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What Good Are the Humanities?
Marco Rubio insulted me; see the video here. He said I was useless, and called me a fool for practicing my useless profession. It was the final proof that Republicans are anti-intellectual. Or so the stories say. Actually, I don’t believe a word of it. All I can say for sure is that he said that we shouldn’t denigrate vocational training, and that having more welders and fewer folks like me is a good way of increasing overall wages. And that was only after he went over a pretty solid laundry list of economic policies supporting freer markets and fiscal sanity.
While I could dwell happily enough in a world in which I’m proven wrong about this, I can still vote for a man who insults my profession, provided he’s the best man for the job. (Never mind that the best woman for the job also happens to be the only presidential candidate who studied philosophy . . . and has also made more money than most welders . . . and is a Republican.) Anyway, though it now seems like last year’s news, it’s still a good excuse to hear from the Ricocheti on the following question: What good are the humanities?
Please select the option that best describes your view:
- No good at all! Nothing but intellectual pretension! This country needs more welders and fewer philosophers!
- They might have been good once, but the Left owns them now. They’re more trouble than they’re worth. Ignore formal education in the humanities. Let the university bubble burst. Anyway, you can read Shakespeare on your smartphone.
- Long live the humanities! Even under Leftist influence, the humanities are great! They teach us how to think, and Shakespeare is better when you study with a specialist. We still need Socrates and Herodotus. Every welder should have to study a little bit of this stuff in college!
- Reform education! Bring back the Trivium. Stick to the basics: literature, history, art history, and philosophy. We need the humanities, done rightly.
- You, Mr. Augustine, are a perfect example of why this country needs more philosophers.
- You, Mr. Augustine, are a perfect example of why this country needs fewer philosophers.
- Actually, in my opinion, ______________________________________.
It apparently also equips its students with a quite droll sense of humor.
A Grove City or Hillsdale approach, I would agree has value.
But much as it pains me to say, the “humanities” have become worthless as they are currently presented in a great many taxpayer-funded institutions of “higher learning” (which is just about all of them as taxpayers are the guarantors of the vast sums of student loans underwriting degrees in Whatever Studies.
On the NRO site today several writers do a good job of illustrating this.
Progressive Faculty and Administrators Deserve All of the Blame for the Recent Unrest on Campus by George Will
and
Give Thanks for Our Freedom to Laugh at Daft College Students by Victor Davis Hanson
Fascinating and tragic. In America, at least, that working-class autodidact culture has died.
Informal learning is terrific, but, given the pitiful state of American intellectual culture, those who eschew college and learn only informally are likely to remain terribly, terribly lonely.
It’s difficult to join a book club when no book clubs exist. (Or, when “book club” merely equals “gossip club.”)
David F., thanks for that link. Nice article. Here is an excerpt:
Another excerpt from “The Classics in the Slums:”
And now the Leftist-dominated universities of America have pitched out the works by dead white Europeans.
Thank you for sharing that. I think this was once ture, and agree with the comment up-thread, that that working class culture has all but disappeared, though my shop foreman when I built pipe-organs, who had only a high school education and was only a few years older than me had that approach to life, so there is still a glimmer.
I agree with this SA; one of the advantages of my useless degree was that I was chosen for a seminar taught by world renown poet Stephen Spender.
I’d like to keep the humanities around. But I’m biased.
#4. I went so far as to get the language(s) and some of the logic (formal and material) for myself. Rhetoric comes next in my personal study. But the trivium by itself can be used to make very smart leftists; we need good communities and teachers to inculcate right values.
Man, do we ever!
I’m sorry, but I don’t understand. Is there some clever joke I’m missing, or is a picture of a walrus family that just went through a drive-through the sort of thing that doesn’t need a reason?
Let me try again…
I’m reading some articles linked earlier. The Victor Davis Hanson piece is very good. This remark is a gem:
One of the biggest problems with education these days is that the biggest universities have so little of it.
Excellent. I think I may understand now. Something along the lines of # 2 above. Our university system is like a walrus Hindenburg.
Oh! The Humanatees!
(Walruses have tusks, Augie.)
Augustine, thanks for asking. I didn’t get it either.
It is cute, though. Thanks, Penfold, and Arahant.
Extreme like!
So we disagree on a little bit more than infant baptism. You say it’s cute; I say it’s AWESOME.
My son, who is a finance professor, was telling me the other day that the econ professors in his school of business are always complaining that they are not as well-paid as the finance faculty, even though econ is a harder discipline (both of which assertions, my son agrees, are true). My son commented, wryly, that the econ profs are the only ones in the b school who don’t understand supply and demand.
I agree with this. I would suggest, even, that learning a trade is just as much an exercise in learning what life is about as is the formal study of the humanities, although from a different angle. It’s a way of understanding what is involved in keeping society functioning.
PS: Seawriter, for months when I would see your avatar it registered in my mind as a guy in a Klan outfit, and I’d have to actively reject that interpretation so that I could see it was a sailboat.
Like guns, the humanities can be a force for good or for ill. The benefit of studying philosophy is that you might learn something useful. The risk is that you might learn something wrong, which puts you that much further from wherever it is you think you are going. In our universities today, it seems to me that the risk far outweighs the benefits. Much nonsense is taught, which then needs to be unlearned – lest you find yourself spending your Black Friday shutting down stores on Michigan Avenue in Chicago for no particular reason.
My suggestion is that you read The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant. Read it a few times. When you have concluded that 90% of the ideas that have been advanced by philosophers over the centuries are total nonsense, you have gotten it. Then go study the other 10% in more detail.
I’ve only read bits of it, but enough to think well of the book.
Oddly, my assessment would have the 10% and 90% reversed.
Chronicle of Higher Education – Crisis of the Humanities
There’s some really great walrus and manatee facepalms out there on them Interwebs, but I’m just not gonna go there this morning. I’m so glad I have a place like this where my quirky humor is understood (or at least tolerated).
Indeed. That had not escaped my attention.
When did college start to become evaluated by how well it prepares you for a chosen career? Forgive the quaintness of my thinking, but I was under the impression that it was intended to prepare you for a more meaningful life by exposing you to the best that mankind has wrought. During the several decades I worked in the corporate world, I hired liberal arts, rather than pre-professional, majors wherever possible since they tended to have a better understanding of themselves and the world around them. My hope, however, is that they elected their majors for themselves and not for me.
My off-the-cuff answer to your opening question: Once public education entered its steep decline, and it became clear that a university education was going to be necessary for pretty much every job, the universities were flooded with students who had no interest in education for the sake of the meaningful life of which you speak.
I have talked to so many students (at a mid-level state university) and their parents, trying my best to explain why a business major should be required to devote half of his academic course work to general education. Most of them, if they had the choice, would have preferred to devote all their course work to business-related subjects.
Oh, good! Those of us who emphasize philosophy and those of us who emphasize welding can agree that blame lies in bigger government and its bigger failures.
Are you? I may be one of the rare persons that scan both the humanities and technical. As an undergrad I doubled majored in Mechanical Engineering and English Lit. I decided for a job to go into engineering and I’ve been one for just over thirty years now. However when I decided to go for a Master’s I was so sick of the math I decided to get a Master’s in English Lit. I specialized on the modern British novel as well and did my Master’s thesis on Lawrence!
I can’t exactly put my finger on why but I credit my success as an engineering project manager to my English Lit background. Certainly I communicate better than most engineers but I think it goes beyond just communication. I think a little differently and I assume it comes from the Humanities.
To Augustine: I pick number 4! Stick to the basics.
I am very late to this conversation. But I just want to say that the need for the humanities is greater than ever, in my opinion. Our ability to examine ethical ramifications of everything we do has seemed to decline while the need for such examination has accelerated. It is the humanities that gives human beings the ability to imagine the consequences of our actions and thus choose a wise course of action.
Over the weekend, I saw this article in NRO’s The Corner: Wesley J. Smith, “United States Prepares to Push Human Genetic Engineering.” It contains the following paragraph:
Discussion is needed in every area of life–foreign policy, government policy, world problems–not just science.
How well we address problems depends on our ability to articulate the problems. And it is the humanities that gives us that ability.