When
Emmanuel Macron defeated Marine Le Pen in the French election,
a former college classmate of mine updated his Facebook status
with a link to a Wall Street Journal article on the
newly elected president with some additional commentary of his
own. “Philosophers in high office to clean up the mess,”
he optimistically added, in admiration of Macron, a former investment
banker turned civil servant who began his untraditional political
ascent to the top office as just another white man studying
undergraduate philosophy. This was a beginning that my classmate
and Macron both shared.
A year
into college, I, like these two, also declared a philosophy
major. Part of me was motivated by an egotistical desire to
insert myself into a tradition of smart people -- one that I
would later realize I do not really belong to. Most of me, however,
was naïvely driven by the romantic allure of a field of
study so archaic and uninvolved in real life -- which, at the
time, seemed much sexier than a lucrative career. The marketers
of the American liberal arts experience sold me a dream at the
tender age of 18. With my parents’ help and absolutely
no idea of what I’d do once the degree was finally conferred
on me, I bought it.
Other
than the two times I registered for a LinkedIn account, I have
yet to exhibit seriously any symptoms of buyer’s remorse.
Looking back at all the philosophy majors I still keep in contact
with, it seems like everything worked out, more or less, in
the end. Part of the experience of being on a campus that oozes
so much privilege is that whenever someone does decide to debate
the merits of your degree by inserting yet another hackneyed
joke about a prospective career at a fast food joint, you can
laugh alongside your interlocutor in good fun -- that the words
deflect right off of you attests less to the thickness of your
skin than to your sense of security.
An
Atlantic
piece on the distribution of college
majors based on how much students’ parents earn, “Rich
Kids Study English,” cites several studies that confirm
what many of us already suspect. Children of privilege are afforded
the opportunity to gravitate towards the useless degrees like
philosophy or English. Anyone who’s gone to college could
tell you the exact same thing. In fact, you don’t really
need to go anywhere to realize that wealthy people can afford
to burn their money without any consideration of a return on
investment in a way that poorer people simply can’t.
Given
these circumstances, money -- and with it whiteness -- can be
found running underneath the philosophy programs of most colleges
like groundwater. Despite the noted efforts of our department,
it was undeniable that all the pasty faces there occupied a
central position in this field of study in which I happened
to find myself. Sitting in any discussion section, sometimes
it really felt that if you weren’t white and male -- that
if you were even just white or just male -- you were there as
a courtesy.
When
Joanna Ong accused her former professor and employer, the philosopher
John Searle, of sexual harassment and assault, a friend and
I exchanged some thoughts on the field of our former studies
-- we had both read Searle for a class we took together. “Man
philosophy sucks,” I wrote over iMessage. “Lol,”
he replied. As tragedies like these manifest themselves in other
fields, the most appropriate reaction is often a boycott. When
evidence of Bill O’Reilly’s sexual harassment came
to light, advertisers pulled out, and he was canned. When accusations
against Searle surfaced, however, some of the most vocal voices
told us to do nothing at all. Though Jenny Saul, a philosopher
at the University of Sheffield, insisted, “If you can
avoid teaching/discussing Searle, that may be the best strategy,”
instead of rallying behind her cause, fellow philosopher Brian
Leiter disparaged her suggestion. On his eponymous blog, Leiter
Reports -- very popular reading for academics in the discipline
-- he wrote, “Is there some merit in [Saul’s instructions]
I am missing? Or are they as outrageous as they seem from the
standpoint of responsible teaching and research?”
Defense
statements like Leiter’s serve to preserve the sanctity
of philosophical champions. This rejection of Saul’s suggestion,
I think, is motivated partly by an impulsive refusal to see
one’s heroes, and perhaps oneself, as outside the scope
of admiration. Advancements in philosophy, as our curricula
indicate, depend precisely on the wisdom of men like Searle
-- and under no circumstances can we afford to set the clock
back on progress. If Leiter is unable to separate Searle’s
work from his conduct, it is perhaps because he too -- as another
powerful white man on the same path -- operates under the same
illusion of impunity. Regardless of all their questionable behaviour,
these men tell themselves, nobody can detract from their contributions
to the academy. This delusional conceptualization of the self
as being occupied with an inviolable higher pursuit is one that
is all too common in the philosophy classroom.
A quasi-religious
admiration of white scholars in the canon imbues in some students
a shameless hubris and upholds an academic ecosystem acutely
inhospitable to people of colour. It is farcical yet true that
a superficial resemblance to Wittgenstein alone was sometimes
enough to demand exorbitantly charitable readers. During my
years in college, not a single person of colour dared to make
a straight-faced illustration of Cartesian skepticism through
unambiguous psychoactive drug references -- how could you expect
your professor to take you seriously? -- while one white man
who exclusively drank Mountain Dew did exactly that on more
than one occasion.
What’s
even sadder is the reality that this contemptuous climate, which
seemingly elevates white scholarship above all else, persists
far above undergraduate philosophy and is not something one
merely grows out of. When The Journal of Political Philosophy
published a series of articles concerning the Black Lives Matter
movement last month, not a single black scholar was featured.
On every level, white voices are granted an unparalleled credibility
that is oftentimes disproportionate to what they merit.
Perhaps
the reason we find ourselves giving more credit to white men
on a college campus is as clear as what Baldwin writes in his
essay “Stranger in the Village.” As Baldwin writes
of the most pedestrian white men, “These people cannot
be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the
world; they have made the modern world, in effect, even if they
do not know it.” Perhaps even the most illiterate and
talentless white man living in a village in Bumfuck Nowhere,
Switzerland belonged in the tradition of Shakespeare, Rembrandt,
and Beethoven more than Baldwin ever could.
Every
so often, even the most unprepared freshman from the whitest
town in backwoods America imagines himself to be following in
the footsteps of Saul Kripke and David Lewis on the first day
of class, without any familiarity with the subject. In these
situations, the rest of us in the classroom merely assume, in
his eyes, the role of Platonic interlocutors, sitting there
like hurdles between the mighty philosopher and his coveted
participation grades. Even worse, numerous horror stories still
circulate of prospective students on college tours, sitting
in on classes, injecting themselves in collegiate classroom
discussions about Kant and Foucault without having first made
a decision on where to attend college -- or reading the material
at all.
The
citizens of Plato’s Republic accept that the
voluntary subjugation of themselves to the rule of the philosopher
is for the best. And any narcissistic reading of Plato -- whether
or not induced by Mountain Dew -- is sure to convince the privileged
adolescent reader who already fancies himself as belonging to
the cherished lineage of Socrates-Plato-Aristotle that he too
can reach out and touch the Forms.
Sometimes,
as I attended to the most long-winded arguments by precocious
know-it-alls talking down at me, I wondered why I was still
listening and engaging. I spent six months of my senior year
watching a student infuriate the entire room by taking the extreme
view that Huckleberry Finn unequivocally should not have enabled
Jim to escape from slavery, as Huck knew he was acting against
his moral conscience -- a position that he would later backtrack
on in favour of something more commonsensical. Did the confidence
of my interlocutor overwhelm me to the extent that I managed
to convince myself that hearing him out was, as in the case
of Plato’s citizens, somehow in my best interest? If so,
what a terrible waste of six months’ time that was. With
this in mind, it might be easier to understand why the philosophy
classroom looks the way it does -- so hostile to minorities
-- and why my classmate, an intelligent now-graduate student
in philosophy who is typically more capable of producing a nuanced
view, had sung such unabashed high praises for Macron, a relatively
inexperienced politician with no longstanding track record.
Probably out of sheer frustration, a professor once told his
entire compulsory freshman humanities class that if it were
up to him, he would expunge works by the likes of Nietzsche
from the curriculum altogether so that he would have fewer pimply-faced
teenage boys roleplaying philosopher kings -- exercising their
will to power without restraint and grossly miscalculating their
domains to extend throughout the discussion table and, occasionally,
beyond it.
Indeed,
planting such fantastical narratives into the minds of self-important
teenagers can only germinate equally misguided perspectives
through which they see the world. In this vein, their lives
and the lives of all others operate within this greater vision,
with their own successes perceived as inevitable and their unexpected
failures perceived as injustices. Macron’s political rise
appears anything but pre-determined, but in the eyes of my classmate,
real life perhaps unfolds with the same teleological perfection
that the ancient Greeks imagined. The philosopher kings, in
the end, ascend to the throne. The rest of us are here to watch.
