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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, ______________________________________.
Thanks for the contribution, MarciN!
Good stuff. What we really need is a good book in the humanities genre exploring the significance of that sort of technology with reference to the best philosophy and science fiction.
Indeed. :) :)
Humanities classes in the universities is way too late to influence ethical decision-making. Humanities classes just help with that last part about articulating the problems. Our current humanities classes are teaching the vocabulary, frames of reference, and points of view of the Leftist Progressives.
Ethics are formed by the time the kids reach college. If you want them to make ethical choices, you had to have modeled ethical behavior and hauled them to Sunday School and church for 18 years prior to college.
I have an engineering license in a state that requires ethics classes as part of my continuing education. These refreshers would not change the ethics of anyone. They do, however, serve as reminders of the stuff we learned long ago in Sunday School.
I have to think that a lot of the college kids you see marching around chanting words to the effect of, “Free speech for me but not for thee,” have never learned the golden rule.
They only seem to value wounded feelings, and have little love for justice, unless it’s some strange notion of social justice.
Their study of the humanities as it exists today seems to make things worse. Students are taught that white males have nothing to say to them because they (the authors) are white males. Instead of learning the best that has been thought and said, they learn the best that has been thought and said by progressive authors who must also be included in some or all of these categories: colored, female, queer, transgendered, disabled, third-world. In short, people without “privilege.”
This sort of education is worthless at best, and harmful at worst.
The ethics unit in my Intro to Philosophy course these days focuses on metaethics and the Golden Rule. We do Confucius, Aristotle, Kant, and Mill. Aristotle, Kant, and Mill are there to introduce ethics focused on human nature, moral law, and the results. Confucius, Kant, and Mill are there to give us the Golden Rule, which we note at the beginning of the unit also comes from Jesus/Isa/Yeshu. (And that’s two non-whites.)
Kudos to you for doing it right.