This Present Bleakness
On Sustaining- Or Not- Scholarly Drive in Fraught Times
I’m not going to beat around the bush. I am finding it harder, maybe not quite by the day but close to it, to maintain what scholarly drive I have left and continue to do the kind of research, writing, and other work that has occupied so much of my adult life from college forward. I am fortunate, to be quite frank, that the professional work I do as part of my (now reduced) salaried academic job often involves things like manuscript transcription or cataloging, tasks that do not require the same sort of intentional sustained drive that say writing an article or a book chapter do. When it comes to that sort of academic writing I find myself advancing in short bursts, but struggling to maintain that energy, struggling, if I am being very honest, to care. Of course like anyone else in a humanistic, writing-intensive discipline, I’ve gone through periods of productivity and of more diminished output, everyone (except for the truly exceptional) is subject to such fluctuations. The last few years, starting in many ways around the time of covid (although not precisely conterminous with that now rather distant feeling period of our history, and only partially causally related), however have been different. The malaise, if that is the right word, has become general, pervasive, almost impossible to shake.
My malaise is not the product of one single trend or issue, nor, am I quite confident, is it unique to me, though the degree to which is grips others certainly varies (I imagine it helps to have a tenure-track job, for instance, a powerful motivator for producing books and articles and other ‘deliverables’). As I look around at the shape of scholarly work and life, in my field and in every other, it is no longer really possible, except perhaps for someone with superhuman levels of naivety, not to feel the bleakness settling over the entire landscape like some toxic impenetrable cloud. If it were merely a matter of our chaotic political moment here in the United States it would be one thing—sure, seeing entities that have become so foundational to scholarly livelihoods like the National Endowment for the Humanities be gutted overnight is hardly reassuring, but we can at least entertain the idea that a future administration will restore everything that has been burned down. Whether that is realistic at all or not (and it probably is not) is one thing, at least there is an imaginable solution, and if we’re being creative maybe we could come up with some other potential future ways of eking out funding streams, I don’t know. Likewise, while the modern university system has now reduced itself to a vast mechanism for boosting GDP, encouraging ‘innovation,’ and humbly kissing the hand of power to avoid losing its meal ticket (that latter one is not really new, alas), we can imagine paths by which at least some of that could be changed, even if such plans are mostly fantasy.
What is worse are the headwinds against which it is almost impossible, perhaps it is presently impossible, to imagine solutions or alternate ways things might turn out. There is no doubt in my mind that humans globally, and in my own country in particular, are undergoing a probably unprecedented decline in the skills and abilities and practices necessary for the survival of humanistic scholarship, and really anything to do with literacy and numeracy. Our collective and individual ability just to read in a sustained manner, much less in a manner that seriously retains and engages with what we read, is collapsing. You know it and I know it, not just from observation of others but from our own honest self-evaluation. The culprit is, if not quite entirely then almost so, modern digital technology, in particular the omnipresent smartphone and the very narrow mode of digital engagement that its set of affordances encourages (‘dictates’ might be an even better word for it). I’ve another piece in the works about the general nature of speed and abbreviation of—everything, so I won’t belabor the point here. In short (ha!) the technological sphere that inhabits us has greatly reduced our ability to pay attention and to process complexity. Whether such a development was a necessary one, built into the trajectory of digital environments, is another question—what matters for now is that it is the trajectory that unfolded, and no one has any idea what an exit might look like.
Hot on the heels of the evisceration of human attention and substantive literacy, ironically (or not—it is doubtful these things are unconnected causatively) it has never been easier for massive reams of text to be churned out and launched into cultural orbit. In fact it is safe to say that the shape that generative AI, and the direction of machine learning applications in general, has taken is in large part being determined by already existing conditions. Students didn’t stop reading entire books because ChatGPT could summarize them for them or spin out a passable essay: ChatGPT provided a solution for a condition that already existed (and we could explore the contingency of the culprit technologies and why they came into prominence in similar fashion). But if this new suite of technology did not light the fire, it has certainly doused the flames with a steady stream of gasoline. Again, not to belabor the point that has been made well elsewhere by others, but all signs point to a veritable epistemic apocalypse in terms of reading, writing, and serious engagement—and as pointed out in this article, there is no apparent solution. We cannot make people sit in a room without a smartphone or computer and read an academic monograph start to finish, and even if we could it wouldn’t have much effect, the die is already cast.
As a historian, as a scholar in a discipline with a long and venerable tradition of scholarly life and work, I have always operated under a couple of foundational assumptions. One, that my work is not merely an enjoyable hobby, by which I mean that when I learn something, when I work through a difficult problem or tangle up with theories and philosophical positions vis-a-vis the human past, in some way that labor on my part will translate outwards to others, that it will have real, meaningful benefit for people beyond myself. Not only did I believe—and I still do!—that the work of history is meaningful for currently living humans, that it can and should inform how we live, think, pray, love, that it can shape in a positive manner our relationships with one another, the natural world, and even with God, but I also believed that my formation in that discipline and productivity therein could and would translate out to others, through my writing, teaching, public presence, and so forth. To be sure I also hoped to make some sort of living doing this work, and for a while that at least has transpired, though it is increasingly in doubt (and my original objective of some form of the professorial life has long since ceased to be viable).
Two, I have always understood myself to be part of a much larger tradition and process of scholarly work, of knowledge production, reflection, and pedagogy, one that in some stretches back not hundreds but thousands of years. I still remember when I first read, some decade and a half ago now, Jean Leclercq’s beautiful book The Love of Learning and the Desire for God and sensing a very real connection with those medieval monastic scholars and their practices, chronologically distant but not really foreign. I have been doubly fortunate to inhabit a corner of the scholarly world in which desire for God remains a motivating factor for many of us, and not in a disguised manner. But I digress. Beyond the somewhat intangible satisfaction of being part of a bigger process, of having a genealogical, emotional, and indeed spiritual connection with those who have gone before you, being part of such a scholarly tradition is also an assurance that your own work has some enduring meaning. I would be very surprised if a century from now anyone except perhaps one or two historians of very specialized bent so much as know my name; the odds that anything I have ever written will still be in circulation then are next to zero. But what I have generally banked on and what has continued to motivate me is the implicit understanding that my little interventions would be part of a much larger continuity, contributing to this dynamic edifice of knowledge we are building and which others will take up in the future.
Both of those foundational propositions are now very much in doubt, for the reasons outlined above, and for others, some of a longer standing nature. It is not that good scholarship is not still being produced, I’ve many brilliant and hard working (much more brilliant and harder working than me!) colleagues who continue to write and publish and engage the wider public, who teach and blog and research. But even for the most brilliant and productive the ambit of effect is shrinking. And it is hard to shake the feeling that our overall range has narrowed, that our intellectual and theoretical approaches have become all but exhausted. The efflorescence of continental philosophy last century (mostly, some figures making it a decade or two into this one) that can be more or less summarized under the moniker ‘theory’ has no real parallel in the present. Whatever you may think of the postmodernist movement in terms of its intellectual usefulness, it had a vitality and a presence that has been largely lost in the present, with no evident successors, despite the vast number of developments in contemporary modernity that cry out for theorization and analysis. What we find instead is the sense that everything is played out, everyone is tired, the curtain is starting to fall, and the audience went home a whole act ago.
I could go on, but at this point I’m just writing to avoid tackling the deadlined articles open in other tabs, writing as a therapeutic venting to the digital universe. I wish I had a hopeful note to end on, some proposed solution forward. I don’t, not really. I cannot steer my way out of the sense that scholarly life as we have known it for my lifetime, for, perhaps, the last millennia or more, will end this century, at least as an important and visible aspect of human life, lingering on, perhaps, in literal monasteries or other obscure corners of the world. In the list of ongoing, seemingly inescapable dynamics and trajectories that make up this stage of modernity or capitalism or whatever you want to call it, the woes of scholars and academia are fairly minor, sure. And don’t get me wrong, I have an incredibly good life by all metrics, and still enjoy most of my work, even if I have to increasingly accept it as basically a hobby, on par with my enthusiasism for building scale models or collecting fossils. Still, if my sense of things is correct (and, God willing, I will be proven wrong!) we as humans stand to lose a great deal that has been good and beneficial, things that could have contributed to tackling the other systemic and pervasive crises of greater moment. Therein lies the true bleakness of the moment: not that things are generally speaking especially bad by most metrics, compared to say much of the twentieth century we’re doing quite well, living comfortably, mass crimes and horrors going on to be sure but simply not at scales from within living memory. Rather it is the sense of terminality, of the very products of our comfort and ease effecting a finality that the terrors and destruction of world wars and totalitarian states could not realize. It is not a feeling of a violent storm roaring through, but of an approaching night without clear promise of dawn.
Where I do see possibility as yet—and can perhaps indeed end on a hopeful note—is paradoxically perhaps in spaces and practices that effectively reach back towards the pre-literate world. My (unpaid and instutionally unsupported!) activities in community agriculture, ecological restoration, and related organizing have been orders of magnitude more successful than I had anticipated, and much of it is due to the same set of factors described above, pushing people, I think, into the real world, into deliberate encounters with other people and with other living things, with the solid earth itself. Orality is the order of the day out in the literal field, the soil on our fingers preventing a lot of screen swiping. I also see something similar at work at church: our very analog, very physically present services act, I think, as a draw to people for precisely those reasons, because they step outside of the technological order that is otherwise so pervasive and increasingly a matter of political imposition from the very top (a topic for another time!). Something I have only obliquely addressed here is the matter of speed and what it does to scholarly life, and to life in general; both agroecology and Orthodox liturgy and spiritual life are extremely resistant to speed, indeed cannot be sped up, but require attention and time and a steady pace. I suspect that many futures, including that of scholarly life and work, will have to find similar pathways simply to survive, though how that might happen is not clear to me.
Time will tell, in more ways than one, I suppose.