Who Exactly is Obsolete?

Elon Musk has recently expressed the opinion that soon, thanks to AI, engineers and programmers with be obsolete. 

It stands to reason. These are jobs involving systematic reasoning. Thinking in a straight line. That’s what computers do best, and better than humans.

I believe that, truth told, medical doctors are already obsolete. AI can diagnose more reliably than any human. And that is what doctors, other than surgeons, do.

Accounting, too, is systematic reasoning and surely easily automated.

So what does this mean to all those parents, and all those government and other organizations, who have been pushing STEM?

A dead end. As usual, the experts were wrong.

The one thing AI cannot do, and will, I warrant, never be able to do, is to think creatively. It can only reshuffle what is already there.

What we need are the humanities, the fields that tell us why and where we ought to be going. We want philosophers and ethicists and people who know the lessons of history at the controls, asking the right questions and keeping AI on a leash to ensure it serves humanity.

And beyond that, it is the creatives, the artists, poets, inventors and entrepreneurs, who will inherit the earth.

Culture and Civilization

 

Our civilization seems to be falling apart. Probably the one essential reason is that we have lost the plot. We have lost our sense of what civilization means and why it is of value. 

The term is rarely used any more, and if it is, it is misused. We absolutely must not, any longer, insist that all cultures are equally civilized. They are not.

In simplest terms, “civilization” means literally citification. For a culture, it means having fixed abodes; having a system of writing; and having a government with consistent rules and enforcement on at least the level of a functioning city and hinterland. 

By this definition, none of the indigenous people of Canada were, at first contact, civilized; they were, to use the literal meaning of the term, “savages”. This is a simple descriptive statement. We used, even in my grad school days, to use the euphemism “primitive.” That is, they had not developed socially to the civilized level.

It should further be uncontroversial that a culture that has failed to develop writing, fixed dwellings, and consistent government is inferior to a culture that has. 

Probably the finest cultures are those that first developed such things; imitation is easier. And culture is persistent. My travels and long sojourns abroad leave me with distinct opinions on what cultures are most civilized. Egyptians, Greeks, Jews, Chinese, are, to my mind, in the top rank. Interestingly, these are also the nations that have been civilized for longest. No doubt they have perfected the art of education.

But there is also something to be said for recent success. Cultures can also no doubt weaken or become diluted. I have to respect the British, with their remarkable talent for social organization: the common law, the parliamentary system. Thay have, if I may be so bold, been a civilizing influence in the world. I feel, for example, that the average immigrant from the West Indies is distinctly more civilized than an average African-American. The difference, I presume, is the education system modelled on the British.

I say that as someone without a drop of English blood in my veins. And mostly Irish blood—the one nation and culture that has least reason to love the English.

Broadly, to be civilized means to be capable of cooperating in large groups. This implies, in turn, an ability to suppress one’s immediate desires to achieve a goal. This is unnatural; it takes work. That work is the work of education, and education is the key to civilization.

But the payoff is more than that. The ability to defer gratification is also the essence of all moral behaviour. It is what makes us human, not animals. It is the secret to material success, to acquiring wealth. And it is what gives us all the higher things in life—the arts, the grace notes.

Education is the key, and the key part of that education is what we call the humanities: religion, philosophy, history, language arts, literature. They teach us to be human; beginning with Aesop’s fables and the fairy tales.  

And, alarmingly, we no longer see the point of the humanities. That marks our doom.

Lacking this education lacking civilization, is disastrous both on the cultural and the individual level. It is the reason Canada’s indigenous people remain in a deprived and desperate state, five hundred years after first contact. Compare the Jews who immigrated to these shores since the complete catastrophe and genocide of the Holocaust. Who is doing better?

The difference is in child-rearing and the education system. Indian children are essentially taught nothing; they just run about and do as they like. They do not learn deferred gratification. Jewish kids have to go to school after school and learn the Hebrew language and all the ancient legends.

There may need to be a balance. Civilization is not an unmitigated good—the conflict between the demands of society and the natural man was the topic already of the world’s first epic, the story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. I myself prefer the relative spontaneity of American music to the rigid formalism of Asian or European styles.

Everyone dreams of being a pirate, or escaping to the wild open range and living like an Indian. Perhaps the strongest civilizations allow for some such release, to keep the system elastic. The English, or  the ancient Greeks, always had the option of going to sea; the Americans to head West. It is also the genius of the Sabbath.

But we also seem to be losing that safety hatch.

Civilized people need to be aware of the issue. You do not, as a practical matter, want uncivilized people living just across the fence from you. They might drop in at any time, break down your door, smash your things, rape your wife, and devour your children.

Consider the events of October 7.

The essence of the general mild anti-American prejudice among Canadians is that the average American, broadly speaking, is less civilized. Well-meaning, but boisterous, less polite. They will come for a visit, and look in your fridge. If they are at home, they will walk around in their underwear. They are childlike.

Of course this is a stereotype. Nevertheless, it is generally true, and it is a real thing—and that is the effect of culture.

Root and STEM

 

When I taught in China back in the early 90s, I was appalled to learn that the university had no Department of Humanities. Purely a mechanistic view of the cosmos and of human life, it seemed. When the Berlin Wall fell, the countries of Eastern Europe understood the problem: their scholars rushed to the West to get a grounding in the Humanities. Unfortunately, they were disappointed.

I am alarmed to see that Humanities is now also no longer taught in high schools in Tennessee. A list of subject areas ESL students must be prepared for gives Language Arts, Math, Science, and Social Science. 

A disease is spreading, and it is deadly. It is deadly not just to democracy, but to civilization itself.

If our culture were sane, Humanities would be the entire high school curriculum.

After the basic skills of Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, taught to mastery in elementary school, the Humanities is the one thing everyone needs to study. It is the reason and grounding for everything else. If you do not pass it on, individuals despair and civilization dies.

Today, we waste our students’ time for four to six years, years when they are full of energy and desperate to learn. Many turn off at just this point. 

Math? It is a common observation, a truism, that we never use our high school algebra, trigonometry, or calculus again. So what is the justification for teaching it? Geometry would be useful—to teach logic. But it is never presented in those terms; just as a set of axioms that obviously do not relate to the real world.

Science as taught in the schools is the antithesis of science. It is taught as a body of knowledge; stuff to memorize. This specific knowledge, taught as certain in high school, is probably false and will probably be shown by science to be false in time. Much of it is already known to be false while the textbook is still in circulation. The essence of science is to doubt you know anything, and to test everything; it is the scientific method. That is not taught. If experiments are done, the result is always predetermined. Anyone genuinely likely to excel in science is only likely to be turned off it in high school.

Language Arts? The grammar of English should have already been learned in elementary school. As to other languages, if it is a matter of learning to speak them—our current emphasis—the classroom is the worst place to do so. The place to learn a language is by speaking it regularly, something the classroom is designed to prevent. Language, when taught as a Humanity, is an exercise in logic: the old grammar-translation method. It is no longer taught in such terms.

Social Science? A mathematician back in the fifties made the observation that anything that has ever been discovered by the Social Sciences is either trivial, or it is wrong. This is still true, and will forever be true. Rather than adding to our knowledge, the social sciences have subtracted from it, by introducing serious errors to the popular mind. Human beings are not objects, and cannot be studied as objects. Even if this were possible, it would be morally offensive. And teaching Social Science is therefore teaching immorality.

The wealthy and the upper classes pay huge sums to educate their own children at private schools that do concentrate on the Humanities: on logic, philosophy, rhetoric, debate, history, classical literature. They know what they are doing. The British Empire was built on the quality of its private schools. The modern public school systems of North America were intentionally designed, in the early twentieth century, to produce cogs for the industrial machine. What they teach is submission and acceptance. The Humanities teach leadership; for they teach how to think. As Confucius said, “a superior man is not a tool.” Without the Humanities, the schools are turning out workers, meant as a means, not an end.

The world may need more STEM. But the problem with STEM is that whatever is taught today is obsolete tomorrow. To teach it at the high school level is a waste of time. Even to teach it later, at university, when specialization is possible, is probably too soon. It needs to be taught continually, over one’s professional career. Something now entirely possible, with distance education.

But what is needed even more than STEM, and all the more so in times of rapid change,  is minds that are adaptable, have initiative, and know the ultimate goal.

Getting an Education at OCAD

 

OCAD's appropriately postmodern architecture.

Noticed recently: a job ad for OCAD University’s English Department. It is jarring to see the courses for which they want instructors. English lit is no longer about what you think it is.

COURSE TITLE: ENGL-2003 POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE

COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course looks at national and transnational literatures in a comparative perspective, focusing particularly on constructs of nation, gender, colonialism, and difference. Its aim is to imagine multiple literary times and spaces grounded in different parts of the world and in their different histories. That is, rather than creating a snapshot or conducting a literary tour of the world, this course seeks to refuse an easy commodification of Literature as a global product. All texts will be studied in their original English or in English translation.

To look at “postcolonial” writing from non-Western cultures is to severely limit one’s exposure to foreign culture and foreign ideas. These are necessarily drawn only from the postwar period, and are in the Western idiom, written by authors educated in the West.

Students should be exposed instead to Rumi, Li Bai, Basho, the Ramayana, and the like. That would give them a non-Western perspective. That’s the last thing they’ll get here.

And the focus is to be on “nation, gender, colonialism, and difference.” Only contemporary concerns of the political left. No new ideas or new cultural perspectives to be risked here. 

COURSE TITLE: ENGL-2011 LITERATURE AND SOCIAL CHANGE

COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course takes a close look at the relationship between literature and concerns for equity, sustainability and social justice, focusing on the ways writers, artists and intellectuals work as agents for social change. The course discusses representations of topics such as dis/ability; gender, sexual and racial equity; labour activism; demands for Indigenous sovereignty; critiques of settler colonialism; postcolonial struggles against empire; and calls for environmental preservation. Texts are disciplinarily diverse and may be performative as well as written. Forms include comics, nonfiction, fiction, poetry and more.

All politics, no literature. “Texts may be performative.” 

COURSE TITLE: ENGL-2012 TRANS AND QUEER LITERATURE

COURSE DESCRIPTION: In this course, we explore the ways in which sexualities, gender identities and sexual politics are addressed in literature. Texts will be by transgender, lesbian, gay, bisexual, two-spirit, queer and asexual creators, and will reflect the complicated nature of queer life. Intersectionality will be a guiding principle, as we examine ways race, gender, language, culture and disability justice intersect within representations of queer life across a variety of literary forms, such as fiction, nonfiction and memoir, poetry, drama and comics.

The subject matter is of obvious interest to, at a maximum, three percent of the population, in aggregate. The texts are also limited to that same three percent. Realistically from only the last couple of decades as well, because before that there was no market for gay lit. Yet this course is apparently offered every semester. One suspects the primary objective is to give sexual adventurers of various types an opportunity to meet, identify their preferences, and hook up.

Then finally something that almost looks sensible. They want someone to teach a course in Children’s Literature. An important and neglected field.

But you have to know that critical theory has a special focus on Children’s Literature. For the obvious sinister reason: they want to indoctrinate, and they think the best approach is to get them as young as they can.

COURSE TITLE: ENGL-2010 CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course aims to answer the question: What is children's literature? The course will survey children's fiction, poetry, and picture-books to introduce students to a wide range of children's literature. We will examine different cultural and critical approaches to this field in relation to cultural interpretations of childhood and gender. As we discuss the social and political visions put forth in these texts, we will consider the effects of publishing and the media (for example, the Harry Potter films) on the field of contemporary children's literature. Our analysis of genre will include the study of the relationship between text and illustration. Course readings may include works by Carroll, The Brothers Grimm, Lewis, Rowling, Seuss, and others.

“As we discuss the social and political visions put forth in these texts.” The important thing about children’s literature is its political vision. Obviously, children and their own interests are of no concern here.

And OCAD is not unusual; I have seen similar course descriptions at Queen’s, for example.

The very least we can do is pull all taxpayer funding.

The Alarming Danger of a Return to Saniity

 

Many people are alarmed about Critical Race Theory in the schools; as in the “1619 Project,” which teaches that America was founded on the institution of slavery. But perhaps you do not realize that Critical Race Theory is just one tentacle of a kraken named Critical Theory that has suckered in far more than the public schools.

I have found a useful overview and summary, written by two declared Critical Theorists, in Critical Inquiry in Language Studies. 

The first and perhaps most important point to take from the paper is that the critical theorists themselves are running scared. One recent CT essay abstract ends with dire word of “a new imperative for survival in what are for many volatile and risky political and media community and civic environments.” The present piece’s abstract concludes: “it is necessary to confront neoliberalism as a new kind of domination.”

Neoliberalism means free market economics and human rights. Its heyday is commonly thought to be the Reagan/Thatcher years. There has been a lot of water under the Potomac bridges since then, and it is not clear that water has been rising. The Democrats just took two houses and the presidency; Trudeau’s Liberals are hunkered down in Canada. The Tories have been crushing it in the UK. In terms of visible politics, a mixed bag.

So how to account for this sense of embattlement? Rather than the votes, I suspect that the Critical Theorists feel they are losing the argument. Neoliberalism is not rising so much as that CT is collapsing, in a logical more than a political sense.

For later in the essay, the authors lament that CT has not accomplished anything.

“Has the increased recognition of critical language studies led to any concrete social change?

The answer is probably no.”

The article diagnoses that Critical Theory has been failing to make proper outreach to educate others. Yet this is an odd claim considering that it monopolizes the schools and universities. Most critical theorists spend most of their day educating undergraduates in their views. The explanation has to be, not that the arguments are not being made, but that they are not convincing. Too few students are genuinely buying the joy juice. Semi-aware that their essential premises are not salvageable, they turn to shouting them louder and more often as the only alternative. Along with suppressing any other voices.

Critical theory is doomed: take it from the horse’s mouth.

Scientism

 

A traditional unsympathetic portrait of the Qin emperor.

Most of the horrors of the modern world can be traced to scientism.

Do not misunderstand me; scientism is not science. But science is rarely heard from in popular culture. Scientism is the pseudo-religion that considers science the source of meaning and reality. It is the dominant faith of our age, and its consequences are profoundly destructive. Not least to science.

When people claim that doubting climate change is “anti-science,” or that “the science is settled” on any given issue, this is scientism, not science.  True science is based on skepticism and taking nothing on authority. Science makes no truth claims; it is a method of inquiry, not a set of dogmas. 

Besides the damage to science, scientism is, for example, the foundation of all racism. If we can agree that racism is a problem, rejecting scientism is the way to solve it. Before science sought to classify humans as if they were animals, the concept of race did not exist. The ancient Romans, or the Medieval Christians, knew nothing of race, and would have considered it as senseless to discriminate against someone due to their skin colour as due to their hair colour or eye colour. This is why both Roman citizenship and Christian baptism was open to all, without discrimination of birth.

Marxism, and all the mass murders it has produced, is also based on scientism. Marxism wanted to reduce all human life to material, and scientific, terms. It defined itself as “scientific socialism,” and was and is, of course, aggressively atheist. People were merely objects, means rather than ends.

Nazism is also directly based on scientism—it is Darwinism applied to the human species.

Everything we today experience as “mental illness” can, I think, also be attributed to scientism, which strips the world of its meaning. It is a striking fact that, before Freud, “mental illness,” melancholy, was generally considered transitory and curable. Now it is multiplying like an epidemic, and is incurable in all its forms. It is still highly curable in non-Western societies.

A Chinese student of mine, without anything being assigned, chose to write and submit an essay arguing for the need for society to support the Humanities. This looks to me like an appeal: Chinese schools and universities, like those in the old Soviet Bloc, do not teach the Humanities. There are no Humanities departments. There are only the STEM fields, and Marxist ideology.

She contends in her essay that this is why the Soviet Bloc fell—history shows, she writes, that any society that neglects the Humanities must fall in time. She cites, along with Eastern Europe, an earlier example from Chinese history, the Qin Dynasty. The Qin unified China in 221 BC under the banner of “legalism,” which emphasized social order as the only value. Books were collected and burned. 

The dynasty lasted only 15 years. It collapsed as the leaders, guided by no principle but power, began executing one another.

A point we are coming to, I fear, in our current societies. Humanities give us morals and meaning. Without the Humanities, there is no “why.” 

My student is not alone in her perception that scientism is a fatal flaw. When the Berlin Wall fell, the new democratic regimes of Eastern Europe thought the same, and sent their academics to the West to bring back knowledge of the Humanities.

Sadly, they discovered that the West, too, had largely abandoned them, in everything but name. Instead they had themselves been concocting and distilling the poisoned Kool-Ade of scientism. 

It has only gotten worse since.

Now the West seems to be falling apart, just as China is falling apart; from the same poison.

The difference is perhaps that there are more people in China who realize the problem. Chinese culture may recover first.

New Great Books Program

John Henry, not Alfred E.

There is good news out there. Newman Theological College in Edmonton has begun offering a Bachelor of Arts in Catholic Studies on the Great Books and Socratic model, similar to that of Our Lady Seat of Wisdom in Eastern Canada.

For most practical purposes, "Great Books" means "real Humanities."

Extraordinary Academic Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

That Shakesperian rag--
Most intelligent, very elegant,
That old classical drag
Has the proper stuff
The line, "Lay on MacDuff"
Desdemona was the pampered pet
Romeo loves his Juliet
And they were some lovers
You can bet, and yet
I know if they were here today
They'd Grizzly Bear in a different way
And you'd hear old Hamlet say
"To be or not to be"
That Shakesperian rag...

The New York Times published an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton suggesting President Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act if the rioting continues. An obvious point. Other Times columnists immediately branded the piece “Fascist,” there was apparently a general staff insurrection, and the paper apologized for allowing it into print. They promised never again to host such reprehensible opinions. In Canada, Stockwell Day, former leader of the Alliance, patriotically insisted on a CBC panel that there was no systemic racism in Canada. He was apparently promptly thrown off several corporate boards for this heresy.

If opinions someone in power disagrees with are going to be aggressively censored like this, democratic government will not be possible, because political discourse will not be possible. Especially if it includes opinions, like those of Day or Cotton, that are held by a majority of the people; especially opinions expressed by active politicians.

Tim Pool seems convinced this must now end in civil war; that civil war has already begun. It seems to me that is an optimistic scenario. It is more likely, at least in Canada, to end in either totalitarian government or social chaos and a “failed state.”

A bit more hopefully, it also seems to me likely that this latest extreme intolerance is a matter of mass hysteria. Calls to defund the police? That seems almost self-evidently irrational. That means, in effect, no government, and social chaos in one easy step. And how about this for tight reasoning: a week ago, it was deliberate murder to allow businesses to reopen. But now it is Fascist to break up gangs of tightly-clumped people getting physical and touching things in the streets. Words are violence, just as they were a week ago, but looting and destroying property is not violence?

War is peace? Assault is “peaceful protest”?

This is hysteria. People are acting out of blind emotion, without thinking things through.

Everyone saw the video of George Floyd being killed. Anger is a natural reaction. I felt it too. Finding someone to blame and punish is also a natural reaction, but an unworthy one. That is how scapegoating starts. A large proportion of the population is now a lynch mob looking for someone to hurt. Many others are going along and miming the slogans, spraypainting “BLM” on their boarded-up storefronts and publicly kneeling, for fear of the mob turning on them.

But here’s the big new problem: this time around, the mob isn’t only in the streets. It has taken over the newsrooms, the boardrooms, the government offices, the legislatures, even, it seems, the military. There is almost no leadership left taking that sober second look, weighing the facts, keeping it all within the established systems, and urging the mob to calm down. Only a small and embattled minority, themselves in danger of being lynched: the Tom Cottons, the Trumps, the Rand Pauls, the Candace Owens, the Stockwell Days.

The Ralphs are dangerously outnumbered by Jack and the choir.

This is what we have leaders for; this is the justification for elites. To see above the crowd and its passions. With their greater education, intellectual training, and demonstrated mental gifts, they are supposed to be able to deal with such matters calmly, without becoming hysterical.

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs, and blaming it on you…

Somehow, but for the odd seemingly self-educated exception, we have stopped producing such leaders, such an elite.

I think this general failure has to be traced back at least in part to the education system. It is the education system’s job to give us such leaders. Inculcating such a capability was always the essential aim of being schooled: to develop character and the ability to deal calmly and justly with whatever befell. In Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Tom’s father says this explicitly: he does not send his son to Rugby to learn to read Greek, but to become a decent Christian gentleman.

We lost this core of education at about the beginning of the 20th century, when the progressive ideal became instead to turn out useful employees in large numbers for industry. We have accelerated this emphasis over time, to the present concept that STEM is what education really should be all about. This was always in direct violation of Confucian principles: “a gentleman is not a tool.”

Over time, perhaps also in reaction to larger social pressures, we abolished religious and ethical education, those things that give the mind a reliable navigational system. We stopped teaching the humanities, the wisdom we had accumulated over the millennia. We say we still do in places, but instead, we teach “social science,” and simply call it the humanities. Social science produces nothing, and does not teach you how to think.

And now we are reaping what we sowed. We have no leadership, no elite, left. There is no one on the bridge. There is no one at the helm. Everyone is running around the decks waving their arms. And perhaps imagining someone else is in charge.

After a hundred years, after perhaps four generations wrongly educated, it is going to be magnificently difficult to rebuild amidst what is likely to be growing social chaos. Western Europe did it once before, in the medieval monasteries. Perhaps it is time for the Benedict option.

Or perhaps new light may come from the East, perhaps from East Asia or Eastern Europe. They too have been devastated by modernism; but at least, having recently known true hardship, having already hit bottom, they may be prepared to make the sacrifices and do the hard work of rebuilding civilization.

Eastern Civilization and Western Barbarism

When I teach young Chinese students, they always seem familiar with the classics of the West. In a recent class, I asked each, “what’s your favourite book?” The first student said “Tom Sawyer.” The next said “Little Red Riding Hood.” They can all recount the story of the Three Little Pigs, or the Tortoise and the Hare. Another was working on an essay on "The Little Mermaid." The Andersen story, not the Disney movie.

I recently signed on to help American students with their high school English Lit homework, and find I cannot. Despite two degrees and most of a doctorate in, essentially, literature. They are all reading recent novels which I would have to read myself in order to advise them.

No doubt North American kids are getting a good taste of the classics outside of school, if in a distorted form: from Disney and other forms of popular entertainment. But we really should be teaching the original versions in school. Obviously, the kids would be interested—this is just about what they are most interested in, according to the box office. Aside from the fact that they teach vital life lessons, these are, after all, the best stories available.

And sometimes versions of the classic stories do appear in North American texts. When they do, however, it is always a modern retelling intended to subvert the original. One classic example I encountered recently was The Boy Who Cried Wolf told from the perspective of the wolf. Who was, of course, a vegetarian.

It almost looks as though the future of Western civilization is in China; or in the Far East. Perhaps also in Eastern Europe.

It is encouraging to know, at least, that it will survive somewhere.

And perhaps this is a good thing. “Western civilization” was always a bit nonsensical as a term. Civilization is civilization. Its centre is perhaps shifting.

Culture Studies

Hungary has wisely decided to refuse government funds to “women’s studies” at their universities.

Let’s hope this is the beginning of a trend. Covering not just “women’s studies,” but “X studies” of all kinds, in which X represents some special interest group. These departments are rarely of any academic value. They do nothing to advance human knowledge, but rather spread politically motivated misinformation—propaganda.

There is a real place for “culture studies.” In fact, it was always my own main academic interest. But frustratingly, you learn nothing about a culture by taking culture studies. You learn only about current Western politics.

Schools: An Education Manifesto

Adam Smith remarked that “there is a lot of ruin in a nation.” Sometimes it amazes me that Canada or America manage to stand, considering how badly we get things done. This gives at least the impression of a civilization in decline. I thought that when I first left to wander, first to China, imagining that they must surely do things better elsewhere.

I have since learned, through my travels, that as utterly screwed up as everything is in North America, it is exponentially worse everywhere else.

At the same time, if we could only start to do a few things a little better, it could make a vast difference. And, if some other more innovative society does so and we do not, the current dominance of America could end swiftly. We have no cause for complacency.

One key to a successful society, perhaps the sole key, as we have said here before, is shared values. This almost goes without saying: if we have a shared goal, we will work together. If we do not, we will not. But, remarkably, the educators and the scribblers and the artist of our time and place are busily dismantling any found shared values.

But then, how does one get to shared values?

That would be the second key to social success: proper education.

As a good general principle, the society that gets education closest to right is the society that will have the most success in all its endeavours. Education is the system or method of passing accumulated knowledge and wisdom on to the next generation. It is the sine qua non of civilization. Do it wrong for one generation, maybe two or three, and civilization is gone.

And we are doing it wrong.

Not only is our present system, in North America, not reliably passing on the information; it seems to be spending most of its energy encouraging students to reject any established cultural norms, knowledge, or traditions whenever encountered.

Unless there is some innate higher civilization underneath and concealed by our own—an utterly improbable premise—this can only end in rubble and ruin.

How can we fix this?

First, abolish the teachers’ colleges.

Unfortunately, as soon as I say “the schools are in a mess and they need reform,” you get the wrong impression. I simply join a chorus with every professor teaching at every teacher’s college in existence, and more or less with every teacher in every classroom. That the schools are a mess is the eternal and fundamental premise of all teacher education already. As a result, as we see no results from any of this agitation, school reform itself has been given a bad name. It always seems to be a massive expenditure of money that ends up making everything worse.

There is a reason why all the “educators” say this, and it is opposite to my reason for saying so.

It is a simple and obvious truth that anyone who has themselves sat in a classroom daily for fifteen years or more—as anyone who enters a teacher’s college almost necessarily has—has a very good education in what works and does not work in the classroom. Nothing they can now be taught in one or two years is going to make a difference.

In order to justify their existence, however, the teachers’ colleges must necessarily teach their students something they do not already know. Which can mean, necessarily, only one thing: they must declare that whatever we do now, everything we do now is wrong. And they much teach their acolytes something else, something utterly counter to either tradition or intuition or common sense. In sum, to justify their existence, they must deliberately teach them how to teach badly. And insist on this as the one “correct” way to teach.

This result was demonstrated rather well by “Operation Follow Through.” A few decades ago. The US federal government sank a large amount of money into a very large trial of various proposed new approaches in the classroom, fitting the latest educational theories, in hopes of improving the chances of disadvantaged students. The result: every approach sponsored by a school of education turned out to do worse than the control—worse than the way the randomly selected “ordinary” classroom of the time was conducted. The one approach that did better, and consistently, was proposed not by a professor, or even a teacher, but an advertising copywriter.

As a result, the results of the study were generally ignored. They left no place for the ed schools, after all. The approach that was proven best, “direct instruction,” basically a good old fashioned lecture with Socratic elements, testing for comprehension, has never been generally implemented. Those fashionable educational theories persist, unaffected by all evidence.

The current success of Khan Academy, however, is based on the same method of direct instruction. Khan, unsurprisingly is another ad man, not a teacher or professor of education.

Salman Khan

Similarly, home-schooled students consistently do better on standardized tests than those who attend a public school. In what other profession would you expect such a result? What would it say, for example, if patients did consistently better if they kept away from doctors or hospitals? If accused parties did consistently better if they did not hire a lawyer, but represented themselves in court?

It is not just that the ed schools force their graduates to deliberately teach badly. The truth is, any bright student or any student with common sense, including the teachers, knows at some level it is a scam. To a bright student, at best, ed school looks like a frustrating waste of a year during which they could instead be doing something interesting, like thinking. And going to one will lose them much respect among their intellectual peers. But worse than that, realizing that it is a scam, and still going, means that the system selects out teachers for proven dishonesty. Given that the chief value of an education is in teaching good morals, and the most important part of imparting morals is setting a good example, this too selects out for the worst teachers.

Self-evidently, those who will make the best teachers will be those who have been the best learners. It is those who know best how to learn who can teach others how to learn. Next to that, and equally self-evidently, those best qualified to teach a certain subject are those who know that subject best.

And so it is obvious how we should select teachers, and it is not how we do it now. It is, however, how they do it in Finland. Funny that—Finland pretty consistently leads the world in student results. It is also how they traditionally do it in China, Singapore, Hong Kong, or Korea, with their Confucian traditions—rounding out the list of world-beating education systems.

We should hire the best students from the most rigorous programs, holding the highest degrees, in the subjects they are actually going to teach.

What, you will ask, about those teaching in lower grades? After all, how much higher math do you really need to know to teach grade three arithmetic? Surely this is all wasted. They need instead to understand children and how they learn, right? “Pedagogy.”

Good question, to which there is a good answer.

Did you never wonder what the Humanities were all about?

People scoff at students who go into the Humanities as layabouts, saying there is no job at the other end. Indeed there is not, but that is our big mistake. The job is teaching.

The whole point of the Humanities, obviously, as the name itself says, is to teach someone how to be human. They constitute the bedrock knowledge and skills everyone needs, whatever else they subsequently do with their lives. Accordingly, it is what should, no must, be taught at the lower levels.

There is a lot of solid evidence that not doing so is harmful in a very direct sense. E.D. Hirsch has shown that it results in functional illiteracy at the college level. Another recent study demonstrated that the single best predictor of high later academic achievement is having been read to as a child—having been read, that is, the traditional stories.

Instead of teaching them to everyone, we are now teaching them to no one. In fact, we are not even teaching them any longer at the college level, in course labelled “Humanities.” This is a fairly inevitable consequence, a generation on, from not teaching them in childhood—nobody is now competent to teach them at college level, and so the thread of civilization has been broken. A perfect way to destroy not only uncounted individual lives, but the entire civilization.

Accordingly, to restore our education system is now going to need to be a two-step, and at least a two-generation, process. First we need to restore expertise in the Humanities. We need to form a new professoriate.

The best way to do that is, presumably, the way it was done the first time, back in the Middle Ages. Expertise was established by public lectures and public debate. The good news is that this is immensely easier to do now than it was then, thanks to wider dissemination over the Internet, and its interactive possibilities. It is indeed liable to happen spontaneously, as people shop for individual courses from individual instructors online.

13th Century debate between representatives of Catholicism and Oriental Christianity.

Only the Humanities, you may ask? What about STEM? Isn’t that what we need to be concentrating on?

We only do harm by teaching science in elementary school. What they need to know is the scientific method: specific scientific “truths” we teach now are only too likely to be found wrong well before they graduate college. Or even before the science texts themselves go to press. It is a bit of a cottage industry among scientists to point out how many things in the current school texts are flatly wrong. By teaching science as a body of knowledge instead of as a method of inquiry, we have also only fostered the damaging but now endemic popular notion that science is a cosmology, a religion, a body of received truths. This is profoundly anti-scientific, and must later be un-taught if they are ever going to accomplish anything in the sciences.

Of course, nominally, there is often a dutiful attempt to also teach the scientific method. Students are made to do “experiments.” But these are not experiments at all. The expected result is always known beforehand, generally explained beforehand, and if the experiment does not produce this expected result, the student is informed he must have done something wrong. This perfectly inverts the scientific method, as well as being an obvious waste of time to any thoughtful student. A great way to queer them on the scientific method.

It hardly needs to be said that teaching technology is even more futile. Technology is changing quickly enough that anything taught in this regard in grade school is almost certain to have been a waste of time by college graduation.

What about teaching basic math? Granted, a hundred years ago, you could make a case that everyone should be able to “do their sums.” Even at the time, there were actually simpler methods available than the memorization of sums and times tables and such that we used: there was always the abacus, or the Japanese string method of multiplication. But today, even the poorest of the poor, even in a poorer country like the Philippines, generally carries a computer in their pocket. Few even bother to do a calculation in their head, when it is so much easier and more reliable to pull out their smart phone. Even if they don’t, the next guy can for them. Knowing basic addition is no doubt still marginally useful, but probably not the best use of everyone’s time, in terms of any practical utility.

What about higher math? Yes, it cannot so easily be done by calculator, but, at the same time, it is not something everyone needs to know. There is, for most of us, the inevitable question: when was the last time you used your high school calculus, or trigonometry? If you actually had call to do so, were you actually able to remember it?

In other words, for the majority of students, even higher math is wasting their time. For those who need it, the computer is again the answer. They can actually now look it up, including any relevant formula, as needed. They can go to Khan Academy or the like for an explanation, if needed, and are more likely to be paying attention now that it has some practical value.

The one branch of math that probably should be a part of everyone’s education is the one branch of math that always was: geometry; or as it used to be called, “Euclid.” Not that everyone will have any pressing need to calculate the radius of a circle in their future life, but solving geometric problems in Euclidian style teaches logic.

Languages, on the other hand, have always been a part of the Humanities. But we also have it all wrong on teaching languages. We now teach only modern languages, with the idea that being able to speak French, say, will be useful for any Canadian, or Spanish to an American, or Chinese to some future importer or exporter.

But how many of us, in English Canada, actually graduate high school able to converse in French?

Almost no one.

Odd, that, because competent polyglots insist anyone can pick up spoken French within three months.

Even were this not so, we are on the verge of having reliable live translation available for multiple languages on any cell phone. Such products are already being widely advertised.

In other words, again, we are simply massively wasting student time, and taxpayer money.

Languages have always been taught, but it is folly to think one can best learn to converse in another language in a regular classroom, which by its nature can offer few real opportunities to converse.

Notice that the languages traditionally taught were always “dead” languages, classical Latin or Greek or Hebrew or Sanskrit. Nobody alive actually knew how to properly converse in them. That was not the goal.

The goal of learning a foreign language was that consciously learning a language and how it works, as if it were a watch mechanism, is learning how to think. Language is almost functionally coterminous with thought. For this, the ideal approach was the old “grammar-translation method,” which forced you to analyse the logic of each sentence, rather than memorize vocabulary. It is rank heresy to suggest or recommend teaching the grammar-translation method today, of course.

Other things are not taught that obviously should be taught. Mnemonics, which is to say, how to memorize something. It is true madness, for example, to try to teach a modern language, involving a large new body of vocabulary, without ever teaching students how to memorize. No wonder nobody ever ends up learning the language. As a language teacher myself, it is endlessly frustrating how the typical modern language course spends each new semester teaching almost entirely the same things taught the previous semester, with little evidence that the students have remembered any of it. But being able to remember things is also an essential life skill. If you cannot remember, you cannot learn. Anything.

Far from teaching it, it is now rank heresy to ask a student to memorize something. A wonderful teacher at my son’s school was fired for it.

Also essential and generally taught at private schools, yet suspiciously ignored at public schools, are the skills needed for leadership: parliamentary procedure, which is to say, how to run a meeting. Rhetoric—notice that it was an ad man who did so well at conveying information in Operation Follow Through, and an ad man who built Khan Academy. Instead of teaching this, our schools are busily teaching that all advertising is evil: their supposed courses in “media literacy.” Debate; most importantly, logical fallacies. Most people have no idea, and this leaves them open to constant manipulation and disastrously bad decisions. These are skills we all need, and society itself needs to function, and we do not regularly teach them.

These all fall under the Humanities. The Humanities are, in essence, the corpus everyone needs to know: the fundamentals of history, philosophy, literature, music, art.

On top of this, and crowning this, of course, the essential foundation of any true education is values--religion. There is no way around this: if you do not know what your goal is, the meaning of your life, you cannot come to any further conclusions about what should or should not be taught or learned or known or done. Without knowing your destination, any path is as good as another.

Ideally, given that we are committed to religious freedom, rather than imposing some state creed—an awful idea, surely—this means a system of school vouchers rather than having state-run “secular” schools with all religious references carefully laundered out. Such a school is not religiously neutral—it is anti-religious. It teaches students it is necessary or advisable to have no values. Which is destructive not only to themselves but to society as a whole.

Infinitely better if parents can enroll their students in religious schools of their choice, run by religious institutions.

To prevent social fragmentation, the core values expressed in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms are, by definition, the core values to which we all must subscribe as Canadians. They need to be taught, systematically, as well as honoured in practice, in all schools. The government’s role should be to ensure that this is done. In the US, the equivalent would be the values of the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence.

The Post-Education Academy

I see my old alma mater, Queen’s University, is advertising for two new faculty members in my old department, Religion. One is for an expert in “Religion and Social Justice.” A full faculty position—that means at least three courses per term. The other is for an authority on “Contemporary Jewish Religion and Globalized Identities.”

Back in my day, when you took a course in religion, you studied religion: Buddhism, Judaism, Islam. Now you study politics.

I find this entirely disturbing. To be honest, it makes me feel physically ill. One of the reasons I majored in religion when I did was because it seemed to be the one place where you could escape contemporary political jive and groupthink and cultural biases and study the eternal things, the things that are really important, from a crosscultural perspective. Now that last portal to true learning is apparently slammed shut.

Not incidentally, when you study “Religion and Social Justice,” you are studying religion from an entirely modern and Western perspective.

This is especially troublesome because academia is profoundly conservative. If you set up a chair or a department in some area, that area will necessarily persist for the rest of that person's career, because their career depends on it. And they have tenure. And they then get to choose their own replacement. Accordingly, once a bad idea is bought into, it is hugely hard to get it out. Marxism continues to be all the rage in academia, and still growing in influence, forty years after the Berlin Wall fell, and 65 years after Khrushchev publicly revealed the sins of Stalin. Nobody takes Freud seriously in the real world of psychiatry--yet his theories, long disproved, still dominate whole departments in the Humanities.

It will take generations to repair this blunder, if we ever do.

And the last sentence on the Religion department web page is “We are situated on traditional Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territory.”

Which is an ahistorical lie. When the French founded Fort Frontenac, the nearest Anishinaabe (Algonquin) settlement would have been over 160 km away, in Quebec past Renfrew. The nearest Hadenosaunee (Iroquois) settlement would have been over 130 km in the opposite direction, around Syracuse, NY. Either group might have passed through, but it would have been a very long journey, of weeks, on foot without roads or by canoe. So they would not have come by often. Certainly neither would have recognized any rights of the latter to the land.

I see other departments have gone just as political, and, apparently, hard left. Geography is seeking a faculty member who can teach “Black Geographies,” a cross-appointment with the department of Gender Studies. The Philosophy department is advertising a position in “Philosophy of Race.” As if there ever was such a thing, outside of Nazi Germany. Political Studies wants profs in the areas of “Indigenous Politics,” “Gender and Politics,” and “Politics of Race and US Politics.”

It is not as though these are just the most egregious examples picked from a larger list, either. In each of these departments, these are the ONLY positions advertised.

The current state of the academy, it seems, is beyond parody. And this is an old established school with supposedly high standards, not some diploma mill.

Where is one to go any more to get an education?

And how did we come to be so racist that race (and gender) is now the only thing we see? 

Down with STEM

Improving the quality of teachers is not the only thing we need to do to improve the schools. The curriculum is also a problem, and as much of a problem. We are endlessly perverse in what we choose to teach.

I know there will be howls of protest over this, but the truth is, we waste kids' time in teaching them so much science and math. Everyone but the kids loves STEM. But STEM is not the way to go.

Yes, these fields are important for a lot of good jobs; and important for the advancement of our physical comfort. But for the majority of students who will not go on to STEM careers, it is pretty much a waste of their time. As the old saw goes, how much of your high school algebra did you use today? When today did you need to work out the circumference of a circle? Yet the time lost studying these things kept you away from learning things that might have been important to you in your real life and real career.

If, on the other hand, you do need these bits of knowledge in your job or your life later on, you have almost certainly forgotten them by then. You must pick them up again on the fly anyway—which, fortunately, is easy enough, when and if they are important to you.

Teaching science is an even worse time sink; at least the way we teach it now. We teach it as a set of known facts and “laws.” This is really the antithesis of science, which relies on taking nothing on authority. Inevitably, a significant portion of the “facts” and “laws” the typical student learns in public school are disproven a few years later—sometimes before the text goes to press. The student then wastes his time not just filling his head with useless information, but with things he will later need to laboriously unlearn, or look a fool.

We ought to teach the history of science, to show what science really is: a method, not a set of conclusions. And, of course, we ought to teach the scientific method. We claim to do that sometimes now, but we really never do. We will assign the class an experiment with a known, pre-ordained conclusion. Then, if the experiment does not produce the intended results, we require the student to explain why it failed. This is still teaching the opposite of the scientific method. Moreover, it seems deliberately pointless and boring.

At the same time, there are a lot of essential things, things everyone needs, that we do not teach. Most important among them are ethics and religion. They are, and have always been understood to be, the essence of an education. Unless you understand your goal, nothing else makes any sense.

But these are things we cannot teach in public schools. We do not want government teaching ethics and religion: that way totalitarianism lies. The only solution seems to be either funding all denominational schools, or school vouchers.

Aside from this, we need to teach basic skills: reading, writing, and arithmetic. Which we do, but not very well. Unfortunately, the best way to teach such basic skills is through direct instruction, or as teachers currently call it disparagingly, “drill and kill.” Memorization is itself an invaluable skill, and we ought to teach it deliberately: the practice of memorizing things is of value over and above the value of the things memorized. Unfortunately, far from teaching it, we currently tend to prohibit it.

Beyond and after this, we need to teach rhetoric, parliamentary procedure, and logic, which we do not currently teach at all. For any position in life, it is important to be able to think, to persuade, and to avoid being conned or manipulated. And it is important to be able to work in groups. Yes, we currently make students work in groups, endlessly, but then we do not show them how—or more often, we set up the groups so that they will not work. They become no more than tools for conformity and bullying. Kids need to learn how to run a meeting.

We need to teach basic bookkeeping—vital to any business, but also vital to anyone else, for personal finance.

On top of this, as I think E.D. Hirsch has demonstrated, there is a good case that we need to teach a core of shared cultural knowledge. Without it, you are left outside the cultural dialogue. You cannot read a good newspaper or a college text. This is where history and literature, in particular, come in. And that does not mean some recent book by a “minority” author, for the sake of supposed diversity. And it does not mean the history of some “minority” group. By the logic of the need, that means looking at the most familiar and established authors, and the aspects of history everybody has been most familiar with over the past generations. All those dead white males. Otherwise the exercise is pointless, and another huge waste of students' time.

Teaching a second language might be a good idea, but certainly not the way we teach it now. Growing up in Quebec, we all studied French from grade 3 through high school. And I doubt anyone ever became fluent in French as a result.

The problem was with the goal. It is crazy to try for conversational fluency in a classroom. Conversational fluency comes with speaking practice. It is almost impossible to manage this in a classroom. At best, it is a wildly inefficient use of student time and resources. If you want fluency, you get it on the streets, in the playgrounds, watching TV, hanging out with friends, shopping in the stores. In a classroom, the only useful approach is the old, now always disparaged and condemned “grammar-translation method.” It is universally condemned because it will never make you fluent in the language. True enough, it that is what you want. But it will give you a reading knowledge. This gives you access to all the most important thoughts and all the most important conversations in that language. That is not such a small thing in itself. More importantly, in having to analyse grammar, it will teach you how language works. And to understand how language works is to understand how thought works.

For the same reason, even apart from its own utility, and perhaps even as a suitable replacement, it would be immensely valuable to teach all students how to program. Unlike geometry or algebra, programming skills have an immediate practical payoff. You can make things, right away.

These are the things that everyone can benefit from knowing. If a student then decides to go into some STEM field, that is the time to learn what is specific to that field.

Of course, we are all charging full steam ahead in the opposite direction.

The Empty Soul

According to medicine, there is no cure for any mental illness. Sometimes, unpredictably, people get better. But that is true of any physical illness, too, without any kind of medical intervention. In general, though, all that medicine can do is offer a pill or a treatment that will alleviate the symptoms for a time. But once you have had one depressive episode, they say, the odds of getting another go through the roof. And the episodes are supposed to get worse as you get older.

This is just what you would expect from many untreated chronic illness.

And the prognosis is worse for any of the more severe “mental illnesses”: schizophrenia, bipolar.

In sum and in simple, psychiatry does not work.

The key is the fundamental error of treating a psychic or mental phenomenon as if it were a physical one.

Mental illness should not be dealt with by doctors--physicians. They lack either the training or the inclination. It is like asking the nerds to play football, or the jocks to do the programming. You might as well send someone with TB to a voodoo doctor. It might alleviate the symptoms for a while, might make the patient feel better, giving an illusion that something meaningful has been done. But is not going to do anything to cure the disease, because its underlying causes are physical, not spiritual. Similarly, treating mental illness as a physical illness is not going to help much, because its underlying causes are mental.

TB or not TB: that is the question

Yeah, granted, there is some crossover. A better attitude can lead to better outcomes in illness, and no doubt physical pain can cause emotional effects. But how efficient is it to just pray on the riverbank for a boat, instead of ever building one?

The area of human knowledge that deals with the soul of man, with the mental realm, is firstly, religion, and more generally, the humanities: the cultural complex, philosophy, religion, and the various arts.

I will go further than that: the cause for the current growing epidemic in mental illness is at least in part a general and growing lack of grounding in the humanities.

The whole point of a culture is to give its audience or human constituency the tools they need for a good and happy life. Starting, of dire necessity, with the basic questions: why are we here, and what is the goal. But beyond that, the culture gives us the tools we need to live properly, most definitely including the tools to avoid psychic dangers and to handle the psychic shocks that may come.

Beginning with the nursery rhymes, animal fables, and fairy tales we traditionally tell our children, which are full of necessary wisdom. And which, of course, in recent generations, have been largely abandoned.

If you have read the recent post on my blog “By Their Fruits You Shall Know them,” you will recognize, if not agree with, my point that the reports of Jesus and the apostles casting out demons in the New Testament were really about curing depression and other mental illnesses.

Jesus actually gives this bit of theory at one point:

“When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first. That is how it will be with this wicked generation” (Matthew 12: 43-5).

That would logically be the result of taking only palliative treatments, over time.

Demons, depression and mental illness can occupy our psyches because they are empty. Most vitally, of course, they need to be filled with religious direction. We, most of us, more and more, are walking around like little robots, thinking of ourselves as no more than robots, machines to eat and breed. Our lives are empty, meaningless. The medical model assumes and positively encourages this. And so the demons come to party in our empty minds.

We need the humanities to furnish our souls.

One reason—the usual reason—people give for not studying the humanities any more is that there is no money in it. There are no jobs. Especially on the right, these days, there is much mockery of the humanities as a self-indulgent easte of time and resources. But it is at least as bad on the left, which has replaced the humanities, while retaining only the name, with Marxist “social science.” Which is entirely mechanistic, and meant to be on the model of physical science, only viewing humans as, again, little empty robots.

The argument that the humanities are of no value for finding or doing a job is circular. There are no jobs because we have decided to do without the humanities, without culture. If people decided they did not need houses, and could sleep as well outdoors in the rain and snow, there would be no jobs in house construction. But that would not mean house construction is a useless skill. It means people are misguided and are causing themselves unnecessary suffering.

All schoolteachers through to the end of high school should be trained in the humanities. That is what education is—the transmission of the culture. That should be their area of expertise, and that is what they should be teaching.

The specialized skills needed for this or that job? College or university is time for these. Otherwise, you are wasting kids’ time with things of no use to them. How many times have you heard someone complain that they never used any of the chemistry or algebra they had to so painstakingly study in high school? When did you last have to figure out the length of the hypotenuse of a triangle?

And if you did, didn’t you just have to learn it again on the spot anyway?

And wasn’t that easy enough to do?

Perhaps most destructive of all is the teaching of science in the schools. It conveys the impression that science is a body of known facts about the world that we should know: fish breath with gills, water is made of hydrogen and oxygen, and so forth. But that is not what science is at all: science is a method for questioning and finding out about the world, and the assumption that some things are simply known and determined is its opposite. People leave high school with the belief that they “know” all kinds of things that, over their lifetime, science will discover to be untrue. Putting their education in science at cross purposes to science, and filling them with falsehoods.

The schools that everyone goes through should stick to subjects and skills that everyone will need. That means mostly the humanities: the meaning and purpose of life, the skills for life, the skills to learn, the skills to acquire and to evaluate new information or arguments. And, sure, reading and writing and basic arithmetic—what is sometimes called numeracy. The rest is useless or harmful.

And then, the second essential sphere of the humanities is to fix what has gone wrong in a soul. They are the necessary training for anyone working in the field of “mental illness.” This is when you need a doctor—a doctor of philosophy. The knowledge acquired in a medical school is useless here.

Art therapy, cognitive therapy, music therapy—lots of studies show they work. But we are only doodling around the edges here. “Cognitive therapy,” for example, is an absurdly primitive and inadequate version of the full arsenal of philosophy.

And all of it is hollow and unlikely to work until we have the core and foundation in place: the meaning and purpose of it all. And that is religion.

The Holocaust of the Heart

A good friend told me recently that my stuff on the Dymphna Complex was over his head. He has now, perhaps, told me why.

He asked me what my evidence was.

Which seemed odd, since I thought I had laid it all out pretty systematically.

So I repeated the list, as given by Freud and Otto Rank (with my own female additions, as arising from their list):

Heracles
Moses
Romulus
Cyrus
Telephus
Gilgamesh
Lohengrin
Siegfried
Perseus
Sargon
Paris
Karna
Tristan
Danae
Agaea
Andromeda
Ophelia.

His response was that he had only ever heard of one person on that list, Moses, “but never read his work.”

This, I think, says something important.

This is not a man off the street. This is a guy with two degrees, a college instructor. A college English instructor, an instructor in the Humanities. How much worse the case must be for the average Canadian or American.

Moses, of course, wrote the Bible. Or at least the first five books of it.

Moses rescued from the rushes--Dura-Europos

In sum, we have stopped educating our rising generations in any meaningful sense. These stories and texts used to be the entirety of our education, in terms of its content.

For good reason. These stories told us what we most needed to know.

There is no way to talk about non-physical experiences of any sort without using either metaphor or narrative or both—an “objective correlative.” Like these stories. Yet ALL of our experiences are non-physical. All of them.

Without this common language of symbol and myth, we can no longer communicate with each another, on anything other than a caveman level. “Gimme meat.” “Sex now.” We can talk only about physical wants.

No wonder modern life feels increasingly empty and meaningless. No wonder there is a “spiritual catastrophe” going on, as Leonard Cohen called it. No wonder the statistics for depression and for mental illness generally are skyrocketing in exactly the way global warming isn’t. No wonder America, Europe, “Western civilization,” and civilization generally (it is a mirage to suppose there is any intact civilization outside the West that might take over. They all fell earlier.) seem to be coming apart. No wonder we can no longer talk to one another, but only swing our fists. Even in the bedroom, between men and women.

This is where it began.

People have sold grounds, of course, for thinking studying literature, myth, religion, philosophy, and history is a waste of time. There are no jobs to be had there.

But this is tautological: there are no jobs there, any more, because nobody any longer values myth, literature, religion, philosophy, and history. There is not even any riddle here about the chicken and the egg: the devaluing had to come first, and then there were no jobs.

Granted, these stories may not give you much practical help in the current world in finding or even doing a job. But a job is not much good when everything else is falling apart; especially if you are psychotic, drug addicted, and completely alone. You may not be coming in for work anyway.

And those jobs that need have nothing to do with the Humanities are exactly those jobs that are easily replaced by a machine. And that is already happening, swiftly.

I am not talking here of the “Western canon.” “Western” is a red herring. We might do as well to study the Vedas, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Confucian classics and those two literatures. (I do not speak here of the Quran and Muslim literature, because it is already a part of the larger West). In fact, we really should study them all. But the same myth motifs and plots tend to be found all over the world. So do the same philosophical issues, and the same philosophical positions.

Dragons appear in folk tales everywhere.

Besides giving us a common language of narrative, allusion, and metaphor, so that we can communicate our own thoughts to one another, necessarily, most of the best thoughts of the past ten thousand years or more have been expressed in this language of myth and story. If we do not know or understand it, all that is lost.

This is, taken together, the rock upon which all civilization is built. It is what our passage through the cosmos on this strange round rock has been about, as sentient beings.

You don’t think anyone figured out anything important or useful in those thousands of years?

You think it is better to smash all the statues, ignore it all and start again from scratch?

Clearly, many people do.

These are what is properly known as bad people.

And this impulse seems to be deep within the culture now. My friend’s protest that he could not understand in the end still seems odd. He did not really need to know any of these characters or their stories. I had not been relying on allusion: I think I had given the relevant details when I referred to them.

It was as if he saw a myth or a word from literature or history, and a light in his mind at once went off.

There is worse. When I noted that the typical fairy tale involved a wicked parent or step-parent, my friend queried this. He said he could think of only one example, Cinderella.

I would have thought that Disney had preserved at least a selection of the traditional fairy tales. Perhaps, however, they pass over us in flickers of light and are forgotten, as the typical movie seems to be. It is only a few hours entertainment, and in most cases we cannot remember much about them a few days later. Eye candy, but leaving nothing to think about.

Fairy tales do not belong in that medium. They were orally transmitted for unknown generations. This means they were composed to be memorized, contemplated, thought about in our solitude and leisure.

Here is the list I offered him, more or less off the top of my head, of familiar fairy tales that seem to include some version of the theme of a wicked parent.

Briar Rose

How many of them do you know well enough that you could retell the basic story to your child? This, after all, is the medium, memory and oral transmission and retelling, for which they were intended.

Snow White
Hansel and Gretel
Rapunzel
Little Red Riding Hood
Cupid and Psyche
Puss in Boots
The Ugly Duckling
Dick Whittington and his Cat
Aladdin
The Gingerbread Man
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Little Match Girl
The Musicians of Bremen
Sleeping Beauty (Disney version of Briar Rose)
Briar Rose (Grimm version)
Rumpelstiltskin
Beauty and the Beast

Perhaps it was here, in the nursery, where the holocaust began. This is when and how we began seeing ourselves and other people as objects.

Art for Politics' Sake

The height of trite: Whenever government puts out something on the arts, it must be illustrated by people dancing. This is from the home page of the PCHA. Art, by contrast, will strive for something fresh and surprising. 

The insanity continues to spread. Now all seventeen appointed members of the Presidential Committee on the Arts and Humanities have resigned in protest against Trump’s even-handed response to the rioting in Charlottesville.

To be fair, these were all Obama appointees, and so may be primarily political hacks. But still—there is something very wrong when every appointed member of the committee on Arts and Humanities is actually opposed to Arts and Humanities.

Maybe this demonstrates the wisdom of the common people in electing Trump. It shows the depravity of the artistic elite. “The Treason of the Intellectuals,” it has been called by one French author. Those in charge in the Arts and Humanities not only no longer believe in either the Arts or the Humanities—they openly and eagerly want to tear them both down.

Here is the full joint resignation letter, with commentary interposed:

Dear Mr. President:
Reproach and censure in the strongest possible terms are necessary following your support of the hate groups and terrorists who killed and injured fellow Americans in Charlottesville.

[You know something evil is afoot when there is an obvious lie in the first sentence. Trump condemned these groups in a press conference, even before the incident in which someone got killed. He has arguably been a lot better than his immediate predecessor in condemning terrorism.]

The false equivalencies you push cannot stand. The Administration’s refusal to quickly and unequivocally condemn the cancer of hatred only further emboldens those who wish America ill. We cannot sit idly by, the way that your West Wing advisors have, without speaking out against your words and actions.

[Did any of these guys condemn the hate? Are they prepared to even now? Have they, and will they, condemn Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and La Raza? If, on the other hand, they are adamant in condemning only “white” people, or white males, or cis white males—they are the hate.]

We are members of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH). The Committee was created in 1982 under President Reagan to advise the White House on cultural issues.

[This looks deceitful—the current members have nothing to do with President Reagan, but were appointed by Obama. They looak as though they are trying to make it appear they do. So much for their moral character.]

We were hopeful that continuing to serve in the PCAH would allow us to focus on the important work the committee does with your federal partners and the private sector to address, initiate, and support key policies and programs in the arts and humanities for all Americans.

[And how exactly is Trump interfering with their doing this? No, clearly, these resigning members of the committee are doing this, not Trump, allowing their politics to come before their stated jobs, and then blaming Trump for it. Lie once, and you will lie about everything.]

Effective immediately, please accept our resignation from the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. 

Elevating any group that threatens and discriminates on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity, disability, orientation, background, or identity is un-American.

[Indeed it is. And that is just what these committee members are doing. But note that term, “un-American.” It is an interesting term. What might it imply?]

We have fought slavery, segregation, and internment.

[No, I wager you have not. You merely benefit from that fight. You are trying to take credit for the good deeds and hard choices and sacrifices of others. This again reveals your moral character, and it is not attractive to look at.]

We must learn from our rich and often painful history. The unified fabric of America is made by patriotic individuals from backgrounds as vast as the nation is strong. In our service to the American people,

[More cringeworthy self-congratulation. One wildly imagines the American people might be capable of, and prefer, speaking for themselves. Like in electing their president, say.]

we have experienced this first-hand as we traveled and built the Turnaround Arts education program, now in many urban and rural schools across the country from Florida to Wisconsin. 

Speaking truth to power is never easy, Mr. President. But it is our role as commissioners on the PCAH to do so. Art is about inclusion.

[No, it is not. First off, art is not about “Speaking truth to power.” This is insisting that art must be subservient to, and serve, politics. This is a fundamentally anti-art position. Nor is art about “inclusion.” Neither museums, galleries, nor literary publications accept all comers. Just the reverse: It would be truer to say that art is about exclusion. Good art is the rejection of bad art, and of all the humdrum and humbug in the world. These people actually have no sense of what art is.]

The Humanities include a vibrant free press. You have attacked both.

[Trump has attacked neither—neither inclusion nor a free press; whether or not either has to do with art. (And neither really does.) The left, however, with their “hate speech” and “political correctness,” and open hostility to “cis white males” has.

This is one of the main pillars of Trump’s appeal to his constituency: the fight for a free press and freedom of speech. Perhaps the main one.

Racists call anti-racists racists, and themselves anti-racists. Fascists call anti-Fascists Fascists, and themselves anti-Fascists. If you want to do something you know is wrong, the first instinct is to call it the opposite of what it is. You love your children by aborting them. Freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. After all, you work for the Ministry of Truth.]

You released a budget which eliminates arts and culture agencies. You have threatened nuclear war while gutting diplomacy funding.

[Morality, in other words, means giving more money to bureaucrats. Or, as Jesus called them, Pharisees. Bureaucrats are not the poor, and they are not the artists.

Note that it was not Trump that threatened nuclear war, It was Kim Jong Un. Once you have walked through the wonderland mirror, everything is presented as its opposite.]

The Administration pulled out of the Paris agreement, filed an amicus brief undermining the Civil Rights Act, and attacked our brave trans service members.

[Never mind the arguments for or against each of these policy decisions; never mind even if what they say is literally true, as of course it is not. This is to chain the arts and humanities arbitrarily to specific policy decisions. To do so is obviously against the interests of the arts and humanities. It is to enslave and then destroy them for your political purposes.]

You have subverted equal protections, and are committed to banning Muslims and refugee women & children from our great country.

[Another outright lie. Trump has never proposed banning “refugee women and children” from the US. Unless perhaps they mean to suggest that it is immoral to deny automatic entry to any woman or child who claims to be a refugee. In which case, besides being profoundly harmful to the US, this policy would be sexist in the extreme. Only women, and not men?

Trump has never called for anything more than a temporary ban on allowing Muslims into the country. But, even if he had proposed a permanent and total ban, even this would have been a perfectly defensible position. Nobody has an inherent right to immigrate, and no country believes they do. Countries, as voluntary associations, have a right to choose to exclude as well as include when deciding their membership. How they treat citizens—members – is a different issue. Some grounds for discrimination might yet be frivolous, but surely not religion. Religion means values, and shared values are fundamental to the ability of any society to succeed.]

This does not unify the nation we all love.

[I think the charge of dividing the nation falls heavily on those who have been pushing “identity politics” for generations. That would be the left. If these folks are against identity politics, why have they been silent for so long? And they are still pushing division and identity politics here and now. They demand that Trump condemn only one side in a riot with two sides, both using violence. What could be more divisive?]

We know the importance of open and free dialogue through our work in the cultural diplomacy realm, most recently with the first-ever US Government arts and culture delegation to Cuba, a country without the same First Amendment protections we enjoy here.

[I thought they were in favour of First Amendment principles. They just said they were. Shouldn’t this mean condemning Cuba? Sequitur, meet non. I expected those with backgrounds in the Humanities would have some command of basic logic.]

Your words and actions push us all further away from the freedoms we are guaranteed.

[This is an assertion without any visible argument or evidence. It immediately follows what seems to be a demand for closer ties with Cuba. How empty can rhetoric get?]

Ignoring your hateful rhetoric would have made us complicit in your words and actions.

[Again, this is just employing prejudicial language. They offer no examples of “hateful rhetoric,” only the assertion. Yeah, and your mother is ugly!]

We took a patriotic oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

[Interesting. They seem to be using this as if to pull rank. Are they unaware that the President also takes such an oath? They seem to be implying he does not. Nor do they explain how resigning from an arts advisory council supports or defends the US Constitution--even if Trump were somehow violating it. If he were, the recourse would be to the Supreme Court.]

Supremacy, discrimination, and vitriol are not American values. Your values are not American values.

[Again, a bit of prejudicial language. Without argument or evidence, at least none apparent here, they are simply asserting that Trump believes in “supremacy” (presumably they mean “white supremacy,” because the word “supremacy” here without a modifier is nonsensical. Anyone with a background in the Humanities ought to understand this much English), discrimination (presumably they mean “racial discrimination”; same problem), and “vitriol.” Maybe Trump believes in vitriol. He should; there is obviously a place for vitriol. Presumably the authors of this letter also believe in vitriol, since they are employing it themselves.

Making them, in their own terms, “not American.”

But then, they also clearly imply there is something wrong with that. Isn’t this the height of nativism? If there is something wrong with being “not American,” what does this say about immigrants? Are they so utterly lacking in self-awareness as not to see this?]

We must be better than this. We are better than this. If this is not clear to you, then we call on you to resign your office, too.

How is that for claiming the moral high ground? They are declaring themselves “better” in some vague but absolute moral sense. In morality, saying it is always the obvious substitute for doing it.

And, the first letters of each paragraph in the letter, together, spell the word “resist.” Just in case you imagined this was all non-partisan and disinterested.

The final and most important irony is that at the event which initiated this resignation, one side had assembled in support of art and the humanities, and the other side was adamantly opposed to them. We cannot honestly know what else the “alt-right” side believed in; they were not permitted to speak. But one thing we do know with certainty: they were there to protest pulling down a public art installation commemorating American history. There you have it: Art and the Humanities, as they intersect with public life. The one thing we can know for certain about the other side—some have called them the “alt-left,” but we really have no better idea who they were and what they thought—is that they approved this pulling down of monuments.

Trump tried to be neutral. But guess which side his Arts and Humanities Commission falls down on?

They are working against exactly what they were appointed to protect.

On one issue, then, they were right. They absolutely ought to all have resigned.

One hopes Trump will appoint some people who actually like the Arts and Humanities. Or at least know something about them.