This other culture

I realize my blog now ventures into issues of academic culture more often than into Southern culture. I wonder if this means that I've been here long enough that I no longer notice the differences in living here (with the caveat that the South is not a homogeneous lot, so Durham, NC, isn't very representative of much other than itself, really, 57% of its residents being from outside of NC). More likely, having returned to academia in the last few months after a couple of years of respite, this is the culture I am rediscovering anew.
Academics are trained in critical thinking. This much is universal across disciplines and across campuses. This training, especially after years of graduate school acculturation, is as engrained as family of origin, almost as engrained as genetic predisposition, I think. And I wonder, once having crossed into this side of the looking glass, if we can ever turn this damned thing off. Being constantly on the lookout for poor reasoning or fallacy of argument, do we ever listen very well? Must we so diligently search out and question weak assumptions and insufficient data that we fail to hear what IS said, what IS known?
The formal writing of chemistry journals eschews the first person, favoring instead the systematic use of passive voice, such that it seems experiments conduct themselves (grad cylinders magically measuring out reagents and data being found to speak for themselves). What do we hear of the people who conducted the research, let alone wrote the paper? What would happen if we did start to write in the first person?
I remember the wrath of some people (by which I mean my feckless ex-husband) when in grad school another poor soul (by which I mean a grad student), she in the humanities, declared that all disciplines were constructs, physics indeed as well. Her intent was to say that as such, scientific disciplines were indelibly human institutions heavily imprinted with the character of the people who shaped them. Some people rely on the in-humanity (in its happiest sense of the word) of academic thought for security. I remember one Russian physicist on the radio saying the physics was a wonderful escape to reason in the absurdity of former USSR life. Another physicist I knew asked the cheeky question "Do people study physics because they're socially inept, or are they socially inept because they're in physics?" But the brains that have brought us this far in knowledge and understanding are hopelessly flesh and blood nonetheless, irremediably so.
So six months into this new academic chapter, thinking of the conversations I join in all the time, here's to listening, and to letting emotion participate in rational thought. Let's see what happens.