Time, I think, to dip a toe in the world of academia. Specifically, some lively rumblings on the relative importance of electricians and sociology lecturers. I suppose you could start here, with this, but there are plenty of tangents and pith, and moments of slightly comical indignation.
Among those moments, this one:
You see, Dr Tim Gill, our associate professor, is “an authority on society and everything in it.” Being an “intellectual,” he can “diagnose entire societies.” And then issue instructions to people of less importance.
Update, via the comments:
From one of Dr Gill’s own students:
“This class is very easy… However [Dr Gill] has an ego…”
A data point, I suppose.
Quoting this,
You see, Dr Tim Gill, our associate professor, is “an authority on society and everything in it.” Being an “intellectual,” he can “diagnose entire societies.” And then issue instructions to people of less importance.
Rafi adds,
But he didn’t see the pushback coming…
Which does rather suggest a gap in his model of the world.
At one point, Dr Gill boasts of never having used a lawn mower. Because apparently that’s a credential. Readers may also note Dr Gill’s use of the word handyman, complete with connotations of something other than respect. Still, you’ve almost got to admire the imperviousness of someone who responds to accusations of being arrogant and haughty and unmoored from reality by being arrogant and haughty and unmoored from reality.
Regarding Dr Gill’s rumblings of alleged profundity and intellectual heft, commenter Chow Bag draws our attention to this.
No laughing at the back.
And it must be quite strange to be rendered indignant by something – assumptions about a field, its standards, and the kinds of people it attracts – that your own indignant replies are pretty much confirming.
The thing is, the field of sociology needn’t, I think, have become so disreputable. I see little that’s inherently dubious about an attempt to study human society. But the field’s near-total occupation, or colonisation, by smug, delusional leftists, with all of their blind spots and baggage – and the consequent near-ubiquity of faulty default assumptions and predestined conclusions – has, inevitably, taken a toll.
The kind of people who, like Dr Gill, want to use a pretence of academic rigour to propagate their own rather weird and implausible political preferences.
Which is why we get supposed social scientists who find it problematic that Wikipedia entries written by men about pop culture topics that tend to be liked by men are often longer and more detailed, more nerdy, than entries by women on topics that are more likely to be of interest to women. As if men and women were somehow – and must be – identical in their psychology, their preferences and priorities, and as if any difference in Wikipedia entry length must be a result of some social oppression, some invisible downtroddenness.
And likewise, it’s why we get a social science lecturer being bewildered by the inegalitarian distribution of litter, and fretting about how to “narrow the gap” in discarded fag packets and food-smeared detritus, while studiously avoiding any acknowledgement of obvious differences in behaviour between social groups, as this would presumably offend his own egalitarian assumptions. And who gives no thought, none at all, to how the litter gets there in the first place. As if it just fell from the sky, randomly, like overnight snow.
And among Dr Gill’s peers, thinking of this kind is hardly uncommon. Hence the reputation.
Consider this an open thread. Share ye, and so forth.
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