The responsibility of the modern scholar

Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

Robert Oppenheimer reflected on his role in the creation of the atomic bomb by quoting this line from the Bhagavad Gita.  Hopefully you got that reference, rather than being stupid enough to think that I was threatening anyone.  (Some people...)  Oppenheimer was a scientist, but he was not engaged in a search for knowledge for the sake of knowledge.  He was working on what was as much an engineering problem as unraveling the mysteries of physics, and he was doing so in full knowledge of the historical context of how his science would be used.  This was no Archimedes death ray.  This was a bomb to end World War II.  And more.  And it scared the shit out of him, as it should.

For some levity in comparison, but keeping with the WWII theme, let's consider Wernher von Braun.  Or at least, Tom Lehrer's song about him.  Von Braun was a nazi scientist who worked on the V2 rockets.  He later worked for the US Army.  The famous line from Tom Lehrer's song about him was, "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?  That's not my department, say Wernher von Braun."

The sociopathic attitude expressed by that line is a start contrast to Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita.  Of course, one could argue that more terror and carnage are on Oppenheimer's hands than von Braun's, despite their specific employers, but that's why Oppenheimer was so traumatized.  If you have a conscience, it's hard to do what he did and sleep at night, I'd wager.

And both Oppenheimer and von Braun were just physicists.  Physical scientists whose job, nominally, was to investigate the laws under which the physical world operates.  They were not mere professors, of course, nor "public intellectuals," that term of scorn that I mentioned on Monday, but the contrast gives me a convenient introduction to the problem I introduced in that relatively brief post on Monday.

What are the responsibilities of the scholar?

Last Sunday, I was too tired and disgusted to post anything.  And of course, nobody pays me to blog.  My university contract far from requires it, and this thing is just a thing I do... 'cuz.  So who's gonna make me?  Nobody.  I posted a long tirade last Saturday about Twitter, Trump and truth, and when Sunday rolled around, I... just said no.  When I shifted from The Unmutual Political Blog to In Tenure Veritas, part of what I intended was to do less news-of-the-week because that's just a giant brain-drain in the crazy-making alternate universe of the world today.

And I already did a sort-of news-of-the-week thing on Saturday anyway.  Yet, there was this elephant in the room.  For once, it was an elephant, rather than a birdie (a COrVID).  And then the country blew up.  And if you haven't read what James Mattis has to say, you really should.  But that was during the week.

So, one of the things I thought last weekend was, hey, I could do a science fiction book thing about the elephant in the room, right?  I mean, isn't that what I do anyway?  N.K. Jemisin?  Octavia Butler?  Someone like that?  After all, to quote from Ling Ma's Severance-- yet another post-apocalyptic/post-disease book-- "when you wake up in a fictitious world, your only frame of reference is fiction."

That has kind of been my motto for this blog.  We are living in bizarro-world, so novelists can help us understand it.

So I thought about that.  I also thought about a more straight-forward post on the fact that democracy is dead in America.  And yes, it's dead.  I've been saying it for a long time now.  You may have heard General John Allen describe Trump's threat to use the Insurrection Act, along with using tear gas on peaceful protesters for his bible photo-op as "the beginning of the end of the American experiment."

No.  This is somewhere around the middle of the end.  We aren't at the denouement yet, but if you are trying to graph where we are along the Gustav Freytag pyramid, you can at least see enough of the structure to understand that this is tragedy in the strict sense.  To describe it as the blackest of black comedies sounds wrong about now.  American democracy has been dead for a long time.  We're just going through the motions.  I've been saying it for a while.  The American experiment is over.

Here I am.  A professor of political science at a supposedly prominent research university.  Author of multiple books from Oxford University Press, bunches o' articles, a fancy award... and I'm saying once again that democracy in America is dead.  General John Allen is wrong.  The American experiment is already over.

Don't believe me?  Then explain to me a plausible sequence of events that includes a normal, peaceful transition of power from Trump to Biden.  Keeping in mind that Trump is now threatening the Insurrection Act, and having Barr tear gas peaceful protesters so that he can show how Jesus-y he is, and yes, there really are people too stupid to see through this.  A lot of them.  And a lot too cowardly to do anything about it.

Democracy.  This has actually been the focus of my scholarly life for a while.  I could have written a post about it last Sunday.  I could write something about it now.  Last Sunday, I didn't have it in me.

So I ask, what is the obligation of the scholar?

I, of course, have a contract with Case Western Reserve University.  My contract specifies remarkably few responsibilities of any sort, glory be to Tenure!, and none of which involve speaking or writing publicly about any particular political, social or economic issue.

In fact, as I go through my contract rather closely, I notice that if I so choose, I could do almost nothing for the rest of my life!  I could hang around, read science fiction books, pick some guitar, stir up trouble, and the University could never fire me!  Huh?!  Wow, that's pretty cool, right?

Hey, Case Western Reserve University!  Treat me right!

So... where was I?  Oh, right.  I don't have to do any of this.  Or, really anything, but specifically, my gloriously-tenured contract doesn't require commenting on politics, social issues, or anything like that.  Of course, one would expect such a contract for a physics professor, an art history professor, and so forth, but... I'm a political science professor.  Are my responsibilities, at least in the abstract, moral sense, different from those of an art historian who studies Van Gogh?  And if so, how so?

The von Braun ethos is to say that we pursue knowledge-- and of course, to be a scholar is to be driven by curiosity and eventually, asymptotically converge to a death state like some Austrian dude's cat-- but that we have no responsibility to consider any social consequences of the knowledge we pursue.  Pure knowledge.  While there is an appeal to the idea of the quest for knowledge for the sake of knowledge, the von Braun/Oppenheimer schism puts in stark relief the various issues involved with taking such an interpretation.

On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, I'm far from a Marx fan, unless we're talking about Groucho, but one must at least bring up his perspective.  That's sort of always the case with that jackass.  (I'm talking about Karl here, not Groucho, who was just awesome in all ways.)  At least in some sense, Marx was a "scholar," although a) that one deserves sarcasm quotes, given his wrongness in all things, and b) it is not clear to what discipline he belonged, given that every discipline tried to disown him on the basis of (a).  Regardless, famously wrong people have this annoying habit of getting cited more often than un-famously right people (hi!).  So, here I go, talking about Marx again, and not the cool one.

Marx argued that it actually was the scholar's responsibility to attempt to bring about social change through scholarship.  Positive change, as he viewed it, although he also argued for violent, bloody revolution, psychopath that he was.  (Seriously, have you read what that asshole wrote?  Not what fashionably pseudo-commie fanboys and fangirls say today, but what he actually wrote?  That dude was psycho.)  Yes, he was making a predictive argument about what would happen in the industrialized economy of Germany (not Russia or China).  In one sense, that is scholarship.  A predictive, social scientific endeavor.  Totally wrong, sloppy and foolish in every way, but that's not exactly a problem isolated to Marx.  Academia is filled with bad scholarship.  Psychopaths too.

However, Marx was not merely making a dispassionate forecast as some pre-science fiction Hari Seldon, from Isaac Asimov's Foundation series.  Marx thought that the act of writing those predictions could guide history in the direction he wanted.  Like... Seldon.  He didn't merely think that capitalism would crumble in a worker's revolution, leading to a glorious communist utopia after all of the bloody hell that he actually lusted to see, psychopath that he was... no.  He thought that his writings could, and should move things along in that direction as a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy.  Create the worker's revolt that you predict by writing about it and encouraging it, stripping away all of that "false consciousness," and yadda, yadda, yadda, blah, blah, blah, eat the rich, or some such psychopathic evil.

I'd say, "forget the ideology," but I've got Santayana singin' in my ear.  Too many people have died for that.  Don't forget.  Instead, let's deal with the part that we actually do need to take seriously-- the idea that scholars have a positive responsibility to promote change through scholarship.

In other words, don't be Wernher von Braun.

This... this we must take seriously, and I must take seriously.

Should we be prescriptive in addition to predictive?  That's really hard.  And yet, much of my scholarship actually has been prescriptive.  Normative.

And here, America seems to have reached its greatest Seldon Crisis since WWII.

What can I say?  What should I say?  Predictively?  Prescriptively?

Predictively, there is a body of work developing around democratic backsliding, following from that book I keep telling you to read-- Levitsky & Ziblatt's How Democracies Die-- and you can look at countries like Hungary for empirical guidance on where things might go, but of course, we are in small-N territory, and the US is not Hungary, Trump is consolidating power in a very different period from when Orban first came to power, and yadda-yadda-yadda.  Point being, it is difficult to give a precise prediction of exactly how things play out as we slide back away from democracy, but there is scholarship whose goal is predictive, and I started assigning Levitsky & Ziblatt to my intro classes a while back.

Yet, harder still is the prescriptive question.  What is the prescriptive role of the scholar?  You don't have to agree with me that democracy in America is already dead, but suppose it is.  Suppose I'm right.  What then?  Not predictively, but prescriptively?

Yikes, right?

So both predictively and prescriptively, I have a lot of thoughts as a political scientist who studies and lauds democracy.  Sometimes.  When I'm not quoting Mencken, 'n stuff.  Yet during a Seldon Crisis, what do we say?

Saying the wrong thing, for a person of influence, creates the Oppenheimer problem.  What if you say the wrong thing?  What if you do damage?  Of course, I'm not a person of influence.  I'm nobody.  I'm just some schlub, shouting into the void.  This blog is nothing, my ramblings are ultimately irrelevant, and nothing is truly at stake in the fate of the country if I make a bad prescription because I influence no one.  As I have said before, there is freedom in obscurity.  For me, the pressure is pretty much off.

For others-- higher profile scholars-- the pressure is on.  People listen to Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.  Even more, although more distressingly, people listen to idiotic talking heads on the television box, uneducated commentators, talk radio demagogues, and so forth, but among scholars, high profile scholars actually have some pressure to get it right, lest they do harm.  First, do no harm.  By being nobody, I can't hurt anyone.  So, there's that.

In principle, if I really wanted to ensure that I never say the wrong thing and cause harm that way, I'd stop typing, right?

I like writing.  It's fun.  Wernher von Braun thought math was fun.

Where was I?  Oh, right.  The dilemma of the scholar during a Seldon Crisis.  What now?  So here's the other thing.  Suppose I'm right.  Suppose democracy really is dead.  Consider the prescriptive role of the scholar.  What can a scholar say?

Academic freedom!

[Cough, cough...]  Sorry, reflex.

Anyway, what can be said?  Are there things that I just can't say?  That are risky for scholars to say?

Yes.

Just bluntly, this is very, very bad.  I do have scholarly thoughts here, both predictive and prescriptive.  And I remain uncertain as to what the current bounds of academic discourse are, as we hit a Seldon Crisis.  I suppose that's the nature of a Seldon Crisis.  Maybe tomorrow I'll write about Foundation.  For those of you puzzled by all of these "Seldon" references, stick around for some elaboration.  And for the Asimov fans, let's dig in.