what are the public academic debates that we are having today? creationism vs evolution? populism vs neo-liberalism?
I hate to reminisce but having two existentialist philosophers debating about socialism vs communism makes me jelly.
I hate to reminisce but having two existentialist philosophers debating about socialism vs communism makes me jelly.
That's not really true in the United States today, where even Socialism is generally held in contempt, and Communism is considered to be a demonstratably failed ideology which doesn't even deserve to be taken seriously.
On top of this, intellectualism itself is viewed with great suspicion by many Americans, who much prefer to hear celebrity gossip, or watch sports and reality shows. As a result, the "public" intellectual debates of the era are dumbed down and infotainmentized by a media mostly concerned with ratings and pandering to the lowest common denominator.
There still are plenty of debates in academia in the United States today, but they're not very public, and mostly take place in academic journals which most of the public would rather die before reading.
I've heard that France is still a culture that greatly respects their intellectuals, so I would expect they still have many public intellectual debates these days. Maybe someone who keeps current with them could comment.
I think one of the contributors to the current political situation is the increasing influence of academia on politics and the law. Instead of having a few big ideas that we wrestle with, every politician and lawyer is a little Leninist bent on burning everything down in favor of their ever-changing pet political philosophies. And the notion of moderation has somehow become radicalized, I think; a dirty word for some people and a rallying cry for others.
The vigorous creativity of scholarship provides an endless supply of fodder in terms of new ideas, new reasoning, new justifications, and most recently new "facts". If we were a nation of philosophers it'd be some kind of paradise. But we're not, and it's ripping apart our core social institutions.
I'm not dissing the scholarship, or trying to suggest it's all bunk. I mean, even bunk can be valuable by challenging assumptions or by making conspicuous assumptions itself. But too much of that debate is bleeding out into the culture. A whole new layer of public policy institutions and media outlets feeds off and disseminates the half-baked ideas. There's never any time or energy to winnow the chaff. And so it's effectively poisoning the social and political culture.
Can you name one cultural meme that's emerged from academia in the last 10 years? I certainly can't. I simply don't think academic debates have that great a cultural impact in our modern society, regardless of this increased vigor you're referring to.
On the other hand, I can think of recent cultural memes that have emerged from the political sphere, pushed by a diverse range of people (from corporate interests to grass roots activists). Very few politically active people seem to be waiting around for answers from academia, they've got their own agendas to push.
I didn't say they were a measure of the worth of academia. However, they are a way to track the evolution of public debate. For example, the '1%' meme (about the top 1% owning more than the remaining 99%) has shaped public debate around wealth inequality. If academia has been a big influence on public debate, my argument is that we should see this play out in cultural memes. Cultural memes are just ideas which are commonly known in our shared culture. The GP indicated that the restlessness of academia was damaging public debate, my argument was that the general public was largely indifferent to this activity.
Those critiques are necessary and valid and healthy, but only in the realm of professional discourse. As they leaked out they lost all context and contingency and infused our culture with an unhealthy distrust and skepticism of the legitimacy of scientific claims and techniques.
The concept of regulatory capture has been co-opted by conservatives as an excuse to oppose any sort of government regulation, even though the theory of regulatory capture doesn't make specific claims about the benefit or value or appropriateness of regulation. That concept is not as widely known popularly but still very widely abused far outside the academic realm. It's increasingly being adopted by liberals to unfairly criticize sensible cooperation between regulatory agencies and private business.
The Laffer Curve is similar that way, except that absurdly Arthur Laffer was the first person to claim (and continues to claim) the concept proves things it doesn't.
On the liberal side we can look at trigger warnings and micro-aggressions. The original academic debates that coined those terms were, IMO, quite legitimate and important. In 2017 is it really controversial to think that we might want to give some thought to people suffering from PTSD, such as when discussing rape in the presence of possibly unknown rape victims still feeling victimized. And the concept of micro-aggression is genius. It finally gave us a concrete, if limited, framework for discussing and addressing many of the subtle ways that our inherent cultural biases prejudice and harm people. But both ideas were co-opted and prematurely expanded and radically applied by an overly eager student movement.
There are countless others, too. They abound everywhere. Every editorial article floweths over with inappropriate citations to complex academic theories. It's like the popular psychology fad of the 1950s ballooned to encompass every field, and we all have the fever. We're all pseudo-scientists, now, credentialed to apply scientific theory, and defend ourselves with scientific theory, however we see fit. It's not new. Social darwinism is a classic example of the abuse of science by both scientists and laymen. It just seems more common and more pervasive.
Maybe I'm mistaken in thinking that the pace of radicalism was slower earlier last century and in times prior. Part of the reason I think that is because college attendance rates are way up, which I think implies that a large portion of society has been exposed to more radical and more highly technical ideas. And like the advent of cheap sugar, we've developed a taste for new, sweet ideas that's messing with our political chemistry. But maybe that's also a poor assumption, not to mention a poor analogy.
Taking one example...
"Social darwinism is a classic example of the abuse of science by both scientists and laymen. It just seems more common and more pervasive."
Perhaps this sort of misunderstanding arises as there's a layer of abstraction between scientific inquiry and the results that are produced. The layman only sees the conclusions, not the subtleties and caveats that are part of the wider truth. Social darwinism seems to be an example of what happens when knowledge loses its original context. I suspect it's common as humans seek to find patterns in the world around them. The problem comes when people find patterns backed up from a source perceived to have greater authority, as it has a chilling effect on further exploration.
What a brave new world we live in...