The best 21st-century thinkers I read – Bauman (RIP), Byung-Chul Han, Clouscard, Fusaro, Rendueles – are all European. Poland, Germany, France, Italy, Spain.
In the Americas, there are people who describe what’s wrong in very talented, engaging ways. Shoshana Zuboff, Joe Allen, Miklos Lukacs de Pereny, Gullo Omodeo. Or even JD Vance in his fine autobiography. As I explained before, this is a very important task. But I haven’t seen anything like original ideas, theory, philosophy come out of the Americas this century. This is new and not great. We had a lot going on in this hemisphere in what concerns generating ideas all the way until the 1990s. But since then, bupkes.
This lack of ideas, this deadlock in the understanding of the world is reflected in our politics. It’s all connected, people. Ideas, art, politics. The place where ideas are created has become shallow and geriatric, and everything else is following suit.
This is very strange given that the US has the money and the structure to bring over the best brains from anywhere in the world. We should have our own Fusaros and Hans by the bucketful but somehow it’s not working out.
What we have instead of ideas is a struggle between lunatic proposals (“let’s cut off the breasts of unhappy 14-year-olds”) and the reaction to these lunatic proposals (“no, let’s not do that, you absolute creep”). We are locked in the lunacy/reaction cycle which is, by nature, repetitive and stagnant. If all you do is say no to XYZ, you are XYZ’s slave. XYZ owns you because your existence is dominated by XYZ’s every whim.
The lunatic proposals in question do not come out of a wealth of ideas, either. Their root is the belief that there should be no limitations on human desires. Biology, society, tradition, religion, law – they all should fall away and not constrain human freedom to refashion oneself and the world in an endless act of re-creation. This fanatical dedication to the philosophy of “be ye as gods” is hardly a new and interesting idea. Rather, it’s hubris adopted in lieu of philosophy.
Europe is actually doing really well in what concerns producing ideas. Europe is on a good path. We need to get ourselves unstuck here in the Americas and start churning out fresh, interesting thought, too.
Clarissa's Blog 
According to Tocqueville, the American system is the supposed to create a strong mediocrity. We produce competent mechanics but not great philosophers.
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We used to produce lots of competent mechanics who invented stuff, wild-eyed eccentrics who tinkered and tinkered and produced wonders– Luther Burbank, Thomas Edison, the Wright brothers, Eli Whitney…
I’m not sure we do even that anymore. It’s worth asking why.
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“I’m not sure we do even that anymore. It’s worth asking why”
One word answer: Credentialism…. you can have innovation or credentialism (which is about maintaining an orderly status quo rather than innovation, which is by nature messy and awkward and a bit threatening.
Of course it’s a bit more complicated than that but not much more….
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Yeah. I think it also has to do with our education system– when we were producing such people, kids didn’t spend *nearly* as much time in school as they do now, and had a great deal more freedom.
Burbank developed/grew the russet potato when he was still a kid, puttering around in his parents’ garden.
These days he’d probably have spent all his spare hours building stuff in Minecraft.
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I firmly agree with both of you.
Credentialism and our educational system are a plague.
Starting with credentialism. So I was told this by my father about a guy he heard about when he first started working in the accounting. There was an old man in his 70s I believe, who people would come to to have their tax returns done. He would take a stack, and do them at a restaurant. He had a high-school education and wasn’t a CPA or any other title nor did he have a degree in accounting. He had made a living doing that for nearly 5 decades. Today to work in accounting you practically need an Accounting degree or the equivalent. To have the title of a CPA, you need to pass the CPA exams, have a bachelors in accounting, and the equivalent of another 2 years in accounting courses on top of that. The CPA license gives you exactly 2 things. First you can ask for a higher salary, and second you can sign your name on audits. That’s it. Nothing else, just the ability to sign your name on an audit. Another example is haircutter is a job you could do to get by when traveling around. After all everyone needs a haircutter at some point, and its something people have done since Adam and Eve. The last hair cutter I went to before she retired told me, to cut hair you now need a license with 3,000 hours, to me that is absolutely crazy.
The Educational system on the other hand takes kids and removes all interest in whatever subject they might have had. Note: a good teacher can avoid doing this, but lets be honest, for every good teacher you have a dozen who should never be allowed to teach. Chemistry should be exciting, mixing and matching chemicals, explosions, changing liquids to solids, solids to gas, and a thousand things more. Yet it is one of the most hated subjects in school. That should have warning bells ringing loudly, but no one running things seems to care. History should be beyond exciting. Do you have any idea the shear number of exciting stories make up history? You can’t go a single year in history without running into assassinations, robberies, backstabbing politics, wars, inventions, groups coming together to fight against any number of people/organizations. Hell half our movies are based off of our highly edited history. Yet kids sleep through history class. The fact this travesty is allowed is astounding. (As a personal note, originally I wanted to teach history, and the fact that 90% of so called history teachers haven’t been banned from any field of education is astounding to me.) Hell, in middleschool/highschool, I think we had 2 actually history teachers, all the other positions were actually being taught by the sports coaches in order to pay their salaries. Worse, in college, the history professors were actually worse, with a few exceptions. Do I even need to cover the abominable failure of the english/literature departments, language arts departments, the abysmal failure of the foreign language departments.
Quite frankly our educational system is beyond a failure. I knew back in highschool that I was going to homeschool my kids even if it was only on weekends. Admit-ably it was because I was so disgusted in the failure of the history departments. Today, I would not send my kids to any school at this point.
I’m going to stop at this point, before I get lost ranting like an old man complaining about kids on his lawn.
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We get it. It’s why we homeschool ours.
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I’m a high school teacher in the public system and I would never send any children of mine to a state school.
There may be some religiously inspired schools that are worth attending because teacher selection is still a thing there, but they are few and far between.
Moreover, the Woke virus is rapidly spreading through society irrespective of generations, consuming not only younger people but devouring hitherto untouched segments of the population: pretty soon even those religious schools will be spouting the same propaganda as state schools.
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Most religious schools are already there. I’ve talked to some parents who have tried them out.
There are exceptions, but… there seems to be a short shelf life for good small private/church schools. There’s an initial, often experimental phase, where things are great, parents and staff are very involved and really excited about it, and they can often keep it going for several years. I went to one such in middle school. My mom was on the curricula committee. It was great.
But then… the founders move on because their kids grew up, and it either falls apart right then (this is the best case scenario) because it was held together by the fierce devotion of a few people and a bit of duct tape all along… or it morphs into an institution, that works for the good of *the institution* instead of the students. All downhill from there. As soon as it makes that turn, the wokies pounce on it.
All good schools are temporary phenomena. Sometimes you luck into one, but they can’t be counted on.
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Did you refer to César Rendueles who wrote “Sociophobia: Political Change in the Digital Utopia“, to Diego Fusaro who wrote … (nothing in English) and to Michel Clouscard ?
Is Sociophobia good?
Would love to find new good authors.
Pity you stopped the former “book posts” on your blog which helped readers access new ideas, even if they didn’t read the entire book or couldn’t because of language differences.
May you revive this feature in the future? Those were the best posts with insights re the modern condition from the best thinkers.
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Sociophobia is excellent. I very highly recommend.
And I still publish my Book Posts. The most recent was on Byung-Chul Han’s book about beauty. It went unnoticed because the assassination attempt took place an hour after I published it.
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It was profound. I just didn’t have anything to add.
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Can you recommend books that describe how christianity was essential for western society to flourish? Or why religion is important and why the lack of it leads to societal decay. I have many rationalist atheist friends and they are all of the view that religion is completely unnecessary and that science and religion are always in conflict. It’s very reddit-tier thinking, I know, but I want to give them solid answers. Thanks!
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Absolutely 100% Dominion by Tom Holland. It’s long but even just one chapter will be eye-opening. It’s a book that should be taught in every high school in my opinion. Holland explains how Western civilization in its entirety is Christianity. Whether we realize it or not doesn’t matter because it’s still in everything we do, say and are.
I now want to drop everything and reread it.
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I checked, and it seems that I never wrote about Dominion on this blog which is weird since it’s a book that shook me to the core. I’ll start a new series about it.
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