This post was drafted at about the same time as Cultural Altruism (Hubs), while hypomanic, and while I do endorse its basic ideas, I feel like in a way it doesn't represent me.
Would it be possible to create an alternative to academia for Christian (or maybe many other kinds of) scholarship?
[This post doesn't really get into anything specifically Christian.]
Academia is expensive, time-consuming, and imposes a culture of professionalism and careerism on people in it. People get PhDs, a huge investment of time, effort, and money, but then can't get jobs that use that education. If you love ideas and facts for their own sakes, you might throw yourself at the process (of higher education) like an artist, and be left paying for it for years to come.
Further, from my limited personal experience, I think that the pinnacle of an intellectual social life is grad school, with undergrad and being a professor tied for second place. (I have been an undergraduate, and spent a lot of time around a grad school department, observing both grad students and professors.)
Also, I have heard it mentioned by defenders of higher education (for instance, Alice Cappelle in one of her YouTube videos on higher education) that there is something that do-it-yourself scholarship lacks, rigor. Do you know how to do good research? This is something you might not be able to figure out on your own. Also, it's true that formal education can help you to write papers which will meet the minimum bar for publication in academic journals.
Another advantage of traditional higher education is access to sources. Maybe the university pays for access to a bunch of paywalled sources and lets the students have access "for free". Or maybe there are books that can only be read if you know someone who can get you access (I'm sort of making up this example) and you access that person by being part of some official research job you get through the university.
And relatedly, at a university, you meet people who can help you "get somewhere" as a scholar.
I am somewhat of an outsider to this topic, so my ideas may have flaws that I am unaware of, but here are some thoughts for how, starting with the above considerations, it might be possible to avoid formal higher education and still be a scholar.
I would start with the idea of "endless grad school" -- endless grad school without any time pressures. ("No deadlines, no degree, no debt.") For this, you need to bring together other like-minded people. Two layers: online and in-person. Pick a city to make into a "endless grad school" hub, and maybe a part of that city to focus on. Try to get all the unattached people to move there. For the online component, maybe use existing networks like Twitter, or make your own forum.
In this endless grad school, you will have to have a day job (just like regular grad school, for some people). You will also have to teach new people the research skills and paper-writing techniques that you learned in traditional academia, or which have been handed down within the endless grad school. You will meet in person (or online) and talk about things. You will be an amateur, and not a professional, but, a serious amateur, capable of getting papers published. (Grad school is the confluence of seriousness and amateurism. Undergrads are less serious amateurs, and professors are serious but less amateur.)
Amateurism is a good thing. You don't want to lose your amateurism. Amateurism connects you with what really matters.
You could enter endless grad school after getting a master's or PhD. Hopefully you would not have too much debt that way. Can a master's or PhD pay off your debt? Maybe not, if you can't get a job in academia. If you have to have a day job, why not have one in a place where you can be part of endless grad school, and make endless grad school your passionate hobby and social life?
Or, you could skip regular grad school and go straight to endless grad school. What would be the disadvantages of that? Maybe you would lack credentials. Well, if you don't have credentials, what do you lose? Maybe some journals won't read your articles? Why do you need to be published in a journal? To get tenure? It's true that professors are well-paid (I think, compared to the average American) and can pursue scholarship full-time. To be a professor, you do need credentials. And you have to play politics and get into status games, and network, and so on. But at endless grad school, you can dispense with all of that, get a day job, and pursue your passions. If you want a job in academia, as a professor, maybe you can get it. But in some fields, your chances aren't that great. So just take a load off and go to endless grad school, unless you really want to play the game.
Will your work not be heard by other people? Maybe, but who cares? I personally am an altruistic-oriented person and couldn't let myself pursue work that didn't have an altruistic edge to it if I could help it. But I am also an artist and intellectual and so if I couldn't figure out some way to be altruistic through art or thinking, I would have a conflict, and probably end up still pursuing art and thinking, but maybe somewhat less. If you're an artist or intellectual, you are stuck with your obsessions and delights, and you have to make the best of your life. So, pursue thinking for thinking's sake (ideas, facts, truth, for their own sake), and just try to do the best job you possibly can, and don't worry about worldly success.
If you are altruistically minded, and are weighing where you can have the greatest impact, I can make a case for endless grad school maybe being good at some things that academia is bad at. In endless grad school, your only motivation is to do things that are interesting. You don't have to "publish or perish". You can try bold new ideas, risking nothing but your own free time. You can remain in touch with the world, by preserving your amateur spirit for decades and decades, surrounded by fellow amateurs who keep the fires alive.
Dogmatism (one definition) is when on a very deep level you are no longer indexing yourself to reality, to what is but might be otherwise than you understand it to be. Becoming a professional is to have become who you are going to be for the rest of your life, to turn your mind and flow of work into a tool that can be articulated with the demands of a mechanized / "economized" society. But an amateur can keep looking to what is going on, and can keep learning new things and becoming a new person, and in this way stay in tune with reality. It's unfortunate that the most trusted people in our society are professionals, who on many levels are competent to speak, but who on the deepest levels have lost touch with reality.
Dogmatism, pattern-boundness, wisdom, is effective, and 90% of the time is better than radical freedom, random thinking, and naivete. But you have to understand (something I learned from We Are Not Saved) that being really good at the 90% of things that don't really matter, but missing the critical thing in the 10%, is a good way for society to die, in the long run. Plenty of people are betting on the 90%, but can we have better (higher quality or quantity) of pursuit of the things that only pay off 10% of the time? Probably we need to have communities of amateurs.
Why would scholarship matter so much? When I say "scholarship", I'm thinking of things that go into culture: studies of religion, politics, history, criticism, some philosophy, maybe others. Reading old books, figuring out the more or less right way to think about the culture of the past (or ruling out wrong ways). Or ideas about where to take culture, what kinds of "speeches to give". In some ways, the altruistic / world-changing side of this is obvious (like when you influence public policy). But there is a lot of work done in these areas that is of tenuous connection to things like "are people starving?" or "are people going to heaven?". Amateurs in endless grad school could think of the ways in which there can be "spiritual X-risks", or other bad outcomes, if culture goes the wrong way. They could think about the far future of culture, and also about the ways to apply the resources of existing scholarship (and of the things that scholarship looks at) to try to focus on those basic altruistic questions ("are people starving?" "are people going to heaven?"). These are roles that I am not sure the existing academic system pursues or incentivizes well.
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I'm not sure about the paywalled sources. It may be cheaper to pay for paywalled sources as an independent researcher than to pay off student debt. I will concede that there are probably some special sources that can only be accessed through the academic system (perhaps rare papyri that haven't been digitized, or something like that).
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I don't know if this post introduces a lot of new ideas that humanities scholars haven't thought of before. Except, maybe articulating scholarship with altruism. I would guess that humanities scholars may have even thought "what if there was some place we could all live and pursue our humanities pursuits for the rest of our lives?" I assume the reason why a hub for non-academic scholarship doesn't exist is partly due to lack of coordination. Are there any really advantageous places to locate such a hub? For the very related topic of "cultural altruism", which might be a superset of Christian scholarship (and many other kinds of humanities scholarship), I thought of what I feel (tentatively) is a strong candidate for such a location. You can read about that here.
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