I’m still alive, I’m still kicking and I’m still looking to create some content from time to time on this blog. My studies, however, have been taking a large chunk out of my time.
Just because you all are not a large audience does not mean that it’s an insignificant one! I still appreciate you all, insofar as anyone can appreciate a collection of mildly interested online avatars.
There is no core curriculum for Harvard’s undergraduate program beyond Expository Writing. One can go through the whole experience without straying one iota from intellectual self-satisfaction. Students exit with wildly different preconceptions about themselves, and what they experienced. There is no ‘Harvard education’ beyond geographic coincidence. The original impetus for the creation of a university, the cultivation and trimming of student expectations, is all but gone. It brings up an interesting consideration. When a student walks into Harvard, what is happening: is a brand being purchased, or is an education being sought? It is my contention that most of the students who end up in Harvard are looking for the brand, and whether they actually acquire the education they need is an ancillary consideration. The process has become an elaborate accreditation process. Show up for four years, get your piece of paper from this elaborate structure, play the game.
It does bring up some considerations over whether there needs to be a financial response to this situation. The President hopes to incorporate over 150 billion in block aid to colleges. For those who don’t know, block aid is synonymous with “here’s a bunch of money, do with it as you will.” Yet in spite of a proliferation of degree holders, there is still a considerable room of doubt. Whether students today are better than those of earlier generations is far from clear. “Trained almost from the cradle to smash the SATs and any other examination that stands in their way, the privileged among them may take examinations better, but it is doubtful if their learning and intellectual understanding are any greater.” One can’t help, looking at recent graduates, whether we have finally reached Hegel’s wimpy end of history. No fights for anything but a cushy middle-manager spot.
“We are the hollow men / We are the stuffed men / Leaning together / Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!”
If there is any doubt that we have become Eliot’s Hollow Men take, for instance, the proliferation of obscure and pointless business classes across the nation. ‘Strategic Marketing,’ ‘International Aims and Means,’ and a whole host of equally pointless classes that purportedly teach groups of near-alcoholics how to become CEOs. Ah, okay! All the classes are going to become CEOs? There’s not going to be one middle-manager of dubious import and intellectual weight? Thank you, Academy, for allowing us the ability to introduce three products into a foreign market with a competing product of higher price, higher quality. Certainly I am not going to end up working for Esurance.
As has been mentioned at length in other posts, there doesn’t seem to be much hope for the humanities either.
What, if anything, can be done? Kevin Carey has a few strong ideas.
To summarize, Matthew Yglesias:
People learn things all kinds of ways. I learn a lot from reading blogs and magazines. Hopefully people learn from reading me. I look things up on Wikipedia. I read books. I listen to lectures on iTunes. But federal funding is tied to a particular kind of learning in a particular set of institutions—college courses in accredited colleges. And who decides what an accredited college is? Why trade groups composed of accredited colleges do!
If the Academy is unwilling, or unable, to provide a good enough reason for its ever rising tuition rates then what else should we expect? A five-year bender for middle-managers sounds fun… But one has to wonder if the debt is really worth it.
“Skepticism” in a blog title only highlights a blog’s arbitrary, unskeptically held, assumptions.
Transgender, adjective. A word used to indicate the opposite. Ex., “I am transgender, so the last thing I’ll consider doing is transcend my gender.”
Activism, noun. An appellation used to connotate the logical sequence of not doing anything.
Academic ‘freedom’ is a common, if odd, mispelling of academic conformity. “The Professor wanted to teach religion, but I believe in academic freedom.”
Yesterday's nuclear test by North Korea was nothing if not predictable for those familiar with the regime's bizarre form of logic. I won't waste your precious time here denouncing the nuclear test (although I do) or expressing exasperation with the irrationality of their leaders (although I share the sentiment).
One of the hardest things for Westerners to understand is the true depth of depravity stemming from the North Korean regime.
He prepared a bubble bath in the sink for the crockery, glass, and silverware, and with infinite care lowered the quamarine bowl into the tepid foam. Its resonant flint glass emitted a sound full of muffled mellowness as it settled down to soak. He rinsed the amber goblets and the silerware under the tap, and submerged them in the same foam. Then he fished out the knives, forks, and spoons, rinsed them, and began to wipe them all over again. He groped under the bubbles, around the goblets and under the melodious bowl, for any piece of forgotten silver–and retrieved a nutcracker. Fastidious Pnin rinsed it, and was wuping it, when the leggy thing somehow slipped out of the towel and fell like a man from a roof. He almost caught it–his fingertips only helped to properl it into the treasure-concealing foam of the sink, where an excruciating crack of broken glass followed upon the plunge.
Pnin hurled the towel into a corner and, turning away, stood for a moment staring at the blackness beyond the threshold of the open back door. A quiet, lacy-winged little green insext circled in the glare of a strong naked lamp above Pnin’s glossy bald head. He looked very old, with his toothless mouth half open and a film of tears dimming his blank, unblinking eyes. Then, with a moan of anguished anticipation, he went back to the sink and, bracing himself, dipped his hands deep into the foam. A jagger of glass stung him. Gently he removed a broken goblet. The beautiful bowl was intact. He took a fresh dish towel and went on with his household work.
Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov; 172-173 (1993, Vintage Books Edition)
On June 4, 1859 two armies met at the town of Magenta. One, representing the French monarch Louis-Napoleon’s desire to challenge Austrian control of Lombardy, was composed partially out of French Legionnaires. The other side, composed out of a multicultural array reflective of the Hapsburg’s crown jewel, Austria-Hungary, was composed largely out of Croatians. The latter were soldiers who preferred executing prisoners and the wounded, some historians accredit them with singlehandedly inspiring the Geneva Convention of 1864.
As the 2nd Corps of legionnaires and zouaves stood poised the town, their commanding officer arrived (Patrice MacMahon) and, “as he trotted past the Legion, uttered the statement that today adorns the wall of almost every Legion bar: “Voici la Legion! L’affaire est dans le sac!”
“The Legion is here. It’s in the bag.” If only that always was true! Not unlike our Patrice MacMahon, later Duke of Magenta, many otherwise astute individuals are ready to declare victory presumptuously and inaccurately. Considerate thinkers, and those less so, assume that there is a division between the secular and the religious before the discussion has even taken place. Just as importantly, this tension has already been answered in favor of ‘science’ without ever questioning why there needs to be a tension in the first place.
To paraphrase, those silly theists and ‘religionists’ can chat up their deities as much as they want—preferably out of sight and in a personal space. Preferably in doors and inside their bedrooms, perhaps even under the sheets (the last, or newest, home of social deviancy). As long as everyone realizes that once ‘science’ arrives and religious thinking “is in the bag” there will be no problems. If anyone questions that then we should simply expect another McVeigh or 9/11. There will always be a few crazies, but once everyone is properly informed religion dissipates. I call this entrenchment of certain, ingrained theological assumptions ‘scientism. I am not alone in this assumption but while there have been several active academics bringing to light this false dichotomy quite a few prosaic and perfectly improbable assumptions take place within the public sphere daily.
Part of this normative thinking I lay at the feet of Immanuel Kant. Our world is so radically steeped in the thoughts of Kant it is hard to properly formulate a trajectory of belief that is not related to the ‘Kantian Revolution.’ There are things that I can experience (like oranges) and things I cannot (the law). One is absolute, or nearly so, while the other is open to ‘judgment.’ Look no farther than art: God becomes a part of Impressionism. Oranges never do.
Too often, those who rock these assumptions are—like in Vladimir Nabakov’s Invitation to a Beheading—sentenced to death for “gnostical turpitude.” A grievous crime made more so by its lack of definition. Those who try to mix the noumenological and the phenomenological are viewed as radicals—perhaps, even, dangerous ones. Even to those who do not grasp the finer philosophical and theological points there is a sense of impoliteness about trying to bridge the gap: those who did, then, are violates of an undefinable crime. In a sense, even the most ardent defenders of ‘rationality’ have become, as it were, transrational on the subject.
Take, for instance, Alvin Platinga, “One of the main lessons to be learned from the history of modern philosophy from Descartes through Hume is that there don’t seem to be good arguments for the existence of other minds or selves, or the past, or an external world and much else besides; nevertheless belief in other minds, the past and an external world is presumably not irrational or in any other way below epistemic par.” When a man or woman is assured of his immortal soul and the existence of the body—or, alternatively, the ‘self’ or the past or the fact that some physical objects cause others to do things—they have to only explain their belief in a God delivered immortal soul. That is the world we live in.
What interests me the most is that the noumenological is almost always a matter of unassailable subjectivity, tightly held. There seems to be a widespread consensus that reason is reasonable, the senses are sensible and casual relationships are identifiable. If you deny causal relations you’re viewed as a crackpot (unless you have a PhD in front of your name). Same for the ‘sanctity’ of experiential data and rationality. Yet no matter how many PhD’s one has there is no way ‘I believe in a theistic entity’ sounds good. If the phrase, somehow, leaps out then one is guilty of gnostical turpitude. That is, holding a set of (admittedly) arbitrary assumptions that are (at the very least) as unassailable as our other philosophical assumptions.
Gore Vidal, as always, has the words for every cutting opening (see “Hacks of Academe”). The world of ‘the enlightened’ is devoted to books that are written to be taught; they are not written to be read. The captive subjects, undergraduates, only mildly different in caste from particularly well-to-do peons, have no other recourse than to read books whose actual value is nil. The professors, perhaps delusional, fret that their free ride managing their classes of aspiring middle-managers and labyrinths of footnotes will end. This is their insurance policy: insulate the conversation up, and beyond, the point of sense. Write books and allow their cohorts to force payment.
“Why does the academy play such a minor role in guiding popular taste in theater, dance, and music?” bemoaned one recent graduate. Why is it that we can go into our libraries and pull off the shelf works that have not only gone untouched but uncared for? Pnin’s a tragic character, but is that because so many in the humanities see a reflection of themselves?
My answer: probably.
Today I held in my hand two books. One was visionary. Exciting. It was, there is no doubt in my mind, why ‘we’ write history. Max Berger defined art as anything that raises our consciousness to a new level, and if that is the case then this book is simply art. So little of American history is interesting to me. This, however, was a dream. A beautiful dream made moreso by its reality. The other book, however, was a perfect muddle. Repetitious. Incorrect. Tedious. Awful construction. My literary taste is not well-defined. My palette does not need much salve but there is no doubt in my mind that this book has done significant harm to my soul.
It was brought home, loudly and clearly, how far the academe has gotten from its purpose of existence. It is a self-perpetuating (Abyss? Morass? State of mind? I leave the word choice up to you, dear reader), or to quote Cornell West “the Academy feeds on critiques of its own paradigms.” It is, in short, “feeble” and it has never felt more feeble as I numbly flip through paragraphs of history—human life—drained of all meaning.
One was rejected by several ‘academic’ presses. It was deemed too, perhaps this is an unsympathetic interpretation, exciting. It would wake too many students in the classroom and hacks enshrined behind their self-importance. It would teach us that essential rule of history: it is the laboratory, the only laboratory that we are given to test ideas. The book was forced, finally, to ask for a printing by Random House. No academic would touch something that did not have a literature review! Heaven’s no. A book that did not consult the intricate, exclusive system of minutiae that they strain under? Heresy, plain and simple. The other, however, went smoothly through an academic press. It’s been reviewed, well, by all his friends.
One will be thrown into the trashcan by innumerable men and women in my classes. One will be cherished. Does anyone want to guess what one goes where?
Today I noticed the true value of what I have been taught. No one needs the bravery to challenge the world’s ideas. No one needs the panche to challenge other people’s views. We all have that. What we do not have is the vitality to contest our own. Those assumptions, above all else, are sacred. Some bloggers need to understand this.
History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought.
Etienne Gilson
If there is one narrative that unites the Western World it is that we do not have a narrative. ‘Educated’ people increasingly did not have knowledge about their own culture. Allan Bloom, “It was not necessarily the best of times in America when Catholic and Protestants were suspicious of and hated one another; but at least they were taking their beliefs seriously…” Today, what do we take seriously? Not the ‘liberal arts,’ certainly not ‘politics’ and not even the sciences. Perhaps we take ‘fairness’ seriously, but as any parent can tell you the Fairness Doctrine is not a whole lot better than the egocentric peaens of an eight-yearold.
If writers like Robert Jenson (“How the World Lost Its Story”) are right, what does that mean for the identity politics of the 21st Century? The purpose of portraying your own identity as a victim presupposes the idea that there is a great oppressor out there who is willing to deny you your voice. But what story is holding the commanding heights? If there is a ‘in’ group, that is self-validated by its narrative, what is that narrative? The answer, it seems, is increasingly incoherent. There is no more universal history and, relatedly, there is nothing to be a victim of. The enemy of the 21st Century, if there is one, is the splintering of our attention. Facebook-Tumblr-Email-Facebook-TV-FACEBOOK! Fighting it is not very exciting. More importantly, reversing the trend would take actual effort.
Effort, as many commentators have noticed, is the last thing we have (after a basic understanding of the English language, a conception of American history, or the ability to put on a condom/solve anything requiring geometry). Women have, as it were, ‘won.’ The 21st Century world is their’s for the taking. Is it no surprise, then, that this wave of feminism’s authors are more concerned with their orgasms and managing Target excursions than fighting the ‘patriarchy’ (a word that reaches fewer and fewer students studying to become middle-managers, which is to say the vast majority of the student body)?
Feminism is the first, but certainly not the last, victim of ‘the Man’ losing his story. How far is Gaydom behind? If I wasn’t poor I would throw down for the answer ‘not far.’
The true issue seems to be that the splintering of the American mind, which is so closely related to its closing, has undercut the production value (as it were) of these various movements. Without a nice, dominant culture that is relatively ambivalent about being the contrast to every right action then where does that leave the cadres of professional activists? Well, it leaves them to build a culture that is not bound up in the increasingly hollow perception of a dominant, normative one.
As we all well know, we are the most elequoent on the subjects of ourselves and what we don’t like. How eleqouent could anyone be on the subject of ‘not-ourself’ and something we like? I doubt the results will be noteworthy.
