[rbrogan]

If I am reading this right, the argument goes something like this: (1) Nietzsche was anti-academic and did his best work independently. (2) He was against academia being used as a means to nation-state ends, and he disliked how that undermined independent, critical thought. (3) There are similar problems today in academia where it goes against independent thinking. (4) The best independent thinking comes through not in high culture, but mainstream culture and it better explores issues than academia.

IMO, the problem is communication. If you read academic writing (especially in the humanities) it can seem like a bunch of mumbo-jumbo and the person writing it is not really trying to communicate anything intelligent, but is just trying to sound impressive. I believe this is mostly not true. Rather, the problem is the same with technical documentation that is high in rigor and detail, but low in learnability; the problem is that it is difficult to communicate. The person writing will usually (IMO) have something in them they are sincerely trying to express.

The goal of entertainment is to entertain, but it also has to appeal at least somewhat to the passions of the creators and the intellects of the viewers. So thinking finds its way through that medium and can reach a mass audience. It is not that academia has no potential to do the same, it is just that there is not a dynamic set up which brings it out very well.

[zenogais]

IMO (4) is a fatal and clumsy misstep for the entire article, and betrays a profound lack of contact with Nietzsche's own writing on the part of the author.

Nietzsche never would have uncritically claimed mainstream culture does our best thinking any more than he would have given such an honor to academia. So it's bizarre to see his thought appropriated to that end. He was, in fact, extremely concerned with the difference between culture that is merely popular and a genuine, healthy, thriving culture. He saw academics and journalists as frequent accomplices in the destruction of a thriving, healthy culture by their appeals to popular taste and public opinion. By their spinning rigorous sounding tales that merely served to comfort (or discomfort) individuals and reinforce their existing opinions no matter how deleterious or suspect such opinions were (eg. about morality, the nobility of the common man, the goodness/badness of state institutions, etc). Additionally, he was just as concerned about the influence exerted by nation states on thought as he was about the similar influence exerted by public opinion, common sense, and mainstream culture.

To simplify the formula down to "mainstream culture" vs. "the state influenced academics" is to be overly reductionist and to overlook the part every segment of society plays in producing uncritical thought.

For more clarity here I would read Nietzsche's "Untimely Meditation" on 'cultural philistinism' - "David Strauss: the confessor and the writer", and "Beyond Good and Evil" namely the section "Peoples and Fatherlands" for an idea of his approach to critique of mainstream culture in his time.

[krotton]

I don't see the article claiming Nietzsche would praise popular culture - it seems to claim otherwise ("Anti-academic Nietzsche may have been, but his mistake was in pinning his hopes on “high culture”") and it's rather solely what the author of the article thinks himself.

[yohoho22]

Yeah, that's how I read it. And that last bit seemed so shoehorned on there that it almost seemed like it was an effort to give the story some kind of hook that the author or an editor might have thought it lacked.

[coldtea]

The fact that the author took the precaution to say that Nietzsche himself would have disagreed with his supposedly Nietzsche-inspired theory, doesn't make his conclusions regarding mainstream culture any less of a non seguitur.

[cornholio]

And because mass culture needs to appeal to pre-existing ideas and sensibilities, it's exactly why it can't really spread fundamentally new ideas. Netflix will never air a show that questions the Holocaust because it could result in it's bankruptcy.

While I'm not a Holocaust denier, I do believe everything can in principle be questioned, including our most sacred beliefs, or especially those - and perpetually reaffirmed. To expunge critical inquiry from any topic, as long as it's not disguised propaganda, means to live on a flat Earth where everything was revealed and there is nothing more to know. And to do that in Academia - by definition a space shielded from popular pressure exactly to give it the freedom it needs in pursuit of knowledge and truth - is a cultural crime Amazon just can't fix.

[jolux]

You must like Descartes.

Though I think what you're saying is actually that everything should be questioned, as your sentence appears to change its meaning halfway through. ("While I'm not a Holocaust denier, I do believe everything can in principle be questioned, including our most sacred beliefs, or especially those - and perpetually reaffirmed.")

Holocaust denial is not a "fundamentally new idea," it's a fundamentally false idea. You don't need to question and perpetually reaffirm facts. It's simply not a matter of opinion whether or not the holocaust occurred.

[PavlovsCat]

> It's simply not a matter of opinion whether or not the holocaust occurred.

Not that it actually occured, no. However, I think this is obligatory, if a bit obvious:

> "If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?"

You know who :) George also wrote this ( http://www.openculture.com/2014/01/george-orwell-explains-in... )

> Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible.

Remember, you don't have to convince everybody. You have to convince (or force, or brainwash by force) a few million people, and then you simply need weapons and robots to slaughter all the rest. We have no serious safeguards against this, it would require everybody to be able to think critically, to be able to choose their jobs freely, and other things we don't have (not for everybody). I'd wager we have more than few million people who'd be up for it, given half a chance and one order, and given current trends, I'm fully expecting a big purge "at some point" (even in 500 years it would be like it happening tomorrow, compared to the near-infinite empire that might follow it) that might make Stalin and Hitler look like choir boys. Pessimistic, sure, paranoid, we'll see, and I guess off-topic for sure. But alas, it's the one fear in my heart. We tend to take the best people in their brightest moments as the standard, instead of thinking of it like security: it's the weakest links that really matter. Being right didn't help the people killed by brownshirts for being right. Also see this bit from "Mortals and Others" by Bertrand Russel: http://russell-j.com/0583TS.HTM

[nn3]

So if all the humanities papers have a serious message which is just somehow obscured due to circumstances outside the author's control, you would expect at least someone (particularly the editors of the journals) to understand them.

But how can the Sokal affair[1] be explained then? There clearly no-one understood it but it was still published.

I suspect Sturgeon's law[2] applies to the humanities, as well as to a lot of other things.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

[jolux]

The Sokal affair is explained in realizing that he didn't know what he was talking about and essentially quote-mined the people he was targeting while carefully shrouding his deception. He claimed to believe in what he said in good faith, and he actually didn't. You can't tell that from reading his essay.

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/fish.html

[dTal]

The whole point was the fact that it was possible to do that is a red flag. Could you "quote-mine" physics or maths papers and get them published, as long as you claimed to believe in your results? If the journals are relying on the honor system and "good faith" to not let crap through, then what exactly is the point of them?

[jolux]

You could absolutely quote mine physics and math papers to make a point that's not true, if that's what you're asking. I think it might be harder to get such a project into a physics journal, but yes, I think it's doable.

That being said, I don't think just anything can make it into a philosophy journal either. He was clearly trying very hard to make a point, and when smart people work hard on things, the result is very rarely worthless. I'm sure that came through in reading his writing, which is why it was published. Continental philosophy is largely subjective, (which isn't to say it doesn't very in quality) and as such it can't be gauged like analytical philosophy or physics can be.

The greater intellectual fraud is extrapolating this example of a minor journal focused on postmodernism publishing an article written in bad faith to a rejection of postmodernism wholesale. There's a lot of valuable insight to be gained from studying it, which I encourage anyone skeptical of postmodernism to do.

[myztic]

I think that the article over-estimates strongly the influence of entertainment to a certain degree when it comes to our intellectual development. And I am someone who consumes a lot of media. While it's true some will profit from the intellectual properties, I would argue in order to see this side of an entertainment show, one must have the intellectual capacity to do so in the first place.

An "intelligent" person might see an existential moral conflict portrayed brilliantly in something like Breaking Bad, others see a story about Drugs, Tough guys, cool Misfortunes, funny incidents, black humour and they don't notice or derive any moral teachings from it. (I might misrepresent Breaking Bad here to some degree, I have not seen it completely. Could have also named examples like Spirited Away, Watership Down, ... simple cartoons to some, but they are missing the bigger picture.)

That's why shows which rate high among TV Critics and get a lot of viewers, normally appeal to both, those who see the big picture, and those who are appealed to the "superficial" version of it.

Academia does not have to entertain in the same way, but academia will also change radically when it comes to getting a point across. Technology will help incredibly with bringing abstract information to people outside of a specific scientific field.

We humans are not good at Maths, not at all. We humans are good at touching, smelling, visualizing things.

Albert Einstein was one of the most influential physicists in the 20th century, and even though his ideas (at that time) must have seemed incredibly counter-intuitive, it was through thought experiments with a large amount of visualization, that helped him form his theories.

Visuals are so important. And they'll become better and better, and we will be able to do them more effectively and in a whole new way as technology progresses. Think about proper 3D-Virtual Environments, 3D Position Tracking in a room with a VR-Headset. The possibilities we have there.

I remember very clearly when we talked about Retrograde Motion of planets in school. By the time we were finishing sketching it out everybody understood it[1]. In order to understand it, not everybody has to be able to reach the conclusion themselves. Why do planets seem to move backwards / stop and turn around? 30 Seconds of video will explain it to the layman, enough so that he is satisfied with the answer and actually gets it.

Education may progress particularly slowly, but eventually we will reach a completely different form of education and will have incredibly clever ways of getting information across. Academia does not have to primarily entertain, but it should also be able to quickly get the point across, we will get there.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72FrZz_zJFU