In the last post, I limned out one of Leopold Kohr's suggestions for overdeveloped societies such as ours: Contraction to Uninstrumented Visibility. Though an admittedly technical phrase, I find that it concisely expresses a vital dimension of attaining social equity and environmental sustainability that often goes unrecognized. E. F. Schumacher captured the rationale behind the CUV approach in his own inimitable way: "There is wisdom in smallness, if only on account of the smallness and patchiness of human knowledge, which relies on experience far more than understanding." If you'd like a good historical account of the socially and environmentally disastrous outcomes caused by the confusion of understanding with experience, check out James Scott's Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1999). Although Scott focuses on the pitfalls of a fundamentalist belief in expertise and top-down social engineering, one could just as easily observe the human and ecological wreckage caused by a fundamentalist belief in capitalism and free market globalization.
The CUV approach draws attention to the diseconomies of scale that are hidden below a merely superficial view of our economy. Kohr emphasized the high cost of "instrumented visibility"--that is, dependence on data collection and processing, theories, statistics, viability studies, analyses, etc.--required to run highly developed societies. You could call this sort of instrumented visibility "mediated experience." Once an optimal threshold of development has been passed, Kohr argued, the capacity to turn information into useful experience declines in a manner similar to the other diseconomies of scale. The cost of figuring out a problem caused by development, and doing something about it, increases in scale faster than the benefits derived from said development. Or, as Anatol Murad put it, "Each further step in the direction of integration, consolidation, automation, then begins to contribute not to the solution of problems, but their scale." Each person theoretically has access to vastly more information than ever before, and we as a society can manipulate our environment far more than ever before. But this has come at the cost of each person's area of experience becoming narrower and narrower in a surrounding swamp of greater and greater ignorance. We might be masters of our own tiny domains, but we haven't the faintest idea whether the direction in which we are all collectively going is good or bad. When it becomes clear that the direction is bad--as with, e.g., global climate change or Peak Oil--the issue seems so vast that individual paralysis sets in.
In this post, I would like to focus on how overdevelopment has compromised academia in much the same way as other aspects of our living arrangement. As a Ph.D. candidate, I currently occupy a position somewhere in the middle stories of an academic edifice that I feel quite uncomfortable inhabiting. It will probably collapse in the foreseeable future in any case. I neglected to bring up this collapse bit in my previous post in any depth. Besides the argument that we should take the CUV approach to both improve living standards and overcome our inertia in dealing with global climate change, it is becoming clear that we have to anyway, and soon. The reason for this is the decline in global petroleum supplies (Peak Oil), and the corresponding declines in other key resources (metals, fertilizers, etc.). By all reasonable indicators, Peak Oil is going on right now. As I've pointed out previously, the current configuration of persons, things, and ideas that we call "modern civilization" requires a great deal of socioeconomic complexity--that is, specialization, the division of labor, etc. Increasing socioeconomic complexity requires increasing surpluses of energy and material. When these surpluses cease to exist and start to decline, societies need to simplify. This means less specialization, less political integration, and less economic interdependence. I cannot do better than recommend John Michael Greer's explanation of the process. Additionally, Greer's piece helps to strip the term "collapse" of its pejorative connotations, which is helpful in light of the fact that the CUV approach is essentially a controlled form of it. I have not found a single convincing argument that we will find a replacement (or array of replacements ) for fossil fuel energy any time soon, so I am forced to assume that simplification is imminent.
So how does academia fit into this picture? The trend toward greater complexity and specialization made possible by fossil fuels applies to academia as much as anywhere else. Although universities, like governmental and religious establishments, often stress their long-held and august traditions, its role in society underwent some profound changes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many of these changes, I would argue, have left academia badly maladapted for what is coming at us in the near future. I'll do my best to explain why I think this is the case.
The real innovators of the university in the nineteenth century were the scientists, whose knowledge of natural phenomena was advancing with ever-accelerating speed, and who required a novel structure for disseminating and testing their hypotheses. The fields of inquiry that would eventually become chemistry, biology, physics, geology, ecology, etc. had previously been the domain of gentlemen scholars, the medical trades, and craftsmen in the "mechanical arts." Their incorporation into the university was part of a larger tendency whereby science gained more prestige and importance in society as a whole. Although, counterfactually, this shift almost certainly would have happened without the bursting onto the scene of fossil-fueled technologies, they had a profound impact on the particular shape that "science" would take.
The increasing funding of the sciences, both applied and basic, became necessary for the continuation of industrialization by the end of the nineteenth century. This fact was not lost on power holders and the public. Besides the legitimate concern for improving living standards using scientific methods (which strictly speaking didn't require fossil-fueled industrialization at all), there was a competitive impulse at play. To maintain both economic and military viability in a rapidly changing world, it became clear that it was no longer adequate to rely on amateurish, unsystematic approaches to mastering the material world. As in society at large, specialization and professionalism in the sciences exploded, as did investment in "scientific infrastructure," such as laboratories, journals, repositories, and philanthropic and state funding organizations. Any doubt about the need for a well-heeled scientific establishment were put to rest by the invention and deployment of the atomic bomb during World War II. It was seen as the culmination of pure and applied sciences, engineering know-how, highly sophisticated instrumentation, and government support.
Underpinning this heady change was an emerging assumption, shared by all the mainstream political ideologies of the modern era. They were all rooted in a belief that industrialism, professionalism, and scientific knowledge would continue to grow indefinitely. This belief influenced all of academia, and not just the sciences. By the 1890s at the latest, "progress" had become the standard by which universities measured themselves. For centuries previously, it was the job of the university to preserve and transmit an eternal body of knowledge, in which all the other branches were seen as sub-disciplines of theology. "Free thinking" generally had to take place extra muros. But from the latter half of the nineteenth century onward, the university was generally seen as a creator of new knowledge . Under this new conception, the teaching (transmission) function and the research (novelty) function became essentially one and the same. Education was no longer about replication, but advancement and innovation. Each succeeding generation of students was supposed to start with the advantages their predecessors had won. On this view, according to Andrew Delblanco, "history becomes a sort of relay race, in which no runner retreads trodden ground--an idea fundamentally at odds with the meaning of humanistic knowledge, which must be re-learned by each generation, and put to the test of individual experience." Particularly from the post-World War II years onward, the idea was that the university would train the next generation of professionals--businessmen, scientists, educators, statesmen--who in turn would generate more "development," allowing for more funding of the university in the next generation, and so on, ad nauseum.
As part and parcel of this change, the faculty of the university were transformed from a pastoral or curatorial to a professional role. Humanists tried, in keeping with the times, to refashion themselves on the scientific model. The emergence in the late 1800s and early 1900s of the "social sciences," with their insistence on "methodology," was one such response. Professional organizations and credentialing standards arose, and the site for scholarly exchange shifted from the local campus, cafe, or public forum to the national or international peer group. The humanities developed an incentive system similar to that of the sciences: attaining a Ph.D. or tenure requires that one do "novel" or "original" research in a particular specialized topic, which itself was supposed to fit into some specialized field. Graduate students are absolutely admonished from writing for a wider audience. Although this form of training and policing certainly has its virtues, a serious problem of overproduction has arisen, with scholars in the same discipline hardly reading each other's work anymore, let alone across disciplines. A professor could try to "go public," but only after a safely long gestation inside the rather different academic environment.
These incentives have had some far-reaching structural effects. One is to push the faculty, using the terminology of David Riesman and Christopher Jencks in The Academic Revolution (1968), toward the academic and away from the intellectual. An academic question is "one raised by some lacuna or ambiguity in the data or interpretations of a... discipline. It is a question asked by one's colleagues or on their behalf, and answered primarily as a service to those colleagues." An intellectual, conversely, is a kind of amateur. He or she asks questions not about internal professional debates, but about experience. (Recall the distinction drawn above.) And an intellectual's natural audience is the broader public within and beyond the university.
The upshot of increased academization has been the creation of many areas of intellectual pursuit whose wider relevance in a future of smaller energy (read: money) surpluses is entirely questionable. I am guessing that there will be little public sympathy for continued support of, say, some arcane debate in astrophysics or linguistics if the highway system is falling apart. But, as it now stands, most well-established members of academia have utterly no incentives to bother changing course. What's worse, masses of recently credentialed specialists are trying desperately to jump onto the careening academic ship while they still can, hoping to do so before it sinks, or totally unaware that it is going to.
But, to return to the earlier line of argument regarding the CUV approach, this could be a blessing in disguise. Much of the specialization and professionalism in which we have indulged over the past decades has actually been quite needless and counterproductive. If we want to prevent academia from reverting back to becoming the preserve of the very wealthy and powerful (even more so than it is now), we need to consider the essential purpose of the university--finding the truth--and provide the means for attaining this as equitably as possible. I'll save my more specific (still quite speculative) proposals on the issue for a future post. But the general gist of my case is that the university would benefit by re-scaling its operations in much the same way as other aspects of society. Academia should become more translucent. In other words, the barriers, literally and figuratively, between the university and the public should become more porous, but not completely so. To be clear, I am not making a mock-populist jab at "academia." Its mores and practices are vital for civilization.
To close, I would like to return to something of considerable relevance that Leopold Kohr wrote in The Breakdown of Nations (1957). The "efficiency of the small," according to Kohr, applies not just to the political and economic, but to the the intellectual and cultural spheres as well. (Note: When he refers to "large" and "small" states, he doesn't mean it in an exclusively political or geographical sense. There are a number of other criteria, which have come up on this blog before, having to do with the degree of mobility, specialization, etc.). Here Kohr is examining the reason behind the "intense cultural productivity of the small, and the intellectual sterility of the large, state":
Societies may have patrons of the arts as rulers. But even so they could do little without artists. And they may provide the facilities for leisure and musing. But, again, these alone might not produce the creative impulse. What is needed in addition is the opportunity for individuals to learn the truth without which neither art, nor literature, nor philosophy can be developed. But to learn the truth in a world that is as manifold as ours and which manifests itself in such countless forms, incidents, and relationships, a creative individual must be able to participate in a great variety of personal experiences. Not in a great number, but in a great variety. And this is infinitely easier in a small state than in a large one.In a large state, we are forced to live in tightly specialized compartments, since populous societies not only make large-scale specialization possible but necessary. As a result, our life's experience is confined to a narrow segment whose borders we almost never cross, but within which we become great single-purpose experts....Instead of experiencing many different things within surveyable limits, as did our enviable ancestors, we experience only one thing on a colossal plane. But this we experience innumerable times. Mechanics now only meet mechanics, doctors doctors, commercial artists commercial artists, garment workers garment workers, journalists journalists....Because modern life makes it technically impossible to participate in manifold experiences, anything written nowadays in the massive crowd states is drawn not from life, but from the co-ordinated study of life. The world no longer crosses an author's path. He must go out of his way and discover it indirectly and laboriously from the encyclopedias and monographs, or from the writings of other hard-working students....The great advantage of the little state then is that, once it has 'attained a population sufficient for a good life in the political community,' it offers not only the advantages of a reasonable degree of specialization but also the opportunity for everybody to experience everything simply by looking out the window. There is no passion or problem disturbing the heart of man or the peace of a large empire that would not exist also in a small country. But in contrast to the large empire, where their meaning lies hidden under the weight of countless duplications and in a multitude of disjointed specialized realms, they unfold themselves without the intermediary of analysts and experts before the eyes of everybody, and with a clarity of outline and purpose that cannot be perceived elsewhere. A small state has the same governmental problems as the most monumental power on earth, even as a small circle has the same number of degrees as a large one. But what in the latter cannot be discerned by an army of statisticians and specialized interpreters, could be perceived by every leisurely stroller in ancient Athens. As a result, if we really want to go to the bottom of things, we have even today no other recourse after having tried Harvard and Oxford than to take down from their dusty shelves Plato or Aristotle. Indeed, the worth of Harvard and Oxford lies largely in the fact that they keep on their shelves the great men of little states.Yet these were no supermen. The secret of their wisdom was that they lived in a small society that displayed all the secrets of life before everybody's eyes. They saw each problem not as a giant part of an unsurveyable tableau, but as a fraction of the composite picture to which it belonged. Philosophers, as also poets and artists, were by nature universal geniuses because they also saw the totality of life in its full richness, variety, and harmony without having to rely on secondhand information or to resort to superhuman efforts.
