American Philosophy

American Philosophy

I take a distant, almost forensic, interest is the state of American philosophy. It is not what it was. It is nowhere near as good. It verges on the bad. All the excellent departments are in decline and soon will be mediocre at best. Once the last of the older faculty, now in their eighties, are gone the younger remnants will not compare to their illustrious forbears. Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley, UCLA, Rutgers, NYU (I could go on) will soon be pale shadows of their former selves (they are already). The people in these places are just not as smart, not as original, not as literate as their predecessors (sorry, but it’s true). Many, in my view, are just plain useless–glorified graduate students at best. Relative to their contemporaries, they might seem okay, but judged more absolutely, they are a bunch of nobodies—dull, inept, uninspiring. Why is this? Philosophy has never been richer money-wise, teaching loads are lighter, the technology is greatly superior—it’s the people. To me they seem philistine and uneducated, callow and conformist. Is it the general state of the culture—people have just become less intelligent? Is it the internet? It can’t be television (that old scapegoat).

I think it is a combination of factors: entertainment culture, the decline of reading, fear of the new, and the abandonment of meritocracy. I think of my younger colleagues in days past: dull, institutional, narrowly careerist, unoriginal, boring, limited. Add to this the drive towards “diversity”, which is dangerously close to being anti-meritocratic. With it we have a loss of respect for objective intellectual values. Here feminists (so-called) have a lot to answer for. The Left has grown increasingly anti-rational and anti-truth. The right has always been pure ideology and rabidly anti-intellectual. People have become (more) spineless and brainless. What is the solution? There is none, except to bleat on about how things used to be and could be again. We are entering the philosophical dark ages. It has been a long time since I heard anything interesting from anyone under sixty (or even seventy). Philosophy is in a bad state, and I wonder how long it can last. It has always been under suspicion and now the chopping-block looms.