I recently had the pleasure of exchanging a couple of emails with a colleague of mine regarding my latest published article, He Who Pays the Piper Calls the Tune. In that article, I expanded some of the topics I presented in my speech during the 2021 BASR Annual Conference held (virtually) in Edinburgh. To cut a long story short, in my article I explained the following:
The recent digital turn has had an unprecedented impact on the identity of the academic disciplines that study religions. Expectedly, this shift has brought about a dramatic change in the power dynamics between the main research actors and funders. In particular, historians and humanist scholars have taken the brunt, mostly replaced by data scientists, software engineers, statisticians, psychologists, anthropologists, and biologists alike. Consequently, multimillion-dollar projects aimed at testing historical hypotheses and massive agent-based simulations have been implemented on shaky methodological and epistemological grounds. Concurrently, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, private religious bodies have increasingly replaced public funding, raising important but still unaddressed moral questions about transparency, independence, and potential conflicts of interests. The present article explores the ethically troubling relationship between the boom of Big Data and computational approaches to the study of religions past and present and the infiltration of religious philanthrocapitalism in contemporary neoliberal academia.
[from the Abstract]
Now, the colleague in question didn’t dispute any of the bio-bibliographical, economic, or historical data I presented in my research article. They also basically confirmed that the ultimate aim of some Big Data-driven historical projects is to do away with historical expertise by replacing the need for historians with AI tools purportedly able to “harvest, evaluat[e], and curat[e] high-quality information sets from the Internet and other sources” without human expertise – which is one of the most puzzling, if not epistemologically bonkers, ideas I’ve probably ever come across. Yet, my interlocutor was far from being persuaded insofar as both the moral concerns of my overview and its overall goal were concerned.
Since I believe that in my latest email I did my best to clarify such moral concerns and goals, I have decided to report it here for your consideration. (Please note that I slightly revised and anonymised the email out of respect for my colleague.)
Hi XXX XXX,
thank you very much for reading my article and offering your thoughts on it, very much appreciated.
[…] As I wrote in my article, the most important point is not the individual researchers’ or multidisciplinary teams’ morality when they accepted such funds; rather, the point is that the JTF (and other similar LLCs or foundations) will use the bona-fide scientific pedigree resulting from their academic investments to credit them publicly as acceptable and even necessary to academia. That's just the first step. When is a John Templeton Chair going to be established at a prestigious university? In Oxford they already have a Templeton Green College. And then what? What's the underlying political agenda? What’s the ultimate goal? If this is an “investment” on their part, what’s in there for them, what’s their return on investment? That’s why I decided to read the founder’s biography and delve deeper into the foundation’s core beliefs. And what I found was most troubling and deeply unsettling. I wonder why no one among those who accepted their funds never bothered to check who the donors were.
I am sorry that you focused on only certain aspects I highlighted in my article – it is not a question of intellectual “purity.” What’s at stake is the democratic resilience of our societies.
And I am sorry if I have not underscored this enough, but the impact of US-based, libertarian think-tanks and foundations on European politics and academia has been most disruptive. As I wrote [in my article], the JTF has heavily funded anti-anti-climate change counteractivism to maintain the fossil fuel industry status quo. If that was not enough, the JTF has also financed anti-EU, radical-right, anti-democratic think-tanks involved with the VoteLeave campaign in the UK and the radical-right branch of the Tory Party with the explicit intent to overturn European democracies. I am talking about millions of dollars, money without which the Brexit campaign – including the despicable, if not criminal, anti-democratic use of Big Data and AI tools through social media to sway citizens’ voting preferences (e.g., Cambridge Analytica) – would probably not have been successful. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but the Brexit referendum has been a watershed moment for the institutional “acceptability” of neo-/para-fascist organisations and their violence in all of Europe. The Brexit project managed to embolden all populist and antidemocratic parties in the EU. […] That's as bad as it gets.
Academia is but a step in the JTF’s, and similar bodies’, plan to exert more political control unshackled from institutional constraints – and that’s precisely why I think your parallel with [accepting] institutional funding during the Trump administration does not work: until proven otherwise, and for all their institutional issues and gerrymandering, the USA are still a democratic country and their leaders are formally subject to the judgment of all the citizens during elections. The CEOs of LLCs, foundations, and the likes are instead like Mediaeval kings - and their shareholders act like their feudal barons. They don’t answer to anybody else outside their financial and religious circles. Once they have more control, they will decide the curriculum and get their representatives nominated in radical-right government to shield their interests and strengthen their beliefs (it happened in Italy with Berlusconi, it happened in the US with Trump, it's happening in the UK with populist or libertarian Tory donors nominated peers to sit in the House of Lords, etc.). I lost count of how many times former businessmen/businesswomen, or politicians with ties to questionable corporations, had been nominated education ministers in the US or Europe and tried to impose Intelligent Design or neo-creationist dogmas in the curriculum, or tried to revise the history curriculum. Just imagine the damage a JTF-affiliated businessman or businesswoman can do by citing and maybe distorting “officially-backed, peer-reviewed” scientific research funded by his/her foundation in favour of ID or some other [pseudoscientific belief] – and you know well how many pro-ID research the JTF has funded in our field/s. Then we can kiss our academic freedom goodbye.
I don’t want this to sound like a questionable slippery slope, but we already experienced an attempted fascist coup on 6 January 2021, when MAGA and QAnon supporters stormed the US Capitol, and I lived through the most worrying resurgence of radical-right violence in the UK. [Just to give you an idea of the gravity of the situation,] the previous JTF Chairman and President, Templeton’s son John ‘Jack’ Templeton Jr. (who died in 2015), was one of the major Republican party donors, and he seemingly donated $600,000 dollars to the far-right think tank Center for Security Policy [and delivered rabid radical-right, anti-Muslim, anti-European speeches there.] Remember: the ultimate goal [of these financing private bodies] is to subvert [the current socio-political configuration of] Western democracies. And I won’t bore you with the details of how foundations and LLCs and the likes are established in the US with the aim to clean their potentially dirty money and pay less taxes (a topic that I touched upon in my article [and masterfully explored by sociologist Linsey McGoey in her works]).
There are consequences to what we do in academia - real-life consequences. We cannot, I think, just turn the other way and close our eyes. We have - I firmly believe - the moral duty to do whatever we can, no matter how small and insignificant such an act might be, to preserve science and democracy, the very bases which allow us to conduct our academic research freely in our secular states. But as the dramatic events that marked the 6th of January, 2021 showed us, our modern secular states are most fragile things.
I am not pointing the finger at [any Big-Data-driven historical project] for accepting funds from [such private bodies] in the past. But now [you all] know what's going on there. Now alternative routes can be pursued. Now change can be imagined. If my sincere plea to stand up for democracy, science, climate change activism, and act against shady financial donors with ultimately anti-democratic, para-theocratic, anti-scientific, anti-anti-climate change agendas, fails then I think we have already lost. I believe that, should that be the case, CESR [i.e., Cognitive and Evolutionary Sciences of Religion] as an institutional academic branch will lose its moral ground. If you think that's a personal “crusade” then, I’m sorry, but I think you misread my article and my intentions and I remain at your disposal to clarify my position and ideas further. Because if I fail to convey this simple message - one backed up by historiographical and economic data - to a sympathetic colleague like you, then I don’t think we as a discipline stand a chance to survive “academically” in the long run.
Thanks for the opportunity to share my thoughts with you.
Yours,
Leonardo
Notes
The title of this post is a quote from a chapter by Russell T. McCutcheon (2013). A thought-provoking passage from McCutcheon’s work constitutes the opening epigraph to my article. Here is that passage in full:
“If we are arguing that the category of religion itself ought to be demystified, then perhaps the history of the academic study of religion ought to be demystified as well. Recovering the political in writing that history is therefore one step in that direction” (McCutcheon 2013: 73).
Ref.
McCutcheon, R. T. (2013). “‘Just Follow the Money’: The Cold War, the Humanistic Study of Religion, and the Fallacy of Insufficient Cynicism.” In W. E. Arnal and R. T. McCutcheon (eds), The Sacred Is the Profane: The Political Nature of ‘Religion’, pp. 72–90. New York: Oxford University Press.