Why philosophy is bullshit

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Doing bloody annual appraisals which go into a drawer never to be looked at again. And, in order to get these tasks done, as HoD, you ask your staff to help out.

Bullshit proliferation. It is not capitalism per se that produces the bullshit. It is managerialist ideologies put into practice in complex organisations. As managerialism embeds itself, you get entire cadres of academic staff whose job it is just to keep the managerialist plates spinning — strategies, performance targets, audits, reviews, appraisals, renewed strategies, etc, etc.

Chloe was a minor player, which is one reason she could be so clear-eyed about what was really going on. These managers surround themselves with officious armies of functionaries who are little more than the kind of feudal retainer a medieval knight might employ to tweeze his mustache or polish the stirrups on his saddle before a joust.

In fact, administrative bloat and consequent bullshitization in the U. This makes sense: in public universities, administrators are to at least some degree accountable to the public; in private ones, they are answerable only to trustees, who are familiar mostly with the standards prevalent in the corporate world and therefore find it normal for an incoming executive to expect to be assigned a bevy of assistants and only then set about making up work for them.

The obvious question is: Why are these standards so common in the corporate world? Why has managerial feudalism expanded from the corporate world into practically everything else?

And why has academe been so particularly hard hit? I suspect that bullshitization has been so severe because academe is a kind of meeting place of the caring sector — defined in its broadest sense, as an occupation that involves looking after, nurturing, or furthering the health, well-being, or development of other human beings — and the creative sector.

These are, certainly, the two sectors of undeniably valuable work that have been most plagued by bullshitization. The creative industries have, over the past several decades, pretty much all seen the multiplication of new and exotic levels of managerial positions that are mainly involved in selling things to one another. The visual arts have seen the rise of a whole new stratum of managerial intermediaries called curators.

In the creative industries, as in the sciences and humanities, much of this is justified by various sorts of internal competition. Then there are teams of executives whose sole job is to decide which of the various proposals deserves to be made. This is the Hollywood equivalent of the 1. Inserting such contests into the heart of the creative process has, in most cases, had effects on culture just as predictably disastrous as our newfound habit of insisting that scientists spend most of their time begging for funding has had on the advancement of science.

For some reason, this is how things must now be done. In the caring professions, the causes are slightly different. Here, too, there has been an endless multiplication of previously unnecessary managerial positions and the consequent proliferation of paperwork.

But much of that, I think, is also a result of digitization. While digital technologies have the effect of rapidly increasing productivity in the manufacturing sector, applied to caring labor they tend to have the opposite effect: They reduce productivity, as nurses and teachers are obliged to spend increasing proportions of their time pretending to quantify the unquantifiable.

The result is profoundly inflationary. In the United States, the cost of health care and university education skyrocketed during precisely the time that those sectors became increasingly digitized. This inflation in the caring sector is not a product of managerialism or of digitization alone.

Rather, it results from an unhappy confluence of the two. Top-down reforms are almost inconceivable. To give a sense of the problem: Once, a colleague and I approached the newly appointed director of our university — a man who was clearly keen to make a name for himself — and tried the following.

Are you willing to come up with a detailed plan for how this would be done? Something about the experience of grad school, the job market, and pre-tenure trials ends up rendering 99 percent of even the most secure academics utterly incapable of meaningful rebellion. Again, to return to my own experience: During the British student movement of , which saw occupations in virtually every college protesting government plans to triple tuition fees, I struggled to figure out some way for my colleagues — every one of whom claimed passionate support for the movement — to chip in.

Expecting them to do anything militant, even spending a day in one of the occupations, was out of the question. So I suggested a boycott of self-assessment exercises.

Many of those were mandated by the government, but since direct government funding was being cut off anyway, why not simply refuse to carry them out? The more polite of my colleagues pretended I was joking. Most stared at me as if I were a lunatic. Change, if it is to come, will have to come from outside the academy. It strikes me that a real problem with the university system is that, intellectually, it is becoming the only game in town. Scholars have no other place to go, scientists few, and even as university departments themselves become less and less concerned with ideas, almost anyone whose work is in any way related to the life of the mind — artists or journalists, for instance — becomes more and more likely to have to spend at least some time employed by one.

These two phenomena are related. The best thing that could happen to universities would be to face a little competition. Most 18th-century Enlightenment thinkers had nothing but contempt for universities, which they saw as corrupt, pedantic, moribund, and medieval; they preferred to write for the general public.

The modern university was a bid for renewed relevance. In each case, the real innovators were much closer to artistic and journalistic circles — which are now, ironically, themselves being drawn into the university — than to academe. But it can hardly be said that academe did not come out better for the competition. One reason is that there was a lot of money floating around.

Perhaps the easiest way to begin to de-bullshitize academic life would be to do something about the current precarity of intellectual life. In fact, the phenomenon of bullshit jobs is one of the most compelling arguments in favor of a policy of universal basic income. One common objection to simply providing everyone with the means to live and then allowing us to make up our own minds about how we see fit to contribute to society is that the streets will immediately fill up with bad poets, annoying street musicians, and vendors of pamphlets full of crank theories.

No doubt there would be a little of this, but if 40 percent of all workers are already engaged in activities they consider entirely pointless, how could it be worse than the situation we already have? A likely result of universal guaranteed income would be the rapid defection of a large number of academics from their university positions to intellectual circles where they would once again be able to argue about ideas and research things they actually find interesting.

They might establish free schools where they could teach anyone who wished to learn. Universities would not become extinct. They would retain many strategic advantages.

But they would be forced to de-bullshitize very rapidly. See J. While Graeber sees the increased bullshitization of the university as an outgrowth of managerial feudalism—basically as downstream effects of ostentatious displays of status and self-justification from those with power—there is, I think, a contribution to the problem that is less easily vilified, and which is in fact held up as laudable in other contexts: the drive for accountability.

It is not unreasonable for the public to want proof that its ivory towers are valuable and that their occupants are doing their jobs well. Sure, some demands for accountability are themselves bullshit—political posturing and the like.

But not all. If private donors or state legislatures are interested in figuring out how to deploy their resources, it helps to have comprehensible accounts of how valuable their options are.

Graeber says, by direct implication, that professional academic philosophy is a bullshit job. What I want to do now is to fill in some of the intermediate steps in the argument, and unpack some further implications.

If the entire class of jobs under that heading were to disappear, then would any other people be significantly worse off or would it make any salient difference to the rest of humanity? Were there to be NO real philosophers who, as a full-time, lifetime calling, were thinkers, writers, and teachers about the human condition in all its aspects and implications, then all those who, at any point in their lives, reflected on those lives and the larger human condition, and asked themselves fundamental questions, would be significantly worse off for the lack of works of real philosophy and able, committed teachers of philosophy; and their absence would indeed also make a huge difference to the larger intellectual, socio-cultural, aesthetic, moral, and political life of the rest of humanity.

The tenure system is ostensibly there to give professors the security to experiment with potentially dangerous ideas. Philosophy Without Borders , aka PWB , is a small cosmopolitan community of people, widely distributed in space and across time-zones, connected by the internet, who are pursuing philosophy together as a full-time, lifetime calling. Again, you can find them HERE. Nevertheless, short of quitting your job and becoming a renegade philosopher, any professional academic philosopher, like yourself, who agrees with the arguments that Graeber and I have been offering, should be generously supporting projects like Philosophy Without Borders.

Please consider becoming a patron!