the well-funded philosophy scenario

Many of my colleagues in the School of Science and Engineering are working as consultants to set up KAUST, or King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, in Saudi Arabia. Naturally, this new university is funded to jaw-dropping levels, with a reported $10 billion pledged to it by King Abdullah himself. It’s a self-contained desert compound serving only graduate students, and only in the sciences. They offered irresistible deals to leading undergraduates around the world, tuition is free, and so forth.

Obviously, your first instinct is to think “the humanities could never get that sort of funding.” After all, the humanities don’t normally generate the sort of income that the sciences or business do, and in that respect it’s no surprise that schools of those disciplines are always so much better funded.

But I’m never impressed by these sorts of “obviously it has to be this way” arguments. Though I don’t think philosophy should even aspire to becoming a $10 billion discipline, that doesn’t prevent us from wondering, hypothetically, what it would take. And I’m not talking about some sort of cheap cynical scenario, such as “philosophers being trained to flatter the ruling power and being heavily rewarded for their complicity with power”, blah blah blah. Among other things, you don’t even have to pay people that much for flattery. Certainly not $10 billion.

No, I’m talking about genuine service rendered by philosophers to the life of a nation that would cash out as a $10 billion pledge from the King of Saudi Arabia. Or maybe not him, but some other government. What would it take? And remember, the cynical answer is simply a cheap, smart-alecky way of avoiding the question. Cynicism is the poor man’s wisdom.

What would it take for metaphysics to become a $10 Billion industry? I don’t think it’s impossible; almost nothing is literally impossible. But it would certainly take a vast transformation of society as we know it.

1. Industries become wealthy when they produce something that everyone really needs, and not just pretends to need. So, what would it take for vast segments of the population actually to need metaphysics? (Yes yes, highly improbably I know, but you have to get used to thinking about improbable things to test the limits of the possible.)

2. Industries become wealthy when they are in rapidly evolving fields. What would it take for metaphysics to become a rapidly evolving field, as rapid as pharmaceuticals or computing? (Yes, I know, highly unlikely, but please stop interrupting. Speculation on highly unlikely scenarios has a lot of value.)