The academic mind.

For all of its claims to be open-minded and attuned to new levels of criticism, academia is really concerned with the instillation of dogmatic thought.  There is a certain genteel openness to differences expressed in personality that belies the fact that many in academia are really not open to the kinds of ideas that would in any way not already be accommodated by the existing academic dogmas.

 

For instance, in the humanities, there is the prevalent idea that we are all, gradually, incrementally, making our way toward a more enlightened and fair-minded attitude, as a society.  That is one of the fundamental academic dogmas.  This idea is that progress is inevitable and that it is slow and that that academia itself represents the fundamental bastion of enlightened thought.

 

But academia is all too often close-minded to the possibility of sudden shifts in consciousness, as would take place within the framework of shamanism.   It is also close-minded in terms of real, ethical fair play.  If you cannot feed your knowledge and experiences in, through one of the holes that is already available in the academic edifice, you will not be heard at all.  That is a problem.

 

For instance, if I would like to speak of the fact that people who migrate from right wing countries can also be susceptible to suffering, I will not be heard at all.  I can speak, but it is as if I am not saying anything.  There is no hole in academia to feed that information through.

 

But if I point out that there is suffering and oppression in developing countries due to oppressive regimes, there are all too many holes to feed that information into.  

 

Also, in academia, there is an expectation of one having a fundamental identity – an easily recognizable mode of being, based on categorical definition.  One may have an ethnic origin, a gender, a sexual orientation, etc.  It is understood implicitly that one speaks through the orientation of one’s particular identity.  

 

But my real identity structure is not considered to exist, particularly, for academia.  It’s so much of a problem to academia that it is NOT EVEN a problem anymore.  It’s out of sight and out of mind.

 

The way academia preemptively structures and controls thought goes quite some way to explaining why and how, for a long time when I was in the system of academia, I felt like the process of thinking involved a necessary dissociation from oneself, by stepping aside from who one really knows one is and taking on a more hackneyed identity, in order to speak as an academic to academics.

 

One has to take on the attitude of, “I am female, therefore...” or, “I am white, therefore...”  (these are allowable categories).  Or, one may even speak of “intersectionality”:  “I am female and white and a migrant (but definitionally not of the oppressed sort, since “white” cancels out “oppression”).  Intersectionality means that I am at the juncture of all of these identities, and therefore the nature of my being and my prospects for the future are seemingly already well-known.

 

But actually very little can be known through dwelling in this dogmatic, dissociated state.  In fact, this leads to virtually an anti-knowledge.

 

What can be known is rooted in experience, not categorical delineations of the external characteristics of identity.

 

But this false system of knowledge as to who I am can tend to by quite insistent.