Academics Fear People.They Study Them & Wish They Could Shut Them Up

We are going to explore, in a series of posts, the Mind of The Academic. There is much to say on this depressing-yet-amusing topic, which by itself is worthy of consideration, but which becomes a crucial subject when we realize the role academics play in our Expertocracy.

Before we get to the meat of it, and although we have done untold scores of these in the past, let’s go through a current example to fix our subject. And before you pretend to be “outraged”, we do of course speak of the average academic. I am sure that you, dear reader, if you are an academic are not in this class.

We have the peer-reviewed paper “Christ, Country, and Conspiracies? Christian Nationalism, Biblical Literalism, and Belief in Conspiracy Theories”—nice alliteration!—by the impossibly named team of Brooklyn Walker and Abigail Vegter, in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. Which is like The Vegan’s Guide To Steak. The pretense is the same.

The opening sentence of the Abstract: “When misinformation is rampant, ‘fake news’ is rising, and conspiracy theories are widespread, social scientists have a vested interest in understanding who is most susceptible to these false narratives and why.”

I’ve said something like the following many times: Academics make their living coming up with small twists and additions in the theories to which their individual fields are beholden. Some of these are even true and useful. Academics are proud of their intelligence, and magnify its importance. They view themselves benevolently and with great esteem.

This is why they find it disconcerting to discover they are not as loved by ordinary folk as they love themselves. “Here we are,” say academics, “thinking great thoughts, really quite terrific deep thoughts, thoughts meant to benefit all of personkind, thoughts which because we thought them are obviously true and beautiful, and therefore should be believed by everybody. So why don’t they?”

So, being academics, and needing to “do research”, they research this most pressing question. Hence this paper, and the many like it.

Now you cannot read these papers profitably without knowing their implicit premise, which is the (near) infallibility of the ideas of academics. They take this as a given, though they allow the ideas to have a small “plus or minus”. This is why an academic in one field, say law, will automatically assent to ideas of academics from another field, like climatology. For instance, an academic lawyer told me the other day while arguing about something entirely different than the climate, “Oh and climate change is real.” He meant this to sting, thinking it would. Why he thought it would is the point of this article.

Second sentence of the Abstract: “Recent research suggests Christians are especially susceptible to belief in conspiracy theories in the United States, but scholars have yet to ascertain the role of religiopolitical identities and epistomological [sic] approaches, specifically Christian nationalism and biblical literalism, in generalized conspiracy thinking.”

Christians in this country, at least those who hold (to some level) orthodox beliefs, are the people least likely to buy fashionable academic theory, and so are most in need of studying. Proof of that is in the last paragraph of the paper:

The deleterious effects of conspiracy thinking have been made evident in recent years. From vaccine refusal to an insurrection, the acceptance of conspiracy theories has had a devastating effect. History tells us that Covid denialism and QAnon will fade at some point and new conspiracy theories will arise, presenting their own challenges to the fabric of the country. Scholars and pundits alike have a vested interest in predicting who will be most susceptible to the conspiracy beliefs of tomorrow. We help tell this story by demonstrating how both Christian nationalism and biblical literalism are correlated with increased conspiracy thinking in the United States.

QAnon was an asinine belief, it’s true, held by beaten people anxious to escape our growing insanity, which itself was caused in large part by academics. Which academics cannot see. They are blind to their own faults. QAnon theory was matched by academics trusting their own plan—they always trust their own plan—with covid, such as imposing lockdowns, criminalizing masklessness, forced vaccinations (take it or lose your job) and a plethora of other idiocies, all believed contrary to all plain evidence.

Non-academics citing that evidence they call “denialism”. Which it is. It is denying the preeminence and correctness of academic theory. Which is not allowed. We know this is true because the academics who wrote this paper are not in any medical or similar field. They study politics, and accept unquestioningly what other academics in medicine told them to believe.

As lagniappe, the peer-reviewed paper “Anti-science conspiracies pose new threats to US biomedicine in 2023” by some recent academic, who does know some medicine. Emphasis on some (he opens by wringing his hands about a mysterious ailment called “long covid”).

Our author is deeply worried people not like him are allowed to publicly criticize academics, which criticism he calls “threats”. He says “anti-science aggression,” by which he means, and only means, open pubic criticism, “is causing a substantial loss of human life, possibly in the hundreds of thousands according to some estimate” He asks the government act. He says they must “consider launching a federal plan to preserve science and protect American scientists.”

They are extremely sensitive creatures, these American scientists.

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