Mark O’Connell’s Saturday’s column in The Irish Times is a great read of who and what appears in the world of social media. Well worth a read.
If you want to understand the monopoly position that X now occupies within the booming grievance economy of the online right, you would do well to observe the reaction to a post by a young academic named Ally Louks, who was recently awarded a PhD in English literature by Cambridge University.
“Thrilled to say I passed my viva with no corrections and am officially PhDone,” posted Louks, along with a photograph of herself proudly holding a bound copy of her thesis. The title of the thesis, visible in gold lettering above the Cambridge Crest, is Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose. Louks’s follow-up post, a screen-grab of her thesis abstract, made clear that it explored racial implications of the language of smell in English literature of the postwar period.
A normal person, seeing this post, might react in any number of ways – perhaps “Fair play to that young lady, that’s quite an achievement”, or “That’s certainly a niche subject, but then again such is the nature of PhD theses” – before immediately scrolling on and forgetting about all about the newly minted Dr Louks and her delight in her intellectual achievement.
But X has never been a place for normal people; it has become even less so since being reshaped by Elon Musk, over the past couple of years, in his own damp and pallid image. The response to Louks is genuinely startling, even within the context of the toxic sludge of bile and stupidity in which users of the site have been stewing for some time. The fact she has borne it with composure and even humour, refusing to perform victimhood, seems only to have inflamed the rage of her abusers.
“Too bad you’re not holding a baby,” reads one fairly typical reply, “we need those more than we need a dissertation on racist smells.” “This woman is why everything is falling apart . . . She got a PhD for this, and from the looks of her, she probably believes that this entitles her to an extremely high-status lifestyle,” reads another.
These are among the more measured reactions. Louks later posted a screenshot of one email she had received, saying she had reported it to the police. It began with “You are the dumbest f***ing bitch I have ever seen on the internet” and concluded with an explicit threat of gang rape.
What is it about Louks and her PhD thesis that has driven young, mostly right-wing men to such feral extremes of rage and despair? Well, the most obvious factor here is her being a young woman, which is a risky position to be in on the internet at the best of times. In the light of the inferno of misogyny that has engulfed her, the image of Louks holding her bound thesis appears symbolically overdetermined: smiling with pride and relief, cradling in her arms the fruit not of maternal but of intellectual labour.
The “too bad you’re not holding a baby” comment comes from an account associated with the “Tradwife” subculture, a movement characterised by an iconography of pre-feminist kitsch: happy and obedient wives in aprons, embracing traditional gender roles within single-income nuclear families. Inside the online dream-space of this patriarchal revanchism, the idea of a woman spending her years of fertile marriageability in pursuit of intellectual self-determination is always going to excite a fury of libidinal intensity.
And in this regard there is, furthermore, the topic of the thesis itself. Its title, and the language of its abstract, is heavily inflected with the language of social justice – with terms such as intersectionality and “misogynoir” – and was therefore bound to prick the many ears nowadays finely attuned to frequencies of anti-wokeness. For such people, Louks’s thesis is evidence of a tendency for everything to be viewed through a lens of racist oppression. Anti-woke sentiment exists along a broad ideological spectrum, from left to right: some are wary of the tendency to reduce the reality to a panoply of interlocking grievances, others are simply reactionaries who don’t want to hear about empires being bad or racial prejudices being built into societal structures.
But beneath the chaotic clamour surrounding Louks’s thesis can be heard, too, the steady thrum of crude anti-intellectualism. A great many of the responses to her post are along the lines of “Why are public funds being frittered away on things I myself would never read, and which serve no discernible social function?” Such reactions badly misunderstand the point of a PhD. A doctoral thesis, in English literature as with any academic discipline, is supposed to be extremely narrow in its focus; it is intended to be read by only a tiny handful of experts in a given area, who will assess the author’s contribution to that field of knowledge. You spend four years digging very deep into a small corner of your chosen field of research, and in the process you become a scholar.
A society in which such activities are under suspicion – in which the work of academics in the humanities is denigrated for its failure to conform to market imperatives – is a society that is one step closer to barbarism. I can understand why most people would not be interested in reading Louks’s PhD thesis (just as no one outside of my narrow sub-discipline is particularly interested in reading mine), but I wouldn’t want to live in a world where people are not given the time and space to pursue such work, and in which the understanding of its value is lost.
But there is something else going on here, too, a primal performance of communal hatred and contempt. The people attacking Ally Louks online are not, in the end, really attacking Louks herself, so much as a pasteboard figure hastily erected in her image, and intended to stand for everything wrong with the world: woke academia, feminists, leftist-elite intellectuals, and so forth.
In his 1972 book Violence and the Sacred, the French philosopher René Girard advanced an eccentric but influential theory about sacrificial violence, based on an observation of ancient and classical mythology and culture: in periods where societal cohesion is threatened by conflict, he writes, humans collectively channel their aggressions and frustrations towards an individual, or a clearly defined group, on whom the crisis can be blamed, and who can be punished, killed or banished.
This sacrificial violence has a kind of restorative function: in projecting all its bad qualities – all its internal conflicts and contradictions – on to a scapegoat, the group can impose a societal cohesion. Oedipus is expelled and peace restored to Thebes. The innocent is slaughtered and the gods are appeased.
We do not need to look too hard to find more contemporary examples of this phenomenon. Some of those election posters, after all, were still up yesterday. And so too are those replies to Dr Louks’s post about her PhD.
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