A year ago today the world lost a great teacher with a great mind.
It’s been a year since the death of Dr Michael Sugrue. Sugrue was an exceptional thinker and teacher, who experienced an unexpected celebrity in his final years, while undergoing treatment for the prostate cancer that would, on this day one year ago, claim his life.
In his early career, Sugrue held various teaching positions at prestigious universities, including CUNY, Colombia, and Princeton, and in 1992 produced a series of lectures for the Great Courses company, running through the history of Western Civilization, including its internal critics in the form of postmodernists. Then he drifted off, it seems, to the less well known, and extremely Catholic, Ave Maria University, where he lectured uneventfully (as far as the public record shows) until 2011, when he was diagnosed with cancer and started chemotherapy.
And that would probably be the end of it, but in 2020 his daughter Genevieve decided to upload the contents of these old VHS tapes to Youtube. I haven’t looked into the copyright rules around this, but it seems they got away with it. As of time of writing his channel has 17 million views, with a quarter million subscribers, and a passionate online fan community.
–“We out here Sugrue posting”- @cunk6721 (Youtube User in a comment on this Seinfeild Sugrue mashup.)
That’s not all just based on the old lectures, though. Once these older lectures had achieved online success, a much older, Sugrue appeared, creating a new series of digital first lectures, along with his old colleague from the Great Courses series and fellow Princeton professor, Darren Staloff.
I was part of this second wave of attention. I discovered his lectures a couple of years after they’d been uploaded, in 2021 or 2022. I am pretty sure of this, because I remember he didn’t have a wikipedia page at the time, and the edit record shows that the first versions came online in 2022.
Whenever it was, it came at just the right time for me. I’d had major professional setbacks, and taken refuge in listening to history and philosophy podcasts while doing stay-at-home dad stuff, washing the dishes, driving my wife and son around, etc. Having something to focus my mind on made it possible for me to engage in these mundane, useful, activities without anxiety about my career overtaking me.
It was also the right time for me in another sense. I graduated in 2008, with a lowly Bachelors of Philosophy from the third best university in Sydney, a degree that serves essentially to make one even less employable than you had been fresh from high-school. But I had enjoyed my degree, and it had left me curious about Philosophy, and with enough context and critical reading capacity to continue my own education. But over the years that had taken a back seat to the pressing concerns of pursuing a career first in journalism then technology. With that all more or less imploded, it was a good time to get back to basics.
In that sense, for me Sugrue served as a kind of intellectual reboot. And he was exactly the one I needed. A carrier and advocate of the western tradition, with its twin roots in Vibrant, Pagan Athens and Devout Monotheistic Jerusalem.
What I realised halfway through was that what I was getting was the comprehensive History of Philosophy 101 course that my University never bothered to offer, carving this history up into specialised areas of expertise, as turf for the different lecturers.
To better explain what I mean, it might help to tell a story from my years as a student. This was probably in second year. I was studying continental philosophy under one set of professors, and analytic philosophy, including philosophy of mind that bled into cognitive science, under a totally different, non-overlapping set of lecturers. What I was struggling with was situating these two apparently separate approaches in relation to each other. So I went to the office of Professor Robert Sinnerbrink, who was the leader of the continental gang, during his consultation hours and asked him, in about as many words, how one set of ideas related to the other. He laughed, amused by the innocence of the question. This was meant in a friendly way, but it felt a little bit like he was scoffing at my stupidity.
He ended up settling on an answer that went something like this: It’s a matter of how well or badly you think things are going, with “things” being western philosophy and/or civilisation. I thought it was going pretty well, needing only minor corrections, then I would be more at home among the analytics, but if I felt things were seriously wrong, the continentals were my thing.
The Iraq war was, at this time, a fresh horror and had (further) radicalised me along with many others. So I felt like things were going pretty badly, actually. But it remained unclear to me how post-modernism or critical theory were needed to make this assessment. Surely on the most basic and common-sensical basis, that it’s wrong to lie and murder people, we could reach the same conclusion.
What was happening, I realise with the benefit of hindsight, and Sugrue’s lectures, was I was being asked to pass judgement on the history of Western thought before I learned it, so I could learn it through a lens that matched my judgement.
They wanted me to choose the moral before I knew the story.
While I might draw some very different conclusions in terms of the different thinkers, or when assessing modern politics (Sugrue’s frequent positive references to Singapore’s “soft” authoritarian capitalism are a particularly bum note to my ears), these comments end up representing a very small portion of Sugrue’s output, which is overwhelmingly a faithful and informed account of the history of how we got here. He has the patience and the respect for the material not to rush through it and focus on assuring that we all learn the right lessons.
It’s worth noting that the sometimes glib, usually implied, Fukayamist outlook of 90s Sugrue’s was something that the later Sugrue explicitly rejected in his final years. In one of these lectures, (I haven’t been able to find it at time of publication, please reach out if you know which one it is) he looks back on this triumphal optimism as naive and repudiated by the intervening years. He doesn’t specify which developments have caused this change of heart, but looking around at the general degeneration of 90s neoliberalism into the current political and economic chaos, it’s not hard to imagine.
Right up to his last days, Sugrue was teaching, and learning. In a world short of intellectual role models, he stands out as one.
