My good friend and colleague Tyler Snow pointed out an article in the New York Times discussing a trend I was completely unaware of. Apparently, studying philosophy is all the rage! Since I graduated in 2004, the relative popularity of philosophy as an undergraduate major has apparently ballooned. Assuming the trend can maintain itself for another 5 years, that bodes well for my chosen career!

Now, I don't intend to imply anything about my status as a trend-setter--I have virtually zero public persona, this site notwithstanding--and I certainly don't want to suggest that I've ever been the "first on the scene" with regard to anything I'm about to discuss; but the phrase "I was X before X was cool" is quickly becoming the theme of my life. Because I am only 27 years old, I was not among the pioneers of computing, or of video games, or of anime, or of fantasy novels or comic books or any of this stuff. But apparently, if I'm doing it, it's going to be cool later.

I'm not entirely sure how to feel about this. Sometimes it's ego-boosting, sometimes frustrating. You can imagine, for example, the frustration I must feel, looking back at how mercilessly my peers teased me for sitting out on the playground reading The Lord of the Rings during recess. The box office take alone makes it statistically unlikely that any of my childhood tormentors skipped the movies. I doubt they even remembered calling me "nerd" and "geek" for supporting the material some of them would, I'm sure, eventually adopt as a "favorite movie." Indeed, I am sure at least some of them have deliberately forgotten the days when "nerd" and "geek" were still pejorative epithets.

On the other hand, there are days when I really am the life of the party based on my extensive familiarity with geek/nerd trivia. Someone who has just dipped their toes into the world of anime or comic books is sure to get an "assigned reading list" of the classic from me. Never read Watchmen? Never watched Cowboy Bebop? Well let me tell you, they are great.

There is a certain dilution that occurs when something "goes mainstream," and that's always hard to watch. The internet was a very different place back when I first fired up Mosaic and witnessed the World Wide Web, pre-commercialization. Of course, researchers and academics beat me to the punch, and they must have been a little miffed that 13-year-old punks like me were diluting their world, so of course this rant is a two-way street.

And yet "going mainstream" always means commercialization, which means increased availability of material that might once have been very hard to find. The first anime I ever watched was the movie Unico in the Island of Magic on the Disney Channel. I must have been 5 or 6 years old. I was fascinated... and it would take me about ten years to find more anime and slake the thirst that psychotic puppet had awakened in me. Back then, there was no magical answer box hooked into the realm of ideas. There were some questions that simply went unanswered.

These days, not so. If ever my wife or I are unsure of something, we check the internet. There is usually an answer, or at least further information. Of course one must be careful of the source, but there's that dilution problem again...

I digress. Sometimes the "mainstreaming" of something is not really about its popularity, but about its acceptance as a valid adult pursuit. The true mainstreaming of video games probably happened with the Nintendo Entertainment System back in the 1980's. I was among the millions of children who enjoyed first the NES and then the SNES, so I was hardly in the minority with regard to video games. And yet, by the time I hit my 16th birthday, I found myself enduring the occasional ribbing for being a gamer. Only in the last four or five years has the fact that I am an adult who plays video games reached generic acceptance in the broader population.

My decision to major in philosophy as an undergraduate was, like all of my decisions, a deeply personal one. My wife encouraged me to do what made me happy, and I decided it was better to be happy than rich. Over the years, a lot of people have doubted the wisdom (ha!) of that decision. Certainly, I doubted from time to time! But apparently I was early to that party, too. I wonder if there is a correlation. Anime is often deep and inscrutable, in many cases approaching literature; video games, too, often raise ethical or metaphysical questions that one never encounters in highly structured, rigid hobbies like sports or boxcar racing. The same is true of fantasy and science-fiction, where one can use exaggerated powers and grandiose mechanisms to pose in easily understood terms very complex questions about existence and what it means to be human. Comic books seem to presage the next literary trend, often five and ten and twenty years before it hits. The internet answers many of our questions, bootstrapping our idle thoughts into genuine inquiries.

I'm sure there are other factors at work--for many, there is the gradual crumbling of organized religion as a satisfactory source of moral guidance, the growing relativism of universal tolerance, the departure of law from natural concepts of justice into the realm of a cold, positivist technocracy of mechanical jurisprudence, or various other things mentioned in the Times article that ring at least a little bit true. Maybe Open Court's "pop culture and philosophy" series of books has even had an impact.

But for myself, I will blame "geek culture." The rise of geek culture in our youth is informing their worldview, I would argue, for the better. Philosophy will serve them well in that journey.