Could primary schools re open early? Credit: Justin Setterfield/Getty

Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, held a press conference on Tuesday, and entirely failed to answer a basic question: if the new variant is more infectious, how come the lockdown rules aren’t as tough as last spring’s?
Realistically, the reason for the weaker lockdown rules is that the Government continues to refuse to take difficult decisions until they are inevitable. But, if Patel were more nimble on her feet, there was a possible, plausible explanation open to her. And that is simply: we know more, now, than we did in March, so we can be more targeted about what we shut down.
For instance: the playgrounds are not closed this time. And that is, I expect, because we know that the virus, both in its old form and its new one, finds it much harder to spread outdoors. Dr Müge Çevik, a virologist at St Andrews University, details here that the risk was around 20 times higher indoors than outdoors. We didn’t have that sort of data in March last year, so we had to be more cautious. (I cannot begin to guess, however, what their reasoning is for allowing estate agents’ offices to remain open.)
Choosing our targets wisely is important. The “wash your hands” message has been drilled into us since the beginning, but the WHO has not found a single clear-cut case of transmissions by surfaces, and research in the Lancet considers it “low risk”. It is important now that we tell people about the risks of being indoors and close to people, rather than about washing our hands until they bleed.
On the same basis, there may be room for being cleverer about schools. British children have not been in their classes since mid-December (except that one mad Monday last week), and before that had only had a few weeks’ in-person teaching since March. The Government plans to revisit its lockdown measures in mid-February, but that seems enormously optimistic: despite the progress with vaccination, the NHS will still be under enormous pressure by then.
Here’s why. By mid-February, the Government hopes to have given almost 14 million people the first dose of a vaccine. That will include all the most vulnerable groups, including all the over-70s. That is, obviously, extremely good news. (If it succeeds.)
Vaccinating those vulnerable groups will hugely reduce deaths. The actuary Stuart McDonald has put the numbers in, and estimates that if we vaccinate those groups on time, Covid deaths recorded by the ONS will drop by about 90% by mid-March. Deaths are hugely concentrated among the elderly.
But there’s a wrinkle. Deaths come down dramatically, and that’s great. But hospital admissions will come down rather less – by about 60%. And intensive care admissions will come down less still – by about 30%. That’s because, as two health economists writing in the Conversation point out, most ITU admissions are younger, with a median age of 62; only about a third are in the over-70 groups who will receive the first vaccines.
And that means that pressure on the NHS will probably remain very high for a few months. It may start to come down as the usual winter concerns fade away, and as the weather gets warmer Covid might start to fade. But it may not, or may not be enough.
There are about 15 million people in the UK aged 50-70. At two million jabs a week, that’s another seven weeks of vaccinations; plus, because it takes time for the vaccine to be effective and because ITU cases are in hospital about twice as long, it would be weeks later still until the pressure on the health service really returns to normal. Say 10 weeks to have full effect; 10 weeks from mid-February is the end of April.
The current school closures are meant to be reviewed at the February half term, which in my borough is 12 February. But the health economists mentioned above say “The proposed date of February 22 for easing lockdown and opening schools seems optimistic,” and at least one academic I’ve spoken to agrees. The vaccinations just won’t have got that far. Even by the Easter holidays, which start 31 March, we will still be vaccinating the 50-to-70-year-olds, and the ITUs will still be full.
What I haven’t mentioned, of course, is the lockdown. Whether it’s been enough to reduce R below 1 is not clear. There are some early indications, as I write, that the spread has come down – the number of cases each day and the percentage of tests coming back positive appears to have plateaued, at least, and may be falling.
But since it’s so close to bubbling over, even under this severe lockdown, the fear is schools could be shuttered until Easter or the May half term. I even had a panicked text message from an academic who works on paediatric public health, wondering whether they would have to stay closed until September.
This is where, I think, we can afford to be a bit cleverer. First, let’s talk about whether schools spread Covid. The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s modelling of the new variant, which was key to this most recent lockdown, suggested that without closing schools, it would be impossible to get the R value below 1. But as I wrote at the time, the schools themselves seemed to have a relatively small impact on the total number of deaths.
Will schools be open by summer?
So: what’s the evidence of schools’ impact on transmission? It is, I am afraid, hugely uncertain. I spoke to Dr Andrew Lee, a public health doctor at Sheffield University, and he pointed me to a recent preprint with the highly relevant title “Do school closures reduce community transmission of COVID-19? A systematic review of observational studies”. And the answer is, essentially, we don’t know.
The review looked at 10 studies, which all examined whether closing schools reduced the spread of Covid. Some of those studies found it had a big effect; some found a smaller one; some found none at all. “Our results are consistent with school closures being ineffective to very effective,” say the authors, unhelpfully. But there is a bit more information we can glean.
First, not all those studies are created equal. “We know the quality of the studies are mixed and the findings are mixed,” says Lee. And those two facts are related. “The studies where the risk of bias is least, the more robust studies, tend to find no effect. The ones where they found rates of transmission were affected didn’t control for other measures.”
Lee himself “is more inclined to believe” the studies finding smaller or zero effect, “because children aren’t effective spreaders of the disease”. He points to reviews of the evidence by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and McMasters University that suggest low levels of spread among schoolchildren.
Çevik broadly agrees. “It’s a very difficult question,” she told me. “We need to accept that studies looking at the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions are going to be at risk of confounding.” But, she says, the evidence, as best we can make out, is that children are not major drivers of disease. Transmission in schools seems to be only rarely from child to child, or from child to adult; it’s mainly adult to adult, or adult to child.
We don’t know exactly why this is. Lee speculates that children, being smaller, breathe out smaller volumes of air, and because their immune system seems to repress the virus more effectively, keeping their viral loads low. Çevik notes that children are less likely to be symptomatic, and asymptomatic cases are less infectious.
Secondly, and more importantly, so far we have lumped primary schools, secondary schools, colleges and universities together, and when we as a society have discussed school closures, it’s largely been all-or-nothing. (Nurseries are currently open, but otherwise it’s key workers and vulnerable children only.) The LSHTM model I mentioned above had them closed or open, altogether.
But children are not all the same. “A primary-school child is not the same as a teenager or a college student,” says Lee. “The risk is much higher with older age groups.” Çevik agrees: “Susceptibility to infection increases with age. After 15 the transmission dynamics are much more similar to adults.” Her own research backs this up. Smaller children seem to be at much less risk of getting and spreading the disease.
So it seems reasonable to say that the risks of opening primary schools, secondary schools and universities are very different. Lumping them together in one big thing called “education” misses a lot of important detail.
It’s also worth noting that the costs of closing primary schools are greater, on every dimension. Small children require much more parental supervision, making home-schooling far harder for working parents. They are more vulnerable to abuse. And the direct educational impacts are worse. So should we reopen primary schools before the rest of the education system, and if so when?
A few things to consider. First, it’s worth noting that I have primary-aged children and am hardly impartial about this. And it seems that the new variant does not disproportionately affect children, as was originally feared. But it seems to be better at spreading under all circumstances, by somewhere around 50%. So even if children are still a smaller part of the equation, relatively speaking, than adults, they could still be important. “If a contact has 5% chance of transmission,” says Adam Kucharski, a mathematical epidemiologist at the LSHTM, “and you have multiple contacts, and so do your contacts, then you have yourself an epidemic.” It doesn’t matter if other kinds of contacts would be worse; what matters is the absolute numbers.
We can take steps to reduce the risk for teachers and others when they do go back – enforcing masks, ventilating classrooms, using more municipal buildings and recruiting more staff to minimise class sizes; the National Education Union has some ideas here. And as the year goes on teaching will be easier: in the summer, the virus will probably have abated and the weather will be warm enough to allow outdoor classes. Shortening or moving the summer holidays might be a good idea, although I dare say there are logistical challenges.
With the vaccines on their way, the cost-benefit equation changes: the costs of keeping children out of school indefinitely are obviously much higher than keeping them out for a few weeks. But it may be that the benefits of closing schools, at least in the case of primary schools, are fairly small as well.
As Patel should have said: our lockdown rules must be as targeted as possible. In the case of schools, that means we shouldn’t treat the whole education system as a single undifferentiated mass. University students and older secondary-school children are essentially adults, in terms of their ability to spread the disease; they’re also more capable of managing without in-person teaching. Primary-aged children seem to be less of a concern from a virological point of view, and keeping them at home has more costs both for them and for wider society.
But in the end, we urgently need a concrete discussion of what tradeoffs we’re willing to make: as cold-blooded as “how many dead people are we willing to accept for a thousand pupil-years of in-person schooling?” It can’t be zero. And if primary schools really do end up being closed until September, that seems too high a price to pay.
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SubscribeThe author uses a novel to try to explain something about the human mind, and i can see what she’s getting at.
She invokes two different approaches and tellingly, describes philosophy as “a safe space for the unfettered operation of mind” as opposed to an untethered approach as characterised by Musli. (I’m tempted to call him muesli, as a scattering of all kinds of ingredients.)
So what i find interesting is how the internet is changing the way our consciousness works; or rather, how we allow it to work. The scatter-gun approach with lack of lengthy concentration is an obvious parallel with browsing, allowing a huge number of ideas to flit through our heads.
To cut to the chase, the question is: what should we do with consciousness? It can be both a blessing and a curse, a tool to advance ourselves and our species whilst also creating a void to be filled with potential harm and falsehood. When young, many find themselves becoming captured by ideology as a means to fill that void (see yesterday’s essay by Mary Harrington) until the realities of life intrude. Some never escape that trap (see any essay by Terry Eagleton).
It just feels like something vital is changing. We’re becoming far more aware of these issues than hitherto, as both the intellectual space freed up by mechanisation and the pace of life expands, whilst our output into – and receptivity to – the internet creates an externalisation for us all, a kind of universal consciousness, along the lines envisaged by Teilhard de Chardin, or perhaps a less holistic way.
Perhaps philosophy provides “a safe space for the unfettered operation of mind” – but there are many philosophies, religions and political systems of thought competing for attention. Strangely none of them converge on a single truth, possibly because there will always be people motivated to break any emerging consensus for all sorts of ‘reasons’.
Thank you, but do not all things in fact converge on a single truth? Is it not love in its unlimited expressions, in its eternal and universal utility?
Doubling Down, continually, is a limited version of ‘unlimited expressions’, and even that ends in unintended consequences, which disrupts any Eternal, Universal Utility.
The essay by Agnes Callard managed to explain the difference between a life guided by the pursuit of serious self reflection, a moral code by which one might try to live and a life that was “a machine for the relentless devaluation of life.” In that former mode, one might as Callard notes be frightened of what one might find in such a serious pursuit of meaning, or truth and perhaps simply see the whole activity as overwhelming us. But at far as I can tell, she nonetheless comes down on the side of those brave enough to inquire, to seriously question ourselves, even in the face of arriving at some revolting conclusions–a task for which philosophy is uniquely suited. Musil, for all his interest in different experiences really is aptly described “what happens when ideas are forced to do the work to which they would only be suited if you did not remove any possibility of ever wholly encompassing some subject matter”. All in all, her essay takes dead aim at Musil’s glibness and deeply cynical approach to living. Under the description she offers, Musil is unarmed without philosophy–something he considers uesless. Too bad for him.
I thought this was a fascinating piece. Exactly consistent with how the Old Testament describes human nature.
Upvoted, not least because I don’t understand why you received downvotes without a comment to explain what you got wrong.
So does Star Wars
Star Wars is more realistic though
I read TMWQ twice twenty or thirty years ago, and always understood Ulrich’s intellectual prostration as a metaphor for the teleological vacuum besetting the Austro-Hungarian empire on the eve of its eclipse. (For the record, I was also a decidedly second rate analytical philosopher, and quit academia the day I got my PhD.)
Bravo RC! Humblebrag of the year. Love it!
Hai thang yow!
“also a decidedly second rate analytical philosopher” – ouch!
When I studied Philosophy over 59 years ago I concluded Western Philosophy’s search for truth was doomed to go round in circles and it should be focussed on choice. Since then the choices available to humans have multiplied and their capacity to make them has diminished. It will disappear completely with a reliance on AI in LLMs that mimic the lowest common denominator of the past thoughts of humans. At first aimlessly and then mindlessly.
The art of thinking has withered on the vine in recent decades. Having been surprised at a request to teach critical thinking to PGs, a data search showed no mandatory twaching of this skill in the Russell group, with creative thinking consigned to schools of management entrepreneurship/ innovation modules. Doubtless a focus on certification over education has not helped, but senior academics are now discusslng whether AI jeopardises even this functional outcome and what can be done (central exam halls ar the obvious answer but resisted because of the cost relative to the Covid virtual option – univeersities being a profit maximising racket these days).
We need to start thinking again, to become excellent secondary data researchers, build inductive/deductive skills and enjoy the freedom of our own conclsions. And to do that we have to make the time for reflection. I saw a hopeful shift in last year’s UG cohort, and I hear this years are more Why (is that so) than How (do I get a first).
Your comment is very interesting. In the light of your words I wonder what you think of my (self serving) thoughts.
So, I teach mathematics and statistics at a pre/first year university level and believe that students should be able to do pen and paper calculations. For example, work out the variance by first principles for say five data points. Any big data set, shove it into a calculator.
Am I silly? Is there any value in this?
Not at your level but I’ve had occasion, with younger people, to revisit the lost mysteries of arithmetic. They complained it hurt their heads. I used to ask them what it was like to go to the gym after a long absence. That Maths is the mental gym? Train hard, fight easy stuff.
At school we used log tables, I used to write down the numbers as powers after taking the log, e.g. if the calculation involved taking the log10 of 5.2 I would write down 10^0.716 for that number. Helped me to remember what it meant. I don’t think anyone else did that. Even then most students were just going through the motions.
Not sure how useful this is at University level.
You must be as old as I am. You said:
Not sure how useful this is at University level.
It is of historical and theoretical value for young engineers to known their heritage.
Log tables were useful for engineers before they were elegantly encapsulated in the slide rule. What an absolutely brilliant and elegant mechanical device for advanced mathematical calculations. It took quite a long time for computers to surpass it.
You’re posing at least two questions here: will it have pragmatic value for young peoples careers – the mundane question; or more importantly for me, will it provide them with pleasure and satisfaction throughout their lives like some find in killer sudoku, the Times crossword, learning other languages, or playing with recursive structural equation models in the social sciences. There is incredible value for those who find it thrilling, or even just fun.
I’m long retired from teaching mathematics and statistics, but I still savour them – and intellectual play in general.
Perhaps a cycle is being broken? First requirement is an inspirational teacher, next the inspired who will grow to pass it on.
A classic example of why I dislike philosophy – the idea that you will be able to understand everything if you just think hard enough. Reality is much more complex than that.
It is also self indulgent; you can’t think much about these things if you’re up at six to get to work
Golly. If only someone had thought to make a distinction between the active and contemplative lives, and to observe the value of leisure and contemplation for any human life that aspires to be anything but merely slavish.
Agreed.
Even the very concept of truth is a bit ridiculous. In many, if not most, areas of inquiry there simply is no possibility of landing on a singular, undeniable truth. The complexity is what makes our world so interesting.
For instance, what is the meaning behind the name “Boxing Day”? I’ve already seen three different explanations in my email today. So, this question, which first occurred to me fifty years ago, is still up for debate.
Note: It’s likely that the first uses were a) oral, not written and b) very local. The people involved are long gone. I think.
2+2=4 is pretty straightforward, I think.
Yes, I believe Aristotle tried to drill down to the basic, uncontroversial truths starting with “A=A”.
‘Identity,’ logic’s most fundamental axiom: whatever a thing is (A, B, P, X… whatever), it is whatever it is.
The clue is in most but not all
However, when there are multiple interpretations available for a set of evidence, not all interpretations are equal. It seems to be not that simple to assess which is the best interpretation, one useful tool being Occam’s razor.
Not in BLM land it doesn’t.
Being that I am currently at the Trona Pinacles in California which is on Bureau of Land Management land, your comment took me a second to realize that you’re not commenting on thar BLM land. Hahaha!
Not if you are off the Post Modernist persuasion or you subscribe to the white patriachal approach to maths-its whatever you want it to be-which is great unless you are doing a job that requires mathematical precision!!
That’s axiomatic, rather than the truth.
Are you saying that it’s not true that 2+2=4?
It can be true, assuming the digits are numbers.
If they are strings, ‘2’ + ‘2’ = ’22’
What is true, isn’t true, always. Someone will come up with the same question, but in a different context. But the original will likely still stand.
Anybody capable of reading this understands they are numbers and therefore the concept represented is always true. Only a deliberate misinterpretation would say it is not. If we didn’t all agree and assume such notation represented numbers mathematics would be nigh on impossible. If it was intended to represent a string that would need to be clarified in accordance with the conventions of our common language and one way of doing that is enclosing in quotation marks as demonstrated yourself. ‘2’+’2′ means something completely different than 2+2.
No one told Microsoft (if you’ve ever programmed in VB you have to be very careful )
There is a difference between a simple fact and a complex truth.
Straightforward, but like all analytical truths–things true by definition–not very interesting. According to the conventional meanings arbitrarily assigned to the symbols in the equation, as far as equivalence is concerned ‘2+2’ is just another way of saying ‘4’–or ‘3+1,’ ‘9-5,’ etc. This doesn’t tell us any more than what we already had to know in order to use the symbols correctly in the first place.
Beware of: ‘2’ + ‘2’ = ’22’
(?) It doesn’t follow from our frequent inability to ascertain what’s true that the concept of truth is itself ridiculous. As for ‘complexity,’ this is a comparative term: it would make no sense to situate things on a complexity continuum that didn’t offer both lesser and greater complexity alternatives. Plus if simple things aren’t themselves interesting, at what point in the complexity hierarchy does interest make its appearance, and if there, why not earlier or later?
Surely what your thus far unsuccessful quest for the meaning of ‘Boxing Day’ should turn your attention to isn’t any opacity in the concept of truth but the very nature of explanation itself, and its limitations. If you wonder how an animal knows how to do something despite no other animal having taught it, for example, and someone suggests, “That’s its instinct”–swell! That clears that up! Now you know how and when to use the word ‘instinct’ appropriately in an English sentence; but are you any wiser than before? In fact, you’ve been given a mysterious black box where an explanation should be; and yet, we accept such black boxes as ‘explanations’ all the time. As long as we can stick labels on things, enabling us to tidy them away into the right closet, our desire for order is appeased and we don’t inquire further. Poke around too closely in those closets, though, and the world can suddenly reveal itself to be much less satisfactorily explained than we thought.
Reality is complex because every individual lives his own reality, reality is a mix of family and societal background, genetics, experiences, what you read and learn, culture, interactions with others, religion or lack of, urban or rural ilfe, etc. There are many different realities, that’s why no one agrees on anything.
I respectfully disagree with the notion of many different realities. There are many different perceptions of reality.Yes, reality is complex, and ultimately unknowable, in total, in this incarnation. We perceive reality through the lens of the inputs you described. Consequently, we interpret reality with varying degrees of correctness and incorrectness simultaneously.
What you have described is not philosophy at all. Some sort of pastiche of someone thinking.
PPE (and History) graduates are why we have rampant NET Zero policies.
Don’t mean to be intentionally cruel but this is pretentious twaddle. “All that can be said can be said clearly.” Where’s Wittgenstein when you need him.
The Tractacus is unreadable.
Wittgenstein might reasonably ask: What do you mean by that?
It could be a variant of „the dependence effect” you mentioned another time: by giving information about Robert Musil’s book, you create the need to read it.
…..
Thank you for explaining to me why I find Robert Musil unreadable
That’s funny. I gave up halfway through the article. I had no idea who Musil was and now I’m not at all interested in finding out.
Living only in the mind breeds impotence. Your heart or gutfeel can give your life direction and then one should commit oneself to act on this. That gives experiential knowledge, the only true knowledge. The rest is mental masturbation.
I have a family member who is like this character. He collects trivia about far distant stars and arcane mathematical equations, but never researches the dangers of Diabetes 2. I once casually quoted to him a stanza from Bob Dylan’s Tombstone Blues, which I think makes the same point as the essayist, and he was highly offended:
Now I wish I could write you a melody so plain
That could hold you dear lady from going insane
That could ease you and cool you and cease the pain
Of your useless and pointless knowledge
There’s philosophy and being philosophical. You can peer at a drop of water in a cloud but it has condensed from the gas of water vapour and is about to fall earthwards. To do this one needs to be close up. A medium sized cumulus weighs 200 tonnes, one needs to be miles back from it to appreciate its majesty, its weight is counter intuitive but a small aircraft can fly through it barely impeded. Best avoided, big brother cumulo nimbus has a fearsome engine raging inside it
A big cloud looks as if it is heading somewhere, has a purpose. It has, it’s heading to where conditions are suitable to redistribute the world’s water. No volition beyond the prevailing wind ‘seeking’ to balance air pressure. It’s part of an auto balancing system but what did the primitives think before science appeared?
A primitive, a child even, will know clouds rain but not that they are completely made up of water. With experience the child grows and expands its purview.
The point? Learn to fly something. You’ll have something new to consider beyond the skill and the machine itself. Look out of a passenger aircraft window and smile at people who say we’re overcrowded. Ponder the narrow minded. Become philosophical over their philosophy, or lack of.
One of your primitives who predates our science is Aristotle. He said the cloud has a purpose, to provide rain.
He wouldn’t have agreed with your idea that its purpose is to redistribute the world’s water. That is not a purpose for him, nor for me as far as I can understand it, and so is not true. It is, using Aristotle’s ‘primitive’ terminology, purely incidental, and to him, of no account.
Therein lies your philosophy. You live in the desert and dismiss, begrudge others’ clouds. You miss the point. I dare say you now know more about clouds than before. Look up today, a huge cloud over your head, all you see. There’s still a stratosphere and more above. Both you and Aristotle don’t see the wood for the trees. A shame with centuries between you.
I am making the point that Aristotle sees further than you, and had the terminology to criticise and correct what you said.
All the best books do teach you how to live. This is one to avoid it seems.
What about those philosophers who believe that have found the answer to how people should live? Here’s a few: Marx, Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot etc.
Better hope that you never find the answer!
I read TMWQ 50 years ago and it had a similar effect on me as listening to Like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan around the same time –
Neither author tries to offer a solution, or even a signpost, but the effect was to inspire me on the path to “relentless” discovery, honesty, self-knowledge and the realisation that the answers to the questions Musil & Dylan pose lie not in more “thinking” but in the realm of the heart, where experience and observation go much deeper than words and concepts. Dylan’s challenge had me travelling through 30 countries over the following years, but it was only later that I was fortunate enough to learn that the journey / challenge is actually more about undoing and realising what a wonderful life we ‘simply’ have, than embracing some convoluted (or even ‘sublime’) philosophical “truth”. As Socrates has it, “Know thyself” .
Nicely put. Though Dylan might be allergic to the very idea an encapsulated Life’s Philosophy, I’d guess he does have a sense of mission and purpose, and with some kind of through-line, though changing shape over the decades. To communicate that sense of questing, maybe, and to call out beauty and bravery as well as injustice, suffering, and sorrow. And to make much of it sound good—though many have disputed that. In Dylan’s body work, the emphasis is toward the grim and sorrowful, but with many notes of mercy and gladness (more so during some decades than others). The fact that he remains quite silent about his own inner motivations and even seems pretty uninterested in exploring them is part of his mystique, and legacy. But he doesn’t seem like a mere leaf blowin’ in the wind.
It takes different breeds of seekers to help feed the hungry spirit of the world—or somethin’ fancy like that. If nothing else, Dylan is clearly a noteworthy original of lasting impact.
Reading this article made me wish that, hope that, Agnes Callard would write a piece for UnHerd on Fernando Pessoa’s very interesting (philosophical, anti-philosophical?) work The Book of Disquiet. (A brother can dream.)
As philosopher Ed Feser has shown, we in the west have literally lost our minds since Ockham’s absurd nominalism, Hume’s self refuting “fork” ideology, Kant’s incoherent antirealism, Descartes’ forgetting about that of which he thought and the train crash of disconnected postmodernism. The answer, preposterous as it might seem to claim in this wasteland, is in Final Causality and the realistic metaphysical foundation of Thomism. Sanity. Final Cause is the ultimate shaper of all reality; God.. all is moved by love. We are definable by the ends we seek. https://www.amazon.com/Thomass-Aristotelian-Philosophy-Nature-Obsolete/dp/1587314320
Well… he hasn’t “shown” anything; rather, he’s put forward an argument that we can either agree or disagree with, in part or in whole.
Immortal Souls – Ed Feser. The evidence
https://www.amazon.com/Immortal-Souls-Treatise-Human-Nature/dp/386838605X/ref=monarch_sidesheet_title
Ultimately only a handful of people are able to be true philosophers, because it is a destabilizing and mind altering endeavor.
Many more would be much better suited to following ideas rather than leading, not entering in any such dangerous intellectual exercise at all… much better for them to conquer intuitively, if at all, than to enter the intellectual labyrinth and ruin themselves.
As Nietzsche said: “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster. For when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”
I’d still position Alain Badiou and Jordan Peterson as the key thinkers of the Left and Right over the past 20 years.
Some might rightly mention Sloterdijk, and I would say that Zizek has been invaluable in bringing Lacan’s thought back into the culture in lieu of the Anglo academy’s rather toxic obsession with Deleuze and Guattari since the 1990s (they being another prop for the Judith Butler post-structuralist complex).
The only right, proper and great thinking for the mind, is to ask what is ‘thought’. Is it a ‘subject or is it an ‘object’. Can it be studied when itself is the subject studying itself as an object?