Is there something behind academic verbosity

The vapid, self-indulgent verbosity of the latter-day academia has become proverbial.  Clever jibes from inside the ivory tower like the infamous Postmodernism Generator make a nice exposé of the likes of Homi Bhabha's 90-minute projectile verbal vomit.

However, is there anything more to academic pontification than an elaborate (and often well-funded) exercise in intellectual masturbation. Actually, rather often than not egg-headed boffins do make sense but their wording is so arcane that it does sound like. Let me furnish you with an example.

"The mythopoetical totality of Western hegemonic discourses serves as the epistemological base for the post-colonial legitimation of the Eurocentric world order." In reality, put in plain English, it boils down to "white folks know better so get on with it!" but you can't really say that, can you?

The years of immersion into that kind of jargon make academics incapable of expressing themselves in any other way. As a result, whatever ground-breaking revelations they may have about the world, stays safely within the campus, for the rest of the world can see their lips moving but can't comprehend what they are saying.

 

Ritual and its meaning

We do need more than "thick descriptions" of the social embeddedness of rituals, unless we assume that external bells and whistles are all there's to a ritual or a belief.

Thing is that the Dreaming (the primary process thinking) is always present within the mind, albeit unbeknownst to or ignored by the conscious. Initiation ceremonies provide an immediate experience of it, connecting the individual to their unconscious mind and its timeless archetypes. Monotheistic religions and later scientific rationality have ruthlessly uprooted those under the rubric of paganism, thus depriving us of an essential human experience, necessary to experience one's life meaningfully.

That said, many rituals have been hollowed out, become mere motions to go through, acquired or were assigned a different meaning to serve purposes different to the original ones, or are experienced as mere cultural/social conventions even by those who are put through them.

Time

The primary process thinking, up to 90% of brain activity, knows no time the way we think of it consciously. It's the same as the mythical time, it's particular and eternal at the same time.

How can we shut down racism?

Flocking into groups based on any shared, real or imaginary, trait is a basic human drive. The good side of it is that humans can only survive by cooperating. On the flipside are racism, xenophobia, homophobia, sexism, groupthink, etc. It takes a self-realised individuated human to become aware to what extent one needs to be part of a group and when it is time to say, 'I'm out of here'. Overcoming group dynamic by propaganda and mass education will mostly create knee-jerk reactions of the anti-political-correctness kind. Even when suppressed very effectively, sooner or later this will burst into something ugly (kind of like suppressed wish pops up elsewhere as a neurosis): just look at how rampantly and shamelessly xenophobic have become the supposed bulwarks of tolerance like Holland and Denmark.

The preachers of Neo-Liberalism, beware of what you preach

The real problem for people who adopt the Neo-Liberal rhetoric of the deserving vs. the undeserving in relation to social security, universal healthcare, free comprehensive education, etc. is that in 99% of cases they are NOT the ones who will actually decide who deserves and who doesn't, and the chances are that at some point of time in their lives, those very people will get the shitty end of the stick of the policies defined and justified by the very views they so eagerly profess now. A classic case of human ignorance sawing off the branch one is sitting on.

Social difference, the alpha and omega of any human group

 "The system produces only waste and social difference", quoth Baudrillard in 1970. The strife to achieve the latter, however, is in fact one of the prime drivers, rather than mere outcomes, of the whole shebang.

Post-modernism and post-structuralism

A lot of contemporary social, literary and cultural theory (Latour a prime example) so obviously comes from white male upper-middle class arm-chair pontificators who have never experienced any kind of discrimination or even material discomfort so they feel free to blabber on how power is everywhere, everyone is an agent and everything in the world boils down to a bunch of abstruse, yet flashy buzzwords.  Argumentum verbosium at its best funded.