Defining a hierarchy of knowledge-value: a necessity in EVERY discipline

 If you don't have some sort of hierarchy of knowledge-value in your discipline (a way to collectively distinguish good work from bad work from within the work itself, based on a set of criteria set by knowledgeable experts), you will end up with: 1) a hierarchy of celebrity (the people who are the most popular and well-known), a hierarchy of enrollment (whoever puts the most butts in seats calls the shots), a hierarchy of seniority (in which the olds stagnate the discipline into irrelevance, a hierarchy of newness (worship of the avant-garde), or even a hierarchy of admin proximity (whoever sucks up to the administration best gets the most cookies) The point is you WILL have some kind of hierarchy, whether internally agreed upon or externally imposed. It is always worse for a discipline or profession to have a hierarchy of knowledge-value externally imposed; it typically means the corruption and imminent demise of that discipline.

If a group of scholars faces that fact soberly they can assert more control over how and when the hierarchy functions, mitigate the worst aspects of how it functions, and check blind spots in their assessment. A denial of the need to assert and define a collective sense of value to define a discipline is a reactionary view. If you don't at least try to define, you have ceded your intellectual autonomy to much larger forces, and some sort of hierarchy will de facto impose itself, usually a kind all that much worse for there being no agency of actual scholars in its making.

I think humanities and social science scholars are much more reluctant to engage in this kind of process, partly because they have internalized a sort of shibboleth that all hierarchies of value imply oppression, and partly, because they do not feel the consequences of not doing it directly in the same way as, say, an engineer, a doctor, a farmer, an architect, or an airline pilot, to name but a few fields where hierarchy of knowledge-value is very important to their function. In these fields, there is a very clear distinction between those who know and those who do not, and distinguishing between good work and bad work is often a matter of life and death. Landing a plane is not matter of interpretation.

The idea that a discipline can skirt this necessity is a rhetorical illusion created largely by people who have had no experience of the hard work of trying to do it, or who weirdly think that all humanities knowledge is a form of aesthetics, or that Foucauldian canard that all truth claims are a function of hegemonic power. Some academic work is bad, really bad (even that by famous academics), and richly deserves to be called so openly. It may not be bad because the person doing it is a bad person, it may not be bad for lack of good intention, but it is bad nonetheless. Calling it thus will not save the humanities, nor should it be freighted with that expectation. But when one is brilliantly contemptuous of low quality and poorly designed research that lacks focus and rigor, one is expressing a yearning for something better that may keep the fire burning in the humanities a while longer.

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Religion, Monotheism, and Ancestral Tradition

Religions that shift veneration away from accomplished and wise ancestors to more abstract, anti-iconic notions of divinity are most successful in times of social crisis, when elders fail in their duties and the collective wisdom of past ancestors seems unable to address the complexity of interpersonal conflict, ecological crisis or the breakdown of political order. In such moments the idea of calling on a force/idea that transcends local ancestral wisdom (a High God) becomes more and more powerful. Originally the High God and the Ancestral traditions could coexist in mutual harmony. But social crisis has tended historically to weaken the ancestral tradition and strengthen the High God tradition (who is seen as above it). This is at least part of the explanation why the original Egyptian religion was weakened over time and eventually abandoned. The reasons for this gradual shift are something I am still studying. Historically, the vulnerability of ancestral transmission as a form of active wisdom, has been replaced by the idea of wisdom as coming in the form of 'revelation' from a High God. An exclusivist 'High God' paradigm has become the new 'norm' of religious practice, condemning the older tradition of ancestral transmission as paganism, shirk, idolatry, kufr, superstition, etc, and projecting itself as ancient and unchanging and true, over against the false idolatry of the ancestral tradition. When believers in the exclusivist High God tradition complain about the anti-iconoclasm of the Wahhabis, they are really complaining about the epistemology at the very core of their own professed tradition, taken to its logical extreme. My own opinion is that the healthiest belief systems have to make room for both communication with ancestral traditions, broadly conceived (an open question is: what does it mean to communicate with ancestors in 2016, when those links were severed in past generations?), and the High God tradition as a form of transcendent 'outside' knowledge. The old ways are not always the best ways, nor are the new ways necessarily an improvement on the past.

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A Bend In the River

"The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it."

So begins V.S. Naipaul's classic of African literature. My last week in Oman had me searching for something to fill the spaces between the history and physics reading. I was pleased to pick up A Bend in the River a masterpiece from an extraordinarily gifted writer. I must tell you I "finished" it in two days. I say "finished" because my copy ends on page 286, as Salim the narrator heads downriver, escaping from the small town in the Congo where he has made his life. The last page is a like an ending, but I am left mysteriously wondering if there is more from Salim, whether the narrative has room for his other life at the end of that steamer voyage. Instead, the last few sentences read: "the sky hazed over, and the sinking sun showed orange and was reflected in a broken golden line in the muddy water. Then we sailed into a golden glow." A full stop, but not an ending.

Naipaul has both fascinated with his brilliant prose, and vexed with the often reactionary observations of his narrators, so much like autobiography. The man has undeniable talent, but I felt as I did when reading Paul Theroux's book Dark Star Safari; the man is grouchy, content with his sweeping views of 'Africans' and seemingly obsessed with the achievement of Europeans in contrasting his society with theirs. In this way the book reminds one of Heart of Darkness Perhaps this is a particular feature of our narrarator that Naipaul has captured with great skill, but, having read other of Naipaul's work, I suspect that Naipaul is able to write so penetratingly into Salim's mind because he himself feels the ambivalence of place, the loneliness, and the slight contempt of the privileged outsider.

Salim's family is from Africa, part of an Indian trading caste (the Khoja) who were originally Hindus but converted to Islam, particularly Ismaili Shi'a Islam. Salim introduces himself as an outsider/insider: "The coast was not truly African. It was an Arab-Indian-Persian-Portuguese place, and we who lived there were really people of the Indian Ocean. True Africa was at our back. Many miles of scrub or desert seperated us from the up-country people; we looked east to the lands of with which we traded--Arabia, India, Persia. These were also the lands of our ancestors. But we could no longer say that we were Arabians or Indians or Persians; when we compared ourselves with these people, we felt like people of Africa."

Salim feels insecure in his family, because they are static, falling behind in changing times. He wishes to get away. He lacks the religious conviction of his fathers and brothers and does not have a temperament like them to be "buried so deep in their lives that they were not able to stand back and consider that nature of their lives." This pessimism of Salim's "can drive men to do wonders" and it pushes him into Central Africa as a shop owner in Kisingani (one of the many way stops for the ivory trade, it was founded in 1883 by Henry Stanley). But even there, he writes of his displacement and loneliness, in a deliberate way: "I seperated myself from them. I still thought of myself as a man just passing through. But where was the good place? I couldn't say. I never thought constructively about it. I was waiting for some illumination to come to me, to guide me to the good place and the 'life' I was still waiting for."

Salim's commentary on both Africa and Europe reveals this insider/outsider dynamic. On the one hand, he and his family have mixed African-Indian servants, speak Swahili, and occupy a long established niche in African commerce. But one of the overriding themes of the book is the ambivalence of Salim's racial and cultural heritage. For instance, while his family and tribe continue to live in Africa and avoid political discussion of Africa's future, Europeans (through the eyes of Salim) are a more creative force in the modern world, and this makes him both envy and despise them:

"The Europeans could do one thing and say something quite different; and they could act in this way because they had an idea of what they owed to their civilization. It was their great advantage over us. The Europeans wanted gold and slaves like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves. Being an intelligent and energetic people, and at the peak of their powers, they could express both sides of their civilization; and they got both the slaves and the statues"

This dynamic finds expression in the affair he begins with Yvette, the young and beautiful wife of a European professor whose 'expertise' on this region of Africa is a penetrating example of the uses and misuses of historical knowledge. Salim reads the scholar's articles and eats with him and Yvette in their home, and then leaves to be with the latter at his house. He finds their company stimulating and it takes away his loneliness; this is the optimistic period where Salim and others in the new African university (The Domain) live "in the companionship of that pretence, to feel that...we all lived beautifully and bravely with injustice and imminent death and consoled ourselves with love."

Salim's discussions with his friend Indar reveal one of the book's dynamic figures. Indar leaves Africa, goes to university in London, and returns as a Lecturer in The Domain. Indar, like Salim, wanted more, but unlike Salim, he was rich and more ambitious. He tells Salim, "I found myself growing false to myself, acting to myself, convincing myself of my rightness for whatever was being described. And this is where I suppose life ends for most people, who stiffen in the attitudes they adopt to make themselves suitable for the jobs and lives that other people have laid out for them."

Of course, the affair ends badly, the situation under the unnamed but obvious character of The President (Mobutu) gets steadily worse, and Salim has to flee. The plot is simple, and the characters, when they are not Indian or European, seem curiously immune from Salim's otherwise penetrating interior gaze. Rarely do we see or hear about the inner life and thoughts of any African from Salim. Even his closest companion, Metty, the mixed Indian-African, is always there attendant to Salim's needs, obsequious, and seemingly concerned only with his female liasons. In the end it is Metty who Salim suspects of betraying him, after Salim tells him he can no longer take care of him. None of the African women Salim sleeps with in the brothels merit so much as a name, and there are only two other African characters who are given any narrative importance. One is Zabeth, a customer from a forest village who Salim admires for her enterprise and attachment to her village traditions. The other is her son, Ferdinand, a boy who grows into a man during Salim's stay in the Congo. I felt Ferdinand was more of a narrative device than a true character, he exemplifies for Salim the ambivalence he feels about the new generation of Africans. For Ferdinand was put in Salim's care by Zabeth, and at each juncture of the novel, Ferdinand straddles the ideological and social debates of post-colonial Africa: loss of tribal allegiance, European education, the African personality. Eventually it is he, as a newly appointed appendage of the post-colonial state, who saves Salim's life.

I always feel a sense of quiet pessimism upon finishing Naipaul's work. His prose tends towards the themes of decay and stagnation, loneliness and the loss of stability in the world. As a writer he must have struggled with this most explicitly as an Indian from Trinidad who was educated at Oxford. I suspect that in writing this book, Naipaul drew quite heavily on his own 'African experience' as an Indian minority in a majority African, postcolonial country. There are bits of him in both Salim and Indar. Of course, writing is autobiography, so this shouldn't surprise, but it ought to make one aware that the position of relentless outsider is not the only legitimate position of a writer, but the product of a unique background. (see Alan Nest's excellent review of the book which touches on this) I can identify in some ways with Naipaul's internal anguish. But I am still debating whether one has to, like Ferdinand, choose an identity and be subsumed by it, or pay the price of loneliness and exile like Salim for the sake of writing with a critical distance. I am not sure this is even the correct way to frame this debate. Can one maintain a critical distance, be true to oneself, and still be a participating member of a given community. Is it really that easy? Is 'fitting in' worth the inevitable price? Are these questions only relevant to those who, through some trick of fate, have lost their own true identity? For historians and anthropologists who want to consider the value of their own knowledge and who they produce it for, these are essential questions to fit within an ongoing critical self-analysis.

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Scholars in the Empire: Sketching a Framework for Understanding

وَمَا أَرْسَلْنَا فِي قَرْيَةٍ مِنْ نَذِيرٍ إِلَّا قَالَ مُتْرَفُوهَا إِنَّا بِمَا أُرْسِلْتُمْ بِهِ كَافِرُونَ

Never did we send a warner to a population, but the wealthy ones among them said: "We believe not in the (Message) with which ye have been sent."

Sura Saba (34:34)

This verse made me stop and re-read it. It struck me with the force of electric shock actually. NEVER, says the Qu'ran, was there a message of truth sent down in which the rich and established ones didn't say, "Naw, that can't be true, and anyway, its not for us." NEVER.

Revolutionary knowledge such as that brought by the Qu'ran, is always a threat to established authorities. Even scholarly authorities (kinda ironic, given the way US development dollars and oil revenue are the engines fueling how the Saudi discourse of Islam dominates Islamic education, Islamic publishing, and the production of Islamic knowledge)

The role of the scholar is to be a witness against imperial projects. Scholars deny their calling if they avoid speaking against totalitarianism, fascism, colonialism, and all forms of immoral societal control. The modern empire—transnational, transcapital, and transformational—is a fusion of older imperial projects with the newest technology and techniques available for social control. Our understanding of empire has broadened. Although the image may still conjure up Darth Vader and authoritarian regimes with power over vast stretches of territory, today’s real empire—i.e. those who exercise true ‘imperial perogatives’ over the globe, are not always openly tied to projects of police repression, military might, and a developed ‘center’. Centers and peripheries are ever-shifting and there are smaller peripheries within larger geographical units representing the center. The beast has more than one belly! Today’s empire may condemn police tactics on the periphery because the center has been so thoroughly pacified. Today's empire is about the mobility and power of a global elite to shape the discourse of the major knowledge-producing institutions of our day and age.

That is to say: Although violence is still the most blunt and often effective tools in the imperial arsenal (see Iraq, 1991-2008), today’s empire shapers have a variety of more sophisticated techniques for quelling a more educated populace as well as dissipating the righteous rage of the downtrodden into a million different diversions.

The empire produces knowledge about the world, but it also produces ontology…that is it shapes what is to be known and makes it the truth. The various agents of empire have very sophisticated tools of media, mass marketing, and international finance mechanisms at their disposal and scholarship is not immune from the power of these tools. If you operate in say, Europe or America as a scholar, you do have certain freedoms—to write, to publish, to say what you like. But there are subtle ways in which the ontology of knowledge in the West is able to counter the antihegemonic strains within its plurality and maintain its core intact.

What I envision the scholar doing is using the tools of the empire—all the latest, most sophisticated conceptual frameworks for ‘studying’ the world and especially other cultures, and using these lens to look at the empire itself. Instead of using the masters tools to build our new house (an alternative to imperialism in all its forms), we are using those tools to burn down the masters house, or if it remains flame-retardant, then brick-by-brick, we will reveal all the shiny promises of instant gratification, value globalization, and ‘development’ to have its own dark-side.

There is a duality at the heart of this project, inevitably. Its a duality I am reminded of when I read that Farid Esack, the noted Islamic liberation scholar, was the Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal Professor at Harvard University (come to think of it, I think Prince al-Waleed sponsors more than a few things at Georgetown too). I do not think this duality can be avoided, especially if one wants access to the latest and most sophisticated resources and to keep abreast of the variety of theories produced within these institutions. I would rather someone produce the truth from a position within the empire than produce inferior scholarship outside of it. And this in itself may be a false dichotomy. But after watching enough videos and homemade DVDs from amateur 'professors' and 'teachers' claiming to be bringing knowledge to the people while spitting PURE unscientific NONSENSE, I've come to believe that right knowledge doesn't necessarily depend on being 'outside the system.'

Science is not somehow value free in the context of our discussion. For even as the industrialized countries produced some of the most stunning insights into our world through the scientific method, this method was tied to a culture whose core beliefs remained rooted in fratricidal warfare and extreme suspicion of the ‘other.’ It has proved to be a deadly combination, but I would caution against the mistake of blaming science or secularism for all these evils. The secular method of inquiry into the world has yielded the most fruitful and productive insights of any current tradition. Certainly religion must acknowledge the tremendous power of science and indeed, it has largely ceded certain domains to scientific explanation.
When we look at what the empire has done, a part of us must stand in awe of the power it has produced. At the same time, this façade of power is a mere smokescreen for catastrophic weaknesses inherent in its model. The signs are clear: the ‘progress’ of the last century or two in the West has come not only at the expense of the rest of the world, but of the planet itself.

Scholars in the humanities are perhaps more attuned to the political dimension of this problem, while scienctists and mathematicians may approach it more from the perspective of pure knowledge. But all would benefit by asking ourselves: who is the knowledge we produce benefiting? And what is the purpose of being a scholar? We cannot be content with the answer of ‘simply learning more’ but must go on to specify for whom and in what way. Thus one answer might read, “learning more about the Middle East in order to become an area specialist and consult with American foreign policy experts on how to represent American interests in the region.” An alternative answer might be, “To learn about different cultures and broaden my cultural understanding in order to become a bridge or ambassador between worlds.”
Or another answer might be, “To advance in academia far enough in order to gain the necessary freedom and prestige to return to my own country and do development work.” Or “To master the techniques of my chosen field in order to be able to engage in the current debates within that field and by doing so contribute to the progression of the field." To all these I would add my own personal goal: to gain knowledge in order that not only may overall human knowledge be advanced, but that knowledge will help serve in such a way as a historical witness against the violence of empire, against the fashionable babbling of our age, against the two extremes of hip, empty trendiness, and religious literalism stuck in the outmoded debates of a bygone age.

This project entails being down in the trenches, as it were, in the sense that the relevant information for scholars is not merely found among the halls of university campuses and scholarly quorums. For a while now the media has invoked the term 'public intellectual' or 'organic intellectual', so much they have made into a cliche (herein lies my only beef with Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson). For some of these PIs and OIs, the public side has outweighed the intellectual side and they have become too fond of panels and interviews. Nevertheless, the terms have a real and ongoing meaning for those like myself who seek to balance impeccable scholarship (which entails a large amount of time buried in archives and books) and an engaged political stance against the various dimensions of empire.

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