https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2022/10/13/an-unphilosophical-spirit-root-causes-of-american-intellectual-decline/
An “Unphilosophical Spirit”: Root Causes of
American Intellectual Decline
By Louis René Beres - October 13, 2022
“The enemy is the unphilosophical spirit which knows nothing
and wants to know nothing of truth.“- Karl Jaspers, Reason
and Anti-Reason in our Time (1971)
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.
In general, these university-based relationships are valued for
presumed personal status and income enhancements.[1]
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?[2] 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,[3] our
American politics and Realpolitik-driven[4] foreign
policies are just “reflection.” Inevitably, they are mere
“shadows” of reality, epiphenomenal and misleading.[5]
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.”[6] 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,[7] 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.”[8]
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,”[9] about
not being “wanted at all.”[10]
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,”[11] proudly
read nothing (nothing at all) and who yearned not to serve his
country,[12] 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.[13]
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.[14] 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.”[15] 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)[16], 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”[17] 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.[18] 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,[19] 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[20] 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 Selfis created by stupefying
kinds of “education,”[21] 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,[22] 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.[23]
Going forward, we must finally insist upon expanding the sovereignty
of a newly courageous and newly virtuous[24] 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.”[25]
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.”[26] 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,[27] it
is a spirit that openly rejects any witting destruction of American
education and intellect by always-ubiquitous forces of
anti-reason.[28]
“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.
[1] See,
by this writer, Louis René Beres, at Princeton:
http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2018/06/a-core-challenge-of-higher-education
[2] The
Founding Fathers of the United States were intellectuals.
As explained by American historian Richard Hofstadter: “The
Founding Fathers were sages, scientists, men of broad cultivation,
many of them apt in classical learning, who used their wide reading
in history, politics and law to solve the exigent problems of their
time.” See Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American
Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), p. 145.
[3] See
by this writer at Oxford University Press: Louis René
Beres, https://blog.oup.com/2011/08/philosopher-king/
[4] For
philosophical background of Realpolitik, see, by this
author, Louis René Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: US
Foreign Policy and World Order, Lexington Books, 1984; and
Louis René Beres, Mimicking Sisyphus: America’s
Countervailing Nuclear Strategy, Lexington Books, 1983.
Regarding this background in law or jurisprudence: “Right is the
interest of the stronger,” says Thrasymachus in Bk. I, Sec. 338 of
Plato, THE REPUBLIC (B. Jowett tr., 1875). “Justice is a
contract neither to do nor to suffer wrong,” says Glaucon, id., Bk.
II, Sec. 359. See also, Philus in Bk III, Sec. 5 of Cicero, DE
REPUBLICA.
[5] See
by this writer, Louis René Beres,
at Horasis (Zurich): https://horasis.org/looking-beyond-shadows-death-time-and-immortality/
[6] Freud
was always darkly pessimistic about the United States, which he felt
was “lacking in soul” and a place of great psychological misery
or “wretchedness.” In a letter to Ernest Jones, Freud declared
unambiguously: “America is gigantic, but it is a gigantic mistake.”
(See: Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Man’s Soul (1983),
p. 79.
[7]See
by this writer at Yale Global: Louis René Beres,
https://archive-yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/trump-and-destruction-american-mind
[8] The
origin of this term in modern philosophy lies prominently in the
writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, especially The World as
Will and Idea (1818). For his own inspiration (and by his
own expressed acknowledgment), Schopenhauer drew freely upon Goethe.
Later, Nietzsche drew just as freely (and perhaps still more
importantly) upon Schopenhauer. Goethe also served as a core
intellectual source for Spanish existentialist Jose Ortega y’
Gasset, author of the prophetic work, The Revolt of the
Masses (Le Rebelion de las Masas (1930). See,
accordingly, Ortega’s very grand essay, “In Search of Goethe from
Within” (1932), written for Die Neue Rundschau of
Berlin on the occasion of the centenerary of Goethe’s death. It is
reprinted in Ortega’s anthology, The Dehumanization of
Art (1948) and is available from Princeton University Press
(1968).
[9]The
extent to which some young Americans are willing to go to “belong”
can be illustrated by certain recent incidents of college students
drinking themselves to death as part of a fraternity hazing ritual.
Can there be anything more hideously pathetic than a young person who
would accept virtually any measure of personal debasement and risk in
order to “fit in”?
[10] “It
is getting late; shall we ever be asked for?” inquires the poet W H
Auden in The Age of Reason. “Are we simply not
wanted at all?”
[11] Said
candidate Donald Trump in 2016, “I love the poorly educated.”
This strange statement appears to echo Third Reich Minister of
Propaganda Joseph Goebbels at Nuremberg rally in 1935:
“Intellect rots the brain.”
[12] This
brings to mind the timeless observation by Creon, King of Thebes, in
Sophocles’ Antigone: “I hold despicable, and always
have anyone who puts his own popularity before his country.”
[13] “The
mass-man,” we may learn from Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y’
Gasset (The Revolt of the Masses, 1930), “has no attention
to spare for reasoning; he learns only in his own flesh.”
[14] In
this connection, cautions Sigmund Freud: “Fools, visionaries,
sufferers from delusions, neurotics and lunatics have played great
roles at all times in the history of mankind, and not merely when the
accident of birth had bequeathed them sovereignty. Usually, they have
wreaked havoc.”
[15] “The
crowd,” said Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, “is untruth.”
Here, the term “crowd” is roughly comparable to C.G. Jung’s
“mass,” Friedrich Nietzsche’s “herd” and Sigmund Freud’s
“horde.”
[16] See
by this writer, Louis René Beres, at Modern
Diplomacy: https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2020/12/01/living-on-mountains-antecedents-of-a-dignified-and-secure-world-order/
[17]We
can reasonably forgive the apparent sexism of this term, both because
of the era in which it was offered and because the seminal European
philosopher meant this term to extend to both genders.
[18] See
by this writer, Professor Louis René Beres, at e-Global, The
University of
California: https://globalejournal.org/index.php/global-e/february-2020/limits-long-distance-romance-risks-catastrophic-war-north-korea
[19] For
accounts by this author of nuclear war effects, see: Louis René
Beres, Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World
Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980);
Louis René Beres, Mimicking Sisyphus: America’s
Countervailing Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass.,
Lexington Books, 1983); Louis René Beres, Reason and
Realpolitik: U.S. Foreign Policy and World Order (Lexington,
Mass., Lexington Books, 1984); and Louis René Beres, Security
or Armageddon: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Lexington,
Mass., Lexington Books, 1986). Most recently, by Professor Beres,
see: Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (New
York, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed. 2018).
[20] See: https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/why-are-americans-getting-unhappier
[21] In
an additional irony, these already unsatisfactory kinds of education
will be supplanted by even more intrinsically worthless forms of
learning. Most notable, in this regard, is the almost wholesale shift
to online education, a shift made more necessary and widespread by
the Covid-19 disease pandemic, but unsatisfactory nonetheless.
[22] The
term is drawn here from the Spanish existential Jose Ortega y’
Gasset, especially his classic The Revolt of the
Masses (1930).
[23] “There
is no longer a virtuous nation,” warns the poet William Butler
Yeats, “and the best of us live by candlelight.”
[24] As
used by ancient Greek philosopher Plato, the term “virtuous”
includes elements of wisdom and knowledge as well as morality.
[25] Carl
G. Jung eagerly embraced the term “soul” following preferences of
Sigmund Freud, his one-time mentor and colleague. Also, says Jung
in The Undiscovered Self (1957): “The mass
crushes out the insight and reflection that are still possible with
the individual, and this necessarily leads to doctrinaire and
authoritarian tyranny if ever the constitutional State should succumb
to a fit of weakness.” American readers should detect in this last
clause the seditious events of January 6, 2021.
[26]Although
this present consideration has been offered as a pièce
d’occasion, it also has much wider conceptual
applications and implications.
[27]Jaspers
notes elsewhere, in Reason and Anti-Reason in our
Time (1971): “The masses have followed the magician again
and again. The fraud has been perpetrated by the promise of absolute
knowledge…An aura of magical efficacy has been produced.” In
present-day United States, the defiling sway of a former presidential
“magician” endures, plausibly with grievous long-term
consequences.
[28]
In a newly published book by Stanley Corngold, The Mind in
Exile: Thomas Mann in Princeton (Princeton University
Press, 2022), the author states in explanation: “Mann cites the
absorption of the educated classes by the masses, the simplification
of all functions of political, social, economic and spiritual life.”
Thomas Mann calls this process “Barbarization.” In some
respects, his argument is reminiscent of an earlier work by Spanish
existentialist Jose Ortega y’Gasset, The Revolt of the
Masses (1930), especially his chapter on “The Barbarism
of Specialization.”
