I made this painting as meditation on philosophical grounding. I’ve been sorting through an optimistic disillusionment throughout my 30s, and one of the sub themes has been academia. There’s a lot to love about it- wonderful people are doing amazing work, it advances innovation, and it’s a precious treasure of western thought. I have a friend who made attachment to people with disabled limbs that helps them move better- have another friend who does light computing. Super great, super cool.

There are a number of pretty large problems, though, today. One is the replication crisis, especially in social sciences and psychology. Many ideas that become part of regular discourse are from studies that don’t work, are fraudulent, or are misread. Something is going wrong where publishing an ocean of nonsense is just…continuing. It also seems like plagiarism concerns poke above the water the way an iceberg might; I think this is only going to get worse as AI becomes a constant temptation.

Also, study of history has really declined in K-12 school, and I can’t help but feel this is creating narrative cul de sacs in academia. There are no sHteam academies. History as a discipline often eats away at the grist for the political polarization mill. It’s hard to get polemical if you know how actual people act and live. Utopia impossible given how goblin like we all act, especially in crowds.

There is also a sort of balkanization of disciplines; a hyper specialization. While that is really powerful in developing in specific directions, there is something really profound about the disparate quality of excellence. The idea of the “Renaissance Man” is gone, maybe because of how difficult and esoteric science and tech has become. You can’t just speak a couple languages and fly a kite in a storm- you have to know quantum mechanics and regularly do bloodsport against supercomputers.

While I’m not an expert in what is going wrong in academia, I am left with a feeling, a vibe. I made this painting with medieval seminaries (the origin of modern academia) as the foundation, with modern Pittsburgh universities jockeying against medieval depictions of the tower of babel. The institution of western societal learning as we know it was once grounded in theology and now….what? It’s definitely no grounded in that, and it’s not really grounded in anything else instead. I can’t help but think that some of problems we are seeing are connected to this essential dislocation.

I wonder if the specialization serves as a sort of answer to the problem of grounding in our largely post christian society. Claims become so obscure they exit gravity and can float free in space. Self reference becomes the planetary core of whole disciplines.

The problem is that without grounding in something substantive, learning can be white bread: a substance where all the nutrients and calories have been stripped out. The sort of disatisfying, incomplete self reference that has become a hallmark of post modernism and metamodernism isn’t something a pastor could comfort a bereaved widow with. Many friends in my personal life will know I recently had a rough experience at a seminary. It doesn’t essentially change this point, for what it’s worth. I think having buildings with foundations is better than not, even if the foundations are flawed.

Anyway, this is my painting about that whole line of thinking. I made it for my medieval Pittsburgh show, and I’m selling it later this week, so I thought I would write about it.