Pretend Science and the Two Cultures
Spoiler alert: If you are a student in India, you are at risk of learning that not all universities outside of India teach Vedic astrology, nor even Modern, Hellenistic, Western astrology. Those with a PhD in astrology, earned from one of India’s top universities, will not likely find employment outside of India where, when interdisciplinary teams form, they do not have to include an astrologer. [The reason, of course, is that the westernized worldview is colonialist and racist, a monoculture of chauvinistic hegemonists; your value and knowledge of astrology is devalued as a way of knowing, depreciated, as you are.]
In India you can earn a PhD in Vedic astrology. Elsewhere you can get a PhD in sustainability studies. Seven years ago there were frustrated students looking for a university offering a PhD in permaculture. Predictably, in 2018 the University of York, UK, was thinking of being the first. In 2019 The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Diseases offered to design student’s “dream permaculture PhD around health.”
Prescott College now offers PHD77530 : Advanced Permaculture that “builds on the understanding developed in the Introduction to Permaculture Design or any Permaculture Design Certificate course.” While a PhD ‘in permaculture’ is not yet offered, 295 universities worldwide offer PhD degrees in ‘Agriculture & Forestry’ with a focus on permaculture, “Agriculture & Forestry students can also focus on permaculture, a concept that fully embraces the idea of working with nature, rather than against it. Permaculture aims to create systems that produce no waste and are beneficial for us and the environment. Permaculture principles are applied in many fields, including regenerative agriculture and rewilding. The need for this type of approaches will keep growing in the next years.” So a ‘PhD in permaculture’ is coming to a university near you. My local community college is offering a new degree course in agroecology (a questionable if not entirely pretend science) this fall.
Over 22,000 schools of higher education now teach the pretend science of neoclassical economics, a subject some get Nobel Prizes for ‘advancing’. About 7+K graduate with PhD degrees in neoclassical economics each year (far more than get PhDs in astrology from universities in India) so they can serve the growth hegemon (like just about everybody else who makes money) to help grow the economy. And when Vedic astrology is fully recognized as one of many forms of astrology, Modern astrology (evolved from Hellenistic astrology), aka Western astrology will be taught and the demand for teachers will ensure PhD programs will be offered as someone will have to teach the teachers, certainly before 2050.
Of course, neoclassical economics has been not only taught in all Western universities serving the World Socioeconomic-political System (WSS) for over a century, but today any high school student planning to make lots of money (by going to university to be schooled further) will take AP Economics.
Today’s WSS serving social narratives (ideologically tainted) within academia (e.g. postmodernism and politicized narratives: neoclassical economics, cognitive linguistics, autoethnography, astrology) will continue to serve until the WSS [World Socioeconomic-political System] hegemon collapses.
Note that at 12th-17th century Oxford, theology was a WSS serving social narrative and needed control system, though at the time no one, with the possible exception of a court jester, could openly question theological verities. Today’s court jesters (e.g. Carlin) can question democracy, human rights, sustainable development, or the value of money and growth.
The intelligentsia view the above as valid ‘ways of knowing’ (aka ‘believing’) to which could be added astrology (though not popular among academics except some in India) and phrenology (though currently not popular among academics), and postmodernism and gender studies (which are). And, yes, there are always a few self-styled members of the intelligentsia who quibble to annoy, who are skeptics and nay-sayers who ‘just don’t get it’.
A more recent addition to the list would be ‘sustainability science’ as promulgated by conventional neoclassical economists (NCE: a deeply entrenched feng shui science) who dominate Schools of Sustainability currently growing exponentially on global campuses. All feng shui scientists, and their ‘science’, can be recognized by their inability to foundationally doubt their assumptions, to reevaluate all values, to actually question everything.
All, however, are master pretenders and will argue, at book length, that they can and have questioned everything which is how they came to realize that their current claims are true, and if you beg to differ…, read their books to redress your ignorance.
Should an opposing book by someone with letters after their name appear, it will be ignored or if necessary ‘reviewed’ to explain to other SYSTEM serving intelligentsia types why the book should be dismissed (e.g. Limits to Growth, Environment, Power, and Society, Exploring New Ethics for Survival, Ecodynamics, Filters Against Folly, The Collapse of Complex Societies, Living within Limits, The Sacred Balance, The Ostrich Factor, A Prosperous Way Down, Half Earth, Limits to Growth Updated). Like those who make time to read their books, most intelligentsia types and academics would rather believe than know and ‘mere eloquence’ prevails.
At the height of their empire-building the British intelligentsia dismissed all who differed as pundits, ‘solemn pretenders to learning’. But all empire builders, from the Mesopotamian to the present Euro-Sino empire-building servants and other Anthropocene enthusiasts do and did the same, being upright walking primates all, clever apes of the only surviving species of the genus Homo. None saw themselves as pundits. Yet all swim in a universal sea of punditry; the British were mistaken only in thinking themselves to not be solemn pretenders to learning. Those who serve their SYSTEM may labor with pick and shovel (when and where told and paid to), but storytellers are also needed to justify whatever ‘needs to be done’ to grow the empire. Someone has to tell the others where and when to dig and who to vote for. Pundits all.
The job of the intelligentsia is to obfuscate what should be obvious to ensure that the ‘what-is’ isn’t obvious. The most effective storytellers are those who believe their own stories and fail to see that they and their fellow wordsmiths are the architects of the magnificent edifice of babble they collectively work to prop up and maintain against all inconvenient data (e.g. that organic farming yields are lower than conventional industrial agriculture’s). Those whose innovative stories or tweaks of current narratives fail to impress, they who neglect to make others feel good, who pontificate yet fail to tell stories that are liked and shared, then they and their endeavors are not rewarded with either money or social approbation. Their narratives are not selected for unless they happen, with or without intent, to serve the SYSTEM, which includes telling others who serve the SYSTEM, all the way up to the Supreme Storyteller (political, economic, and/or religious) on down to those standing in the welfare line, what they will likely like to hear.
Go to any university campus. Sit and watch those hurrying past. About sixty percent are plugged in (per a half-hour I spent counting 800 passersby at UofA), ‘smart’ phone in hand or earbuds in ear, but that’s a detail, a distraction. Ask what they are doing here? The answer should be obvious. They are there, at great expense to someone (including future self), to learn to serve the SYSTEM so they can make money and consume prosperously (and maybe save the world). They may or may not like being there. They may or may not have a personal or ‘abiding interest’ in what they are learning. It doesn’t matter. At fourteenth century Oxford they (the especially ambitious) may have studied theology to serve the God’s Mandate narrative…, or business management, science, environmental resource management, sustainability studies, and economics today to serve the Growth’s Mandate narrative. What matters is that they use what they are learning to serve the SYSTEM which must be sustained at all costs. They will know that they are serving the SYSTEM because they will be paid to ‘figure it out’ or do what they are told to do, which may include telling others what to do, for which they will be better paid.
In dominance hierarchies there would be a supreme ‘teller’ of what to do. Ten million years ago that would have been the alpha male. But the alpha male was not free to do what he wanted. He had better want to do his alpha male thing as otherwise he would soon be replaced by another alpha more enthusiastic and ‘competent’ to serve. Ditto for all the emperors of China whose word was literally law, whose mere look of disapproval could signal his guards to execute a would-be servant of his SYSTEM. Ditto for the current Chairman of the Communist Party or ‘leader’ of any other political party, corporation, or dominance hierarchy. A Chairman Sanders would have been different from a Chairman Trump, but all who rise to the top do so by serving the SYSTEM, the self-organizing collective of the self interest of all who suck at the Golden Tit of the current extractive empire/economy, aka complex society. Chairman Sanders would have worked to grow the economy and would soon be replaced if he failed. He would merely have distributed the growth-dependent wealth of the nation differently than The Donald. The perceived reduction in inequality might have delayed socio-economic collapse allowing the economy to grow another decade, enabling the pace of planetary destruction to continue unslowed longer, even if Sanders’ likeness was added to Mt. Rushmore to celebrate the growth of nations.
Almost all serve the SYSTEM. Some may be living ‘homeless’ or serving eight consecutive life sentences at the Florence ADX prison. The less enthusiastic servants may not be well paid, but a failure to serve the economy and reap the rewards is widely regarded as evidence of incompetence, stupid. Whose bread they eat, their song they sing. And who do the one percent serve? Oh, let’s see…. We are the SYSTEM, we who live in industrial society, who receive a paycheck, benefits, food stamps, dividends, or line up at the local food bank — we billions are the one percent (we, the consumers of a planetary vat of fossil energy — why ignore ancestors who didn’t and/or posterity who won’t be able to?).