Have you noticed the liberal arts degree is in “crisis”?
With the recent weekly dump of editorials on the subject, I’ll bet dollars to
donuts you’ve read at least ONE “omg the humanities!” type article in the last
month. What is with these damn things? Has nobody else noticed how weirdly
histrionic they are? I am shocked by how quickly they can move from a position
of the loftiest self-praise to an account of persecution so paranoid that if a
friend of mine started talking like that I would be advising him to seek
medical help from two rooms away as I was reaching for my vacuum-cum-impromptu
blunt defensive object. Who are these Quixotes, and how many books did they
read to get that goddamn crazy?
*
Perhaps the most stirring scene in Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai is the one right
before the end of the first half: the samurai, gathered by economic desperation
to defend a village of peasants, are treated skeptically by their charges.
Finally, when the time comes to abandon three outer houses in the village for
the greater defense of the whole, the inhabitants of the houses in question
decide to drop the fight and to defend their homes on their own. Suddenly the
righteous military method of the Samurai comes alive – the music swells into
the Bushido leitmotif – Kambei runs up with his unit of well-disciplined
farmers and cuts off the deserters:
You, pick up your spears and return to you units. There are
only three houses beyond the bridge and there are twenty in the village. We
cannot endanger twenty because of three. And if the village is destroyed, those
three will not be safe anyway. War is
like that. If the defense is for
everyone, each individual will be
protected. The man who thinks only of
himself, destroys himself. From now on,
such desertion will be punished.
How often do those with a liberal arts education
feel just like this when leading disillusioned charges through the militaristic
discipline of writing a paper, preparing a thesis statement, or using a correct
historical or literary allusion! You face the despair of your ill-prepared
charge as they resign themselves to mediocrity; the sudden power of years of training
in writing and critical thinking takes over: “Pick up your pen and return to
your thesis” etc. Moments like that, just like the scene in the movie, serve as
subjective justification for the clerisy just as the discipline of the Samurai
seems to shine through the screen. One thinks, “how splendid! How could
something so fine die out?”
And yet that is what the whole movie is about.
The grandeur is just a fading shadow of what it once was; a stirring speech
about war and death suitable before the walls of Osaka Castle is spoken in the comic
context of the defense of a small village cynical peasants. Eventually most of
the samurais die; it is right that they should do so. The remainder leave the
village sad and dispirited, continuing their descent into living anachronism by
a society that no longer needs killers. This perceived tragic state is how the
proponents of liberal arts seem to see themselves today. Indeed, complaining
about the state of the liberal arts is becoming a career-making position in its
self.
*
I urge you to be critical about the recent dump
of essays dealing with the state of the liberal arts. The systematic targeting
of liberal arts programs for funding cuts cannot simply be a pogrom of the
intelligentsia by the barbarian overbelly of society (managers, business men,
suits etc). Nor is it the infection of the liberal arts by “scientizers” who
want to empiricism the great and mystical tradition of the Great Books. The
question is a complex one, but I suspect it is motivated by a structural need that
engenders, rather than depends upon, the outer shell of the debate: a simple
war of ideas. A sane consideration would require treatment beyond these
histrionics about the misinterpreted “value of education”, as if the problem
could be solved with just a spirited Socratic speech delivered to a crowd of
knit-browed gentlemen blowing their noses with dollar bills, suddenly converted
to the true meaning of education like
the Grinch Who Stole Geist.
The people who write these essays are some of the
dullest, most naïve, and least critical
thinkers in academia. You will notice that they represent an increasingly
reactionary tendency against the erstwhile domination of theory; what they
preach is the (by no means well pedigreed or historically founded) pseudo-religion
of the “great books” – essentially a faith in reading “in general” as the
salvation of humanity, values, and tradition. Along with salvation, however,
they are also sure to sneak in a pragmatic twist or two: the value of critical
thinking for business development or the scarcity of “good writers” among
communications students etc.
Incidentally, I would be hesitant to concede to these people even that which they preach with regards to "Great Books". A lot of them remind me of Bible-Belters who stand by the truth of the Bible with really no interest in reading it. Somehow or another the Bible comes to the defense of the U.S.A, Israel, the Republican Party, Country Music, tax cuts for the rich etc. Their "reading" tends to exclude most of the actual content of the Bible - it serves as an origin rather than an ongoing source of truth. The sanctity of the Lumpen-GreatBooks are similarly often a justification for the economic back-end of the University System as it stands today.
My general requests to these hacks would be: Stop defending culture in my name, or in the name of all people who read books. Stop trying to start shit between me and Scientists. Stop trying to justify money in your pocket with smokescreens like "the death of culture" and stop pretending like what you do is anything like promoting free thought. Also, read more.
*
What these book lovers do not ever seem to do is an analysis
of the problem from any perspective other than that of some Haroldo-Allanian
Bloom decay of kultur. As soon as the
topic of the institution is brought
up, a strawman of a “clash of ideas” is immediately put in its place. Ignoring
any sort of social or economic analysis of the institution of the University,
the structural relation of MONEY to specific programs, the internal politics of
funding and funding sources, or the viability of maintaining the system of an
arts degree in today’s world, they rather settle on a vague position akin the
Hegelian “Beautiful Soul” under siege by the barbaric tendencies of the age. Attacked
from all sides, the supposedly objective presentation of great ideas in books
simply read without a theoretical framework is being poisoned by demands for
pragmatism and science on the one hand and biased, narrow minded European
theory on the other. What we are left with is the standard pose of melancholy
by a presumed over-class of aristocrats in decay. It is an entirely
mythological view of the problem.
Lukacs said: “A conceptual mythology always
points to the failure to understand a fundamental condition of human existence,
one whose effects cannot be warded off. This failure to penetrate the object is
expressed intellectually in terms of transcendental forces which construct and
shape reality, the relations between objects, our relations with them and their
transformations in the course of history in a mythological fashion.”
Perhaps the true question to ask is why the
crisis itself is doing so well. The liberal arts degree as it is currently
structured is not an ancient institution – it has, as long as it has existed in
its contemporary form, always been in crisis. It is almost as if the right to plead for the liberal arts in the
face of barbarity is the very thing one earns when one gets the degree. One
is taught how, and then granted the qualification to, speak from the side of
culture against the rest of society.
What these articles represent is actually a
mindset entirely opposed to the supposed goal of a “liberal education”. They
are precisely representative of a sect that is unable to see its interests as
part of a greater whole; the worldview expressed in them presents a shockingly
dulled sensitivity to the totality of
the university system as such. It’s as if a censor had forbid them to
actually discuss the bureaucratic operations and relations of the institution,
leaving them with only allusions and obscure references in the world of fairy
tales to get their subversive message across.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment