There is bullshit, and there is academic bullshit: Professor Donda, by Stanislaw Lem

 I think I have a new and healthy reading practice.  After any modern, woke science fiction/fantasy novel, I go back and read something old.  Like my old stand-by, Stanislaw Lem.  I love this guy.  Problem being, I've already read his stuff, but it stands rereading, and occasionally a new opportunity presents itself.  Lem wrote a few books with Ijon Tichy as the POV character, although Tichy is hardly a character.  Mostly, he is the center of whirling chaos of a particular variety, and a few years ago, a version of Memoirs of a Space Traveler: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy was published with the first English translation of "Professor Donda."  So, despite being half a century old, the story was new to me!  Hey, new Stanislaw Lem!  Kinda.  Hey, I don't speak Polish, nor am I fluent in the other languages into which it had been translated.  So let's have some fun.

The compilation has a few other nice pieces, including a satirical rant about how tourists are ruining all of Tichy's favorite space destinations with litter and graffiti.  He sounds like a snobbish, hipster and self-righteous preservationist of modern day.  Nothing changes.  There are a few stories of solipsistic nonsense, which is one of Lem's fascinations, a nonsensical commie drivel story, and then the real gem, "Professor Donda."  Classic Lem.

The forward to my translation says that it is unreadably racist.  It was written in 1972, and here's what is there.  The story is set in a pair of fictional African countries, which are rich in natural resources and in which Lem tried to write corruption to the point of satire, problem being that even in the 2020s, if you measure corruption empirically, as political scientists do, yeah.  The corruption in many African countries is over the top.  Poe's law, before the internet existed.  The stuff that one would more plausibly call racist is the stuff about witch doctors, and a few other similar characterizations.  OK, lefties, lemme know when y'all want to cancel Karl Marx.  Here's a great Marx quote that you probably forgot, or more likely, never knew.  "Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?"

Remember his buddy, Engels?  "Being in his quality as a n___, a degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us, he is undoubtedly the most appropriate representative of that district."

Have you ever seen kids wearing Che Guevara shirts?  Here's a great Che quote:  "The Negro (I'll type that one out, I guess) is indolent and lazy and spends his money on frivolities, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent."

And as long as I'm doing this, I will go right back to Karl Marx.  I keep circling back to antisemitism.  Go and read "On the Jewish Question."

"What is the worldly religion of the Jew?  Huckstering.  What is his worldly God?  Money."

Nothing Stanislaw Lem ever wrote was as bad as Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Che Guevara, or the heroes of the left.  I have no patience for posturing.

So let's talk about a story.  A fun story.  And the left can get back to me on Archie Bunkerisms when they decide to move on from Marx.

Professor A. Donda.  The "A" stands for Affadavid, which is a mistake, like everything else in Donda's life.  One of Lem's long-running themes is a sequence of improbable events.  Even Donda's birth, with odd parentage.  His father was a woman, and he had two and a fraction mothers.  So... woke!  Kinda.  He was a test tube baby, with a woman's cell implanted into an ovum, making the woman whose cell was implanted into the ovum sort of his father by a pseudo-gamete definition.  (So how'd a Y chromosome get in there?  Possibly a frog licked a slide, or something.)  Then, there were a series of surrogate pregnancies, with the last one only lasting a few days, so Donda called that a fraction.  It's a long, crazy story, in typical Lem fashion, but none of this is critical.

What does Donda do?  He is a bullshit artist of an academic.  So... an academic, but he stumbles into something real.  "Svarnetics."  Huh?  Donda theorizes that information has mass, and can therefore be converted in the same way that matter and energy can be converted based on the principle of conservation.  More still, there is such a thing as a critical threshold of information, just like critical mass with uranium.  If there is too high a concentration of information, the information gets converted into a much smaller amount of mass, because information itself has a small mass.

The problem is, how do you test this?  You have to put fuckloads of information into one place at one time.  The other fun thing is that it doesn't matter whether the information is true or false, good or bad.  Junk will do just as nicely for these purposes.  Bullshit is just as effectual as truth.

So he gets himself appointed to a professorship with the job being entering magical spells and shit into a massive computer under an utter bullshit, pseudo-scientific premise that even he doesn't believe.  He just needs a grant to afford a supercomputer so that he can dump information-- any information-- into the supercomputer to try to reach a critical threshold.  A shitload of folklore spells will do just as nicely for that purpose as the contents of a physics journal.  So he tells the government of the African country that is employing him that he'll work on magic for them in order to get the grant for the project, conning them out of the money to fund his project, while making a clown of himself in the world scientific community, not caring because it is what he needs to do to test his theory.

And as it turns out, he's right.  He blows up his computer because it reaches critical information, and worse, the world is reaching critical information, and it's about to be sent back to a pre-technological era.  Worse, if anyone tries to replicate his process to check his results, all they do is speed along the process.

So that's how the technological world ends.

It's fucking hilarious.

Ah, academia.  Donda is actually quite a brilliant scientist.  In many ways, he is the model scientist.  He challenges orthodoxy, designs an experiment to test a hypothesis, his results replicate, and vindicate his unorthodox view.  Smart guy.  His approach to the sociology of academia, though, is either a brilliant exploitation of the weaknesses of the institution, or just plain douchey.  You decide.

You see, Donda looks around and asks, how do I get funding?  How do I exploit the biases of those around me, silly and nonsensical though they may be?  The woke forward would probably include the belief in magic among Donda's African patrons as part of the racist nature of the story, but the problem with any such assertion is that critical theory demands that we not assert the primacy of science, rationalism, nor empiricism, and that we not reject such belief systems.  Change the context, change the players a bit, and the assertion of scientific rationalism becomes the assertion of "white supremacy" to the very types who write such a forward as a preface to the new version to Memoirs, in which case we cannot simultaneously criticize this element of the story, while criticizing the elevation of scientific rationalism to a unique status.  You can't both insist that we respect magic and accept that science is the way.

Regardless, Donda knows that he is full of shit, promising magic, but that's not the point for him.  The point is that he needs to dump information into a computer, and when you are an academic, the way through is to work with the existing orthodoxy around you, stupid though it may be.  So, he does.  Telling his patrons that magic is fake would do as little good as telling his real theory to the European scientific community.  Why?  Because it doesn't fit within their existing paradigm, in Kuhn's terminology.  So, he's fucking with everyone, because that's the only way to work.

To a significant degree, Donda stumbles into his ideas, but from a scientific perspective, that's both a) fine, and b) how things frequently work anyway.  The real question is the question of how we respond to controversial ideas.  Yet, how was he to get a grant?  Here's the real challenge.  If his idea is sufficiently absurd, then even if right, he's going to have a very hard time getting a grant legitimately, and there is no easy answer to that.  His bigger problem is that even after having tested his hypothesis, because he has made a clown of himself through dishonest means, no one will believe him anymore.

But he did what he needed to do.  He appealed to an existing orthodoxy.  Sadly, that is how academia often works.  The orthodoxy to which Donda appealed was not a scientific orthodoxy, but many orthodoxies are not.  Even within modern American academia, there are orthodox ideas driven by political ideology directly contradicted by science, which we are simply not allowed to challenge openly.

And that's why Donda did what Donda did.

But hey, such people can complain to me when give up their Marx fixations.  I won't hold my breath.

Living Colour, "Information Overload," live.  The studio version is on Time's Up.  Vernon Fucking Reid.