A revelatory thought I had about “our culture” is that, because of our investigating impulse about the world, we've developed a self-reflexive muscle that allows us to critique ourselves. This is sometimes labeled as “the bad” part of humanities, although I think of it as our salvation so long as we learn how to “look in the mirror.”
Martin Gurri is a writer and former CIA analyst who is promoting the idea that the self-reflexive and critical nature rampant in the “humanities” (which inevitably includes the social sciences, such as history) is the major force which is degrading our culture.
Implicit in the critique of our capacity to re-analyze history is a critique of Michel Foucault, whose work, which included the history of state surveillance, is often attributed to being “structuralist,” which is a methodological approach in the social sciences which interprets elements of human culture by way of their relationship to a broader system. Which is to say Foucault likely did not rewrite history, and his work was likely one of the most major influences of the twentieth century on our thought today.
What is a former CIA analyst doing when he critiques the movement in the social sciences to structurally understand the history of the most dangerous institutions of our society - the asylum and the prison?
I remember when I was in college, in an anthropology of religion class, we watched a video about a tribe which practiced ritualized homosexuality and semen ingestion among all members who were not fully grown men: all women and children were required to perform fellatio and ingest semen under the pretense that it was how the men “transferred energy and power” to the lesser people.
We live in the tribe that studies that tribe, and every other tribe. Why can’t we study our own tribe?