Hi Rob, I very much enjoyed hearing you talk to Jordan on his podcast. And I saw that you’re still crazy enough to openly display your contact info on your website, so I wanted to send you a short note.
I really appreciated hearing your perspectives. I’m terribly worried about what the future holds for students like you and teachers who aren’t conforming to the new purposes and ideology of the university. I believe that Jonathan Haidt is right that it’s a deep question of teleology. If the fundamental basis for why the university exists changes enough, there won’t be room for people like him or you there, and there already isn’t room for Jordan.
I hope you can find a good use and fit for your skills and education once you graduate. I was feeling deep sympathy for your position, listening to you speak about it. I suffered great disappointment during my own graduate studies and became very disillusioned with academic culture. I eventually had a falling out with my department, and they told me they didn’t want me around any more either.
I confess I left with an empty diploma holder, as they refused to accept my thesis after letting me walk. I left academia, resentful and depressed, and ended up with a sleep disorder and panic attacks for several years. I never went back. I gave up my academic career and drifted through many menial jobs. Working through all that wasn’t an easy process and set me on a very different path in life from what I had expected. Navigating that kind of uncertainty can be a very painful process, as it brings into question your whole identity and reason for being.
I don’t think there’s the slightest chance of you having those sorts of problems, that’s not what I mean. But it is a limit case, and it’s a growing problem. Where will the people who won’t conform or who get forced out go, and what will they do? They can’t all become authors or media influencers. People need stability in their lives, and productive work that can support a developing life and family.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with Alan Smithy. He’s a sociologist at the University of Texas and has some great books on contemporary sexual culture. I was talking to him about surviving in academia as someone who skirts the edge of what’s “acceptable”, and he opined that you have to be careful to pick your battles. He also seemed a bit pessimistic about how long he could maintain his footing in such tricky territory. But then he’s in sociology, which is a high risk area, ideologically.
I very much wish you all the success in the world, and I hope you can figure out what that means for you and what path that might take. You’re already doing so well, I’m sure you will find some interesting avenues, and I’ll be looking forward to seeing what you produce.
Hearing your ideas made me think of Amy Wax and Larry Alexander and the criticism they faced for their op-ed in support of “bourgeois culture”. If you haven’t had a chance to listen to one of her lectures, I recommend them. She has been riding a very similar train of thought to yours and has been criticized enormously for being the spoiler who actually points out that elites don’t practice what they preach and sell a vision directly antagonistic to their own security and even more destructive to those who lack such security.
Wishing you all the best,
Mr. Nobody
P. S. If you ever want to explore the intersection of your own ideas about beliefs as a class status symbol with our moral and religious instincts, something Jordan was clearly interested in in your discussion, you might consider reading Shelby Steele’s “White Guilt”. I think you could generalize his insights about popular “progressive” attitudes about race into a general theory about how woke ideology functions as a kind of social ritual that removes sin and guilt (the negative aspect of social status) and generates positive moral status and legitimacy.
People have a deep need to justify their position in the priestly class, the power holding and successful and influential class. Being in that class comes with an immense burden of guilt and a need for a legitimizing liturgy, a socially acceptable display of piety and status within our civilizational value narrative. A way to “peacock” acceptably and correctly in the current culture. In a culture that values ideological piety, making large your phylactery is a great way to gain status while also defending yourself from the existential threats that guilt and sin present as persistent psychological and social threats.
It’s entirely possible that these “luxury beliefs” of yours are not only the byproduct of a desire by elites to differentiate themselves from the rabble, but may be serving the interests of multiple, deep psychological needs, both positive and negative. Status is, after all, a pretty complicated concept with many complex factors that either support or erode it.
Piety is itself a kind of costly sacrifice and burden to carry, a dearly bought gem to display and flaunt, just as excessive license and indulgence is. And I’m not at all sure that people aren’t actually doing both, indulging themselves in absurd luxury beliefs while also finding a way to sell luxury and indulgence and decadence as a kind of beneficent, rarified moral good. Why not have it both ways, if you’re already being hypocritical?
And if you happen to have a childish, pampered kind of attitude, as a result of being raised in a very privileged environment, which produces doubts about your own capability and worthiness that need to be answered, it allows you to stick it to your parents and declare your independence and rebellion, while still enjoying the security of their protection. People have a deep need to establish their value and class status, and that also includes defending it against our innate feelings of guilt and sin, as well as our innate sense of dependence on and inadequacy next to our parents (or abstract parents, the culture that produced us). We crave identity, emancipation, absolution, legitimization, and ultimately value.
Anyway, I highly recommend “White Guilt” as a specific case study in the power of ideology as a status game.
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