Let Others Rail...
Two
recent essays, in the very different sources of The New Republic and The New
Criterion, say many of the same things about the state of the humanities
and humanism in contemporary, dare I call it, culture. I recommend them, and in
some ways wish I had written them myself. But I would only offer, vis-à-vis the
arts, that the same utilitarian mentality that seems to be driving our
universities, public policy, and even philosophy (how often is an intellectual
position justified on the basis of its utility?) is just as prevalent in the
arts, where the mechanics of realism and the coding of urbanism substitute for
the richer culture of art and building we once had (albeit centuries ago).
"Perhaps
Culture is Now the Counterculture"
A
Defense of the Humanities
by
Leon Wieseltier | May 28, 2013
For
decades now in America we have been witnessing a steady and sickening
denigration of humanistic understanding and humanistic method. We live in a
society inebriated by technology, and happily, even giddily governed by the
values of utility, speed, efficiency, and convenience. The technological
mentality that has become the American worldview instructs us to prefer
practical questions to questions of meaning – to ask of things not if they are
true or false, or good or evil, but how they work. Our reason has become an
instrumental reason, and is no longer the reason of the philosophers, with its
ancient magnitude of intellectual ambition, its belief that the proper subjects
of human thought are the largest subjects, and that the mind, in one way or
another, can penetrate to the very principles of natural life and human life….
JUNE 2013
Ave atque vale
by Donald Kagan
I find a kind of cultural void, an ignorance of the past, a
sense of rootlessness and aimlessness, as though not only the students but also
the world was born yesterday, a feeling that they are attached to the society
in which they live only incidentally and accidentally. Having little or no
sense of the human experience through the ages, of what has been tried, of what
has succeeded and what has failed, of what is the price of cherishing some
values as opposed to others, or of how values relate to one another, they leap
from acting as though anything is possible, without cost, to despairing that
nothing is possible. They are inclined to see other people’s values as mere
prejudices, one no better than another, while viewing their own as entirely
valid, for they see themselves as autonomous entities entitled to be free from
interference by society and from obligation to it….
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