The Death of the Intellectual Space
Modern universities have destroyed what they used to foster, a space for the creation and debate of world changing ideas
A fair first reaction may be to outright disagree with me. Surely there are other spaces to have an erudite debate. You could point to conversations with friends, internet forums, and the aforementioned university as places where they can occur. Each has a crucial shortcoming. The house of dogma that is the university system has forced us to alternatives that can never live up to what it used to offer.
Speaking with friends of varied interests can provide a panacea to much of our intellectual hunger. When people from different disciplines bring their own insights, the resulting conversation can lead to places no one could have come up with on their own. A problem eventually does arise from this set up. When no one has a shared specialty of knowledge, everyone begins to accept everyone’s assumptions without a query. A state of agreement grows as everyone talks on the peripheries of their knowledge of other subjects. A good non-academic example came up in my life recently. I am an avid college football fan and my friend is a diehard NHL fan. We discussed both and ended up just defaulting to the other’s views without having too deep of a conversation on either topic. This same problem can occur with the most esoteric of topics as well. Its important to have discussions with friends of varied interests, but it needs to be supplemented by those who have an intimate knowledge of your expertise.
The internet allows us to find strangers with similar interests. There are a plethora of forums and locations to find people. Despite this abundance, it is difficult to actually find a good community. Many are either dogmatic or closed off to newcomers. Some are chalked full of people trying to prove how much they know, not those who yearn to challenge their views. I have found several people whose ideas I particularly liked (and often wanted to challenge) but they had big followings. The only way to get a response was to pay them money on something like Patreon and all that guaranteed was a reply, not a deeper discussion. The internet can be useful if you get lucky and it helps expose us to more viewpoints we would not have considered. Unfortunately, it can take a lot more effort than it is worth to even find a place to have good discussions.
The university used to provide this space. Both in and out of the classroom, philosophical discussions were to be had. Now, anything that goes against the accepted knowledge is shunned and anything that takes things in a different direction is first judged for its potential political value, not merit. A good example is how philosophy classes have functioned for me. We learn about Hobbes or Plato and then are essentially given what our conclusion should be. If you are lucky, they provide you with two potential views of it. If you express something that is completely different than the conventional view (which I often did) it is dismissed. Clubs have also seen a decline. Clubs now represent something to add to a resume, not something used to facilitate scholarly pursuits. A TPUSA or DSA club on campus cares more about your displays of loyalty, not the proliferation of ideas. University life stresses hedonism much more than academics. I was not above this fray and found myself fall into this trap. Our colleges have lost their way, very few (save any) people now go to college dreaming of the intellectual debates they will have. They either think of the prestige, the parties, or the placement into a job after. The death of the intellectual space has led to a winnowing of ideas and ideologies.
We need an impetus for action and new ideas in this nation. Somehow and some way we need to recreate what colleges used to have. Clubhouse and Substack seem promising but are limited for now. I do not expect that a new alternative will be promulgated for all to see. We will have to all individually try and fail to invent something new. Our yearning for deeper knowledge is innately human and we will never stop this pursuit regardless of our political circumstances.