In a flattened world drained of greatness, today’s steep decline of humanities majors among undergraduates is a lagging indicator of lack of interest in humanity’s lessons learned on the path to the present. Given this nation’s unhappy present, it is remarkable to remember that the arrival of screen-soaked lives was cheerily announced as the next stage of the “information age.” LOL.
I wondered: How old is George Will? Answer: 81.
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I disagree that the world is drained of greatness, and this excerpt ignores the decline of the humanities education itself, but what may be his main point sounds accurate—the “information age” has encouraged people to compartmentalize their knowledge and remain completely ignorant of vast areas that are deemed not useful to the worldview they wish to cultivate.
The “unknown unknowns” are growing.
"screen-soaked lives"
Not everything that can be seen should be seen. And there is much a person can see in the world that propriety would suggest avoiding lest psychological damage ensue. There is an invisible and incredibly thin but sturdy veneer draped over humanity's waking life that in every cultural example you can choose took extreme effort, supreme sacrifice and great patience to create. This veneer is completely subconscious and transparent, but every human on earth instantly and implicitly knows when the veil drops.
Pickling people's brains in the brine of world-star, ubiquitous cell phone 1st person video, and the unbridled id of billions of people could only be considered 'information' if you also thought you could take a drink of water by opening your mouth in the middle of flowing river and drink it dry. Most modern people, despite their modernity, were not genetically designed for this much access to this much information this fast, and most of which does not reinforce their prior perceptions.
There's no going back. The genie is out of the bottle. The world-star brine is bitter, and the pickle-brains are winning.
If you could turn a pickle into a human, it would be George Will.
Shorter George Will: "Hey kids, get off my lawn!"
RideSpaceMountain said... Most modern people, despite their modernity, were not genetically designed for this much access to this much information this fas
Off topic, but worth noting, IMO: our brains are barely changed from when we dropped down out of the trees and wandered onto the savannah a couple million years ago. I hate the self-satisfied, self-righteous ego stroking of the various “beam me up Scotty” sayings (it may be one of my favorite podcasts, but I hate the name of “You Are Not So Smart”) because the truth is, it is a wonder how well our brains function in this world considering how radically different it is from the world they were designed to navigate.
LOL
Been a while since I've seen LOL.
That Geico ad is kind of brilliant.
Enjoy the Millennials, George. Gen-Z is worse.
Better question than Will's age - where does he work. For someone who works at the Washington Post, that was remarkably restrained.
Have any of you read the Mark Bauerlein books that the article is based on? I worry that they would just confirm my priors without adding much information. When I say, my priors, I'm not as discouraged as Bauerlein/Will. Most of the millennials I deal with directly are STEM majors and are at most lightly invested in the religious beliefs of their peers in the humanities and social sciences.
Very true, but when George Will says it it's like somebody scratching their nails on a chalkboard. The 18th century squire routine is stomach curdling.
University professors are expected to add to the sum of knowledge with new research. That works in the sciences. It really doesn't work in the humanities. As someone once noted, a new discovery in physics inspires new theories and experiments; a new book on Shakespeare just makes it harder to say anything new or original about Shakespeare. Consequently, higher education in the humanities is subject to fads, which give professors something apparently "new" to say.
Academics having run through earlier fads, race, gender, sexual preference, post-colonialism, and ecology are what's left. Sooner or later a new fad will come along, probably related to what's going on now in science, but the demand for "original research," and the hunger in the larger culture for what people take to be novelty, will keep universities and humanities graduates focused on grievance studies for some time to come. Universities aren't going back to the old model of reverential reshuffling of the old ideas that dominated before the Germans infected them with research mania.
George Will thinks Humanities Departments are where students learn the lessons of history.
Like how to be a Maoist.
That's called INDOCTRINATED. BRAINWASHED. ECT...ect...ect...
RBG was 87 when she died.
Re "Antiheteronormativity."
Hetero is normative.
The main problem with the humanities is that they had become infested with third-rate Marxism.
There is still a need for college students to be educated about the great ideas of western civilization, but they won’t get that from today’s humanities courses. They’ll get half-baked sociology at best.
Where have you gone, Harvey Mansfield?
Old man yells at cloud.
Apparently wokeness is sufficiently on the downswing that George Will feels safe in criticizing it.
George Will recoiled at a father and son in an airport where the dad was dressed in blue jeans. He stated he himself had never worn vile blue jeans.
It was like when your obviously gay cousin tells you with great solemnity that he’s gay.
There was a time when I thought George Will was our greatest columnist. I read him religiously. Not just his columns, but his books. And for me it wasn't just what he said, but how he wrote. His use of language and phrasing was of a higher level than most columnists.
Over the years I stopped reading him when I felt he had come to represent a brand of conservatism who's time had passed. The old country club conservatives. Those who stood proudly on the canons of Western Civilization, looking to protect our foundations and keep them safe. I believe in that myself. I believe in it strongly. But I also believe that the fight changed and we had to shake away from the country club set to engage the broader public. The new right has done and continues to do that. The Bush family/George Will right had it's chance and did some good things. But the new times require new thinking and new tactics.
All that said...
I think Will is correct in this post, as much of it as I can read (I do not subscribe to WaPo any longer). I think his language- classically Will- is spot on. And I agree that the loss of importance, the loss of interest in the Humanities, the very studies of what made Western Civilization the driver of freedom and of the modern world, was an early signal of our current demise. When the great schools (I'm looking at you, Stanford) drop humanities requirements, when administrators and faculty show no interest in them, or more- a disgust with them, we are ourselves in trouble. Certainly the students are not going to demand more humanities. Why would they want to study what they've been taught is the basis of all evil?
Humanities used to be where we learned the lessons from those who passed before us. What worked. What did not. Now? I'm not sure if the canons of Western Civ are taught any longer. I suspect not. And they've no doubt been replaced with the new canons of ever-changing junk social theories on the bending definitions of race, gender, and climate something or other.
George Will voted for this.
He doesn't get to pretend he didn't.
Years (and years) ago, Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear navy, was asked what he looks for in officer candidates. His answer: a man with a classical education steeped in the humanities, the study of which, he said, taught critical thinking better than anything else.
George Will thinks Humanities Departments are where students learn the lessons of history.
Like how to be a Maoist.
Apologies for not reading the piece, but yes, if anything a modern humanities education accelerates the pathologies we're suffering from today. I'll always be grateful I didn't pursue a postgraduate English degree, disappointing my wonderful Honors advisor, because I was unmoored philosophically and can see myself having been nudged in steps to some progressive dystopia.
The role of the humanities used to be transmitting the the best of Western culture from one generation to the next. Now most departments are burning down their own little libraries of Alexandria.
Mark Bauerlein is right, but George Will is overly optimistic about reviving the humanities as a useful source of learning. I guess the inhabitants of the WaPo are incapable of looking in the mirror, assuming (probably incorrectly) that they read their own articles. Or they just shrug and say "he's 81."
Have any of you read the Mark Bauerlein books that the article is based on?
Since I didn't read the article, I don't know if that is literally true but I have read his latest book, "The Dumbest Generation Grows Up," and I agree with most of it. My youngest daughter, she is now 32, was not a reader in spite of my efforts to encourage her. My three grandkids are not readers but have substituted sports and are doing fine. I have two other grandkids, the children of my leftist son, and I have no contact with them. My rare interactions have not been encouraging. They live with their mother in the Bay Area and she resembles MS Blasey Ford. I think they know each other.
What Bauerlien says about the "Millenial Generation" sounds about right and they are closer to the Red Guards of China than any previous generation I know of. I don't know how we can fix this. Personally, I think a peaceful separation would be best, if possible. However, it might result in something like the Berlin Wall along the California and New York b orders.
Danno said...
"If you could turn a pickle into a human, it would be George Will."
I think we should end the thread right there.
...today’s steep decline of humanities majors among undergraduates...
Ethnic and gender studies aren't humanities*? What are they then, STEM?
Your bow tie's too tight, George. Loosen it up!
*I understand that he means humanities in the traditional sense. This is bad writing.
Where there's a will, there's a pompous bore.
Criticism of the men and women who try to teach languages, literature, art, music, philosophy, and history to the unwilling or actively hostile is blaming the victim.
New research in the humanities is possible and desirable. In History, new research also includes new ways of looking at-- re-visioning--the evidence as well as adding new information. (I've always considered a clear picture of the past to be a foundation of modern Western civilization, but then I'm just a librarian/archivist/historian and I would say that, wouldn't I? YMMV.)
I spent my adult lifetime on campus, and know that American higher education in the Humanities has a very large target on its back. The takeover of the campus by Wokecorporatism is just the final stage of a slow death inflicted by focus on athletics and grant-grubbing, with the willing participation of admin.
The decline in humanities majors is a direct consequence of what is now taught at the humanities. And that curriculum is what people of George Will's generation brought forth. Not what they were taught, but rather what they thought better in the 1960s and 1970s. For Will the regurgitation of his humanities lessons was just recitation and performative art.
Will is the nerd you don't want with you when the fighting starts.
George, don't you have some baseball game to take your kid to?
Go to the park and stop annoying the rest of us.
@tim maguire
If you had a time machine, and could go back in time to meet socrates or Homer, or Confucius, or even Jesus or Sidhartha, and bring them here, they would be stunned: at the technological development, and the speed, and the distances traversed by people and ideas.
They would not be stunned by any supposed 'advances' in the human condition or the human spirit. They would recognize the same people they knew 2 or 3000 years ago. Same faults. Same b.s. Same aspirations. Same lust. None of the things of modern human psychology would be different to them except maybe the speed at which it moves.
The animal is still the same.
Now George Will is using performative? This has to be proof that the word performative makes its users feel very serious and possessed of deep thoughts.
He is a twit. A Georgetown cocktail party creature.
The so-called College "Humanities" were taken over by the Left along time ago. They're worthless and spew out Leftwing, anti-western civilization propaganda. The obvious solution is cut them out, and get rid of them. They cannot be saved. Since most college student take these classes in their Freshman year, getting rid of them, would allow College to be reduced to 3 years. Thereby, saving everyone a lot of $$
In saner times, a well-rounded education included knowledge of Greek, Latin, philosophy, art, mathematics, architecture, etc.
Now it's oppression, pronouns, and how to tuck your dick.
But we're soooo advanced.
I spent my adult lifetime on campus, and know that American higher education in the Humanities has a very large target on its back. The takeover of the campus by Wokecorporatism is just the final stage of a slow death inflicted by focus on athletics and grant-grubbing, with the willing participation of admin.
I'm not so sure. I was an English major in 1960 and had a great time with great professors. Not all was parties as I got an F on a quiz. The professor quoted some lines from Wordworth's Lucy poems. I had not read the assigned material and got the interpretation wrong.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
That was the stanza we were required to interpret. I still got an A in the class but that F has stayed with me 62 years. I doubt an instructor would have the guts to require students to memorize poem or to give an F when they failed.
I was offered a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship the next year but I started medical school instead.
I (Heart) Humanities.
@Doug, point of information. Will attends cocktail parties in Chevy Chase, not Georgetown.
Will has often been heard to moan: "The Humanities!!! Oh, the Humanities"!!!
Will promoting book by Mark Bauerlein, the Trumpist editor at First Things. I'll pass.
Doc K, I'm not sure what you're not sure about.
I got to good old Memphis Mistake University (a.k.a. Tiger High, a.k.a. The MIT of Extreme Southwest Tennessee) in 1971, when most of the faculty were veterans and first-gen college grads. They were left of center for the most part, but so what? They took their fields, and general culture, seriously.
After I ascended into the ranks of the faculty, I served on committees that tried to write guidelines for required humanities courses, and it was obvious that we were fighting a rearguard action. Neither the admin nor the non-humanities faculty (with some wonderful exceptions) really cared; the primary goal of the former was more throughput by maximizing resources and creating synergies (or was it creating resources by maximizing synergies)?
(For those who may not know, American higher ed, for all the agita' about PCDIE, is a handmaid of the military-industrial-congressional-media complex, and always adopts corporate practices and jargon a few decades after their use-by, and humanities profs are the least influential people in the whole rotten structure.)
Most STEM faculty didn't much care for the Humanities as undergrads I think; they certainly didn't evince much interest in the lectures and performances I attended over the decades, with some exceptions.
Will wears bowties. 'Nuff said.
'Go to the park and stop annoying the rest of us.'
But for those pesky restraining orders, he'd be there with his Lincoln Project buddies...
"The decline in humanities majors is a direct consequence of what is now taught at the humanities."
Undergrd humanities are studied by future law students, or the rare ones who seek the internal thrills of poetry or philosophy, and don't prioritize a non academic job. Is Psychology a humanity? if so then sales recruits have jobs.
a slow death inflicted by focus on athletics and grant-grubbing,
Narr, that was what I was not so sure about. I think the takeover of college by the left was due, initially at least, by the Vietnam War. Leftist students got deferments and kept in grad school to avoid the draft. They became the leftist faculty that packed the colleges with ideological brethren.
The professor who gave me an F on the Lucy poem quiz told us that he took Spencer's Fairie Queene as his only reading material on a cruise on a freighter since it was the only way be could get through it. I doubt an English professor would bother now. Just assign rap lyrics.
We agree that there has been a general decline, Doc K. It has many causes, and I don't want to flog the beast too much.
But I have to say again it wasn't just leftist students who took deferments. Does the name Dick Cheney ring a bell? Our campus was full of big-talking anti-Communists who knew that straight A's in the B-School would keep them safe until they could start running the country, as was their due.
Not that I much blame them--it was the D's JFK and Lying Bird Johnson who started that criminal fiasco. And since then, has there been any American military adventure that professors should have supported?
Somalia
Iraq
Serbia
Afghanistan
Iraq
Ukraine
In 2002 or 03 the Organization of American Historians met here and I was on the local leadership committee and went to a lot of the sessions. In addition to the regularly scheduled panels and discussions, a lot of ad hoc discussions of the Bush-Cheney regime's regime-change crusades-on-behalf-of-Islam agenda took place. The people who had spent their lives studying the places, peoples, and cultures were telling the fools that their plans were utopian, but did they listen? Noooooo.
Keep your precious kids and grandkids out of the clutches of humanities profs, y'all, but don't blame us for the imperial overstretch that's killing the country as we type.
Bob R. asks: "Have any of you read the Mark Bauerlein books that the article is based on?"
I read the first, and it's pretty depressing, although it mostly confirmed my own dire suspicions, as did Hirsch's earlier CULTURAL LITERACY. I was also struck by a passage in David Denby's GREAT BOOKS, in which Denby, a Baby Boomer, enrolls in the Great Books course in Columbia, where he is surrounded by GenXers. He says that when he was in college, he and his peers aspired to being "well read," whereas the kids he was now attending class with seem to have no such aspiration. A college education to them was mostly a ticket to a better job.
I understand that situation has changed drastically since 1990, when the book was published, Now I guess the kids are both culturally illiterate AND underemployed. and I can take some satisfaction that at least I got a good education even if I were part of the First Downwardly Mobile Generation in American History (they say).
I saw Bauerlein on CSPan talking about his book. I had read some of his work before so wasn't surprised or bothered. He did bang on about how everyone should have a religion (a serious one, left undefined). Hard pass.
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