Philosophy

When I was in college I took three Philosophy courses, all taught by the same instructor. She was a dedicated Atheist, Communist, and Existentialist. I thought her insights into the Human Condition were just amazing. I thought the books she had us read were incredibly thought provoking (although I never completely accepted the Communist Manifesto as being the best way to handle economics). Now, twenty years later, I can see all this for what it was, namely baloney.

This is what happens in a college environment. You have a group of young people, with essentially no real-world experience. You add a group of older people with titles, letters after their names, and most importantly tenure. This second group generally has little more real-world experience than the first, but they've had the time to read a lot more. Group two then proceeds to fill group one's heads with all sorts of wonderful-sounding stuff, and group one lacks the discernment derived from experience to recognize the fallacy of what they're learning. The students lack the experience to question the underlying premises they're being fed, once those premises are accepted they'll fall for the rest of the philosophy. Anyone who's studied logic can tell you that if you start off with an incorrect premise you can prove anything at all.

This system is self-perpetuating. I was a Computer Science major, my goal was a job out in the real world. Had I been a Philosophy major (and I seriously considered a double major) my goal would probably have been a college teaching position. I would have simply moved up the Ivory Tower, from student to teacher, and helped to fill the next generation of young, inexperienced brains with nonsense. A percentage of them would also have become Philosophy teachers, and so on and so on and so on.

Don't get me wrong, we need Philosophy teachers. We don't want to raise generations of worker drones who know how to do their jobs and nothing else. I do, however, think Philosophy departments in general would be better off if the teachers had to apply their philosophies in the real-world day after day.

I had basically three classifications of teachers in my major and closely related subjects like Engineering. First, and decidedly in the minority, were those who had been teachers since they got out of school themselves. Second were people who studied their fields in school, then worked in the field for some time before semi-retiring to a full-time teaching position. Third were people who were currently employed full-time in their fields and were teaching part-time. Those last two categories were about equal in number. What this meant was that the majority of my teachers in my major had real-world experience. They knew what it meant to work late to find and correct a program problem. They knew what it was to have the phone ring at 2:00 AM because your program just bombed. They knew that all the wonderful theories in the world meant nothing until the program was thoroughly tested and debugged. They knew that if it hadn't been tested by definition it didn't work.

Communism, for instance, is a wonderful philosophy on paper. Everyone treated equally, everyone working for the common good. As Bill Whittle said though, it requires you to believe that the entire commune will turn out at midnight to search for the cow that no one owns when she gets lost in a snow storm. If you've never had to search for a cow in a snowstorm you might well believe such a thing, once you have you'll know better.

My Philosophy teacher often criticized my essays and papers for being too logical. I took as critical a look at the philosophy in question as my limited experience allowed. Looking back, it wasn't sufficiently critical, but you can't expect old heads on young shoulders. The majority of my course work was in a field where a misplaced comma could mean a long night of debugging, where hooking the circuit up to the 12 volt instead of the 5 volt power source could ruin your day, and where Murphy's law was always strictly enforced. Where the question was not whether something would break, but when and where it would break and how much damage it would do when it fell.

So I look around the laboratory that is our world. Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing and expecting different results, well I see a great many people holding on to failed beliefs and expecting them to work this time. Communism, Moral Relativism, Collectivism, Multiculturalism. They've all been tried and have failed, in some cases multiple times. If you make a wrong turn it's not "progress" to keep going in the wrong direction, you only make progress by going back to the last place where you were right.

Anything else is insanity.