221. FROM DESPAIR TO WHERE? - Has Philosophy Failed Us?
I saw the pictures of Donald Trump meeting King Charles and Keir Starmer the other week and couldn’t help but project the images into an imagined future: our Chamberlain appeasing Hitler moment. Smiling blankly and shaking hands with the tyrant. Pretending all is normal while history waits to judge.
I remember thinking something similar back in 2014 when Russia was reported as annexing part of Crimea and nobody seemed to do anything about it. I thought how much it sounded like something you would read about later in history books. The first domino falling that leads to World War III. I was right. Some of those books - about Ukraine - are already being written. By 2016, with the occupation ongoing, Brexit fresh in my mind, and the election of Donald Trump, I actually wrote a song about it:
The people have spoken and I’m feeling sick
Who could imagine things changing this quick
Frustrated, ignorant grasping at straws
These are the things that make people start wars
I tremble as everyday life starts to look
Like the opening chapters of an old history book
These were the dark days that caused Rome to fall
These were the factors that started it all
The end of the world
Comes without warning
The end of the world
Is today
A moment of madness undoing the years
Of progress it’s taken to get us to here
Long battles fought and hard victories won
The evolution of civilization
Enlightenment can’t last without any lights
And now we are facing the darkest of nights
Desperation giving way to despair
The people have spoken and I’m feeling scared
The end of the world
Comes without warning
The end of the world
Is today
The comfort of thinking it can’t happen here
Is the surest sign that it is already near
Right on your doorstep, right on your street
Amazing how well we can walk in our sleep
Napping our way through this democracy
Un-informed, responsibility-free
Until we awake and blink open our eyes
It’s hard to believe that we’re even surprised
The end of the world
Comes without warning
The end of the world
Is today
It’s a pretty bleak song, but nine years later it still feels fairly precient. I drive to work these days accompanied by growing signs of a creeping fascism. Flags menace from lampposts while the news on the radio repeats, uncritically, the racist talking points of the far-right. It feels like something out of a dystopian novel as selfish motorists further demonstrate the collapse of society as a shared and collaborative project. The old rules of the road no longer applying in the growing Wild West of the morning commute. Cash-strapped councils have left the streets to split and pothole and austerity wrecks our tyres and kills our suspension. Reckless drivers speed to their oh-so-important destinations first by putting everybody else’s lives at risk. Isolated in our death machines (every few days my journey takes even longer than usual as an accident blocks the roads and sadly all I can think about is the inconvenience rather than the human cost of the tragedy), we switch off the depressing radio and listen to the downloaded voices which confirm our existing world views instead. We tut knowingly at all the idiots who think something different than us and arrive at work repeating the latest buzzwords and memes to each other; inherited echoes of someone else’s thinking, noises devoid of meaningful content, much of it generated by AI.
We laugh a lot at work about how much people are becoming reliant on AI these days. How old jobs that used to take a lot of time can now be done in the blink of a cursor. And we admonish those who use it in ways we wouldn’t dare to — though we all admit to our own little experiments with the large language models. A task here, a chore there. It’s funny how easy it is to become the very thing you hate with a few simple clicks. We laugh a lot, but feel increasingly guilty. Soon we stop laughing and choose to change the conversation.
There are a lot of conversations we aren’t having. I think a lot about what’s going on in Gaza, for example. How there has been a genocide live-streamed to us all for nearly two years now that has just become so-much background noise to the general turmoil of everyday existence it seldom ever comes up. The same way I think how horrifying it was that when Charlie Kirk was murdered — a man I had never heard of until his death — so many of my young, male, students were familiar with his work. Had heard his words and been the audience for his beliefs long before he was shot. The same young, male, demographic who made Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson household names before him. I think a lot about the hours of “content” they consume each day, and how so many of them seem to hold the exact same handful of views about the exact same handful of political talking points some people have spent a hell of a lot of money disseminating to them online. I think about why so many of my British students (some of whom are no doubt happy about the sudden influx of “patriotic” flags up on lampposts near their homes) find it so difficult to distinguish between American socio-political issues and British ones. How often the 2nd amendment comes up when they are asked what they are interested in talking about, despite it not being an amendment relevant to gun legislation in their own country. Or abortion rights and the perceived impact of the supreme court decision in America on domestic UK law. “What happened to freedom of speech?”, they ask me sometimes, and I ask them why they think we ever had it this side of the Atlantic? There’s certainly no constitutional right here, in a country without a formal constitution and with some of the strongest libel laws in the world. I think a lot about what happens when culture becomes so fragmented people no longer feel anchored to any shared sense of place and time. I think about how quickly the word “woke” became an insult. How strange it is that so many celebrated being so wilfully “asleep”. How easily the poisonous “culture wars” crossed international borders and found people pointing the same ugly fingers and throwing the same tired insults and accusations no matter what different flags their national sports teams played under. Again, I thought about how much money goes into making sure the whole world is having the same self-destructive conversation all the time. How easily social norms can be eroded.
And amongst all of this, I think about philosophy. My beloved subject. The tool that is supposed to bring clarity to our thoughts and solve problems. I think about how philosophy was supposed to have the potential to save us from ourselves, and how it hasn’t. How, if anything, it is the sophistry of pseudo-philosophers — the same problem Plato was dealing with way back when — which continues to dominate the minds of the masses today. Easy answers and seductive showmanship rather than the hard work of bitter truths. I think of the old saying: if voting changed anything they would make it illegal, and I think about the place of philosophy on the school curriculum. Its ability to stay alive amongst cutbacks and belt-tightening. If philosophy changed anything, it would be outlawed. Philosophy has not been outlawed, therefore…
I drive home from work and take a walk in the local woods to clear my head. Someone has stuck a sticker on the entrance gate. A red swastika with the legend: “We R Back”. I turn around and head back home. The woods seem sinister to me now. No longer a place of peace and rejuvenation. Innocuous dog walkers now look suspicious to me as I leave. Who is the “we” referred to in the sticker? Who stuck up the sticker? Which innocent dog is most likely to belong to a Nazi? I don’t know, but the next day I see the same grim symbol has been carved into a chair in my classroom. They really are back, it seems. Thousands marched, wrapped in flags, down the streets of the capital just the other week. More angry men listening to online profiteers of hate. Women too. They’re eating swans now, the voices tell them, and next thing you know they’re standing watch down the river. Setting up camps and vigils.
Those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it. Those few who learned from it are condemned too, unfortunately, by the overwhelming apathy of the vast majority who didn’t, sleepwalking the world into an ugly future that could have been avoided had somebody only shook the world awake.
Those who don’t learn from philosophy are condemned to the same sort of existence as those who do. Just a different set of ideas to cling to. Ones with fewer supporting arguments and footnotes. Less scrutiny, but just as contested and arbitrary. I’ve seen the best minds of my generation lost to dead end academic publications and myopic conferences, throwing pearls into the void.
If political philosophy was a worthwhile pursuit, wouldn’t the world be better now? Is the current state of things a damning critique of the futility of the discipline? Given all the years of ethical philosophy to draw from, shouldn’t we be making better decisions? I don’t know. Nor do I know what’s going on. Another failing of philosophy: all that epistemology and still the only thing we truly know is that we don’t know much of anything.
There isn’t an argument here. Just a feeling being articulated. A provocation. An amorphous idea in need of some clearer understanding. A creeping dread in the pit of my stomach that if we have the answers, they have long been ignored. And if we don’t, then has philosophy not failed us?
It is an old fear of mine, which sums up the futility of philosophy: the idea that someone once wrote the perfect argument. A solution to all the world’s ills. They wrote it down and got it published and now it sits gathering dust on several shelves, unread and ignored. And were it ever picked up and looked at, who would even recognise its truth? After all, we’re trained in critical thinking. To find flaws and fallacies as sport. Of course this can’t be the answer. There has to be something wrong with it. There always is. And so the solution is summarily dismissed and lost to history. We continue the needless struggle of suffering a problem which has already been solved.
Has philosophy failed us? If our thinking remains (as it so obviously is) unclear and ill-suited, if our world continues its trajectory towards decline, then we must at least ask where exactly philosophy has helped?
It is a genuine question in need of an answer: if this is the current state of the world, what exactly have philosophers been doing with their clarity and rigour of thought? What exactly is the point if this is the best we are doing?
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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