Centers of Pseudo-Excellence
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It isn't just me saying it. Many of the world's most accomplished scholars point out the various severe failings of professionalised science and professionalised scholarship. But all those self-styled centres of excellence and "prestigious" "scholarly" journals just carry on in totally smug complacency about their unquestionable intellectual superlativeness. To a large extent they can cosily conceal their rottennesses behind the screen of censorship by libel law and sewn-up media. Many will be familiar by now with the problem of commercial interests leading to corruption of research and scholarship. But that is only one of the strands of the problem. I will now indicate some others. 1. Even when funding comes from government (e.g. research councils), there is still liable to be corruption, because governments are so very much tied up with commercial interests anyway. 2. The mega-industry of mass "education" is very much a major part of global capitalism anyway (see "The Ideology of Our Age", zazz.org.uk). 3. Even in the absence of direct financial biases, there is the rigid regime enforcing the universal ideology of the Third Way (see "The Ideology of Our Age"). 4. A career as a scientist is a specious concept. Science is about exploring the unpredictable unknown, whereas careers are about arranging for a predictable personal agenda. You cannot genuinely combine the two. One of the perversions resulting from "careers in science" is the preferential valuation put on generation of problems rather than their solutions. For example theories are considered worthless unless they generate unforseen "testable predictions" (a perversion of Popper's falsifiability), in other words more jobs for the career scientists. 5. Much of the procedures/protocols of scholarship have changed little if at all from the days when scientists were amateurs. There is very strong incentive towards dishonesty. "Distinguished" "scholars" have no incentive whatever to acknowledge the achievements of newcomers, but instead have very strong incentive to belittle the challenges to their own prestige. No attempt whatever has been made to address this problem. The heavily-criticised system of anonymous "peer review", with no effective opportunity for defence by the author, continues to be proclaimed to be fully satisfactory by self-styled top-ranking journals such as Nature, Science and the Lancet. 6. Beyond all these factors already mentioned there comes a most crucial element, the key causality of institutional decadence which I indicated in my early paper "The causes of decadence and renaissance" (zazz.org.uk). The central symptom of institutional decadence, excessive authoritarianism, is nowhere so intensely concentrated as in universities, with their rigid preoccupation with discrimination on the basis of elaborate status heirarchies, and all manner of indicators of prestige. After all, universities are all about people being "authoritative" experts, lecturing others as figures of "authority", so how could it be otherwise! A key element of this decadent authoritarianism is that truth and honesty cease to be valued. Or rather there is a perversion of the concept of what is truthful or worthy. Direct evaluation of the merits of ideas, arguments and evidence by reference to reality, are cast aside in favour of indirect secondrate indicators, namely the elaborate system of prestige status rankings. Along the lines of "The Vice-Chancellor said it therefore it is evidently true." 7. A further major factor is the rigid application of a very narrow concept of what constitutes intellectual excellence, namely in terms of hyperactive reading, writing, memorising and so on. Indeed it is very much a definition of excellence in terms of the hyperauthoritarian's own copying and parroting mentality. 8. This rigid false definition of excellence totally excludes creative geniuses. There is much empty rhetoric about the high esteem granted to groundbreaking originality and independent- mindedness, but the reality is that they are subject to heavy persecution instead. 9. To aggravate this situation still further there is a vicious circle, whereby the selected become the selectors of the next generation of selectors and so on indefinitely. Thus the bias, towards authoritarian qualities of conformity and lack of respect for truth, becomes ever more concentrated, like a fungus in an enclosed space. 10. In addition, the "information explosion" has made matters worse. With the great increase of material to be read and studied there comes inevitably a reduction in the depth with which any particular work is considered, which tends to disfavour the more demanding, exceptional material, which is all the more easily lost in the ocean of routine matter. 11. Globalisation and the expansion of scholarly communities have added a further malignant factor. The resulting increase of "strangerness" (see "Impending Social and Economic Catastrophe due to Excessive Cars and Roads" www.zazz.fsnet.co.uk/urbna.htm ) reduces the tendency for scholars to get reputations, thus encouraging dishonesty about the merits of others' works. Various reforms could be envisaged to address these faults. For instance the vicious circle described above could be broken by breaking down the rigid criteria for selection and advancement. But no such reforms are going to happen. This is because the criminals in charge of the pseudo-educational establishments have no interest in replacing themselves with non-authoritarian personnel, any more than dictators have interest in replacing themselves with democracies. It follows that these institutions, along with the parallelly corrupted Royal Society, National Academy of Sciences, etc, will resolutely march onwards down to ever increasing decadence, until such time as their credibility in the wider world is exhausted, and they collapse in disgrace. The only question is how long that will take to come about.. Meanwhile, the only remedy available for scholars of genuine talent and integrity is to found their own institutions, formal or informal. We truly are living in the dark age of dark ages! =================== May/September 2000 |