Erm Dark Academia

 Firstly, I apologise, but around the outbreak of the the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I watched Timothy Snyder's Yale lecture series on Ukraine and he was talking about Putin's essay that was like "On the History of Russia and Ukraine" and he said to use "On" was to assert that something was indeed a thing, and I'm fairly confident that "dark academia" is a thing, but not confident that I understand it well enough to be sure I am talking about the thing most people who have any interest in "dark academia" would understand to be dark academia.

And I disclaim my ignorance because of this:

The trend emerged on social media site Tumblr in 2015, as an aesthetic that captured the imaginations of a maturing "Harry Potter generation" ~ From Wikipedia's page on the aesthetic.

So great, now I have to write disdainfully because I can't efficiently process away the emotions evoked by one of the most problematic symptoms of infantalism being that large cohort that cannot get past Harry Potter. This all could have been averted by the prefix "physically" before "maturing." 

Harry Potter is a children's book. I've written about this before in a much longer post, just because Cedric Diggory dies and then a bunch of others does not make HP not a children's book even though the primary cast age-up. Had "The Deathly Hallows" opened with JK graphically describing Harry jerking off as he listened to Ron fingering Hermione because they thought he was asleep when they are fugitives at the beginning, then maybe Harry Potter would not be a series of children's books. But they didn't, we just assume that happened, but The Deathly Hallows is no IT by Steven King with a minors gangbang graphically rendered in prose.

I listened to Donna Tate's "The Secret History" which is generally credited as foundational to the Dark Academia genre. This will largely be what I am talking about when I talk about Dark Academia. I will dither a little upfront though to opine that I find "genres" not so helpful a term. Particularly when I look to music, genre is probably a bad way to approach music. There are either genres so big as to be meaningless - like do NOFX and Blink-182 really have anything meaningful in common? (no doubt more fans than we might assume) and others where a genre mostly consists of an act that basically is THE genre, and then a bunch of Chinatown junk store rip-offs, like Industrial is really just Nine Inch Nails and then what? Ministry okay, Marilyn Manson for one whole album (of his two big ones) and then pick through the list.

I suspect Dark Academia the literary genre is more of the latter type, that in some meaningful sense there's "The Secret History" and then a bunch of dime-store homages that boarder on fan fiction, near as I can discern. 

So this I will say, I think "The Secret History" is a book for grown-ups, depending on one crucial factor - if you find the aesthetic the least interesting or most interesting aspect.

Meat and Potatoes

The heading is really just a milestone to commemorate me finally getting to what I want to talk about in this post - which is the central aesthetic of "The Secret History"

The title you can set aside, it is almost as perfectly neutral as "The Name of the Rose" in terms of describing the content of the story. It is also billed as a reverse-detective story, with opening lines revealing that Bunny was murdered, and I initially learned of this book by watching an old interview of Donna Tart by Charlie Rose. 

What the secret history reminds me of most, is actually "The Great Gatsby" in an almost derivative way, it is allegedly set in 1985 but one could seriously defend an impression it is set in the Gilded Age. Henry reads pretty much as the mysterious Gatsby, Camilla as whoever Gatsby was in love with, Richard functions like Nick Carraway.

The inverted-detective story built no tension for me, which Tart had lured me in with in her interview by sighting Alfred Hitchcock's observation that tension doesn't come from not knowing what will happen, but from knowing there's a bomb under the table and watching diners obliviously eat their dinner as you dread what you know will happen to them - like I imagine the opening scene of "A Touch of Evil" which is Orson Welles not Hitchcock but whatever. 

My thing, as the ebay ads of the moment say, is that I don't care enough about the central cast of characters to feel any tension at all. Their lives and deaths are statistics to me. In short, these are the kids that I would turn up to a college reunion and their aged adult faces would evoke in me the jamais vu that accompanies recognizing someone I had completely forgotten existed.

Richard, Henry, Bunny, Camilla, Charles and Francis are in short, kids on the margins. For me the most interesting aspect of The Secret History was Richard's journey into, and disillusionment of, a clique that turned out to just be unpopular kids.

For others though, I fear, this clique is the precise appeal of "The Secret History" the kind that 30 years after its publication take to tumblr and pinterest and put together vision boards like this:

In an abstract sense I get the appeal, but it's shit.

For my sensitivities, nothing tells me more about an aesthetic than the monomaniacal effort-at-arms-length Koreans and Japanese pour into their pastiches, which then get fetishized by the very cultures they refuse to interact with when making their counterfeits and create a bizarre sad-interest group that also functions as a feedback loop.

Where I can build a bridge with cognitive empathy, is that me and my friends would idly wish aloud to eachother that a bus might rock up and simply take the dicks in our year away, and the removal of two-or-three dickheads could yeild exponential results. 

The thingamajig being, that I'm self aware enough to know that very likely I was on someone else's list of two-or-three dickheads they wish would get deported. Hell is other people, alas. We can choose our friends, but the offcuts don't go anywhere.

Donna Tartt paints a fantasy though, of an eccentric effete professor who handpicks 5 students to study Greek Classical literature as their major, and they do no other subjects and pretty much interact with nobody else. These kids dress like it's 1929, but elsewhere, everywhere it is 1985 so presumably they are hoofing it in wingtip shoes and button down shirts with tweed jackets and wire-framed spectacles while those studying practical majors are wearing acid washed shrink-to-fit Levi 501 distressed jeans, Van Helen cropped t-shirts, bangles and have permanents. 

This is what "Dark Academia" has become to me, a censored-for-comfort Solzhenitsyn quote:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

The central cast of the Secret History impress upon me 5 Xenophobic children who simply do not wish to have to navigate a world populated entirely by their outgroup. Then there is misguided Richard the narrator, who mistakes these losers for elites and entangles himself with them, and is destroyed by their incest. There is also Julian, the professor, who is by Richard's subjective evaluation, awful and encourages the misguided children to pursue their deluded values. He is both gatekeeper and enabler.

This aspect of the Dark Academia is what I find morbidly fascinating. I feel the appeal of this kind of xenophobia is worth at the least, writing a blog post about, because it is rarely recognized as such.

Hirohito was a very naughty deity.

Nietzsche who was likely the darkest academic ever, had his "slave morality" a morality based on resentment, I don't buy wholesale Nietzsche's genealogy of morals, though I suspect phenomena akin to his "slave morality" would be empirically observable in a discipline like anthropology, religious studies, history, sociology etc. One such being a kind of "nerd xenophobia" definitely exhibited by incels, but also I suspect more garden variety unpopular kids.

And in that way, unpopular kids are likely not-too-different from so-called "popular" kids, at the cool table, they wind up in a clique that is roughly the same size as the population of unpopular kids and they likely are both consummed by feelings of inadequacy coped with via judgement of out-groupers.

For me, there is little difference between popular kids wishing everyone who couldn't afford to keep up with seasonal releases by Lulu-lemon would be barred from entering the Brighton Yacht club so they could enjoy an Apperol Spritz or whatever unbothered and unsullied by the outgroup, are morally equivalent to those who wish all the jocks and meatheads and Barbie dolls will be repelled by the Dean of Admissions so they can sit and summarize Proust to each other in the quadrangle, or whatever the appeal of Dark Academia is.

Ricardo is probably the true father of classical economics, and therefore neo-classical economics, which is the mainstream orthodoxy now. As such, there is clearly a lot David Ricardo got wrong, but one thing he cruelly got right is that "absolute advantage" is a thing. He is famous for modelling the benefits of trade by having Portugal produce wine (it was really good at that) and England produced wool or cloth or something (it was really good at that) and then by trading their surplus both economies are better off than if they allocate resources to producing wine and cloth in-house specifically.

That is comparative advantage, and I think some people lack the observational skills not just to miss that the race doesn't always go to the swift nor the battle to the strong etc. but that they don't observe that the athletically gifted can often be academically gifted also, and that the reverse can be tragically true as well, where somebody with no athletic ability can be twice cursed with no real academic ability either. Hence you can find in Oxbridge no-doubt, students reading in Law or Medicine (I don't know how their archaic system works) doing rowing and cricket on the weekend, where those who read Sociology (I don't know) eat Doritos (I know the british call these "Nachos" and pronounce it wrong despite the reputations of Oxbridge) and drink mountain dew and have little awareness of what day of the week it is.

Dark Academia isn't cringe because it doesn't impress me as having risen to even that level of self-awareness, it isn't obliviousness either, nor oblivion. Its an immature person's idea of maturity, maturity as liberation abrogating all social obligations to cooperate with the full gamut of human quality that would better be described as "infancy" than maturity. The seeking of sanctums preferably indoor ones, under the misguided notion that anxiety is "out there" rather than within. 

Whereas actual maturity, involves a lot of acceptance, especially of responsibility. It is in many senses, an act of making way for the immature. 

Concluding remarks

Okay, you probably get that I'm not a fan of Dark Academia, is Donna Tartt's book worth reading? Yes. Just don't go nuts, and there's better books for sure that I'd read first, so many one could be forgiven for not getting around to it. That said, The Secret History is one to read sooner than Harry Potter, provided you are not a child. Children's books are appropriate for children, and grown up books have more utility for adults. 

More important to say than that though, is that I firmly believe that responsibility is a prerequisite of maturity, and the meting out of meaningful responsibility has been less and less generous since the late 70s, I suspect rivalling only growing wealth inequality as a social transfer.

Remaining a child into your mid-20s or even early 30s is somewhat appropriate to the circumstances the economy presents young people with. Forget the "AI" shit, due to quirks of habit and sensitivity we have been operating in an eccentric, inefficient and irrational economy for decades already. 

Boomers entered executive positions in the late 80s for superstars, and early 90s for the mediocre and 40 years later they are largely still there. They are retiring and dying off in record numbers, but consider Gen X in a holding pattern for 30 years. 

Yeah, fucken play quidditch then, doomscroll tik tok videos, there's no rush particularly for the mediocre for you to be called in to the economy to do any chores. There's already 6 people lifting the couch and a 7th would get in the way.

The real issue, is the xenophobia, you may not need to mature and in some ways it may be better if you take your sweet time doing it. But these exclusive cliques aren't good for anybody and its better if you learn to play nice.

There is plenty of pressure on the jocks to play nice, to stop bullying. Pressure on unpopular kids to socialize - as in, not just interact with others, but to learn to navigate social situations - has never been lower. I fear there are many that regard this as progress, and that's not even counting the screen writer of The Predator 2018 that propagates the idea that the non-verbal autistic are actually the next step of human evolution as well as getting every single other thing one could get wrong in a movie wrong making for a fascinating case study in cinema.

Solidarity with the precariat, it is the fastest growing class. Get out of your xenophobic lifeboat and talk to your uber driver, answer fucking phone calls. You can still spend most of your time at play, just your schema for life can't be "Mum! Dad!" romanticisation of Oedipus Rex. If your childhood was deprived of unsupervised play, a campus in your 20s is a great place to redress it, just...try not to get raped.