My dad stopped by last week; he’s the delivery boy of random things between my mom and myself. He is always very business-like about the delivery. The goods are exchanged, and then he rushes off to the gym or to pick up a sack of cans for the food kitchen. This time, he sat and chatted for a moment.
I told him that a speaker at the local church talked to the parents about the culture of texting. Kids sleep with their phones, jump up whenever their phone beeps, and don’t get a full night sleep. Dad responded with the long list of things that kids don’t know how to do today. I reminded him that kids know how to send an attachment along with an e-mail and don’t need their daughter to guide them through the process every time.
Leon Wieseliter’s commencement speech at Brandeis echoes much of my dad’s sadness about skills and knowledge that is being lost in our Wikipedia culture.
For decades now in America we have been witnessing a steady and sickening denigration of humanistic understanding and humanistic method. We live in a society inebriated by technology, and happily, even giddily governed by the values of utility, speed, efficiency, and convenience. The technological mentality that has become the American worldview instructs us to prefer practical questions to questions of meaning – to ask of things not if they are true or false, or good or evil, but how they work. Our reason has become an instrumental reason, and is no longer the reason of the philosophers, with its ancient magnitude of intellectual ambition, its belief that the proper subjects of human thought are the largest subjects, and that the mind, in one way or another, can penetrate to the very principles of natural life and human life. Philosophy itself has shrunk under the influence of our weakness for instrumentality – modern American philosophy was in fact one of the causes of that weakness — and generally it, too, prefers to tinker and to tweak.
Back when I was teaching, I taught a wide variety of classes. I taught very practical subjects like the public policy classes and state and local government, which are more substance than theory. I also taught Introduction to Political Theory, which sprinted through history. Plato, Aristotole, Augustine, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, and so on. It was a required class for majors, so I was guarenteed a large group. But they gobbled it up. They loved reading the original texts and engaging in sometimes loud debates about rights, government, and laws. The ancient texts were still delightfully relevant to today.
There is still an interest in the humanities, despite Wieselitier’s pessimism. We just have to provide the opportunties to bring these matters to the kids.
Apt. 11d 
I really loved my political theory classes, but still Aristotle and Aquinas are both absurdly dull to read. Never read Marx. We used to joke that the course was Plato to NATO, but that’s because everybody likes rhyming.
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We did Aquinas in one class period. Dry, but incredibly important. You can’t understand the Dec of Ind without John Locke. And you can’t understand Locke without Aquinas. From Aquinas, we get the notion that we each have god-given rights that can never be taken away or given away, and it’s the job of government to protect those rights. Aquinas never says exactly what those rights are. It was always interesting to see how all 35 kids would completely agree that natural rights exist. It’s such an abstract idea, but it is thoroughly part of American culture even if the kids hadn’t really thought it through.
Aristotle is a classifier. He sorts everything. Types of government, poetry, science, whatever. He loves to group things. It may be obvious today that a democracy is different from an oligarchy, but Aristotle was the guy who defined and grouped these things. He was also the one who said that humans were “political animals” — a major influence on Hannah Arendt.
Both of those guys were certainly on the autistic spectrum, btw.
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I know they are important, but I’m not about to read them again now that I can hit Wikipedia should I ever need to get the gist. My theory prof alternated between Aquinas and Augustine and I regretted not getting an Augustine year.
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Anyway, the priest who gives the overly long homilies every week this week mentioned Aquinas. I think maybe there is a connection. I can hear the ushers groan when he starts again after what sounded like an obvious stopping point.
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Couldn’t you just rename this post “the tyranny of having to pay the mortgage”? We prioritize things with high utility because we have to make a living. Simple as that.
In former days only rich guys could become scholars. And when we compare today’s students to those of 60 or 70 years ago – when maybe 5% of the population got a bachelor’s, and they were almost all rich guys – should we be surprised that in today’s world, when half the population gets some college education, there is less room for people to study the humanities? I wonder how that number breaks down if you track the majors of kids with family money?
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Thank you. I had been feeling sad this morning after a conversation I had with my teens in the car. Apparently there’s an app you can download which compiles fan fiction, and both my girls were arguing that fan fiction in which young girls fantasize about dating members of one direction counts as literature. And it’s difficult to see a world in which I can convince them to read Charlotte Bronte rather than said fan fiction about members of one direction. I foresee the death of literature on the horizon and it makes me want to cry. I suppose you could argue that maybe someone somewhere will read a whole bunch of fan fiction about one direction and move on to reading Charlotte Bronte but I find this highly doubtful. The problem is that the total immersion in teen culture means that they have this limited view of the world and they are unlikely to use even a vehicle like literature to learn anything about foreign cultures and the larger world. The word I keep coming up with is ‘solipsistic’.
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I don’t think that many people ever read Bronte. I’ve taken to using “Reader, she married him,” as an overly literate substitute for “That’s what she said,” but I’m not about to actually read the whole thing.
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I think generations talking about the good old days always shows a dangerous focal thinking that is almost always highly inaccurate. The world changes, and some changes are for the good and others not necessarily slow. There’s usually little to be done to stop changes, though.
I love data, and not because it is quick or expedient but that I think that information, data, and analysis is the a baseline for all the other discussions (yes, a mindset on my part, and even I do agree that some discussions that become side discussions about data shouldn’t be data driven). So for me, the internet and computers and the tools its made available (the ability to look up information of many many sorts, the tools to analyze it, like excel and matlab) deepen our understanding of the world in precisely the ways that I find intellectually fascinating.
My kids are pretty much like that, as well. I haven’t gotten them to read Bronte yet, but they’re not reading fan fiction, and the tween is starting to recognizing the structure, repetition, and stereotyping in the mass literature/media that she reads. I think intellectual curiosity finds routes to excellent material, and that the access to creativity today are no less than in the world in which Jane Eyre was written.
We watched Casablanca with the kids the other day, and one of the first things my daughter noted was the access she had to technological tools that she had, if she were to make Casablanca today.
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Marx is quite readable. The Manifesto is light readying (as, I think it was meant to be).
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I found a comic book on Marx and I think I got the basics from that.
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Marx is actually a very hilarious writer, with a very dry wit. Kant is also occasionally funny in that stuffy elderly German man way.
I’ve been thinking quite about about technology as communication, and one thing is, despite all the complaining, communication through the medium of writing (texts, blog comments, etc) requires a level of global literacy unheard of even 50 years ago.
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“And you can’t understand Locke without Aquinas”.
Thankfully, that’s not true at all. (It’s not at all clear that Locke read Aquinas, at least closely, among other things. There are lots and lots of paths to natural rights ideas, and it’s disputed whether Aquinas’s idea of natural law has proper room for natural rights of the sort that came about in the enlightenment.) The real problem for trying to teach Aquinas is that he’s pretty systematic, so hard to make sense of if you cut out little bits of the text, and the Scholastic form of questions, answers, objections, replies, etc., is very alien to modern readers and surprisingly hard to make sense of without practice. He’s one of those thinkers where most people are probably better off with a clear, sympathetic secondary text.
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Is there a comic book version?
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There might be- there is a series of books called “Introducing Philosophy” or something like that that has comic book versions of lots of philosophers (and other “theorists”, understood pretty broadly.) I have the Hegel one- for a long time most of what I knew about Hegel came from that. (May be I should say “knew”, as I don’t know how accurate most of it was.) Now it’s down to being maybe 20% of what I “know” about Hegel. At the least, these books can give you enough to bluff if you need to.
(A very quick search doesn’t seem to get an Aquinas one, but there might be such a thing.)
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Of course there is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_Philosophers!
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My kids can’t forge an excuse note because they can’t write in cursive. It’s all good!
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