> Academia seems to be the source of so much of this anger and resentment.
It's because academia, especially in the humanities, rewards radicalism. Thus the endless parade of overwrought sociological theories spinning the prosaic into complex systems (in the area of race, phenomenological systems) purporting to not only explain but prescribe and proscribe correct behavior. Yet, none of them seem to add anything of substance that earlier writers, such as Frantz Fanon[1], haven't elucidated in far better detail. (This radicalism is today no less a problem on the right, or in other partisan domains, than on the liberal left. On the right, though, you often see it as an obsession with counterfactuals and supposedly "gotcha" empiricism, very much in the vein of the popular book Freakonomics--many of their "gotcha" theories turned out to be bullshit, but people eat up anything that purports to overturn conventional thinking. Freakonomics was pretty moderate, with authors of liberal sentiments, but that's beside the point. These patterns of argumentation are independent of views, it's probably just accidental or, perhaps, path dependent the degree to which they're adopted by various groups.)
All of this debate represents its own privilege. And it reflects our own impotence--our inability to make substantive change, or even to come to an agreement on simple, concrete remediations. For example, qualified immunity probably isn't going anywhere anytime soon, unfortunately. You don't need a theory of white privilege to explain the violence wrought against blacks when barely hidden racial animus is still widespread. In fact, internalizing theories of white privilege is a damned good way to overlook one's own animus as it doesn't address, for example, the palpable fear and angst a white person (or any person, including black) might feel when a young black man walks into a convenience store; but rather diminishes its importance. And you don't need whites to internalize a guilty conscience to agree to substantive changes. It happened in the 1950s and 1960s, at a time when the open views of almost all whites would be unspeakable today. You just need to focus on and emphasize our basic humanity, and the cold consequences of racist policies that can no longer be openly justified. And, most importantly, to do so relentlessly and with a unified voice. (It worked for gay marriage, and without needing the majority to internalize sophisticated, radical theories about sexuality or to even come to terms with gay sex.)
Modern culture wars are like trench warfare--when you end up in the gutter of philosophical debate it should be clear your strategy has failed.
[1] Somewhat ironically, writers like Fanon often ended up concluding that it's simply not possible for blacks to find complete justice in a predominantly white society. And it's hard to argue with that if you adopt all of his assumptions. (It's certainly hard to find fault in his observations alone.) I can't claim to know of better frameworks for understanding and addressing larger sociological problems. But maybe they'll emerge on the path to addressing the more egregious and indefensible behaviors using solutions that are staring us in the face.
More prosaically, and less politically, academia is full of people who are very smart but not necessarily emotionally and socially well-adjusted. If you conjure in your mind a stereotypical non-self-aware computer nerd who sees that the people around him know less about networking than he does and therefore cannot fathom that his understanding might be inferior to theirs in other ways, think of how much more powerful and persistent this misperception can be when you replace networking with behavioral economics, foreign policy, or the works of George Eliot. Many academics take it for granted that they must be emotionally sophisticated because of what they study. It doesn't occur to them that they can write about poetry or social theory for a living and still be operating on an early adolescent level in their relations with other people. It's pretty obvious that you can be an emotional child and brilliant at an adult level with computers, less obvious but just as true with any subject where success is measured by your ability to publish a paper that other people cite or argue about.
It's because academia, especially in the humanities, rewards radicalism. Thus the endless parade of overwrought sociological theories spinning the prosaic into complex systems (in the area of race, phenomenological systems) purporting to not only explain but prescribe and proscribe correct behavior. Yet, none of them seem to add anything of substance that earlier writers, such as Frantz Fanon[1], haven't elucidated in far better detail. (This radicalism is today no less a problem on the right, or in other partisan domains, than on the liberal left. On the right, though, you often see it as an obsession with counterfactuals and supposedly "gotcha" empiricism, very much in the vein of the popular book Freakonomics--many of their "gotcha" theories turned out to be bullshit, but people eat up anything that purports to overturn conventional thinking. Freakonomics was pretty moderate, with authors of liberal sentiments, but that's beside the point. These patterns of argumentation are independent of views, it's probably just accidental or, perhaps, path dependent the degree to which they're adopted by various groups.)
All of this debate represents its own privilege. And it reflects our own impotence--our inability to make substantive change, or even to come to an agreement on simple, concrete remediations. For example, qualified immunity probably isn't going anywhere anytime soon, unfortunately. You don't need a theory of white privilege to explain the violence wrought against blacks when barely hidden racial animus is still widespread. In fact, internalizing theories of white privilege is a damned good way to overlook one's own animus as it doesn't address, for example, the palpable fear and angst a white person (or any person, including black) might feel when a young black man walks into a convenience store; but rather diminishes its importance. And you don't need whites to internalize a guilty conscience to agree to substantive changes. It happened in the 1950s and 1960s, at a time when the open views of almost all whites would be unspeakable today. You just need to focus on and emphasize our basic humanity, and the cold consequences of racist policies that can no longer be openly justified. And, most importantly, to do so relentlessly and with a unified voice. (It worked for gay marriage, and without needing the majority to internalize sophisticated, radical theories about sexuality or to even come to terms with gay sex.)
Modern culture wars are like trench warfare--when you end up in the gutter of philosophical debate it should be clear your strategy has failed.
[1] Somewhat ironically, writers like Fanon often ended up concluding that it's simply not possible for blacks to find complete justice in a predominantly white society. And it's hard to argue with that if you adopt all of his assumptions. (It's certainly hard to find fault in his observations alone.) I can't claim to know of better frameworks for understanding and addressing larger sociological problems. But maybe they'll emerge on the path to addressing the more egregious and indefensible behaviors using solutions that are staring us in the face.