OT: On academics and their “obsessive” concerns and niggling disagreements

I’m just putting this down because it seems like a sort of precondition for a lot of what I am doing on the blog, and it’s something that’s often misunderstood. I wanted to have this here so I could link to it occasionally when I want to remind readers of it.

I. Obsessive consideration of trivial themes

I write about some things because they have an intense emotional meaning to me. I write about some things because they have broader conceptual or analytical significance.

But many times I write only because I am curious or fascinated, without the meaning of what I have to say being anything broader than that. I tend to be interested in issues or things because they are complex. The more complicated, the better, in the mind of Servetus. But there doesn’t have to be any other reason beyond the fact that something interests me. In my mind, that’s sufficient, no matter the topic. In short, I don’t think academics are necessarily smarter than other people (though some academics are indeed very smart, as are some non-academics); rather, they’ve been taught to think, or enjoy thinking, in particular ways that differentiate them from most others.

It’s absolutely not exclusive to academics, but academics seem to be more likely than members of the general population to have a personality feature that causes them to be (relatively abnormally) curious about the detail level of anything. Richard Armitage is a detailed actor and that falls on my synapses like dopamine — I love detail. I’m open to uptaking every detail he’s going to offer, every signal he’s going to send. This attention level may seem strange if you’re not used to it, because it doesn’t correspond neatly with the social categories of polite society. We may seem incredibly occupied with one thing that seems irrelevant to you and totally oblivious to others. It’s hard for me to come up with a good example of this that doesn’t stereotype academics, but I know that people outside the university often find speaking with me fatiguing because of this trait. I always want more detail. I’ve always got another question to ask. And if possible, I want to discuss how it might relate to larger conceptual questions. I can be incredibly practical — this is the sort of intelligence that my mother worked hard to develop in me — but given my druthers, I wouldn’t be.

So the care with which I examine or think about some issues may seem extreme from the non-academic perspective. But it’s more or less par for the course for professors, since this is what we get paid for — to do incredibly detailed research, often simply out of curiosity. Some of the things we research have applications (“applied research”), some of them do not (“pure research”), but both are legitimate — one of the assumptions of the university being that very few questions are so small that they merit no examination. Now, before you conclude that the conduct of pure research means that professors waste their time on answering trivial questions no one’s interested in, please keep in mind that all of our research has to demonstrate significance, or it would never be funded. That is, even scholars conducting pure research need to show why their questions are important — it’s just that potential practical or money-making applications are only one sense in which some questions are considered to be important to study. I’ve spent most of my life on two decades of history. My own field would probably seem remote in its applications to most readers here — even if you might be interested in it for personal reasons, or you might “just like history.” Nonetheless, my research has consistently been funded by major agencies in both Germany and the United States because of its significance to three major questions: the nature of the development of the Protestant worldview that has influenced so much of life and society in the West; the influence of the general understanding of certain events on subsequent developments in German history; and the matter of the mechanisms by which the creation and cultivation of historical memory affects contemporaries and later generations.

Does understanding in itself have an application? I don’t know. But I always go on the assumption that understanding anything is better than not understanding it. I may not necessarily learn more about something by thinking about it in ever more complex categories, but I certainly won’t learn more about it by not doing so. Hence the “obsessive” attention here to things that many people think don’t need explanation — or don’t think are worth “worrying about.” It is fine to tell me that I should just be happy about Armitagemania, but “just accept it” is a suggestion that don’t square with the way that I see the world; acceptance doesn’t usually make me happy — whereas the effort to ask why, to know, to understand sometimes does. And the fact that I write about something in incredible detail doesn’t necessarily indicate worry about it — only preoccupation with it. Usually if I’m worried or unhappy about something, I’ll say so explicitly — but that’s not necessarily consonant with fascination / preoccupation with it.

II. On disagreements, minor and major:

Academics are also professional disagree-ers. We learn from a pup to make precise our own positions as a way of differentiating them from those of others. We do this because we believe that the more precisely we say something, the more likely it is to be accurate or useful. Words and labels matter to us because we believe they shape how we see the world. We thus believe in our hearts and souls that discussing things, even things we’ve discussed before without a final consensus or result, will help us learn, and the process of disagreement is an inevitable and even desirable part of discussions. Discussions may be repetitive as some questions may deserve an intense and detailed treatment (see above). Many of the topics I assign my students to write about involve questions that have been asked for centuries without resolution — but I do this precisely because I believe that the exercise of discussion and learning to disagree constructively and usefully that comes out of this process is essential to developing a critical mind. We don’t expect scientists to do independent research without ever having learned to do algebra and calculus before starting the higher mathematics they need to answer their questions, so I’m always confused when people tell me that we shouldn’t ask students who want to develop high level critical skills to practice them by learning how to analyze — a necessary component of which is always disagreement.

Sometimes we hear the phrase “it’s all academic” about a disagreement, as a means of implying that the disagreement doesn’t matter, or it’s just disagreement for the sake of discussion or mental exercise. I couldn’t disagree more. Academic disagreements are vital because they help us understand the world more exactly. And we spend a lot of time learning how to disagree. But what academic disagreements are not supposed to be is vicious. (Academics unfortunately don’t always live up to this ideal.) The more we disagree and practice disagreeing, the better we become at disagreeing with an idea or a position as opposed to disagreeing with a person. My non-agreement with something someone else says is not an indication that I dislike the person. It’s an indication that I disagree with something he or she is saying. I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to tell the difference.

I’ve learned in life that people who do not disagree for a living don’t usually get this, so I don’t always air all of the energy of my disagreements with other people. And this blog is emphatically not a university classroom. But it is my space. So, if I do take the time to disagree with you and write about it, it’s not a sign of disdain or condescension or dislike for you, it’s a sign that I respect what you have to say enough that I think the disagreement will teach us both something, and also, and this is just as important — it’s a sign that I think you can take it, that you understand the difference between my disagreement with your argument and a negative reaction directed at you personally. What I hope this willingness to disagree means is that when I say something is smart or insightful, it correspondingly really means something, because I don’t just agree with everyone.

OK, end of explanation. I hope this helps people understand a bit what’s been going on with my posts on objectification and maybe some other stuff that will come up in future.

~ by Servetus on October 15, 2011.