be defunded and completely discredited as an absolute baseline. He's essentially been excommunicated from a new secular religion, and there's no priest that would risk their livelihood to lift it.
What would you replace it with? If we don’t have something better available yet it’s hard to see the merit in that.
I wouldn't replace it, we absolutely need higher education. But it needs to be defunded by the government and allowed to wither until all the parasites starve to death. The social sciences and other worthless departments only exist because they're subsidized by the taxpayer.
Ohhh that makes sense. Just cutting public funding. Very sensible!
The market would eagerly fill that gap if governments allowed it to.
The job starts with ending massive government funding for the problem.
Put another way, intelligence is virtuous if it serves wisdom. Otherwise, it will end up being perniciously destructive. Obviously, intelligence and wisdom are related, but quite different. Wisdom defines the necessary parameters for intelligence to be socially useful. Wisdom depends on value judgement based on long experience about what rules are necessary for a healthy civilization. You need first to know what is “good”, to put intelligence usefully to work. I do not think Cofnas, or people like him, understand this. At least not fully. Being smart is not a substitute for what is right. Otherwise, what is the value of a true statement? We value truth because it works much better than lies for maintaining a functioning civilization. And that is a characteristic of wisdom. People who are not highly intelligent but wise can build a much better civilization than super-smart fools. Wise, smart people can do even better.
I like to think of intelligence as being like the engine in a car. Wisdom is the steering wheel that points the car to the correct destination.
It's Christ or chaos, Nate. Circle one.
Terrific piece! Cofnas should read The Abolition of Man. As you point out, he doesn’t like being vilified by an academic mob for exposing an uncomfortable truth. But if he rejects objective morality, on what basis is his treatment by them unjust? It’s all subjective. Their sensibilities and values may be in conflict with his, but if there can be no arbiter, why is he angry?
The problem with woke, DEI, etc. is the dribble down. If it stayed in the hall of academia it's hardly affect most of us.
I had my annual visit to the clinic the other day and was asked what my pronouns were. I politely replied he, him, whatever. and didn't follow up with my willingness to refer to them with the all inclusive pronoun; she/he/it (Said fast.).
Hey I'll never say to someone that someday may be looking down at my comatose body with a scalpel in their hand anything they may remember as denigrating them!
Most people are driven by a desire for status. If you build things, whether in construction or engineering (as two examples) there is a real world test that plays a key role in your status. Does the building fall down or stand? Does the program work to meet the goal or not?
Academics is not like that. It is a circle jerk. All that matters ultimately are the subjective opinions of other people who are judged the same way. Since academics seek prestige for being brilliant, other people, who want the same prestige, judge them as brilliant or not.
What a perfect opportunity to create a culture completely divorced from reality and sanity. The type of person who excels in such a system is not the person who excels in a system with real world metrics.
So called “intellectuals” are not immune to tribalism. Facts, truth, reaaon, logic? Just means to the ends, comrade. Utopia, here we come!
Sounds like a redditor who just had his first brush with the mods.
"what the hell, I'm not allowed to criticize a man because he's black? That's stupid! I thought reddit was for smart people!"
Friend/enemy distinction. Figure it out.
Reading of the Cofnas-Arday affair, is anybody else reminded of the Borges story, 'The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero'?
This is the best essay I've read so far on the whole shebang. Kudos.
I have a theory that all these western institutions are collapsing around us because they've become so complex and cumbersome in structure and bureaucracy, that human intelligence plays no part in its outcomes except to exploit gaps in its function, thus damaging its prestige and credibility even further. Bureaucracy is the devil, even the ancient Chinese knew this, as per the Book of Lord Shang, and how Shang proposed that, to build a militarily competent central government, the population needed to be reined in through a vast, encompassing system of laws and regulations. Of course this failed and the Qin dynasty only lasted a few years. The point is, the more complex a thing is, the more moving parts and therefore the more points of failure. The latter point is salient when the system is oppressive: either conform or operate within its points of failure or die; morality cannot possibly exist from within the system as writ, because natural social behavior isn't legalistic and cannot be neatly contained in labeled boxes. I suspect Cofnas' peers may very well be bright and even, under normal circumstances, morally sound, but the institutional machinery by which they operate is so total and so oppressive that they have no rational choice but to either conform to its irrational, ideological whims or to exploit its gaps themselves, kind of like how just about every professional athlete has to take PEDs to compete no matter what their moral stance on it is. Consider that as many athletes probably can't find stable careers outside their sport, neither can many academics find careers outside academia. How many do you suppose actually want to produce real, quantitative and actionable research or at least duplicate existing research, but simply can't due to grant seeking pressure or because they expect their peers to discredit them or retaliate? The whole thing is broken, and I don't believe academia can be reformed or rehabilitated. Honestly, it needs to be destroyed. Turn the clock back to the Renaissance with humanist studies or something, I dunno
Excellent article. However, I do believe, that you would rank higher than the sociology professor as per the Cofnas valuation system based on intelligence quotient. Most fields of the humanities in our century are not populated by the naturally meritorious.
Can’t help but notice that we hear the loudest yelps of Elite Human Capital from the most unheroic-looking men on earth.
“Cofnas would pull a drowning sociologist out of a river over an HVAC guy on the grounds that the professor contributes more to humanity; the sociologist would call out for assistance in holding Cofnas’ head under water and a gaggle of adjuncts would no doubt swoop in to help.”
Brilliant.