Once you understand two simple facts, everything will make sense:
1. We are ruled by persons whose behavior is indistinguishable from that of high-functioning (in the sense that they can fake empathy when called upon) sociopaths. According to The Iron Law Of Oligarchy, this is basically inevitable, as sociopaths are precisely the people who will do whatever it takes to gain power.
2. The middle class in the West is increasingly picked clean and left to rot. Either you become one of a shrinking number of very well-off people, or you are tossed aside with less consideration than shown for a dead bird.
A friend of mine has to read and grade undergrad papers and can see loads of students are using ChatGPT. Now why on earth would you go to the huge expense and amass debt to study English or Theology at college, only to get a computer to do your assignments. It doesn’t make sense.
I remember taking three quarters of African American history in the mid-seventies. The teacher was a Black woman who was difficult and demanding. By the third quarter, there were only three students in the class: two women in their late 40s and myself. I worked hard to keep up with these returning students who read every scrap of assigned reading, wanted to discuss controversial topics, and embraced writing papers. I changed; instead of thinking only twenty-something people could handle the challenges of college, I wanted to be like them when I matured. I still do, 45 years later.
I was an international high school humanities teacher (primarily history and literature) for 23 years before recently retiring. My biggest frustration was what I called, on an old and fairly influential "edublog" back in the 'aughts, "schooliness"--the fears that "the Four P's" (parents, principals, politicians, and preachers) would cause you to lose your job if you raised all the proper questions about religion, politics, sexuality, on and on, that the humanities invite. So teachers avoid the provocative questions that make the humanities vital in the first place, all for the understandable sake of job security.
I never managed to do that. As a result, my classes were always the most popular because my questions were the most "dangerous." I lived in constant expectation (not fear) that parents would hear around the dinner table what ideas came out in my (seminar-, not lecture-based) class, and pull out the torches to storm my classroom the next day. Surprisingly, it only happened once in all those years.
Still, I was holding back more than I wanted to. So I began a blog aimed at high school students that included a long series of "Unsucky English Lectures" about, of all things, the radically interesting earliest long narrative of the human species--the Epic of Gilgamesh. (Okay, there's the Enuma Elish too, for purists out there.) No schooliness in these writings. Provocative questions about sexuality, religion, politics galore. All the "dangerous questions" given full force.
After publishing the first lecture on Book 1 of Gilgamesh, I woke the next day to discover 70,000 visits and over 100 comments--mostly from high school students who'd shared it, and all saying "I wish school was like this!" They stayed for the succeeding eight lectures, too, commenting substantively all the way. Teenagers. Oh, and lots of adults too.
My point is to agree with you: there is a hunger out there. But also to push back with this evidence that the hunger is also in our youths. Ironically, it's the worst elements of the adult world and all of its "cancel" instincts, in today's parlance, that are killing the love of humanities in the young.
Fantastic article. Those outreach programs are certainly one way to revive and/or keep the humanities alive in the real world. I've actually taken a couple of continuing studies classes at Stanford, and liked them a lot. First one was a beginning creative writing class, which forced me to use parts of my brain I haven't used in years. Then I just finished a wonderful music class on the Music and History of the Grateful Dead (taught by the equally wonderful David Gans). Now, that subject matter may be a special case, but I was shocked at how much learning a musical neophyte like me experienced in there. I'm about to embark on a Dostoyevsky class in the upcoming quarter. Only drawback is I have to take all of these online because I'm in flyover country. But ironically, that's technology in action too!
Your article made me reflect on how I started down that path. I'm a busy professional at a large firm doing fairly complex stuff for a living. Long hours in the trenches on client matters, and a bunch of business development responsibilities that only get more demanding each years. And am compensated accordingly. That's not a brag or boast. I only say all that to illustrate that the alienation you allude to is all too real. A couple years ago, during an especially busy stretch, the lightbulb kind of went off. There's got to be more than this. So I started thumbing through some catalogs (or whatever the online equivalent is). A lot of universities and community colleges offer just about anything you can think of in the humanities for, yes, greatly reduced prices. I only picked Stanford because it had an interesting selection of writing classes and offered the most stuff online that fit my schedule.
I'm raising two teenagers too, so time is at an incredible premium. But finding time for stuff like this has been one of the most worthwhile investments I've made in awhile. I do better in a class setting with lots of formal structure and expectations (they've been telling me that since I was seven years old!). But you are right. This same kind of learning experience is popping up all over Substack as well. People doing long, serial readings of classic novels, and then having online discussions about that. I've seen similar things for visual arts and music. You just have to look a little harder.
But keeping talk about this, and hopefully more people catch on!
I had the exact same experience that you did, as a TA at Harvard. I taught two sections of a course on political philosophy and ethics, one to Harvard undergrads, the other to adult students enrolling via Harvard Extension School. The latter didn't have the technical essay-writing skills of the former, but they had so much more interest in the subject and so much more life experience to bring to it. That section was a delight to teach and the students felt it - two of them even asked me, a year ot so later, to officiate their wedding.
Being as I am a writer and scholar in a humanity (history), I naturally support any effort made to improve the standing of the humanities academically and elsewhere. And I hope I can get a chance to instruct people about animation the same way you taught them about jazz- and get the same results.
I am not sure I agree that the root problem is the crisis in the humanities. I think the real crisis is the financialization of the economy and the resulting mass outsourcing and offshoring of jobs combined with massive legal and illegal immigration. This has created a scarcity mentality. Everyone is desperately trying to secure their piece of the pie. I certainly don't mean this as a criticism. It is a rational response to precarity. As a result, less and less value is assigned to pursuits (be it volunteering or respecting people who work with their hands or choosing a college major that does not have a direct link to a job) that do not earn money.
If the tech platforms are making money hand over fist, it is because all complaints and all exposes notwithstanding, people are continuing to use those platforms.
I am writing as an immigrant of 40 years standing. I loved the country that I came to back in the eighties because it seemed that there was an optimism and energy in the air and most people seemed to not worry about securing a job at all costs. In tech, I worked with a music major and a history major both of whom had become very good software developers, and even everyday people seemed to have a can-do spirit and an admirable work ethic. I came to see the freedom of Americans to have faith (that there would be second chances) as a true sign of a developed society and a high quality of life (beyond simply having access to cheap electronics and ample food).
In lieu of Elon's microchiped-brain-enhancer being available in the near future, it seems improbable for most 18 year-olds to acquire the world experiences necessitated to embrace -- or "gronk" -- what is hoped for here: depth and empathy for the human experience involves more than simply moving beyond one's' high school.
Wouldn't it be quite lovely for the tech giants to come together and create a multi-billion-dollar fund in order to provide the means for a "2-years of service" program (the military and or Peace Corps always being alternatives, of course) whereby high school graduates would contract to work in (pick one) nursing homes, inner-city tutoring, rural health clinic, community food bank and or a not-for-profit organization focused on the disadvantaged? Housing could be achieved through (monitored) dorms -- thereby also creating jobs -- and voluntary billeting.
And after the 2-year contract is completed? Free tuition to any institution of higher education in which the student is accepted.
Ongoing oversight would be necessitated, of course; a check-to-counter-check for whatever the nefarious might conjure, as is often true, sadly. But the goal would be threefold: 1) life experiences which can not be achieved within an academic setting yet would set the foundation for academic appreciation ; 2) giving back to this country, where "freedom" should never be taken for granted; 3) producing generation(s) of individuals who, by way of this program, inherently are able to live their lives within the premise of what is hoped for in the above article.
The government won't do this -- well...maybe after the next 9/11 they might have to -- yet the billion-dollar-buddy-club certainly could do this, or something similar, right now.
Thank you for writing this. I just turned 23 and what you are discussing has been increasingly my credo as well. The “life or death” statement hit particularly hard. I’ve had the thought before and it’s become central to my values.
People always complain about the new generations, usually in pretty wrongheaded ways. But these problems do exist and people my age are being hit incredibly hard by our dehumanizing institutions. Our values, goals, and modes of interacting with the world and each other feel like they are being irreparably changed.
It feels like we have an ‘opt-out’ culture. We opt-out of face to face interaction. We opt-out of listening to the ambient world. We opt-out of the focus required to truly enrich our lives. We opt-out of contending with the reality that 95% other humans are likely incredibly disagreeable to our little individual realities.
And who can blame us? Pandora’s Box seems so scary and depressing that a meagre dopamine hit, well-cultivated feed or “for you” page, and a close and intensely value-aligned inner circle of friends feels like it can make the difference and give us comfort. I attempt to channel my life into a sort of humanism, maybe modeled after my “pre-Infinite Scroll” childhood. If I see and talk to more people in person at my workplace than on social media in a given day, it feels like I’m at best an anachronistic, Luddite ascetic and at worst a negligent, immoral global citizen.
Swirling thoughts of great magnitude here but the bottom line is: Watch what people really do! All rhetoric aside, pro or con, people make decisions based upon how they will survive a particular situation. Mine was to disconnect my landline phone due to excessive and interminable, abusive and robotic calls of an obviously tech glitch nature. It is therefore very quiet in my home and study and I am left alone in silence without distraction. Hurray for me - and you, too. We CAN do this.
Read this and am literally in tears. Like the wanderer, who after four, six, ten years in a desolate wilderness of frayed modernisms and plugged-in-ness, stumbles into a neon-lit bar; one without a screen or monitor anywhere to be found, but Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris on a jukebox, and an old guy hands him a Schlitz with a smile, and asks, "care to tell me about the last time you just felt human?". Thanks for this.
And I am listening to Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris on the stereo doing a live set...
Ted, for a writer as typically nuanced as you, I don't see why the college/real world binary is necessary. In fact, what's happening in tech is in direct conversation with the corporatization of higher ed and the sidelining of the humanities there. The questions that you are raising are ethical ones, and they are precisely the kinds of questions that administrators are deeming too impractical to market. So the myopic focus on industry-friendly skills continues, and no one learns the critical thinking necessary to question the foundational premises. The dichotomy you posit is false. It's both/and. By which I mean to say that the one problem exists, at least in part, because of the other.
Once you understand two simple facts, everything will make sense:
1. We are ruled by persons whose behavior is indistinguishable from that of high-functioning (in the sense that they can fake empathy when called upon) sociopaths. According to The Iron Law Of Oligarchy, this is basically inevitable, as sociopaths are precisely the people who will do whatever it takes to gain power.
2. The middle class in the West is increasingly picked clean and left to rot. Either you become one of a shrinking number of very well-off people, or you are tossed aside with less consideration than shown for a dead bird.
A friend of mine has to read and grade undergrad papers and can see loads of students are using ChatGPT. Now why on earth would you go to the huge expense and amass debt to study English or Theology at college, only to get a computer to do your assignments. It doesn’t make sense.
I remember taking three quarters of African American history in the mid-seventies. The teacher was a Black woman who was difficult and demanding. By the third quarter, there were only three students in the class: two women in their late 40s and myself. I worked hard to keep up with these returning students who read every scrap of assigned reading, wanted to discuss controversial topics, and embraced writing papers. I changed; instead of thinking only twenty-something people could handle the challenges of college, I wanted to be like them when I matured. I still do, 45 years later.
I was an international high school humanities teacher (primarily history and literature) for 23 years before recently retiring. My biggest frustration was what I called, on an old and fairly influential "edublog" back in the 'aughts, "schooliness"--the fears that "the Four P's" (parents, principals, politicians, and preachers) would cause you to lose your job if you raised all the proper questions about religion, politics, sexuality, on and on, that the humanities invite. So teachers avoid the provocative questions that make the humanities vital in the first place, all for the understandable sake of job security.
I never managed to do that. As a result, my classes were always the most popular because my questions were the most "dangerous." I lived in constant expectation (not fear) that parents would hear around the dinner table what ideas came out in my (seminar-, not lecture-based) class, and pull out the torches to storm my classroom the next day. Surprisingly, it only happened once in all those years.
Still, I was holding back more than I wanted to. So I began a blog aimed at high school students that included a long series of "Unsucky English Lectures" about, of all things, the radically interesting earliest long narrative of the human species--the Epic of Gilgamesh. (Okay, there's the Enuma Elish too, for purists out there.) No schooliness in these writings. Provocative questions about sexuality, religion, politics galore. All the "dangerous questions" given full force.
After publishing the first lecture on Book 1 of Gilgamesh, I woke the next day to discover 70,000 visits and over 100 comments--mostly from high school students who'd shared it, and all saying "I wish school was like this!" They stayed for the succeeding eight lectures, too, commenting substantively all the way. Teenagers. Oh, and lots of adults too.
My point is to agree with you: there is a hunger out there. But also to push back with this evidence that the hunger is also in our youths. Ironically, it's the worst elements of the adult world and all of its "cancel" instincts, in today's parlance, that are killing the love of humanities in the young.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
William Carlos Williams
Fantastic article. Those outreach programs are certainly one way to revive and/or keep the humanities alive in the real world. I've actually taken a couple of continuing studies classes at Stanford, and liked them a lot. First one was a beginning creative writing class, which forced me to use parts of my brain I haven't used in years. Then I just finished a wonderful music class on the Music and History of the Grateful Dead (taught by the equally wonderful David Gans). Now, that subject matter may be a special case, but I was shocked at how much learning a musical neophyte like me experienced in there. I'm about to embark on a Dostoyevsky class in the upcoming quarter. Only drawback is I have to take all of these online because I'm in flyover country. But ironically, that's technology in action too!
Your article made me reflect on how I started down that path. I'm a busy professional at a large firm doing fairly complex stuff for a living. Long hours in the trenches on client matters, and a bunch of business development responsibilities that only get more demanding each years. And am compensated accordingly. That's not a brag or boast. I only say all that to illustrate that the alienation you allude to is all too real. A couple years ago, during an especially busy stretch, the lightbulb kind of went off. There's got to be more than this. So I started thumbing through some catalogs (or whatever the online equivalent is). A lot of universities and community colleges offer just about anything you can think of in the humanities for, yes, greatly reduced prices. I only picked Stanford because it had an interesting selection of writing classes and offered the most stuff online that fit my schedule.
I'm raising two teenagers too, so time is at an incredible premium. But finding time for stuff like this has been one of the most worthwhile investments I've made in awhile. I do better in a class setting with lots of formal structure and expectations (they've been telling me that since I was seven years old!). But you are right. This same kind of learning experience is popping up all over Substack as well. People doing long, serial readings of classic novels, and then having online discussions about that. I've seen similar things for visual arts and music. You just have to look a little harder.
But keeping talk about this, and hopefully more people catch on!
I had the exact same experience that you did, as a TA at Harvard. I taught two sections of a course on political philosophy and ethics, one to Harvard undergrads, the other to adult students enrolling via Harvard Extension School. The latter didn't have the technical essay-writing skills of the former, but they had so much more interest in the subject and so much more life experience to bring to it. That section was a delight to teach and the students felt it - two of them even asked me, a year ot so later, to officiate their wedding.
The cost per tuition hour vs the economic benefits of a chosen degree has shifted rapidly over the last two decades
Unless you have a rich uncle, the degree in humanities, as offered at the university level is not obtainable !
Being as I am a writer and scholar in a humanity (history), I naturally support any effort made to improve the standing of the humanities academically and elsewhere. And I hope I can get a chance to instruct people about animation the same way you taught them about jazz- and get the same results.
I am not sure I agree that the root problem is the crisis in the humanities. I think the real crisis is the financialization of the economy and the resulting mass outsourcing and offshoring of jobs combined with massive legal and illegal immigration. This has created a scarcity mentality. Everyone is desperately trying to secure their piece of the pie. I certainly don't mean this as a criticism. It is a rational response to precarity. As a result, less and less value is assigned to pursuits (be it volunteering or respecting people who work with their hands or choosing a college major that does not have a direct link to a job) that do not earn money.
If the tech platforms are making money hand over fist, it is because all complaints and all exposes notwithstanding, people are continuing to use those platforms.
I am writing as an immigrant of 40 years standing. I loved the country that I came to back in the eighties because it seemed that there was an optimism and energy in the air and most people seemed to not worry about securing a job at all costs. In tech, I worked with a music major and a history major both of whom had become very good software developers, and even everyday people seemed to have a can-do spirit and an admirable work ethic. I came to see the freedom of Americans to have faith (that there would be second chances) as a true sign of a developed society and a high quality of life (beyond simply having access to cheap electronics and ample food).
I miss the America that I came to.
In lieu of Elon's microchiped-brain-enhancer being available in the near future, it seems improbable for most 18 year-olds to acquire the world experiences necessitated to embrace -- or "gronk" -- what is hoped for here: depth and empathy for the human experience involves more than simply moving beyond one's' high school.
Wouldn't it be quite lovely for the tech giants to come together and create a multi-billion-dollar fund in order to provide the means for a "2-years of service" program (the military and or Peace Corps always being alternatives, of course) whereby high school graduates would contract to work in (pick one) nursing homes, inner-city tutoring, rural health clinic, community food bank and or a not-for-profit organization focused on the disadvantaged? Housing could be achieved through (monitored) dorms -- thereby also creating jobs -- and voluntary billeting.
And after the 2-year contract is completed? Free tuition to any institution of higher education in which the student is accepted.
Ongoing oversight would be necessitated, of course; a check-to-counter-check for whatever the nefarious might conjure, as is often true, sadly. But the goal would be threefold: 1) life experiences which can not be achieved within an academic setting yet would set the foundation for academic appreciation ; 2) giving back to this country, where "freedom" should never be taken for granted; 3) producing generation(s) of individuals who, by way of this program, inherently are able to live their lives within the premise of what is hoped for in the above article.
The government won't do this -- well...maybe after the next 9/11 they might have to -- yet the billion-dollar-buddy-club certainly could do this, or something similar, right now.
One of your best, Ted - thank you!
Thank you for writing this. I just turned 23 and what you are discussing has been increasingly my credo as well. The “life or death” statement hit particularly hard. I’ve had the thought before and it’s become central to my values.
People always complain about the new generations, usually in pretty wrongheaded ways. But these problems do exist and people my age are being hit incredibly hard by our dehumanizing institutions. Our values, goals, and modes of interacting with the world and each other feel like they are being irreparably changed.
It feels like we have an ‘opt-out’ culture. We opt-out of face to face interaction. We opt-out of listening to the ambient world. We opt-out of the focus required to truly enrich our lives. We opt-out of contending with the reality that 95% other humans are likely incredibly disagreeable to our little individual realities.
And who can blame us? Pandora’s Box seems so scary and depressing that a meagre dopamine hit, well-cultivated feed or “for you” page, and a close and intensely value-aligned inner circle of friends feels like it can make the difference and give us comfort. I attempt to channel my life into a sort of humanism, maybe modeled after my “pre-Infinite Scroll” childhood. If I see and talk to more people in person at my workplace than on social media in a given day, it feels like I’m at best an anachronistic, Luddite ascetic and at worst a negligent, immoral global citizen.
Swirling thoughts of great magnitude here but the bottom line is: Watch what people really do! All rhetoric aside, pro or con, people make decisions based upon how they will survive a particular situation. Mine was to disconnect my landline phone due to excessive and interminable, abusive and robotic calls of an obviously tech glitch nature. It is therefore very quiet in my home and study and I am left alone in silence without distraction. Hurray for me - and you, too. We CAN do this.
Read this and am literally in tears. Like the wanderer, who after four, six, ten years in a desolate wilderness of frayed modernisms and plugged-in-ness, stumbles into a neon-lit bar; one without a screen or monitor anywhere to be found, but Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris on a jukebox, and an old guy hands him a Schlitz with a smile, and asks, "care to tell me about the last time you just felt human?". Thanks for this.
And I am listening to Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris on the stereo doing a live set...
Ted, for a writer as typically nuanced as you, I don't see why the college/real world binary is necessary. In fact, what's happening in tech is in direct conversation with the corporatization of higher ed and the sidelining of the humanities there. The questions that you are raising are ethical ones, and they are precisely the kinds of questions that administrators are deeming too impractical to market. So the myopic focus on industry-friendly skills continues, and no one learns the critical thinking necessary to question the foundational premises. The dichotomy you posit is false. It's both/and. By which I mean to say that the one problem exists, at least in part, because of the other.