You may have noticed a recurring theme on Do the Math that involves prisons. Inspired by Ishmael, I compare modernity to a prison whose bars few inmates can even detect: prison life is all they’ve ever known. The brain creates a prison that for many becomes more real than the universe itself. The last post cast Richard Feynman as a prisoner of modernity. If challenged about the hypocrisy of eviscerating modernity while enjoying a house, car, grocery store, and internet I tend to point out that a prisoner can offer perhaps the most legitimate complaints about prison or even the entire penal concept. Moreover, if I tried to live an authentic ecological life in my location, I would soon end up in an actual prison after violating any number of property rights and other laws that function to keep people in the modernity pen. Likewise, we know what happens to people who take direct action to disable infrastructures and institutions of modernity, right?

I did, at least, manage to break free from one major harness of modernity. I left my academic job at age 53. In doing so, I took a 75% paycut and effectively said no-thank-you to perhaps millions of dollars of cumulative income. Granted, this is different from a 100% paycut. But I hope it can be appreciated as a substantial step away from the treadmill, imposing a much simpler and lower-impact lifestyle. I don’t pretend to be living in right relationship to the Community of Life, but neither do I feel that I, personally, must accomplish the full journey if I can use my time to help many others start the journey themselves. It will take generations—facilitated by the inevitable dynamic duo of death and replacement. Rome wasn’t destroyed in a day.

Academia is its own sort of prison, which is what we’ll examine here. You’ve no doubt heard much ballyhoo about academic freedom, which sounds great. But maybe that’s akin to a prisoner being allowed unsupervised time in the prison library on account of good behavior. The ostensible freedom has both soft and hard limits.

Tenure

Most people who work in jobs do so under the awareness that they could be fired for not performing up to the bosses’ expectations. From this perspective, the concept of tenure gets naively translated into “they can’t fire you, so you can do anything you want!” Anyone who has actually experienced the academic tenure scheme knows it doesn’t work this way, in practice.

Foremost, tenure is bestowed on individuals who show relentless drive in achieving scholarly/research impact. Such people are extremely unlikely to shape-shift into couch potatoes once granted tenure. In fact, service (committee) responsibilities usually step up, teaching load often increases, and research commitment generally only becomes more intense. The process aims to select exactly the sort of folks who will keep the pedal to the metal. It’s hard to fake for years on end in the pursuit of tenure.

Now, a tenured professor could, in principle, shift research focus in any direction with complete freedom. It almost never happens. Firstly, academic positions are situated within departments (physics, philosophy, history, economics, etc.). Would it surprise you to learn that members of a department tend to regard their field as superior in some way? If an International Relations professor started dabbling in chemistry, their colleagues would think they’ve gone mad. Perhaps more relevant is that in matters of evaluation, the department members would not be equipped to assess the credibility of research in chemistry, and the “actual” chemists would likely dismiss such an amateur’s overtures. “Stay in your lane” is the strong message. Adjacent lanes are better tolerated: a physicist applying their techniques in biology or a historian pursuing political science won’t raise as many eyebrows.

But let’s say a professor persisted in their leap to an unrelated field, and managed to gain credible acceptance within that community. Life in the original department would become fraught. Teaching assignments would necessarily satisfy department needs in the “old” subject matter. Promotions would face serious challenges if the department (and dean, even) has no basis for appreciating the alien work. Relationships are strained. Graduate students and postdocs would be hard to attract (why would a chemistry student risk teaming up with an International Relations prof?). It is sometimes possible to shift appointments to a different department, but that tends to be an uphill battle. Academic positions are highly coveted rarities. They present an opportunity to expand the departmental portfolio, bring in new talent, and try to attract the best in the world. Why would a department “waste” a prized slot on someone who is already at the university, unlikely to be top-tier internationally—especially as a novice in the cross-over field—and following this most-unconventional path? It’s a huge risk for little “new” gain.

Tenure is more of a cage than is generally appreciated.

Two Lanes at Most, Please

Not only is it difficult to change lanes in a significant way, it is very difficult to straddle multiple lanes at once. For all the praise of “interdisciplinary” research, 99% of the time it’s sitting in a natural intersection of two related fields. For instance, physics mixes well with chemistry, biology, geology, astronomy, engineering, etc. but not so much disciplines within the arts, humanities, or professional schools.

A big barrier is journals. To make it academically (in most departments), one needs a steady publication record—which requires reputable, impactful journals in which to publish. This sets up a bandwagon limitation: if too few people are working in a particular intersection to have formed a new journal to support that community, then the barrier is formidably high. Little academic incentive exists to pursue unusual combinations that lack supporting infrastructure. The “pure” journals won’t often touch a paper that has significant content from an alien field, so such work is effectively unpublishable.

As such, journals remain narrowly focused: not offering a place for sweeping analyses spanning dozens of domains. This “silo” effect stifles big-picture perspectives. Peer review also becomes exceedingly difficult if a work spans too many fields of study. It becomes nearly impossible to identify an expert who can validate the coherence and credibility of the whole work. Even a team of experts from relevant fields could not easily judge validity of the synthesis.

How do interdisciplinary journals ever get started? The tides of academia move plenty of people into adjacent lanes often enough that communities spontaneously form as new techniques open new possibilities. But again, it’s usually an intersection of a small number of closely-related fields.

Limits to Freedom

My sense is that academia is hostile to anti-modernity positions. Universities are in some ways the pinnacle of modernity: the ivory tower acting as the focal point for knowledge, technology, and innovation via basic research. The two primary roles of universities are knowledge creation and knowledge transmission to new generations of modernity’s movers and shakers. It’s part of why I felt I had to get out. I was part of the process to crank out more modernity.

Aside from the limits to freedom mentioned above in the context of field changes and narrow journal outlets, some ideas are simply anathema to the enterprise. We must remember that academia is brimming with disciples of modernity: completely invested and rewarded within that context.

As a hypothetical, let’s say that a professor named Mot Turphy tries to synthesize thermodynamics, evolutionary biology, ecology, molecular biology, psychology, economics, history, anthropology, religion (animism), literature, neuroscience, and metaphysical philosophy, coming to the fully defensible (reasonably rigorous and certainly not falsifiable) conclusions that:

1. Brains are no match for ecology in terms of a full expression of complexity.
2. Ecology is the ultimate “decider” of viability, not human constructs.
3. Agriculture is far too brief to have proven ecological viability, and in fact shows numerous signs of being a tragic misstep.
4. All academic traditions that do not strive to listen intently to what the actual universe says are fabricating flimsy “knowledge” so that most of the literature is of highly dubious value.
5. Everything generated in the fallout of agriculture—written language, religions, money, economic systems, political structures, legal frameworks—is highly suspect as cognitively (not ecologically) generated accomplices to ecocide: inseparably connected to and facilitating a sixth mass extinction.
6. The surest way forward for the planet and humanity is to begin shedding the modernity suit and seeking to re-establish authentic ecological living in small bands adapted in myriad ways to myriad environments.

How do you think this would fly? How would a department, its chair, the dean, or the campus committee responsible for assessing impact view such analysis—especially if no journal will publish such work? Would they dig in and follow the many unfamiliar threads spanning fields they have no experience assessing? Or would they proffer a categorical rejection based on the uncomfortable starkness and unconventional nature of conclusions? Would a cheerleader for modernity likely consider such threatening work as having great academic value?

Syntheses of this sort are in some sense too broad to qualify as academically valid. Maybe it’s the province of some books, but not journals. Academics are thus constrained to keep it narrow. How lame is that?

It would be going too far to say that not a single individual survives in an academic environment holding such views. I also cannot claim that this message (or something very similar) is entirely absent from academic literature (which journal should I be checking?). Although I have not done an exhaustive search, I would be pleasantly surprised if academic works seriously questioning the value of cognition and written language exist. Such material likely would have found me already, by people pointing out that my message is very similar to such-and-such academic work. So far, that hasn’t happened, although I would be absolutely delighted to learn that I am wrong, here. I relish company in this lonely place: especially when others offer new insights that propel me further.

In short, if the conclusion of such analysis cuts off the academic enterprise at the ankles by questioning written language (eeek!) and thought itself (madness!), I would not expect much sympathy from a body whose stocks-in-trade are exactly these implements.

Thus, for all the hype over academic freedom, in practice academic work tends to be narrow in scope and seldom challenges the human-supremacist premise that humans can think our way into novel modes of long-term success (lacking any shred of evidence, notably). Academics are not terribly receptive to hearing that our entire 10,000-year project is brief, bankrupt and would be better abandoned. I think maybe we found the bars.

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