I haven't been part of academia for decades now, but it was where I spent close to half my life. I liked to brag (more like "humble-brag") that I entered university in 1971 but they didn't let me out until 1998. That's because, shortly after graduating with two degrees from McGill, I was hired by a conservatory and later another university to teach.
Since I left academia in 1998 I have heard more and more about "woke" academia and the Congressional Hearings with the presidents of MIT, University of Pennsylvania and Harvard were a pretty good indicator of what has been going on. "Woke" academia, at least from my perspective, has been infected with all sorts of ideological strains such as "settler-colonialism," "systematic racism," and just plain old antisemitism. I'm not going to bother dissecting any of these as it has been done elsewhere, plus I haven't heard any arguments that are worth responding to.
Recently I have heard a new phrase, "dark academia" which is, as far as I can tell, just the old academia before it got drive-byed by the woke. Here is a little clip about which fountain pen inks are suitable for dark academia pursuits:
Mind you, I'm not sure he entirely understands what is going on with dark academia, but hey, let a hundred flowers bloom, I say. We also seem to have something called "Dark Classical Music"
Of course they are going to start with the Moonlight Sonata. Oh god, there is even a fashion aesthetic:
But things are really going off the deep end:
Re the music, Erik Satie and Beethoven are NOT 18th century! But the mere fact that something called, however loosely, "Dark Academia" is trending seems, uh, interesting at least. So let me hasten to provide some real 18th century music to do whatever it is you are doing to:
UPDATE: From the other side of the room: British countryside can evoke ‘dark nationalist’ feelings in paintings, warns museum.
A sign for the Nature gallery states: “Landscape paintings were also always entangled with national identity.
“The countryside was seen as a direct link to the past, and therefore a true reflection of the essence of a nation.
“Paintings showing rolling English hills or lush French fields reinforced loyalty and pride towards a homeland.
“The darker side of evoking this nationalist feeling is the implication that only those with a historical tie to the land have a right to belong.”
That a country even has a history and traditions seems deeply threatening to the progressive intelligentsia.
Bryan, you're really going off the Dark End! And I don't mean that in a clinical way. It's within the spectrum of normal human responses to change that we can't control. I suffer from it myself, and it brings a comfort hard to find even in music, since there hasn't been much good made since we lost Francois Couperin.
ReplyDeleteRegarding academia, back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when I was a campus radical of the dark Marxist-Trotskyist sort (which was an economic theory that has little to no relation that I can see to what is today called "cultural Marxism" and more recently "woke"), my professors all cautioned me against judging the past by presentist standards, and more deeply they advised that studying history includes trying to appreciate the sensibilities and understandings of the time and place under study, rather than analyzing it as if it were in our own time and place. That was a hard mental space for me to get to at such a young age, and though I don't claim any expertise at it even now, at least I know it is an essential part of approaching any real understanding of the past.
Another dimension of historical thinking that I was too young (and therefore too unread and too unthoughtabout --sorry, I'm making that a word) was that a much richer perspective and more informed assessment of the individual and group actors in history requires a comparative study, to better appreciate the range of historical paths and how development is deeply affected by past events. An analogous development can be seen in the growth of old trees that betray the influence of prevailing winds and light patterns and other species interacting with the tree over time. So it leans this way, reaches that way, has scars here and there. One of the valid insights (in my judgement) of Marx's theory of historical development is that technological changes deeply affect social organization, from the institutional to the cultural level. But I have come to reject his revolutionary politics because I have seen how the harshness of early industrial capitalism (his experience) has been greatly ameliorated by the socialist dimensions of the modern economy, in which instead of a naked contest between capitalism and communism we have come to a pragmatic modern economy that keeps the entrepreneurial and capitalist engines of wealth creation and adds the social dimensions of retirement and health and disability insurances, universal public education, regulation of markets by democratic political institutions, etc.
All told, I think I've grown into something quite conservative in the sense of appreciating the value of the institutions and cultural forms that have grown organically and pragmatically over centuries (and in some cases millennia) of experience. Liberal in the sense of accepting the need to accept change, though judiciously and tentatively rather than recklessly and sweepingly.
I don't think a young mind can get to such a place because it truly takes time to survey the long and wide diverse human experience and come to any overview of it, however tentative and mostly ignorant my view will always be. Youth don't even realize their ignorance. Read a few random books in college and suddenly one feels smarter than their parents. And so I judge the radical youth softly, hoping they will continue to study and continuously reassess their ideas without fear of changing them as necessary to accommodate new facts and the larger meanings they might support.
Will, if there was a justification for my eccentric post it is that it provoked you to make one of your deeply (darkly?) thought out comments.
ReplyDeleteWhat I find delightful about "Dark Academia" is that it not only accepts the traditions and learning of the past, it rejoices in them, even if a bit superficially.
Re Couperin, one of the most brilliant and creative musicians I had the pleasure to work with once said that music has been in decline since 1733, the death of François Couperin.
I think the locus classicus of the concept that in studying history one ought to try and get inside the skin of our predecessors was expressed in a wonderful book, The Idea of History, by R. G. Collingwood.