most of the humanities seems like like feels like most professors of whatever historical thing are basically hate readers feels like this is importanthttps://twitter.com/benjamindcrosby/status/1287853935420637184 …
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when things are high status and you know a lot about them it becomes more higher status to shit on them as a sort of badge of how much you know and how unimpressed you are, unlike those plebs who think the thing you like is good
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signals purity of interest too i guess ("i like it *just* because of pure passion, not because i gain status from it") source: i used to shit talk Literary Canon because of that (though i still sorta stand by that one)
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i think it's like that italian pizza -> american pizza -> italians making american pizza thing a popularly held image of what academics do was internalized/realized by the following generation of academics, let that go on for a while and u have the state of the humanities today
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u could make the case that the perception of academics as exceptionally skilled sophists goes back to the greeks and the drift towards sophistry started when people started taking socrates seriously after his death
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In the humanities, people too stupid for the job are compelled by academic bureaucracy to read wise authors; they're institutional achievers--so who are these long dead authors to frustrate achievement by concealing wisdom? Political Enlightenment then can & must contemn wisdom.
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I blame it on the world wars. partially. the "life is bitter and we should be bitter about it and everything good is fake" strain got a big boost from Europe tearing itself apart two generations in a row.
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You cannot talk demonstratively about Shakespeare; you can talk dialectically or rhetorically; dialectic turns out to be a very rare art, the possession of rare souls--not something produced by career tracks or jobs; but talking rhetorically is open to anyone sufficiently trashy.
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The belief in equality has a lot to do with it - the most prestigious scholars in the humanities have to demonstrate their support for egalitarianism: the easiest way to do this is to denigrate the works of the great. It becomes empty signaling as theory swallows its own tail.
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All a lot of fields are right now is trashing those who came before for being insufficiently anti-racist, woke, pro-trans rights, whatever. It has been building to this crescendo for about 30 years. Calling them "haters" collectively is not at all a stretch.
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