I think these attitudes are not confined to philosophy. That alone would have had quite a small impact on society. The problem is that these attitudes are much more widespread in humanities as a whole and in large parts of mass media.
Certainly not confined to philosophy, but it is surprising that they are so widely shared by philosophy–what about reason, truth, justification, etc? I have a new definition of a university: a place where ignorant mobs gather to destroy intelligent people.
Alas, it’s not surprising. It’s an example of an inherent tendency for the bourgeoisie in an advanced capitalist society to evolve to the point of feeling guilty and to desire to consume itself in order to expunge that guilt. Roger Kimball, in his sloppy but sometimes wise book “The Long March,” pinpoints this:
“[T]he behavior of the ‘revolutionaries’ of the counterculture consistently exhibited that most common of bourgeois passions, anti-bourgeois animus—expressed, as always, safely within the swaddling clothes of bourgeois security. As Allan Bloom remarked in ‘The Closing of the American Mind,’ the cultural revolution proved to be so successful on college campuses partly because of ‘the bourgeois’s need to feel that he is not bourgeois, to have dangerous experiments with the unlimited…. Anti-bourgeois ire is the opiate of the Last Man.’ It almost goes without saying that, like all narcotics, the opiate of antibourgeois ire was both addictive and debilitating.”
That was a great article indeed, but it won’t change much…
Here is more of the same in Boghossian’s letter of resignation from Portland State:
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/my-university-sacrificed-ideas-for
That’s a remarkable article. What amazes me is that those kinds of attitudes are now prevalent in philosophy.
I think these attitudes are not confined to philosophy. That alone would have had quite a small impact on society. The problem is that these attitudes are much more widespread in humanities as a whole and in large parts of mass media.
Certainly not confined to philosophy, but it is surprising that they are so widely shared by philosophy–what about reason, truth, justification, etc? I have a new definition of a university: a place where ignorant mobs gather to destroy intelligent people.
Alas, it’s not surprising. It’s an example of an inherent tendency for the bourgeoisie in an advanced capitalist society to evolve to the point of feeling guilty and to desire to consume itself in order to expunge that guilt. Roger Kimball, in his sloppy but sometimes wise book “The Long March,” pinpoints this:
“[T]he behavior of the ‘revolutionaries’ of the counterculture consistently exhibited that most common of bourgeois passions, anti-bourgeois animus—expressed, as always, safely within the swaddling clothes of bourgeois security. As Allan Bloom remarked in ‘The Closing of the American Mind,’ the cultural revolution proved to be so successful on college campuses partly because of ‘the bourgeois’s need to feel that he is not bourgeois, to have dangerous experiments with the unlimited…. Anti-bourgeois ire is the opiate of the Last Man.’ It almost goes without saying that, like all narcotics, the opiate of antibourgeois ire was both addictive and debilitating.”
I think it’s bloodthirsty insanity–never far from the human veneer of civilization.