All quotations here come from that source.
Professor Fox shows uncommon readiness to blow the gaff on his colleagues, saying this conference marks a departure from their former activities. These have included huge and extravagant social events, disguised as international meetings, which served no serious intellectual purpose, the papers presented being usually boring, pointless and skimpy, seldom including anything not already known, and having no purpose other than to secure a travel allowance for the presenter. Most of their published 'proceedings' went straight onto library shelves, to lie there undisturbed. Systematic ideology argues from the foraging communities which have been directly studied by anthropologists to those formed by the first human beings, treating the modern communities to some extent as living examples of the paleolithic. This procedure sometimes gets challenged, and indeed its validity is limited to features of a particular type.