Academic Neuroticism
Originally posted to iFunny on 09/15/2023. [Oct 29, 2023]
A big trend I’ve noticed in contemporary history/historiography is that most academics (like an overwhelming majority of them) are kind of neurotic about how they define things, especially ideas.
This is present in pretty much all fields, for example biology with the debate on troons being “real men/women" and abortion (is the baby alive or not) and you can see how inconsistent they usually are. Regardless, I am educated as a historian so I am more intimately familiar with the details of this issue in academic history so that is what I will speak about here.
For example, we’ve all heard people say that racism didn’t actually exist for most of history and was only invented by the White (Anglo) man in like the 18th century. Anyone with a brain can read virtually any ancient source where the author discusses outsiders and it becomes obvious that “racism” has existed basically forever. The distinction these people pseud academics make is through this ridiculous definition of what racism means which makes it next to impossible for anyone pre-1619 to be “racist”. They usually argue that racism carries specific ideas of like nationalism and racial science or something like that, and since they also argue that Nationalism didn’t exist until around this time (also just patently false, even by their own definitions) and since science didn’t exist until the 17th century, racial sciences obviously couldn’t have existed either.
But again if you were to take, say, Caesar’s comments on basically any group he ever conquered and say the exact same thing in the modern day (to a non-White anyways), it would be recognized as racist.
The same also often applies to technological innovation, with a particular emphasis on sucking off ancient China for “inventing” literally everything before Whitey by a bazillion years.
Without getting into the nitty gritty details of history of technology, 9/10 times when someone says this they are either are pseud or maliciously dishonest.
Take, for example, the cotton gin. The earliest known example of a “cotton gin” is in India around the 5th century AD. So clearly pajeets beat Whitey in that regard, right? I mean that smug Marxist troon in your class at Uni seems to think so. But no, not really. This “cotton gin” was slow, required a lot of skill, and only worked for long staple cotton (which is much easier to process). In comparison, Eli Whitney’s cotton gin was fast, required the skill to turn a crank and that was it, and was designed for short staple cotton (which is what most of America’s cotton was).
Virtually any technological innovation like that, where someone claims a non-White civilization beat Whitey to the punch, has a TON of extra context that they are ignoring. But only a sperg would have this information on hand so they can usually get away with it.
However, what you should notice here is the inconsistent logic between these to lines of reasoning.
On the one hand, contemporary definitions of racism are so specific that they define away the possibility for clearly bigoted individuals of antiquity to be racist. On the other hand, Whitey never actually invented anything ever because some wholesome BIPOC invented something vaguely similar a bazzillion years ago.
That is to say, academics have a tendency to be overly specific and overly vague with seemingly no consistency. But it is actually consistent. Because it’s always done to make Whites look bad. Whitey made racism; nobody else except for colonial Whitey (and their descendant) was EVER racist!!! At the same time, Whitey is also stupid because they never ACTUALLY invented anything and had to STEAL everything from wholesome BIPOCs.
That’s the common denominator.