The Boulevards of Extinction. Andrew Benson Brown

book shows us that age in a state brings decay and chronic disorders of public character. At this point the prudent among us chide ourselves and apply this macro-principle down the social ladder. Only then will we know future generations better than they know themselves.

      Tragic Currency

      One can’t write tragedies about important figures today, as tragedians in the past wrote of royalty. The pride of the powerful fails to convince us. They are too transparent, too accidental: in the right circumstances, any person could have held their position—precisely why we envy or resent them. We rightly recognize that the campaign funds of the politician misdirect his charisma and crush his vision. Under monarchy money was a prerequisite of greatness; in democracy it is greatness. Money is the tragic hero of every democratic drama: it, and not individuals, decides the course of history, while the consequences of its flaw—that it runs out—cannot be overcome by any amount of Spartan will or Athenian guile. This is why the lot of money is most movingly expressed on the stage through its empty-handed victims, the scavengers of rare coins who don’t even die clutching air, but linger on past the anticlimax. The modern tragic individual is distinguished by his lack of dramatic significance, his irrelevance in contemporary life. He is a supporting actor playing out the content of his pockets.

      Comedy is the proper treatment of the powerful. Where the tragic hero feels guilt, the clown is shameless. Even when a CEO’s buffoonery with his capital is exposed, he does not acknowledge ignominy but pleads innocent. Having become accustomed to these episodes of corporate life, we watch the trial with all the relish of a sitcom. Our cynicism stabilizes the stock exchange; the CEO’s pain mitigates our frustration and, for a moment, we laugh at corruption’s fallen partner. The judge tries to throw the weight of the world on his shoulders and hold him accountable for ruining it—a fact which we accept but can’t bring ourselves to believe: we would not tremble to be his neighbor as we would a trivial rapist or murderer; instead of closing our blinds we would open our doors, hoping to coat ourselves in his hemorrhaging lifestyle.

      How to Philosophize with a Screwdriver

      “He is a scholar and a gentleman.”—One never hears of such a unity anymore. When social roles specialized they had nothing to balance them, they lost their sociability; each moved in the direction of maximizing its internal logic. Thus gentlemen, to retain their status, have devolved into merchants; while scholars, to regain their lost reputations, have fallen into Nobel laureation. Sycophancy to princes was somehow more dignified than to prizes or dead presidents. One pledged arms, life, and soul, but never lunch meetings or lecture tours.

      Scholars of expression, come forth—and show these intellectuals how to be learned. Obliviously we tread over buried treasures, tracking eroded footsteps through windy dunes. Future minds will be digging through the sand for centuries. But we men of experience, unknowing of the world’s depths—we are relegated to the surface. The most we hope for is to find an oasis to wade in and forget our thirst.

      The new father of “modern” philosophy—the philosophy culminating in our concerns—is not Descartes, but Russell. “The Right Honorable Earl,” mirroring the ambiguity one cannot help but feel towards empty titles in a period of fluid mobility, started a new trend: the academic first as obscurantist, then as populist. With the journal article, he moved philosophy out of the salon and into an office where philosophers smoke their pipes for stimulation as they read and discuss themselves. With the pop-philosophy book, he crammed the subject into a compact car and drove it into the marketplace. What results is the dumbing down of a mystification. To be told in small words what cannot be understood in big ones does not lead to comprehension. The interested reader, expending much time but little effort, becomes more than ignorant but less than knowledgeable: he becomes “informed.”

      Medieval scholasticism that eschews its faith while retaining its terminology, academia is reason taking a sabbatical. Like a reverse-alchemical process that turns gold into base metal, eternal questions are compartmentalized into methods. Philosophy of Brains limits experience to the interior images of eggheads, warring against divergent techniques of analysis; injecting himself with chemicals for a PET scan, the Cerebellicist records the metabolic changes of his thoughts before overdosing on observation. The Alphabet-Reckoners go further, so impudent as to educate the scientists: the tweed shirt waves logical paradoxes at an inattentive lab coat and points him in the direction he was already looking towards.

      The master asks after some coffea arabica. The maiden recommends with a curtsy that visiting the public sphere of the coffee house would be more stimulating than drinking alone. The master is disdainful of her contribution, rebuking the maiden for her absentmindedness and rejecting her suppressed premise: if he wanted stimulation, he would not drink arabica. He always has his morning coffee, and arabica is the least bitter form of reliability. He knows she is only pretending to be absentminded out of laziness, and gets up to make the coffee himself. The maiden cannot, after all, be trusted to mill the beans without an electric grinder. In the real world people use their feet to get things done. The master asks himself why he even retains a maiden, since it is always he who does all the work. The laborer should reap the benefits. The last thing he needs is someone to follow him around explaining his own behavior to himself. It is only respect for her parents’ memory that prevents the master from dismissing the maiden from his service.

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      Object of oblivion: all the ways idleness, lassitude, the disquiet of empty thoughts went into meriting the philosophy professor’s paycheck—blood and sweat of student fees. The paycheck is not just the instrumentality of living, but far deeper than what we thought it was. Beneath it—beneath everything—is less. All along a veil of presence had been cast over the paycheck so as to not overwhelm us with its bare nothingness; to uncover the setting of the paycheck—the night jobs of insomniac grad students—is to swoon about in void-vertigo.

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      The only way one can use philosophical terminology these days is to take it hostage: buy an academic’s book and mail a new page to him every day. With any luck, he’ll define your ransom with a restraining order. “The defendant is prohibited from approaching within five hundred feet of the plaintiff’s book . . .” If only contemporary philosophers would appeal to a judge to design their book cover, so the curious will instantly know where they stand in relation to it. The law is perhaps philosophy’s last friend, the one who stays behind to help clean up after everyone else has left the party. But then, the law is obliged to be everyone’s friend . . .

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      To sum up the history of the “love of wisdom”: the journey of philosophy begins in wonder; the Journal of Philosophy ends in bewilderment. Philo + strophia: love of turning. Philosophers today are dancing masters. “Step here, and here, and here,” they say. Good form is a product of technical mastery; those who try to keep up with the incessant twirling of the bios theoretikos collapse in dizziness.

      Children grow into imbeciles when neglected. When the educated retreat into research caves, mass culture learns to tie its shoes with a safety fuse and brush its teeth with matches. If our basic pyromania skill-set doesn’t end in self-arson, the smoke from our knowledge will asphyxiate us. The leviathan has grown too large for sailors to navigate without trembling for uncertainty—rightly so, for they have lost their mastery of the sea. The armada scattered, the sailors of each ship lower their flags and drift along, charting lonely bays.

      The New Pedagogy

      Learning by doing: a child who gets the idea of a hat by using it after Dewey’s fashion—lecturing into it. Sounds conveyed into the ear indirectly are transformed into expectations of entertainment: the child, hoping Dewey will pull a rabbit out, receives instead a sluggish lesson on the reflex arc. An adolescent deprived of magic grows to imitate the habits of knowing.

      Dewey the Destroyer: progressive education is philosophy’s euthanasia. The only way to make the aim of the philosopher compatible with that of the nonphilosopher is by unplugging the superannuated search for wisdom and hooking everyone up to the science industry. Academia and the factory are two islands stranded by one sea, bridged only by journalism dialectics and the sophisms of media moguls.

      The Forgotten