The End of Op-Ed pieces

Within the past 20 years, we’ve seen people proclaim the End of History, the End of Faith, and now the End of Philosophy. It is typical of Generation Narcissus that it would produce such a bumper crop of people who really do believe that wisdom will die with them, that you can just shut off the lights once we have exited the scene, that everything worth doing, saying, and thinking will have been done when the last Baby Boomer shuffles of this mortal coil, rings down the curtain and joins the bleedin’ choir invisible.

Still, I am skeptical that a generation as rife with fools as ours is really stands constituted to announce the end of faith, philosophy or history (though it stands very well positions to engineer the end of capitalism, western civilization, the US, human liberty, and a great many human lives).

Case in point, David Brooks’ piece today on the end of philosophy. He writes:

Think of what happens when you put a new food into your mouth. You don’t have to decide if it’s disgusting. You just know. You don’t have to decide if a landscape is beautiful. You just know.

Moral judgments are like that. They are rapid intuitive decisions and involve the emotion-processing parts of the brain.

Ah! So the world is basically run on the “Ick! Yum!” principle. Hitler said “Jews! Ick! Ovens! Yum!” but the rest of us had different tastebuds. Moral ambiguity? That’s just when things taste sweet and sour at the same time and you feel conflicted, I guess. You just know. After all, what could be more self-evident that “Love your enemy.”

God? Well, he’s just an artifact of morality. Think of him as a traffic cop conjured by your hypothalamus to make you play well with others. The real God is evolution and progress is whatever comes next.

Yeah. A civilization that buys that bridge has indeed come to the end of philosophy. But the civilization after that–the one that will be picking through its ruins–will perhaps go back through its history and see where it made the wrong turn, then resume the sane Catholic philosophical tradition that does not imagine wisdom begins, much less ends, with us.