Shattering Silos
Photo by Jim Witkowski on Unsplash
Storage silos are a common sight on the Canadian prairies and in the American Midwest. They store crops in properly protected spaces until ready for use or shipment. I don’t remember seeing them on the California farmland where I grew up. But Iowa, where I attended college, has more of them than any other state. And when I began my teaching career at The King’s University in the early 1980s, silos punctuated the unending fields and modest railway towns outside Edmonton, Alberta.
Today, traditional storage silos are shutting down, in favor of more efficient or eco-friendly ways to stockpile and distribute crops. Some now stand forlorn, like crumbling sentinels to a receding way of life. Others have been torn down. Still others live on in cutesy or creative reincarnations, like the Airbnb in Alberta that joins and domesticates two silos, while offering its own “cowboy hot tub.”
Tin Bins Cabin, Mountain View County, Alberta, Canada
Beyond farm life, however, metaphorical silos are more ominous. Consider, for example, the hundreds of underground missile silos scattered across the Midwest. They house gigantic weapons of nuclear annihilation. Or think of unwelcome “silo syndromes” or “silo effects” in the world of business. These happen when units within an organization fail to cooperate or communicate, hunkering down instead in their own insular silos, and thereby undermine shared efforts and a common mission.
Expert Ignorance
I had such organizational patterns in mind when I titled a recent book Shattering Silos. I wanted to challenge the “self-prescribed silos” that keep philosophers from countering “the onslaught of post-truth politics, with its daily attacks on science, the news media, and the public sphere” (p. 3). To recall the metaphor from my Burning Down the House blog post, I wanted to say it’s high time to creatively reconstruct the roofless, many-niched house of contemporary philosophy.
Self-prescribed silos are not unique to philosophy. Every academic discipline confronts hyperspecialization. Professional status in biology or economics or art history requires mastery of a small area of expertise. Moreover, universities are set up to reward such specialization. There’s no Nobel Prize for being a generalist; rarely does one get tenure for acing interdisciplinary studies. Reinforced by technological trends, political pressures, and economic demands, the modern university regularly produces what, during my doctoral studies in Berlin, we often disparaged as Fachidioten—specialist experts who are generally ignorant.
Further, there’s a political payoff for expert ignorance. It lets you keep your head down and stick to the job at hand—teaching your next class, preparing your next paper, attending the next conference, or writing your next book. You don’t need to mix it up in the public sphere or try to speak truth to power. Instead, as John McCumber puts it in the title to his scathing study of how McCarthyism affected American philosophy in the 1950s, you can comfortably spend Time in the Ditch.
The tendency to reward narrow expertise is especially destructive for generalist disciplines such as history and philosophy. The current demise of the humanities gives one sign of this. When budgetary push comes to curricular shove, how do you convince university administrators, corporate donors, and government bureaucrats that society needs more generalists? Even within the profession of philosophy, who still believes that asking the big questions about life and society remains our primary vocation? That our specialized areas of expertise should remain attuned to our being philoi sophia, lovers of wisdom? That the silos we’ve constructed—breaking down communication within philosophy and isolating it from other fields—can no longer stand?
Labor of Love
If you’ve ever transformed a dysfunctional school or agency or business, you know that shattering silos can be a long and laborious process. But it can also be a labor of love. It requires respect and trust among your colleagues as well as passion and commitment for the mission you share. That’s so in philosophy too. In the words of my first blog post, the love of wisdom needs the wisdom of love.
Two things in particular will be required. As proposed in my book Social Domains of Truth (pp. 286-96), philosophers must develop a comprehensive critique of contemporary society. And we need to combine this with the pursuit of what I call social-ethical wisdom. I’ll have more to say about such critique and wisdom in later posts.
But let me leave you with an image from “Anthem,” a well-known song by the late Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen. When we try to shatter silos, cracks in our tight constructions inescapably appear. Yet that’s no cause for despair. There is a crack, Cohen sings, in everything: That’s how the light gets in.
Photo by Omer Salom on Unsplash
