The Yale Free Press

I am bored with myself right now. Some possible explanations for why I feel bored:

1. Everyone else seems bored, and if everyone else feels the same way, it can not be that bad. Everything is alright.
2. My classes are interesting, but apparently not interesting enough to everyone else. No one wants to discuss them. I suppose it is better than having boring classes. Everything is alright.
3. Everyone listens to the same soft rock. I suppose Coldplay is soothing when classes are busy. Everything is alright.

When I first came to Yale, I envisioned a place to grow, to pursue enlightenment, and to seek truth. Seek truth? For most students’ priority lists, that’s right under paying the student activities fee and right above swearing off drinking.

This means one of two things about truth:

1. There is no truth, and therefore no reason to seek something that is a figment of our imagination, or
2. We got bored of looking.

Sartre once said life is a futile passion, maintaining that the human condition is one where we eternally seek rationality in an irrational world. By his view we cannot help but feed this passion to find a reasonable explanation for everything around us.

Many thinkers feared that if we admit the world has no rational explanation, then society would introduce cultural relativism and dangerous and radical ideologies would be allowed to emerge. Nietzsche’s superhuman evolution would give way to super Hume-an skepticism; every premise can be doubted, and thus there is no justifiable reason to raise one set of assumptions above another. As Ivan Karamazov said, “If God is dead, then everything is permitted.”

While today’s society may have bought into cultural relativism, few in our generation are suffering from a futile passion. No bold and aggressive ideas have emerged from this nihilist premise, most people just got bored. Perhaps this condition should have been more appropriately named “futile passiveness.” The most tragic casualties of such apathy have been the world’s top universities. As havens of free-thinking and new ideas, the university is the last place one would expect a proliferation of cultural relativism.

But look around campus. Everywhere there is empathy for even the wildest of philosophies, and yet nothing dangerous and radical has sprung up amidst the student body. Sections are filled with people who either do not want to be there or did not do the reading. Even section leaders act like they do not want to be there, which only heightens the feeling that discussion is unproductive. People take a minimal interest in politics; the Yale Political Union is a fraction of the size it was a few decades ago. Casual literary discussion has come under the spell of Harry Potter and television is so uninspired it relies upon reality shows to draw viewers. The closest America has come to supporting a radical and threatening cultural group is the Church of Scientology. We are freer than ever to espouse even the most extreme views on campus, but no one has much to say.

One root cause is a lack of competition. Much like a market system, competition stimulates innovation and effectiveness. It forces companies to prove their usefulness—or philosophies to prove their endurance. When competition is eliminated in the marketplace of ideas, inquiry stagnates. In a relativist framework, there is no need to compete because no idea can demonstrate its superiority over another.

Before the competitive instinct disappeared, tradition and great thinkers of the past used to fuel such inspiration. Ancient and Enlightenment philosophers provided a clear challenge to every student and the natural inclination was to contest their assumptions. True, some of their thoughts were outdated, even offensive to modern sentiments. But that was precisely the point, people are supposed to prove them wrong and measure them against modern day thinking. They are the springboard for critical thinking.

Where is the knowledge of and respect for tradition today? Today most people see tradition as close-minded and old-fashioned. How many today are familiar with the Republic and Either/Or? How many engaged such works 40 years ago? I believe there are two major causes for the banishment of tradition. The first is the aforementioned hyper-skepticism, which has led to people to give a simple “philosophical shrug” to the past. The second is that people who call themselves traditionalists today admire the past simply for tradition’s sake. There isn’t a desire to question; rather they believe tradition is to be idolized and protected. Because of this, tradition has become associated with the imposition of absolute truth. In response to Peter Johnston’s editorial in the Yale Daily News defending tradition, Michael Seringhaus responded on September 29 by writing, “in a social context, a stalwart belief in absolute truth is restrictive, exclusive and potentially damaging- far more threatening than any relativist stance.” Instead of representing a dialogue between the present and the past, interest in tradition is now associated with interest in “stalwart belief in absolute truth”.

Perhaps the best way to combat this relativism is to demand students prove the correctness of this theory. Require them to demonstrate the weakness of Greek and Enlightenment thought before settling into resigned relativism. Even if there is a return to relativism, it will be a much healthier understanding of it. These old ways of thinking have survived because they have proven robust in the face of criticism, a test all philosophies must pass over generations of scholars. The worst possible outcome, yet the easiest, is to casually accept relativism as true, without realizing the sheer irony of that assertion and without seeking knowledge of the traditions it challenged. End this satisfaction with impotent philosophies and re-introduce discord, real debate, and force students to make bold defenses of their premises. Otherwise, even Yale’s best and brightest are destined to fall into default lives—taking the obvious choices and leaving their historical footprint, so to speak, in the tide zone of a sandy beach.

Sound frightening? Don’t worry. Everything will be alright.