369. The Confusing of the American Mind

In the preceding post I told Donald Trump to quit listening to fantasists on global warming and go to a university and listen to some professors.  Get the facts from those whose reliability is established by tests, one version against another.  I spoke to him as if he were an eight-year-old.

Now I'm wondering about the speaking (condescension) and the testing (reliability). 

Reliability first.  Trump will find that the odds on factual reliability are not going to be the same in every department.  In general they will be lower in the humanities than in the sciences, lower in the soft sciences than in the hard sciences, and lower in English and sociology departments than in others.  And the odds will vary over time.

Time. The long decline in respect for fact that we see in our nation is also visible in our universities, and indeed may have started there.  It was just fifty years ago, in a famous lecture at Johns Hopkins University, that Jacques Derrida injected skepticism about fact into the English department bloodstream, and from there maybe into the bloodstream of humanities departments, and social studies departments, and who knows.  I see it as an infection.

How far it has broken out on the public skin I don't know.  We in the Ohio University English Department spoke theory to each other in our cloister, as academics do, and only if we were overheard would we have contributed to any decline in the public arena.

And you have to consider that most literary theory would have been incomprehensible in that arena.  The eavesdroppers would have to have picked up the talk it generated, as the wave from France carried us along.  A moment at a department meeting showed me its power.  In a discussion of budget reductions our chair used the word "fact" and then added — wryly or sincerely I don't know — "if there is such a thing."

In the simplification I made of the philosophical conflict behind his addition (Post 97), one Smothers brother against the other, the fact-minded brother, Dick, says, "Your shirttail is out," and the motive-minded brother, Tom, replies, "Why do you  hate me?"  French psychoanalysis, or subjectivity, wins out over British empiricism, or objectivity.

I linger on this because it bears on such a serious question: To what extent are American academics responsible for the present confusion in the American mind?  If today's Trump voters are lashing back were we, when we condescended to them — down there so pathetically behind the postmodern wave — were we among the lashers?

Condescension now.  Finding myself too confused to make analytical sense I wrote a poem showing the extent of my confusion:

I hate being told it's all relative especially after I've laid out evidence for global warming which will do in your grandchildren no matter who you are and worst of all when it's Donald Trump blowing off the evidence because he's going to be the President and I hate stupidity in Presidents yes stupidity which I can say because I have already in a post instructed him as if he were in kindergarten which is terribly condescending which if I am to anybody but Trump I get scolded but not when I condescend to him because I guess if you say two million people voted illegally and Barack Obama is not a citizen you ought to be condescended to and even called stupid because you're not in the tribe of thinking people who look for evidence and that's our tribe so whether you can condescend or be condescended to depends on the tribe you're in it's all relative.