Socrates said he was sent by the gods to provoke the city of Athens out of its slow and ignorant ways, like a small biting insect that makes a large horse jump. He must’ve done something right, because the city killed him for it, and two millennia later we still revere his name.
In 1962, Bertrand Russell exchanged telegrams with Khrushchev and Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
YOUR ACTION DESPERATE. THREAT TO HUMAN SURVIVAL. NO CONCEIVABLE JUSTIFICATION. CIVILIZED MAN CONDEMNS IT. WE WILL NOT HAVE MASS MURDER. ULTIMATUM MEANS WAR… END THIS MADNESS.
Russell’s telegram to Kennedy
How times have changed: such a philosophical intervention is difficult to imagine now.
Academics (particularly philosophers) seem to have become people not worth listening to. When was the last time you heard a ‘philosopher’ contribute to our public debates and be taken seriously?
What we see today, in philosophy’s public lack of stature, is the end result of a downward slide that started 40 years ago when the balance was tipped against a certain idea of what a university is and ought to be.
That’s all history to me; before my time. I lean on the excellent words of those who lived it:
In the early 1980s Don Gunner, a philosopher at the University of Melbourne, told me that the task of the university is to civilise the city.
Raimond Gaita, ‘To Civilise the City?‘
A philosopher who started working in the 60s says to a philosopher starting work in the 80s: ‘this is your task, as it has always been’. That philosopher starting in the 80s hears this, but the world is changing: the idea of academic life as a vocation is being replaced with the idea of it as a profession. Rather than aspiring to civilise the city, the philosopher only hopes that the university can resist the worst of the city’s tendencies towards philistinism.
Universities did not resist, or at least not as much as they should. Instead they went along with it, as the ‘businesslike’ attitude, and the language that is its characteristic expression, crept into the academy. It is the language of ‘product’ and ‘customer’ and ‘profit’: a university education was a product (which had a price), the student was a paying customer, and the purpose was profit for us (the university) and the student (in the form of their lifetime earnings potential).
Even in the early eighties it should have been evident to anyone with their eyes open that universities could more easily survive government cuts than they could survive the degraded language in which academics were beginning to speak of what they were doing.
Raimond Gaita, ‘To Civilise the City?‘
Why did academics, particularly philosophers, go along with it?
First, they thought that any description of what they did that made the work of management more tractable would not impinge on their sense of what mattered in what they did. […] Second, they believed that they could forever keep an ironic distance from the managerial redescriptions of what they and their students did and of the relations between.
Raimond Gaita, ‘To Civilise the City?‘
This turned out to be catastrophically naive.
When I started working, in the 2010s, universities were well down the road to philistine ruin; when I left, only a decade later, I left ruins. In my brief 17 years as a student and lecturer, I saw many good and sincere philosophers retire (or ‘retired’) in despair, and many others suffocated by the polluted airs of university management. Some suffocate still, or get by only by holding their noses and occasionally vomiting.
Who is left to ‘civilise the city’? That’s the wrong question because there are many, only most have abandoned their task. The real question is why the city no longer has any capacity to be civilised.
I’m quite happy to say I’m not good enough to contribute, in any significant way, to public debates. I’m no politician, no revolutionary, and I have no interest in being a ‘talking head’. But I know there are many philosophers, and other specialists in other fields, who are perfectly capable, and do try, but are nonetheless largely ignored. That’s no failure of philosophy or any of the other academic disciplines since what these specialists do and say is perfectly reasonable. It is a failure in the public’s perception of it. No one has ears to hear. Certainly no one in government has ears to hear. They’ve ‘had enough of experts’. They would rather listen to a celebrity from reality TV.
Which makes me realise something obvious. When I write and consider sending things to the great and good, I realise that my lack of confidence isn’t so much a personal thing as a public thing. It’s a matter of knowing your audience. I have learnt that no one will listen, and so I don’t bother to speak.
But there is something worse than remaining silent from a lack of confidence.
The ideal of the university was once to hold a place for the life for the mind. Language is essential to the life of the mind. And so the role of the university was, in part, to preserve the language of the life of the mind. But it doesn’t, not anymore, having replaced it with the language of business. That having been the case for some time, it’s now lost that language that once defined what it was, and as a result so have we; so have I. That language has gone dead on us.
As confident as anyone could be, if they have no words then they have nothing to say. And if they have nothing to say then we should hope that they stay silent, because the alternative is worse.
Words must be taught, and constantly retaught, not because they are specialised, but because human beings are forgetful. As Socrates said, he teaches nothing but is instead forever reminding people of what they already know but have forgotten. He does this only by asking the right question.
I am no Socrates. But we must all do what we can. When you feel driven to do something that you know will achieve nothing, it reveals, to you, the intrinsic value of what you do. I hold to that, even though I can’t articulate it.
Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, not to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something foreseen by no one, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.
Hannah Arendt, ‘The Crisis in Education’
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