America the Philosophical by Carlin Romano
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Good Philosophers Do Not a Culture Make

Philosophical boosterism is an unusual enthusiasm, especially in someone as articulate and intelligent as Carlin Romano. And it seems particularly unnecessary in an era when professional American philosophy has been long recognised as important and globally influential. C.S. Peirce, William James, Josiah Royce, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rory are not only famous American names in philosophy, they are also links in a chain of philosophical tradition which is uniquely American, a tradition which has seeped, often subtly but nevertheless decisively, into European thought. There seems little reason to write at length about what has been apparent for at least a century. Why then the effort?

Romano, it seems, has a much broader agenda. He would like to convince us that the philosophical prowess of these intellectual giants, who happen to be American, are really the tip of an enormous intellectual iceberg. Below the professional/academic surface, according to Romano, lies a culture which forms the intellectual gene-pool responsible for such achievement. He uses decidedly un-philosophical prose to praise the elements of this culture:

“The openness of its dialogue, the quantity of its arguments, the diversity of its viewpoints, the cockiness with which its citizens express their opinions, the vastness of its First Amendment freedoms, the intensity of its hunt for evidence and information, the widespread rejection of truths imposed by authority or tradition alone, the resistance to false claims of justification and legitimacy, the embrace of Net communication with an alacrity that intimidates the world: all corroborate that fact.”

So America is not just the home of a respectable philosophical tradition, it is the new Athens, the modern Rome: “America in the early twenty-first century towers as the most philosophical culture in the history of the world, an unprecedented marketplace of truth and argument that far surpasses ancient Greece, Cartesian France, nineteenth-century Germany or any other place one can name over the past three millennia.” There is apparently a sociology, a politics, and an inherent progressive attitude in America that make it a truly exceptional place.

It is the culture, therefore, not just the philosophy that Romano wants us to admire, and to respect as one “that suits the twenty-first century and jibes with accelerating trends of globalization in economics, politics, culture, ethics and communication.” America is the future of the world, and deserves to be based on its intellectual contribution if nothing else. Well, I suppose this might be considered in the same genre as the patter of a used car salesman, mere nationalistic puffery, possibly debatable but really intended as encouragement for the young to buy the product. But overselling is risky business.

Because then along came Trump. Trump is the antithesis of everything Romano claims for American culture. And he has populated the government, the courts and federal positions throughout the country with officials as mendacious, as ill-read, as self-serving and as lacking in aesthetic and ethical sense as he is. Even more damning: approximately half the American population considers him a valiant representative and defender of the culture they want to preserve - one that values religious cant over thought, racial tribalism over national solidarity, and intimidation over democratic process. Trump is the one fact which entirely destroys Romano’s pitch

It is clear today that the America Romano wrote about in 2012 is an illusion. That place and it’s people may be unique, but not because of a socio-political substrate that makes it culturally superior. Throughout the book I found myself thinking of Robert Venturi’s gushing praise for the architecture of Las Vegas in the 1960’s. Frank Lloyd Wright certainly produced some great American architecture. But the garish hideousness of the Las Vegas Strip is much more typical of aesthetic taste in the country. Romano is the cultural Venturi, elevating the ugly to the sublime because it happens to occur in the same geography.

The overwhelming anti-intellectualism and parochialism of American culture that can be seen in Trump, his associates and his supporters show the American philosophical tradition is a cultural aberration not an example. It emerged despite not because of its cultural matrix. It is clearly resented and considered as suspect by even those few Americans who know about it. The clichés about American disdain for intellect, it turns out, are truisms; the platitudes about the lack of any real interest in the welfare of the whole are really axioms of American culture.

Much in the way that Francis Fukuyama’s claims about the End of History with the rise of democratic capitalism came shortly before a series of financial crises in the West and the dramatic emergence of a decidedly un-democratic China, Romano published at just the wrong time. “Events, dear boy, events,” as a British Prime Minister once said. Events tend to foul the most promising hypotheses in so many annoying ways. If the future really is American, heaven help us all, including American philosophers.

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