Stoner Logic in Academia
When I realized my journey into higher ed would not be what I'd hoped.
Written by Brandon.
After reading this piece, which offers an explanation for why Michel Foucault is our most cited public intellectual, I was reminded of a terrible realization I had during a class in undergrad. The realization was simple: if I let them, my teachers would send me out of higher education as dumb or dumber than when I entered.
I was in my mid twenties when I went to university, having spent several years after high school working in agriculture and living as a sort of stoner autodidact. I was always reasonably intelligent and had a high need for cognition, so I would read a lot of philosophy and social science in my spare time.
However, my philosophy operated on what was essentially stoner logic, given my lack of education in quantitative methods and actual science. For this reason I found myself drawn to Foucault and postmodern philosophy more generally. As Shako notes in the piece linked above, this is likely a common factor behind Foucault’s popularity, including in academia itself:
Foucault is also a way to escape the fact that many academic theorists are innumerate. Modern empiricism is fundamentally quantitative and difficult. Reading statistics and critiquing them requires a baseline ability most of these academics lack. If it turned out though that they are all built on a fundamentally racist understanding of knowledge, then it becomes easier to dismiss them out-of-hand. This would probably be too uncharitable, if I hadn’t seen it first hand in the departments of sufficiently prestigious Political Science departments.
In my mid-twenties I decided that, given my natural propensity for learning, I would finally get my degree, and maybe even pursue graduate studies. It was around this time that I realized my stoner lifestyle and hardcore progressivism were neither satisfying nor empowering, and that self-learning could only teach me so much. What I needed was rigorous education from people smarter than me.
I imagined being surrounded by smart people, learning valuable technical skills, and being confronted with challenging ideas that I’d never grappled with before. Thus, I began a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology.
At my university, the BA had a core curriculum of compulsory classes that you had to take in order to graduate, as many universities do. It was in one of these classes that I had my terrible realization.
The class was sold as something rigorous. We would be challenged to “think critically” and undertake a far-reaching examination of society, and of our assumptions about ourselves, our identities and the world. (“Identities,” I now know, was a warning sign.)
On day one, the lecturer (a highly esteemed scholar, I should note) launched into a shallow Foucauldian analysis of the panopticon as it applied to the university. He went on and on with a sort of smug self-awareness, like he thought he was delivering gold and absolutely blowing our minds. (I should note here that this lecturer is really likeable and a genuinely nice person).
“Look at this classroom,” he said. “Look at how the very structure of this classroom exerts power. You are all on one side, stepped-up in auditorium seating so I can see all of you, but you can only see me, not each other. You are kind of forced to look at me and listen.”
He continued: “The construction of this lecture theatre exerts a system of power, and ensures the self-perception of you—the students—as lacking knowledge, and sets me up to be the distributor of knowledge, and thus it conveys power and authority. These systems of power are everywhere hidden in the architecture and the systems of our society, and designed to maintain the continuity of power.”
I remember being thoroughly unimpressed. This was exactly the kind of simple, fact-free, intuitive analysis that I and other high-school graduates had arrived at many times while sitting around a bong. And it wasn’t even accurate.
I remember thinking that, since class sizes tended to be small at our university, 90% of the teaching rooms were not stepped auditoriums. They were smaller, flat, office-like rooms perfect for “egalitarian” discussion-oriented classes. The only rooms with this structure were the few lectures theatres intended for hosting large audiences. And in any case, they clearly had that structure for acoustic and communicative reasons—not because our neoliberal overlords wanted to inculcate in us some sort of pliable consciousness, lest we threaten “systems of power”.
What’s more, there was a knowledge differential between us and him (at least there was supposed to be). We were there, as young people with less knowledge, to be educated by a more knowledgeable teacher. I couldn’t see how pointing out this obvious fact was some kind of mind-blowing revelation.
Crucially, while he had an issue with the “systems of power” inherent in the structure of the lecture theatre, he apparently had no objection to the overt power required to make students pay for a core curriculum of courses he helped design, that he teaches, and for which they have to buy the compulsory textbook that he co-wrote!
Despite its veil of “critical thinking”, the course itself was really just a subtle attempt to indoctrinate students with the simplistic but intuitively satisfying progressive worldview. Indeed, it applied this kind of analysis to all sorts of sociological and psychological topics.
During that lecture, many others that followed, and in many different classes (anthropology may have been the worst), I realized that far from superseding my old stoner intuition, the university was reinforcing it. I was learning to argue by analogy rather than by appealing to evidence. (A great example of this style of argument is the feminist idea that skyscrapers are symbolic penises reflecting the inherent sexism of built environments.)
I was literally hearing lecturers say things as dumb-but-intuitive as things I’d heard said by stoned 16-year-olds. As Shako notes:
I remember when studying this stuff being told that reading these texts was subversive. It’s unclear in what way, but the professor certainly believed it. There is this aesthetic to the argument where you’re being let in on a secret … On the other hand, I’ve never felt any sort of dopamine hit reading marginal effects statistics from panel regressions in Political Economy journals. Whereas critiquing an entire field as arising only from maligned or biased power and knowledge structures has a feeling of being let in on forbidden knowledge.
So many of the lecturers were teaching us to use emotionally satisfying, simplistic analyses as “shortcuts to insight”. They were telling us that:
The world is not endlessly complex, requiring painstaking empirical decomposition of cause and effect. Rather: It’s simple, but they wouldn’t have you think so, for they have poisoned your well of knowledge. After all, a framework for thinking that lets you avoid a decade of studying statistics, reading, learning to code … and instead gives you that all for free up front is going to be endlessly popular for an intellectually lazy researcher and student alike.
For this reason, I dropped out of the BA and switched to a Bachelor of Science (still majoring in psych). I had no interest in paying for courses and textbooks that had negative utility, and which—despite their stated opposition to indoctrination—were completely laden with it. I instead took courses on biology, economics and a lot of statistics.1
As soon as I learned about the replication crises, and about political and ideological bias in social science, my entire worldview shattered.
So many students in the humanities and social sciences are trained to rely on intuition, on the vibe that they are entertaining subversive, radical theories. But those theories are just plain wrong. The whole edifice is built on a literature that is often motivated, ideological, unreplicable, and sustained by citation laundering.
The ascendancy of Foucault and the anti-empirical project he inspired has been a disaster for the academy. Many students graduate having learned little, except to let their thoughts flow like water down the most intuitively satisfying path of least resistance.2
A slightly different version of this article was originally published here.
Brandon is a PhD candidate and lecturer in psychology from New Zealand. You can follow him on Twitter and Substack.
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I still call myself a midwit in this domain!
Don’t get me wrong, I eventually found rigorous courses, true academics and good bodies of work. But most students won’t without a concerted effort. And most are prevented from ever recognising the problem in the first place.
"I was learning to argue by analogy rather than by appealing to evidence."
Precisely; it was an inculcation of resorting to the fallacy of false equivalence. Such flights of fancy have their utility when learning to write works of fiction. They are maladaptive when applied to domains where verifiable facts are required to avoid adverse outcomes.
Psychology is peculiarly vulnerable to these suboptimal paradigms, owing in part to Jungian symbolism. There is, however, a quantifiable distinction between meaningful symbolism and rhetorical legerdemain.
A really good piece. It is a shame that students are fobbed off with worthless degree courses but at the same time I suspect Brandon isn't usual in his thirst for knowledge. If he were then more students would become as disillusioned as he was.
It could be that many students take the path of least restistance because doing the opposite would be hard or even impossible in some cases, especially for those with only a very mediocre intelligence. Since a ludicrous 60% of the population now goes to university there are bound to be many among them who have a lower IQ than the average intelligence among the general population. Such students neither want more challenging classes nor have much thirst for knowledge. All they want is a bit of paper at the end that says they are now 'educated' and thus belong to a group who are allegedly cleverer than the hoi polloi, something that looks year on year less credible.
It would have been nice if Brandon had stood up and asked the lecturer, 'How are we supposed to see you if this auditorium isn't stepped? How are we supposed to listen to you if we are looking at our fellow students, especially those with breast-hugging sweaters?'