Academics (not) in society.

I attended a lecture from guest speaker David Merli today entitled “How do we know what to do?” From the title, and from the advertizing for the event, I thought I was going to attend a discussion of how to engage in debate with those who have different value systems than yourself, but are nonetheless worthy and intelligent opponents.

This ended up being a misunderstanding, and fortunately I was not the only one who made the mistake. While Merli’s talk had some interesting points which I found intriguing to think about, he did not really address the issue I imagine most of us were in the room for – how this conundrum applies to contemporary politics, and what to do about the social conflicts it produces, such as the debate over abortion, gay marriage, secularization, etc.

This was revealed when he answered a question concerning the beliefs of a Taliban member. The structural background assumptions that lead a radical Islamist to believe in specific things like say, the subordination of women, is something we can dismantle on rational grounds, said Meril. Well absolutely. But his talk had been dealing with situations where the fundamentally different assumptions people bring to an argument cannot be put in competition with each other on shared rational grounds or, that is how I understood him. The rest of the talk was therefore focused on what to do next, which to be honest I am not entirely clear about. But it seemed these situations, with two opposing value systems which cannot be proved, revolved mostly around elaborate philosophical quandaries and systems which pretty much only professional philosophers have any idea about. So quite frankly, very little to none of the talk was applicable to the real world as we encounter these issues in our day to day life.

That is no fault of Merli’s; again, I think the advertizing created some false expectations. He did what he intended to do well. But it made me think about the power of academia to remove those who administer to it from present day concerns and actual problems that are presented to us. Even something that seems as immediately relevant as, what to do with value systems opposed to ours, ended up focusing on ideas and circumstances that the average or even thoughtful person is rarely presented with in the public sphere. How difficult would it be, I wonder, to get someone to come to give one of these lectures and actually talk about gay marriage, actually talk about the problem of the religious right and the anti-science attitude of much of this country?

Part of the avoidance is built into the culture of academia itself; there is always this subtle suggestion that “contemporizing” historical processes or, in this case, philosophical concepts, is a project for the short-attention span of the masses, whose interests stop once the discussion moves beyond material appropriate for cable news. For example, Merli said that in any lecture concerning the question of clashing value systems, one is always expected to talk about abortion and Hitler, and by mentioning this, he joked, he had disposed of this obligation with one sentence. And to a large degree this is a totally valid bias, and something I complain about quite frequently myself.

But it goes too far when it keeps us from discussing how our thoughts and discoveries are relevant to our contemporary situation – because after all, if we want anybody to be throwing their two cents into these debates, shouldn’t it be the trained, intelligent and thoughtful people who might really know what they are talking about? The fact of the matter is that most people are quite interested in abortion and Hitler, and for good reason. To shrug these issues off as tainted with the shallow discourse of the masses is to give up the chance of making it even better, and therefore I don’t quite understand the hesitancy of so many academics to dive deeply into contemporary issues.

Of course, I should have been alerted to the fact that this was not going to be something applicable to the current situation when it was clear that the talk would be concerned with debating those of equal intelligence and thoughtfulness. While there are, obviously, intelligent and thoughtful Christians, those are not really responsible for the mess our public discourse is in.* The people we are dealing with are fundamentally irrational, unreasonable, and thus even if they are intelligent in terms of their mental capacity, are not really putting their brain power to any intelligent use.

I am comforted by Meril’s assertion that the crazy religious beliefs of Jihadists – and, I assumed, other religious beliefs including those of Christianity – do not even require us to take both value systems as equal in weight, since religious belief is so easily dismantled by reason. However now we still have this question, the question I came in with and then realized wasn’t going to be touched upon, let alone answered: what the fuck do we do about these people? Seriously? We need to start thinking about it and doing more about it more often, even if the wall of irrationality seems impossibly unresponsive. It would irresponsible, as enlightened individuals, not to at least try.

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* Sure, the “moderate Christians” who just like to have something to believe in bug me too, just for the fact that they choose to subordinate reason to something else when the reasons not to do so are so compelling, but those aren’t the folks who get out there with Yes on Prop 8 signs, but rather the ones that stay out of the debate entirely, perhaps aware that their faith is too fragile to take a beating, and they prefer to keep it as one likes to hold on to an old sentimental sweater.