Small Victories
27 Jul 2025Praise, condemnation, questions, and comments can be sent via email
Anyone who has been reading this blog for the past two or so months knows that I am very concerned with the current state of the United States government. I also find myself angry, indignant about the current state of affairs. I feel, as I’m sure many in my generation feel, that the America I was promised is not the America I’ve joined as an adult. I don’t want to look at the past with rose-colored glasses. There are episodes of corruption, lawlessness, and general mismanagement scattered throughout this country’s history. But the current shift feels like something more significant. At least, that’s how it’s covered.
My core worry is that the plans I made thinking that America will go one way are now null and void, since it seems like America is going a different way. Oddly, nothing has materially changed for me thus far. The research program that I served as a research assistant for this summer had its NIH funding cut, but the professor sponsoring me has been able to pay me out of his own research funds. The universities haven’t been shut down, the philosophers haven’t been convicted of polluting the minds of the youth, and daily life continues much as normal.
Do I have a reason to be upset? If nothing so far has materially changed, if I’m still able to at least finish my Ph.D., is there any sense in which my life is worse? Does my life need to be worse for me to be upset? There’s something to be said for sympathy, I have friends who are international students at UR who are under much more pressure than I am, and I’m certainly upset that they now might be cut off from their families or threatened with deportation. I feel sympathy for them, but I’m not just feeling sympathy. I’m really taking the additional uncertainty and the threats to the things that I value in this country personally.
I’m not so arrogant to think that I have a right to get a Ph.D. in philosophy. I don’t think anyone has such a right. It is very much a privilege to be paid (however modestly) to pursue one’s own research with some minor teaching responsibilities attached. But I do think I earned that privilege. I worked hard in undergrad, I went above and beyond when I could, I did some good philosophy, all while navigating a minor drinking problem and subsequent sobriety. I’m very happy with my work and I think that I have enough talent to meaningfully contribute to the field and future students.
But now, through no fault of my own, that privilege is in jeopardy. It’s a frustrating thing to be subjected to, especially with something that I’ve wanted to pursue for so long and that I so thoroughly love. I thought we had a deal, America! I provide cheap labor for a few years to my university and, in the summers, local pizza kitchens, and you let me read and write and teach for a career. What gives?
Low Tide at Pourville, near Dieppe, 1882 by Claude Monet
I hold myself to certain standards of adaptability. Before I applied to graduate school one of my professors told me “you should only go if you can really only see yourself doing philosophy, and if that’s the case it’s a really depressing thought.” I can see myself doing things other than philosophy, though the other things I can see myself doing are in some way related to academic philosophy. Writing in some other capacity, editing, maybe I could become a librarian. I don’t think it would reflect very well on me if I really struggled to find work I found meaningful and interesting outside of philosophy. I think such difficulty would be symptomatic of too narrow an intellectual focus.
Nonetheless I love philosophy, more than any other intellectual activity. I think that philosophers consider the most conceptually difficult problems that we, as a species, have. I also think that philosophical work is important, and has transformed the world to be a better place. The entire American experiment is heavily rooted in Enlightenment thought, and despite the many, many, morally reprehensible things this country is responsible for, there has also been a lot of good done in the world by America and Americans, especially in the period since World War II.
Every day it seems this country is more and more willing to turn its back on those original Enlightenment principles (and, to some extent, the field of inquiry responsible for producing them). The Vice President is an admirer of “Dark Enlightenment” figures like Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land, neo-monarchists who reject any sort of liberal democratic principles. These men are not philosophers, they are polemicists, they aim to arouse and inflame the ego, not the intellect.
I worry what this country, and my life, will look like without quality, analytic philosophers who take their work seriously. I would find something else to occupy my time, I’d find some other way to pay the bills, and I’d move on if the philosophy departments were closed and we were all sent home. I’d find ways to be happy. But I am sure that my life would be missing the richness that it has now. I am sure that the classes of students who would not have the opportunity to study philosophy (or worse, be assigned Curtis Yarvin instead) would lose out on intellectual and personal growth.
I fear for the future, and selfishly, I fear that my interests will not be considered in the new world order that we are being rapidly submersed in. I feel myself becoming bitter in response to that fear, and I don’t want to be bitter. I want to be resilient, and I want to find some inner peace that allows me to take the blows in stride and move forward with my life, joy in the face of all of it. At this moment I’m not doing that well. I’m really struggling to find the silver lining.
But I’m working on it. I just got a new bike today, and it felt nice to ride it around town. I celebrated my new purchase by riding over to a new panini restaurant in town where I eavesdropped on the table next to me, a couple on their first date. I think they’re going to go on a second date. Small victories.
Please let me know your thoughts! Thanks for reading!