For the most
part, Americans loath mind-challenging excursions into philosophy.
At times, certain other forms of intellectual activity are
judged more-or-less tolerable, but only to the extent that
they are conducted in pursuit of practical academic certifications
or job-related advancements. To be sure, many Americans
do remain conspicuously proud of their specific educational
accomplishments and associations, but only rarely because
of any connections to genuine learning.
Still, in the
final analysis, core origins of America’s intellectual
decline are best explained by philosophy. Reasoning as an
educated European in the late 20th century, German philosopher
Karl Jaspers observes succinctly in Reason and Anti-Reason
in our Time (1971): “The enemy is the unphilosophical
spirit which knows nothing and wants to know nothing of
truth.” Though there is nothing tangible about such
a spirit – and while the philosopher’s subtle
indictment would soar indecipherably over the heads of most
Americans – this demeaning spirit has palpable consequences.
Inter alia,
it is anything but benign.
We should begin
at the beginning. What does it really mean for a nation
to be “anti-intellectual”? On its face, intellect
is “elitist.” Always. At a minimum, intellect
seems impractical, contrived, “highfalutin.”
Typically, in the United States, from its very beginnings,
the most casual mention of “intellect” or “intellectual”
has been met with opprobrium. In essence, such mention has
elicited precious little in the way of curiosity. Instead,
it has brought forth variously acrimonious cries of disapproval,
an openly belligerent rancor and abundantly witless howls
of execration.
So what (if
anything) has changed? Credo quia absurdum, exclaimed
the ancient philosopher Tertullian, “I believe because
it is absurd.”
Significantly,
with few discernible exceptions, the United States celebrates
pragmatic accomplishments and “common sense.”
Don’t bother with abstract or speculative learning,
we are instructed early on, especially when any dedicated
citizen excursions into literature, philosophy, art and
poetry “don’t pay?” This command becomes
still more worrisome when the broadest meanings of Jaspers’
“enemy” is uncovered and understood. Far worse
than “merely” knowing nothing of truth, the
philosopher already understood, is “wanting to know
nothing of truth.”
This distinction
is more than a matter of degree. It is vastly meaningful
per se.
There are assorted
pertinent details. Truth is exculpatory, always, and a proper
answer ought always to be prompt, unhesitant and unambiguous.
Accordingly, there are times for every nation when history,
science and intellect will deserve an absolute pride of
place. Recalling Plato’s parable of the cave in The
Republic, our American politics and Realpolitik-driven
foreign policies are just “reflection.” Inevitably,
they are mere “shadows” of reality, epiphenomenal
and misleading.
In the United
States, politics still offers only a deformed reflection
of what lies below. This American politics also reveals
a problematic vacancy of “soul.” Sometimes,
such wearying vacancies warrant even closer analytic attention
than usual. Today, especially after Trump-led efforts at
seditious conspiracy and cultivated criminality, we are
in one of those dissembling times.
Donald J. Trump
is gone from the White House, but there are compelling reasons
to fear his return (directly, or by obeisant surrogates)
in 2024. The crudely retrograde and simplifying sentiments
that first brought him to presidential power still endure
unabated. Now, still lacking the refined intellectual commitments
of mind necessary for dignified democratic governance, "We
the people" ought not to display incredulity at the
unprecedented breadth or depth of our political failures.
And the next
time could be much worse.
Too-many American debilities remain rooted in a presumptive
“common sense.” Over the years, it remains difficult
too contest, American well-being and political freedom have
sprung from variously orchestrated postures of engineered
consumption. But in this steeply confusing derivation, our
national marching instructions have stayed clear and demeaning:
“You are what you buy.” It follows from such
planned misdirection that the country’s ever-growing
political scandals and failures represent the predictable
product of a society where anti-intellectual and unheroic
lives are routinely encouraged. Even more insidious, American
success is measured not by any rational criteria of mind,
compassion or “soul,” but dolefully, mechanically,
without commendable purpose and without any “collective
will.”
There is more,
much more. What most energetically animates American politics
today is not any valid interest in progress or survival,
but steadily-escalating fears of personal insignificance.
Though most apparent at the presidential level, such insignificance
can be experienced collectively, by an entire nation. Either
way, its precise locus of origin concerns certain deeply-felt
human anxieties about not being valued, about not “belonging,”
about not being “wanted at all.”
For any long-term
intellectual renaissance to become viable, an unblemished
candor must first be encouraged. Ground down by the demeaning
babble of half-educated pundits and jabbering politicos,
"We the people" are rarely motivated by any elements
of real insight or recognizable courage. We are just now
learning to understand how badly our Constitution was recently
battered by dissembling voices of anti-reason, of assaults
by a law-violating head of state who “loved the poorly
educated,” proudly read nothing (nothing at all) and
who yearned not to serve his country, but only to receive
plaudits (and monetary “donations”) from its
self-deceiving citizens.
Truth is exculpatory.
Donald J. Trump abhorred any challenging considerations
of law, intellect or independent thought. For the United
States, it became a lethal and unforgivable combination.
At the chaotic
end of his incoherent tenure, the former president’s
personal defeat was paralleled by near-defeat of the entire
nation. Lest anyone forget, the catastrophic events at the
Capitol on January 6, 2021 were designed to undermine or
overthrow the rule of Constitutional order in the United
States. The once-unimaginable plan failed not because it
lacked criminal intent (mens rea), but because
its backers lacked all relevant intellectual and historical
understandings. If there hadn’t been such an evident
lack, leaders of the American insurrection would have readily
understood that an SA-style (Sturmabteilung) para-military
force would need augmentation by a more seemingly “respectable”
infrastructure of field commanders and organizational bureaucrats.
There is more.
To understand the Trump presidency’s self-induced
declensions, we must learn to look beyond “reflections,”
beyond transient personalities and beyond the daily news.
Even now, in these United States, a willing-to-think individual
is little more than a quaint artifact of some previously
imagined narrative. Even now, more refractory than ever
to courage, intellect and learning, much of our American
“mass” displays no decipherable intentions of
taking itself seriously.
Quite the contrary.
“Headpieces
filled with straw . . .” is the way poet T S Eliot
would have characterized present-day American citizens.
He would have observed, further, an embittered American
“herd” marching insistently backward, cheerlessly,
wittingly senseless, in pitiful lockstep toward still impending
collective declensions.
What’s
next for America’s increasingly-imperiled Republic?
For the moment, whatever our specific political leanings
or party loyalties, "We the people" have at least
restored a basic normalcy to the White House. At the same
time, our self-battering country still imposes upon its
exhausted people the hideously breathless rhythms of a vast
and uncaring machine.Once again, we witness, each and every
day, an endless line of trains, planes and automobiles transporting
weary Americans to yet another robotic workday, a day too-often
bereft of any pleasure or reward, and a day filled with
yet another inexplicable inventory of mass shootings.
Let us be candid.
Even for those who can “work from home,” the
cumulative outlook for happiness is dreary at best.
“I think
therefore I am,” announced Descartes, but what exactly
do Americans “think?” Answers should come quickly
to mind. But even now, We the people lack any unifying sources
of national cohesion except for celebrity sex scandals,
local sports team loyalties, inane conspiracy theories and
the hideously murderous brotherhoods of gratuitous violence.
As for the more
than seven million people stacked cheek to jowl in our medieval
prisons, two-thirds of those released will likely return
to lives of crime and mayhem. Simultaneously, the most senior
and recognizable white collar criminals – in part,
those Trump-era sycophants who managed to transform their
humiliating personal cowardice into a religion – can
look forward to lucrative book contracts and to far-reaching
immunity from criminal prosecutions. Ironically, these contract
agreements, prima facie, are for manuscripts that
they themselves are intellectually unfit to write.
"We the
people" inhabit the one society that could have been
different. Once upon a time we displayed discernible potential
to nurture individuals to become more than a “mass,”
“herd” or “crowd.” Then, Ralph Waldo
Emerson described the United States as a nation animated
by industry and “self-reliance,” not moral paralysis,
fear and bitter trembling. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
would have urged Americans to “learn to live upon
mountains” (that is, to becomewillfully thinking individuals),
but today a declining nation remains grudgingly content
with the tiniest of metaphoric “elevations.”
In Zarathustra,
Nietzsche warns decent civilizations never to seek the “higher
man” at the “marketplace,” but that is
where a “practical” America discovered Donald
J. Trump. What went so badly wrong? Though basically a manipulative
confidence man, Trump was seemingly very rich. How then
could he possibly not have been both smart and virtuous?
Perhaps the best answer lies in Reb Tevye’s clarifying
remark in Fiddler on the Roof, “If you’re
rich they think you really know.”
Previously,
many could not understand Vladimir Lenin’s concept
of a “useful idiot” or the improbable corollary
that an American president could become the witting marionette
of his Russian counterpart. Still, truth is exculpatory.
The squalid derelictions that Americans were forced to witness
at the end of the Trump presidency resembled nothing less
than The Manchurian Candidate on steroids. These
sordid derelictions could arise again.
“Credo
quia absurdum,” said the ancient philosopher
Tertullian. “I believe because it is absurd.”
The true enemy
faced by the United States is not any one individual person
or ideology; neither is it any one political party or another.
It is We the People. As we may learn further from Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra: “The worst enemy you can encounter
will always be you, yourself; you will lie in wait for yourself
in caves and woods.” So we remain, even today, poised
fixedly against ourselves, against our own literal survival,
badgered by conspiracy theories and battered by the former
US president’s inane policy forfeitures.
Again, there
are relevant specifics. North Korea presents much more of
a nuclear threat today than before Trump’s proudly
declared “romance” with Kim Jung Un. This potentially
existential threat (especially if it should become synergistic
when joined with coinciding dangers from Russia and China)
was not in any fashion diminished because Kim and Trump
“fell in love” at their Singapore summit. To
deal with growing nuclear threats across the world, national
leaders will finally need to conceptualize their task as
one of “mind over mind,” not just “mind
over matter.” Donald Trump’s frequent assertions
notwithstanding, world politics is never just about “attitude.”
Never.
There is a conceptual
“bottom line” here. In spite of our commonly
clichéd claim to “rugged individualism,”
we Americans are generally shaped not by any exceptional
personal or national capacities, but by abysmally rote patterns
of imitation and conformance. Busily amusing ourselves into
oblivion with illiterate and cheapening entertainments,
our endangered American society audibly bristles with childish
jingles, chronic hucksterism, crass allusions and potentially
fatal equivocations. Surely, we ought finally to inquire:
“Isn’t there more to this unhappy country than
abjured learning, stomach-turning violence and endlessly
manipulated commerce?”
“I celebrate
myself, and sing myself,” observed Transcendentalist
poet Walt Whitman, but now, generally, the self-deluding
American Self is created by stupefying kinds of “education,”
by far-reaching patterns of tastelessness and a pervasive
national culture of rancor and self-defilement.
There are other
special difficulties. Only a rare “few” can
ever redeem courage and intellect in America, but these
quiet souls remain determinably well hidden, often even
from themselves. One can never discover these souls engaged
in frenetic and agitated self-advertisement on television
or online. Our necessary redemption as a people and aa a
nation can never be generated from among the mass, herd
or crowd. There is a correct way to fix our fractionating
and anti-intellectual country, but not while 'We the people'
insistently inhabit pre-packaged ideologies of anti-thought
and anti-reason.
Going forward,
we must finally insist upon expanding the sovereignty of
a newly courageous and newly virtuous citizenry. In this
immense task, basic changes will be needed at the microcosmic
level, that is, at the society-shaping level of the individual
human person. Following the German Romantic poet Novalis’
idea that to become a human being is essentially an “art”
(“Mensch werden ist eine Kinst“), the
Swiss-German author/philosopher Hermann Hesse reminds us
that every society is a cumulative expression of unique
individuals. In this same regard, Swiss psychologist Carl
G. Jung goes further, claiming, in The Undiscovered
Self (1957), that every society represents “the
sum total of individual souls seeking redemption.”
One again, as
in earlier references to Sigmund Freud, the inherently “soft”
variable of “soul” is suitably acknowledged.
Looking to history
and logic, it would be easy to conclude that the monumental
task of intellectual and moral reconstruction lies far beyond
our normal American capacities. Nonetheless, to accede to
such a relentlessly fatalistic conclusion would be tantamount
to an irremediable collective surrender. This could be unconscionable.
Far better that the citizens of a sorely imperiled United
States (1) grasp for any still-residual sources of national
and international unity; and (2) exploit this universal
font for national and international survival.
We have been
considering the effects of an “unphilosophical spirit
which knows nothing and wants to know nothing of truth.”
During the past several years, huge and unhidden efforts
have been mounted to question the “cost-effectiveness”
of an American college education. These often-shallow efforts
ignore that the core value of a university degree lies not
in its projected purchasing power, but in disciplined learning
for its own sake. When young people are asked to calculate
the value of such a degree in solely commercial terms, which
is the case today, they are being asked to ignore both the
special pleasures of a serious education (e.g., literature,
history, art, music, philosophy, etc.) and the cumulative
benefits of authentic learning.
The core problem
of U.S, decline is less that its people don’t know
what is true than that they don’t want to know what
is true. Even now, even when the risks of a nuclear war
are rising over intersecting crises in the Ukraine and North
Korea, America’s citizens remain too easily charmed
by their suffocating national politics of gibberish and
chicanery. To finally rescue this declining American democracy
from a population that insists upon its own collective defilement,
We the people will require nurturance by a suitably philosophical
spirit. Recalling the philosopher Karl Jaspers, it is a
spirit that openly rejects any witting destruction of American
education and intellect by always-ubiquitous forces of anti-reason.
“Seditious
conspiracy” is not just a matter of US criminal law
and jurisprudence. It describes what happens whenever an
“unphilosophical spirit” is allowed to displace
core human obligations of intellect and mind. Now looking
ahead to a more expressly chaotic world of nuclear proliferation
and genocidal threats, such an allowance could no longer
be accepted as tolerable. At one time or another, it would
prove insufferably lethal.
