Liberal “Objectivity” and Academia Fetishization
Marx wrote that “The ideas of the ruling class are, in any age, the ruling ideas”. Never has that been more clear than in the 21st century, epitomized by the Internet age. The internet has allowed the ruling classes of individual countries to create unique but ultimately homogeneous virtual ecosystems to scrub and warp historical narratives to fit their point of view.
Today, we see a lot of well meaning ‘historians’ taking up the cross of pure, non-ideological and ‘objective’ work. What they fail to understand is how history and its retelling are ideologically motivated and often shaped by whoever is in the driver’s seat.
As a leftist, do you ever here this chorus in your DMs or personal life?: “But the sources….but where are the sources…can you link me an academic article about that?”…usually preceding a barrage of handpicked JSTOR theses written by the (default) anti-communist academics at American universities.
Many of these academics have the same issue inherent with most liberals: they are unaware of their own ideology. What they think is grounded historical judgement and writing is shaped by the “sensible” assumptions of liberal analysis. These assumptions include a sort of better-than-thou high mindedness and a dedication to ideas vs materialism. Liberals believe that ideas and great men decide history, and not the progression of class struggle, the vast sums of working masses and their conflict with the current system.
This mindset is much the same phenomena of people who are loathe to identify as “partisans” and instead want to believe there are just “good ideas” and technocratic bias-free governance. This is of course a silly, idealist notion. Anyone with the funds and technical knowhow to manage an SEO campaign can get their results at the top of the country’s Google search results, regardless of its truth. Many times when you try and research historical events, you are going to get pages and pages of propaganda, paid for by the larger institutions and ideologically limited to mild criticism of capitalism at best, and outright lies most of the time.
Academic historians default to the best objective view they can muster but fail to view themselves as an object with a function in liberal ideology. Historical study is not immune to being hostage to the bourgeois ruling narratives. Many academics either reflect the ideology of liberal “rationality”, or if they offer some critique it is ultimately toothless. They are obsessed with sounding reasonable, being taken seriously, and not harming their careers. Above everything else, the obsession is this: don’t sound like a crank! Subversive ideas and geniune questions that everyone should be asking of themselves and their elected officials get muted or remain unasked. Michael Parenti in his famous book ‘Inventing Reality’ speaks profusely of this self-censorship playing a key role in the fostering and perpetuating of capitalist ideology. If we restrict the conversation in academic circles to what is considered ‘proper’ and what lines one up for a long and prosperous career, is it really any wonder that the truth can be obscured so easily? Materially, one need only look into how private academic institutions work in the first place.
Want to get invited to speak to students on campus? Well you’d better check the boxes of that universities board of trustees.
Want to acquire funding for research, have your tuition subsidized in graduate school so you can avoid a deeper ocean of debt? Again, one must limit themselves.
That makes it so that direct intervention is not often necessary at all. Even if you allow certain subversive opinions to enter the zeitgeist of academic research or writing, it’s no problem! The internet ecosystem makes it easy to push these publications deep into the search results, limiting their impact under the pretenses of ‘freedom of speech’.
I can think quite clearly of examples in my life of people that fall under this ‘objectivity obsession’, while becoming avid listeners of NPR or the BBC (for example). NPR of course, is theoretically ‘public’, as in tied monetarily to the US government. If that isn’t enough to set off some alerts in your brain, it’s current CEO John Lansing used to be the head of the United States Agency of Global Media. This organization broadcasts pro-US news under a quasi-independent facade in 62 languages worldwide. It gets ‘advice’ from the US State Department, NED, and other shady NGOs that often get their hands dirty in regime change abroad. When these organizations use terms like ‘spreading democracy’ or ‘promoting independent journalism abroad’ this almost always means polluting the international news media, funding protests against leftist governments, or just straight up funding neo-fascists to overthrow or challenge governments that are not in line with the Washington Consensus. Having ingested these second or third hand narratives, conveniently laundered in a way that appeals to the liberal fetish of ‘independence’ and non-partisan ‘truth’, this person can then continue about their day believing themselves to be more informed than the average person: there is no person more deluded than this.
I plan to write a related article about how ‘hard science’ (i.e. maths, biology, chemistry) have been divorced purposefully from ‘soft science’ (i.e. philosophy, the arts). I find that that discussion is very much connected to this one, but think it deserves its own piece.
Thanks for reading if you do!
