Comment by mlsu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mlsu | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The liberal arts education was originally conceived to educate the leaders of society. That is where the free-minded pedagogical angle comes from, it's explicitly privileged. The idea was that if the leaders of society learned what it means to have values, integrity, what it is to be virtuous, etc, then they would diffuse those values into society and create a just world. Society would transcend in the image of the great works. Books from 500 years ago can teach us what being ethical means because human values are transcendental and totally outside of technological or vocational fads.

Unfortunately, at some point in the last 30-40 years, we've totally abandoned this idea. The most powerful people in society are not just indifferent to the liberal arts but are actively hostile towards it. They see it as a frivolous waste of resources. Why waste time studying a great work of literature when you could be "building" instead?

Of course, it's predictable where this leads. We did all this building, but forgot what justice means, what it means to have values, what it means to do right. So now our society is ugly, corrupt, and rotten. Hey, at least we (the leaders) are rich!

There are two angles on this. There is the rejection of the humanities in favor of science and wealth, which are good things in themselves but are not everything. But, on the other hand, what many modern humanities faculties offer is a very time-bound activism that rejects books from 500 years ago and is not interested in the permanent things.

It probably doesn't help that much of the medieval liberal arts curriculum is now taught in high school using modern textbooks, much diminishing the value of learning Ancient Greek so you can study Euclid's now 2300-year-old Elements for your Master of Arts degree.

They offer generalized marxism (that isn't even generalized well. Had that slop taken over a physics department instead of humanities we would have gotten all the * studies currently plagueing us and all the rest they havent generalized to yet in the firat two weeks. Its not a good or productive look, which is why i have given up on humanities despite holding a humanities degree in economics.

Materialist analysis is not marxism although marxism is a kind of materialism-based economic analysis. Plenty of radical movements are not marxists (because Marx had a narrow understanding of the materiality of social relations), and plenty of marxists are very conservative.

As someone who's not a marxist myself, i find it weird and scary how the US neo-fascist movement lumps every social study together under the guise of "societal marxism". Or as the french neo-fascists call it, "islamo-leftism". Or as the historical nazis used to call it, "judeo-bolshevism".

Doing a little more reading, I am concerned you don't understand the point. It sounds like Materialist analysis is pretty much exactly the definition of generalized marxism. It's the framework that marx applied to the mode of production generalized to whatever you want to moan about. It's basically missing the requirement for praxis and the application of the dialectic for analysis purposes, which is present in the vast majority of the * studies generalizations of marxism I was talking about, as well as marxism itself. Which makes sense, given most of the * studies were created by butt hurt marxists by generalizing marxism away from the mode of production to <insert dichotomy you think you can use to divide society and cause strife to achieve your revolution here>

Its generalized marxism because nearly all the * studies people trace their academic lineage back to butthurt marxists watching the ussr not work and free markets turn the poor underclass marxism preys on for its power into middle class families too busy picking out their second car to have time for intensely stupid and radical marxism. Those butthurt marxists generalized the bad ideas to other dichotomies and today we have the * studies programs.

As someone who grew up poor and around dubious morals, nothing about university suggests to me that this is the case. On the other hand, the Confucian classics and perhaps the Ancient Greek works immediately dive into virtue and the likes.

What did I learn from my Japanese history class? To not let power into the hands of zealous military foot soldiers? Who took 大正，昭和，and 武士道 too seriously?

But the problem with the Confucian classics is that how can you be a 君子 when your neighbor sees your silent contempt for them as a reason to push you into the ground and make others feel humiliation when they consider seeing you as a friend. Or when your neighbor asks you for your car and then doesnt give it back. Or when your neighbor sees your success as a slight to them, when you don’t help their son get a job at your place, but they have a good friend who can extort very well, and they practice it often because the world is full of evil according to them. I think if I studied the liberal arts a bit more they dive into such contrived scenarios and how to avoid being ugly, corrupt, and rotten with a low spend rate in tight spaces.

The world isn’t evil though so perhaps the liberal arts dont need to get into these unrealistic cases.

If you look into modern Western philosophy, it is not much better. Instead it embraces moral nihilism and the only thing it teaches is do whatever you want.

I am Catholic. Catholicism is far from perfect. But it teaches two principles which I believe in. We are all brothers and sisters, equally deserving in dignity and respect. We are in this journey of life together and we should strive for the common good meaning we should help the less fortunate. People are not valued by how much tax they pay and cannot be discarded when they are no longer “useful”.

The ruling class received a classical education and many went on to a law degree. By becoming judges, solicitors, prosecutors, and politicians, they kept their position in society. Engineers, administrators, and medical doctors are not members of the ruling class. The former considered themselves natural leaders and determined society’s direction. Unless a humanities department belonged to one of the two universities the elite sent their children to, it was a fraud. They mimicked Oxford or Harvard but was not the educational institution the elite went to.

Perhaps liberal arts abandoned its core principles and values?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com