Review: Tractatus Anti-Academicus
Authored by Joshua Hansen
In ages where one can feel the sands of the epoch shift underneath one’s very feet, such times produce similar reactions. Many a peaceable person has been catapulted into profound, self-nullifying despair, complicit mob drunkenness or a see-no-evil ostrich posture. All three responses abdicate the individual who would adopt them from assuming responsibility for grabbing hold of the wispy telos of the zeitgeist to chart another chapter in the epic saga of humanity.
Joshua Hansen is, emphatically, not one predisposed to such temperamental histrionics. He is clearly a man capable of staring down the barrel of a gun (albeit intellectual) without blinking. Just so, he delivers his fulsome, yet remarkably concise, forensic explanation of the heinous, cowardly murder of the modern higher education system. By the cold, grubby hands of – you guessed it – the Academic.
In this review, I will discuss similar works in this now plentiful field of contemporary higher-education critique, touch on my assessment of the most salient ideas present in Joshua's, offer some minor constructive critiques and, finally, ponder the wider implications for the future of society Joshua places in immediate and incontrovertible doubt.
Throughout this book, I was constantly in admiration of the even-handed deftness Joshua handled these weighty and often complex topics. This is an immense undertaking that many other prominent minds have levied their strengths to and Joshua, for my money, comes out among the best of them, if not on top.
His style is not for the faint of heart, nor the uninitiated. But, for anyone with a rudimentary understanding of the intellectual underpinnings of our current cultural crises, this book will give you the full blueprint, in all its detailed glory.
Ultimately, the most succinct way I can describe this book is that it is the diagnosis for the meta-threat for our epoch. It’s a civilizational, seminal text and in turn a skeleton key to the myriad problems that proliferate from this disease we find ourselves afflicted by. In this way, Joshua is just the kind of doctor you want at your bedside when a life-threatening prognosis is given – a master of the complexities of the subject matter, but clear-eyed and steely in his resolve to fight the good fight.
The problem the book deals with, unfortunately, is not a new problem (though to many Republican lawmakers, it is apparently). It has been addressed going back to the 1920s, in books like the oft-referenced The Betrayal of the Intellectuals. There is a canon cataloging the sins of the intelligentsia instantiated in their roles as robed purveyors of reality throughout the 20th century. More recently, there have been numerous works of this ilk, oft in response to the current culture wars that get their start in the Petri dish of the modern university.
Titles like The Coddling of the American Mind, The Parasitic Mind, and The Madness of Crowds are best sellers. Lesser known and slightly older works like The Idea of Decline in Western History, Excellent Sheep or A Culture of Narcissism retain robust salience. Indeed, it has become a booming cottage industry to assail the marble foundations of the ivory tower. For good and numerous reasons, let us be clear. Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Christopher Rufo, and James Lindsay to name a few, all now make profitable careers (more or less) out of bewailing and cataloging the wrongs of academia. This is no doubt a good thing in many ways.
But what is evident from having read many of the aforementioned works, the primary sources of the ‘critical theories’ many of these works address, as well as having imbibed much content of these public intellectuals, is that they are striving to reach a wider audience. They, by fact of necessity, dilute quite a bit of the content so as to be more pragmatically effective with various social media and podcast algorithms and with their readership.
Who can blame them? I’m not even making a critique, because it seems clear to me, that they all are playing noble parts in a foundational cultural struggle. I merely point this feature out to differentiate Joshua’s work as the most potent, concentrated form of this oeuvre. All the other works are well and good, but if you’d like to skip the line of intellectual middlemen and go straight to the heart of the matter – Tractatus Anti-Academicus is the ticket.
Now, to provide a few morsels of enticement to imbibe the heady brew of TAA yourself. The three most salient concepts I found from the work were as follows – ‘Nietzscheanization’ of the University, the 'Hollow Corporate Ethos' and ‘Academics’ contra Academia. These ideas separately would all merit their own books at least the length of TAA to explore and extrapolate their ill-effect on the culture. Amazingly Joshua rents the intellectual material into concise summaries of all three. Not only does he achieve this adroitly, he similarly traces the causal connections between these concepts and explicates the malignant bearing they have on the university system and the culture as a whole. So without further ado, I shall summarize them briefly in order they appear in the book and offer some reflections on how I see these concepts manifesting in contemporary society.
First; the Nietzscheanization of the University. Although a bit unwieldy as a marketing slogan, it is a perfect summation of the university system’s most prominent source of rot and in tow, the rest of popular and professional culture. Aptly summarized, I think, as “American cultural nihilism…culminating in the rise of poststructuralism (and hence postmodernism) that would universalize Nietzsche’s value revolution.”.
This concept connected a vast web of research that I have been prosecuting myself, and living through as a younger millennial, over the past eight years since I first attended a university. Not only is it the metaphysical swamp in which the university system is now rooted, but also in popular culture – as is abundantly obvious in its various manifestations from Taylor Swift, Only Fans accounts, Bravo’s various ‘the Real Housewives of…’ and the Walking Dead. These various popular phenomena all have one core thing in common: they don’t actually mean anything, they are simply an expression of the constituent ‘creators’ will to power, and manifest the most base expositions of various aspects of the human condition for money and notoriety – from emotional to simulated gore to actual porn – our popular culture, like our academics, have nothing of value to say other than whatever will validate their gross assertion that they should and will be powerful in this lifetime. Irrespective, of course, of the consequences. The academics naturally pursue this will to power through a more sophisticated and socially palatable means but ultimately it is the same base drive so vaunted by Nietzsche, promulgated by a bunch of nihilistic, lost nerds.
The second concept that sticks out to me as a salient skeleton key is the “Hollow Corporate Ethos”. If Nihilism is the Word in our modern theology of inverted values, the Hollow Corporate Ethos is the Word made flesh. It is the animating spirit that keeps the machine moving forward. First, the cogs are forged in the furnace of the university for easy installment and replacement in the wider bureaucratic factory of the ‘parauniversity’ system. The Hollow Corporate Ethos is the ghost in the machine of the parauniversity, a wonderfully concise and fulsome term that covers everything from the universities themselves, their attendant administrative hive apparatus and drones, myriad NGOs, international bureaucracies, and deep state ministries in many Western countries.
This ethos is so poignantly demonstrated just recently in the testimony by the Presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT on the demonstrations of their campuses calling for the Intifada. These grown women cannot simply say it is wrong to call for the genocide of Jews, except to look at it ‘in context’. While it is patently obvious to everyone else that if another protected, fashionable ‘class’ was inserted into the role of Jewish students currently, they would use the most morally saturated language and draconian measures to stamp out the ‘free speech’ they are now so ostensibly committed to.
They cannot see the depths of their own blatant hypocrisy, nor smell the stench of the moral turds they are proffering to everyone as ‘mature’ positions. One can feel a lifetime of legalism, finagling and massaging various 'truths' inserted in power plays, leaking out of their pores in the tepidly confused and cynical answers they give. But I digress. They are the product of a wider system of resume polishers who have never done anything that required moral backbone, only a lifetime of credentialed LARPing in controlled environments, and it shows. The Hollow Corporate Ethos on full display.
Joshua puts the nail in the coffin by spelling out the urgent nature of the situation our culture finds itself in thanks to the Academic. Now employed chiefly to “separate theory from practice in order to advance technocapital. A large part of this has to do with attacking traditional morality to break open new libidinal vectors for market segmentation and professional business marketing campaigns, and to place increasing spheres of life under biomedical intervention, state surveillance and subject to therapeutic discipline; not necessarily for some putative good or interest in flourishing, but the institutional self-advancement and pecuniary remuneration of the individual actors and investors, etc.”.
Or perhaps most brilliantly: “Trace any catastrophe far back enough you’ll find a university admission page”. Having spent the majority of the book dismantling the chief pillars by which most current academics sham their way through life, wrecking things, with an embossed piece of parchment behind glass, he makes the point that our attitude towards academics to shift unreservedly to: “don’t show me your credentials; demonstrate your skills, if you can.”.
This is the crux of the issue and the attitude by which we might wrangle our culture from head diving off a cliff. We must push back against the academics to demonstrate their myriad claims in reality, and not allow them to cower behind their magic pieces of paper and slippery rhetoric. Let them succeed or fail by their merits, in reality. Let them face the music when they do fail, which has been quite often.
Tractatus Anti-Academicus is one of those deeply challenging, life-altering reads. From start to finish we are confronted head-on with a dire, thorough warning of civilizational destruction. It’s not like it hasn’t been addressed, as we’ve seen, but with a book so fulsome yet compact this denotes the degree to which the situation is severe.
We are seeing something like the harbinger of the things to come. Written with the deadly accurate, stoic, sober tone of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. We are, like Spain in the 1930s, getting a glimpse of what is around the corner. Joshua is clearly not writing this book with glee or in order to take the helm as some culture war general/impresario – he’s raising a tragic problem with all the probity required of such an urgent warning. Let us not treat him as Cassandra of antiquity.
All my praise and exaltations aside, I do think there is some room for improvement. Particularly in the heavy repetition of the word ‘putative’ and phrase ‘tout court’. Also, I could certainly see the dense citations, academic jargon and quotations as being intimidating for the casual reader. Yet these are the only things I see in the way of critiques.
So, where does this book leave us? It leaves us in a great big hole. Thankfully there are already green shoots popping, clawing for life, out of the charred wasteland of Academia in the form of the proliferation of podcasts and X, organizations like Heterodox Academy and FIRE, the formation of new universities like UATX and digital academic frontier towns like OtherLife. There’s the stalwart, I hope, institutions like the University of Chicago.
Unfortunately, this is far from enough. The real crux of the issue on a pragmatic level is the credentialing monopolies that have been granted to the universities for professions, like teachers, or the university degree requirements for the Bar. It is a thorny problem because part of the justification for the creation of the massive administrative apparatus was the centralization of knowledge in order to promote standards that provide ubiquitous care, professionalism and operating systems. Unfortunately, this logic has been captured by corrupt and spiritually bankrupt forces. But it is a practical issue that can be worked out, and there for an eminent cause to rally around politically.
Another pragmatic plan of action that seems critical, and has mercifully made it's way into the mainstream via Ron Desantis in the latest republican debate, is the removal of federal loan guarantees for universities. This is a massive perverse incentive structure that promotes bloat and 'critical studies', leaving universities without 'skin in the game' a la Taleb.
It is, I wager, up to a new generation of dissident intellectuals to go forth and simply be better, unfettered by the red tape and political showmanship of the current system. The vanguard of this movement will likely have to sacrifice their dream of a corner office in an esteemed Ivy League department, but there is a new frontier and a new war to be fought, one that is the most meaningful in human history up to this point. It will likely take an army of partisans working independently yet banding together to peaceably agitate both politically and create the way forward by their own hands. This is, fundamentally, a spiritual call to true adventure.
The project of the Enlightenment, the sire of the university, in the wake of the world wars and cold war of the 20th century, needs to be rescued from its deathbed. Otherwise, humanity falls over the brink of its own self-destruction through some fiendish combination of applied nihilism, anti-human technology, technofascism and various other forms of university-created disaster.
A text that may prove useful to the determined partisan on the side of humanity is The Forest Passage by Ernst Junger. As Junger indicates in that text – the holy trinity of Art, Philosophy and Theology will lead the forest rebel beyond the forces of totalitarianism. Good to know a liberal arts major can still find some gainful employment.
All told, Tractatus Anti-Academicus is an incredibly important book, in an incredibly important time. If you care about the fate of our culture, about the fate of humanity, read it. Read it, digest it fully and get to work.
You can buy it here:
Follow
