Theme: Class

(good)(attack on academia) (Disclaimer: I have a fine art degree: art history and theory. Aesthetic philosophy. Although I am also educated in economics, philosophy, history and computer science.) [Warning: Harsh words follow.] 1) COST. Now, if I paid 10K for this degree, or even 20K, that would be one thing. But these degrees are too expensive for the cost of the education. Humans make cost benefit analyses and the data is in: there isn’t a return on them. 2) CONTENT. Philosophy departments can alight with the humanities and religion (which is a death sentence) or align with science, economics, politics, business and law (where it is terribly useful). 3) FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHICAL PROGRAM. The academic humanities bear much of the responsibility for their plight having tried fitfully to prove via the metaphysical program on one hand (a demonstrated failure), via the logical program on the other (a demonstrated failure), by the mathematical program (a failure at least at the set level to correct mathematical platonism rather than justify it), that philosophy is a science in itself, rather than the means by which we interpret the findings of the sciences and therefore to inform and alter our perception and understanding, such that we adapt our actions to the new knowledge. Philosophy then is a moral discipline, where morality is the study of action. It is not a means of attempting find justification that philosophy is a science. It is not. It cannot be. Because science requires that we use instrumentation to confirm our senses. 4) REPLACING THE CHURCH: It is not lost on those of us who are critics (even those few of us who write philosophy nearly full time), that Academia, originating as an extension of the church, has sought to replace the church’s influence over moral and political life. It has done so. It has done so largely by a) promoting both socialism, communism, postmodernism and totalitarian humanism, social democracy, and therefore bearing the responsibility of both the decline of the west’s aristocratic mythos, and the death of nearly one hundred million people. If that is not an indictment I don’t know what is. And rather than extend rights to all, academics encouraged extraordinary rights, and in particular supported feminism as a means of increasing revenues and attracting women to previously male dominated universities. However, the feminist program has been successful in undermining the nuclear family, and are the voting force that allows socialists, democratic socialists, and totalitarian humanists produced by the university system, to obtain political power, by which to both undermine the 14th amendment, the Absolute Nuclear Family which is the necessary component of the high trust society, and to undermine the western model through forcible large scale immigration. Even now, the supreme court is populated by non-protestants. And that matters. Because protestants are the keepers of the Absolute Nuclear Family, and the High Trust, Individualist, Risk taking, Experimental society. 5) FRAUDULENT PRODUCTS: The source of much of our political trouble is the fascination in the humanities introspection and self reinforcement rather than external evidence and adaptation, combined with its fascination with totalitarian humanism, and philosophy with postmodernism and socialism. Economics departments don’t teach Marx. It’s bad economics, and really bad philosophy. Furthermore, the evidence is in, and is decidedly against democracy – we cannot seem to make all men aristocrats. So much of the philosophical tradition is not only demonstrably false. It is not only false. But it is harmful. 6) CRIMINALLY DEFECTIVE GOODS: It is not lost on us that academic wares are not warranted, any more than religious wares are warranteed. If they were I suspect academia would rapidly change. The fact that the state gives license to academics who sell faulty goods, but punishes ‘thought crimes’, is evidence enough to demonstrate that academic humanities has in fact, succeeded in replacing the mystical religion of christianity, discrediting the church, only to replace aristocratic egalitarianism and christianity, with totalitarian state humanism – effectively communism by other means. 7) INCENTIVES: It is not lost on any of us that the INCENTIVES in academia are (in economic terms ) ‘perverse’. That we have spent two generations now exchanging personal retirement accounts of parents, for overpriced education of children, most of which ends up in rapid expansion of academic administration, diversion from teaching professors to research faculty, physical capital, and endowments. That graduate students are little more than slave labor, that their work products are almost universally shoddy, that the quality of writing in the humanities is offensively bad, and that obscurant language is used consistently to mask weak, false and unsupported thought. SO BEFORE YOU JUSTIFY THE HUMANITIES PERHAPS AN *EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS** WOULD HELP YOU UNDERSTAND THAT THE BENEFITS ARE SOLELY RESERVED FOR ACADEMICS AT TRAGIC COST TO SOCIETY. AND THAT BY AND LARGE, THE HUMANITIES HAS BEEN THE SOURCE OF MORE HUMAN SUFFERING AND CORRUPTION THAN THE CHURCH EVER MANAGED TO MUSTER. That’s what SCIENCES tell us. So choose whether you will be part of another tragic religion, or move into hard science with the rest of us. Cheers Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev   http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=7629 The Decline of Humanities blog.talkingphilosophy.com One of the current narratives is that the humanities are in danger at American universities. Some schools are cutting funding for the humanities while others are actually eliminating majors and dep..