The university system has a vice-hold grip on what we consider ‘true’. However, academia has for a long time only served a materialistic picture of the universe, and so ‘truth’ really just means ‘scientific materialism’. This state of play is kept going in universities by a culture of group-think, dogma and disenchantment – where student well-being is left by the waste side, writes Jules Evans.

‘Esalen existed in the liminal space between academia and the counterculture.’

So reads a line in Jeffrey Kripal’s history of Esalen, where he’s the director of the Centre for Research. It made me think of my own relationship to academia.

Esalen is a place in Big Sur, California, set up in 1962, which offers week and weekend-long courses, mainly in personal growth. It is like an alternative college, exploring topics that academia was scared to touch (ecstatic experiences, psychedelics, alternative medicine etc), but also exploring new ways of knowing, beyond the lecture format, like the encounter session, the trip. Why did it require a non-academic college to explore these ideas?

Academia has a kind of vice-hold on western culture, and on what is designated ‘truth’. It has one dominant mind-set — rational-intellectual and resolutely secular; one main method of learning — the lecture; and one main method of evaluation — the exam. Its culture was defined by the sociologist Max Weber, in his very influential lecture of 1917, ‘Science as a Vocation’.

Weber insisted that academia must be committed to the search for objective rational truth. It must have no other values than that. It must resist the temptation to serve other gods, such as happiness or wisdom. The lecture room must not become a church pulpit, he insisted.

This defence of the objectivity of academia sounds heroic but was in fact profoundly disingenuous. Academic culture is not a ‘view from nowhere’. Weber was deeply committed to one view, one ideology — secular naturalism — and he envisaged academics as foot-soldiers for the advance of this ideology. Academia is, for him, a machine for disenchantment. That dogma academics are very much encouraged and expected to preach. In fact, it is so all-encompassing it is simply taken for granted.

Academia has a kind of vice-hold on western culture, and on what is designated ‘truth'.

Yes, his attitude to disenchantment is ambivalent. Yes, he thinks the modern godless condition is somewhat tragic. But we must face it like adults. To believe in anything except secular materialism is to collapse into childish superstition, he tells us sternly.

So what Weber really means by ‘serving objective truth’ is ‘serving secular materialism’. If you do not commit to that ideology, you are an enemy of academia, a ghost in the machine, a throwback, an evolutionary vestige. You are a male nipple.

Also, academia has long had a tendency to group-think. This is a consequence of the peer-review system, maybe, and the hierarchical nature of PhD supervision. It is very difficult to think outside established lines of thinking. You get bitten, like a husky that has strayed out of the tracks. That’s why ‘paradigm shifts’ (I hate that phrase) often start outside of academia. When there was a shift from the Aristotelian to the materialist worldview in the 17th century, for example, it was pioneered by thinkers outside of academia, like Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes and Thomas Hobbes.

Since the 1950s, there has been a slow shift against the rationalist-materialist ideology, to try and re-integrate forbidden ways of knowing — dreams, visions, trance states, mystical, psychedelic and paranormal experiences, and somatic knowledge (knowing with the body).