I am the last person I thought would succumb to this, ever, but I miss philosophy.

Entering college, fresh in the ways of academia I shunned philosophy as a doctrine and philosophy majors as effete nerds who couldn’t apply what little analytical thinking skills they had to any question that was actually important, like how to feed people or sell them things. I assumed that “philosophy” -  whatever that meant – was a semantic exercise devoid of real content; the same kind of intellectual circle-jerking about culture that all my mini-hipster friends were so fond of all grown up. After spending slightly over a month getting a prerequisite out of the way at a community college, I’ve begun to realize that all the rest of school is a worthless semantic exercise, however practical it looks. I miss arguing and talking, and most of all I miss questions, even the bullshit ones.

At the end of the day, the lack of questions is the thing that bothers me most about “practical” education. Do I know a bunch of shit about dead white men that I will never, ever need? (Well, maybe if I get a PhD, but really, “need?”) Yes, yes, a thousand times. But I think about things when they’re told to me, at a least a little bit,and that’s so much more than most students – even college students – will ever even realize they’re missing out on. And as much as I’d like to take credit for being brilliant and brave and special and all that, I had nothing to do with it, really; because of where I was born and how I was born and because my IQ manifested itself early rather than late I got the best of everything for my brain from the day I started reading until the day I graduated from college. People, for whatever reason, believed that I’d grow up and be a thinker and that’s the only reason I am.

Maybe there’s not room in the world for all of us to be thinkers, but I look around at those other kids in my class, the ones that didn’t go to prep school or get mocked for saying Nietzsche wrong in seventh grade and wonder how different we’d be, if they’d still be awed by me and the things I say if they’d had everything I had. Chatting with one of them before class, I mentioned that I had already gone to college, and he asked what I majored in.

“Philosophy,” I answered, expecting the usual eye-roll. It didn’t come.

“Damn, that’s a hard class,” he replied.

I was floored. Because it shouldn’t be hard, not for anyone. Taught right, anyone at all should be able to read philosophy, and love it, and learn from it, and the older I get and the closer to academia I orbit I hope more than anything that someday I can restore her to her rightful place as the queen of sciences. Not for the sake of any dead white men, but for the sake of all the living people who aren’t living quite as much because of all the questions they never thought to ask.

Reading a week-old issue of The Economist today, I did a literal double-take:

A part of an American draft resolution, for instance, calls for nuclear-armed states to vow never to use such weapons against non-nuclear states.

http://www.economist.com/world/middleeast-africa/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14462435

Why the hell would anyone bother pushing this sort of thing? I’m going to stop short of saying that the UN’s time is precious, since a great deal of what they do is finger-wagging anyhow, but I find it hard to believe that any reasonable policy-maker could be naive enough to think that a  “promise” to a body with as little leverage over nuclear powers as the UN could ever prevent one from deploying its full military might. Don’t they have more important things to be talking about in there?