education

All We Are Is Piss In the Wind

By in ai, education, foolosophy, the geist of the zeit No Comments

David Shapiro:

What really needs to happen, and what has happened many times throughout history, is that we need to integrate the new technology into society. Like coal and steel, like electricity and radio, and like the internet before it, AI will have its pros and cons. That’s just a fact of life.

As some like to say in the South, fighting that is like pissing into the wind. I will pick my battles, namely about Post-Labor Economics, but that’s integration work, not unserious “shut it all down or everyone dies” nonsense.

I don’t think of myself as a Stoic, but I recognize that Stoic psychology is awfully useful. I just accept that change is always uncomfortable to those who have stakes in the status quo. How I feel about that is irrelevant, and childishly indulgent if I make it the centerpiece of my reaction. I also don’t need to be a Hayekian to notice that social orders routinely produce outcomes that no one designed. If a tyrant confiscates ten million homes for some vanity project, there is a decision-maker, an intention, a victim class, and an obvious moral question: was this act justified? Anger has a target because agency is concentrated. But if ten million people gradually decide they prefer streaming to DVDs, online shopping to department stores, AI-assisted work to unassisted work, or automated service to paying another human to perform the same task, what exactly is the corresponding moral event? There usually isn’t one. There are ten million little decisions, each of which may be perfectly intelligible from the standpoint of the person making it. The video-store clerk loses his job because nobody in particular decided that video-store clerks ought to suffer. People just stopped renting DVDs.  But ideologues, demagogues, and everyday morons turn “millions of people are voluntarily adopting a technology because they find it useful” into a story about a handful of sinister executives doing this to us. The moral grammar is much more satisfying that way. Someone can be blamed, resisted, or forced to stop.

I am mostly tired of what I think of as “theorizing from 30,000 feet.” The discourse around AI is full of humanities blowhards pontificating about What It All Means, despite the fact that none have them have even tried to use it, or understand how and why others have used it. I see Jonathan Pageau eructating about “shining souls” who want to “foster wisdom and virtue” and “practice truth and love,” in opposition to the tech lords building island fortresses who want to force AI on us, a moral framework better suited to Saturday morning cartoons. “Who does it serve?” he asks ominously, with the flashlight under his chin for spooky effect. Well, as Hayek might interject, it serves countless people in countless different ways, like all complex phenomena, and you would have to demonstrate some attempt at understanding those people’s perspectives if you want to be convincing. “The 1% vs. the 99%” was retarded demagoguery when Occupy Wall Street types said it, and it’s no less so when Christian humanists say it.

Most disappointing to me is the fact that so many of the humanities types, who I would expect to have greater-than-average perspective gleaned from engagement with thousands of years’ worth of culture and literature, are disproportionately among those panicking over their own high-altitude, worst-case theorizing. I don’t expect ideologues, demagogues and everyday morons to be capable of sober reflection. I did expect better from anyone who has actually absorbed thousands of years of literature in which we encounter human beings finding ways to be vain, lazy, brave, stupid, ingenious, loving, self-deceiving and disciplined under an astonishing variety of material conditions. But exposure to history does not automatically produce historical perspective. A person can spend decades reading old texts and still experience the present in a radically presentist way. In fact, expertise can sometimes make that worse. You acquire a vast stock of analogies, concepts and quotations, but those can be used either to relativize the present or to dramatize it. If you use them to enlarge your sense of the range of ordinary human adaptation, AI looks like another extraordinary circumstance imposed upon a very old animal. If you use them chiefly to furnish grand analogies, every new circumstance can become Armageddon.

But He’s So Pretty and I Don’t Mind

By in education, ohferfucksake 2 Comments

Justin Smith-Ruiu:

I suppose now is the appropriate moment to run through the expected reassurances. No, I don’t condone plagiarism or fabrication of data. And neither do I share, at all, the institutional priorities that got Arday hired in the first place. His dissertation looks like a hot mess — a simulacrum of a contribution to a slapdash field that itself, in my view, should have no place in any institution bearing the name of a university. But who gives a shit? The integrity of our institutions —obviously, unquestionably— is not worth a single human life.

I can only read the first four paragraphs, because I let my subscription to Smith-Ruiu’s Substack expire some time ago. On this evidence, I see it as money well saved.

One might argue that a concern with “the integrity of our institutions” is about honoring the best of countless previous human lives, and that squandering it on any individual, let alone a simple con artist, is — obviously, unquestionably — a stupid thing to do. And even leaving that Burkean argument aside, institutional integrity has present human beneficiaries. If a university knowingly protects fabricated scholarship because exposing it might devastate the fabricator, who pays? Honest scholars. Students. Other applicants who followed the rules. Researchers who rely on the literature. The institution’s future graduates whose credentials become marginally less trustworthy. The costs disperse, so none of them produces the emotionally overwhelming image of one dead man. But dispersed costs are still human costs.

Put one identifiable person on one side of the scale and an abstraction on the other. A human life vs. “institutional integrity.” Well, naturally the human being wins. But describe the conflict charitably and the picture changes: “One individual’s interest in avoiding the consequences of exposure vs. the interests of thousands of other people, living and dead, in maintaining a system in which fraud is investigated and standards mean something.” Now we actually have a moral problem. One might expect a professional philosopher to have an interest in such things.

Arday himself seems to possess remarkably little agency in this telling. He “only ended up” producing a fake dissertation because the university forced a storyteller into the mold of scholarship; then the exposure of that fraud had his death as its “direct result.” At each morally significant juncture, circumstances and other people act upon Arday, while the bean counters retain enough agency to bear full responsibility for their actions. The fabulous protagonist gets causes; the “little nerds” get culpability. And those “little nerds” he contrasts with the fabulous are, in large part, the people who keep the inheritance intact: checking citations, preserving records, refusing fabrication, teaching what they actually know, and doing their small part without expecting the institution to reorganize itself around their personalities.

Amusingly, Smith-Ruiu concedes that the bean counters are technically correct, but they’re evidently correct for the wrong reasons. Plagiarism, fabrication of data, DEI programs, even the fraudulent soft sciences themselves have no place in a university, according to him. So far, so conservative. But if higher education is really so debased that Arday’s dissertation was merely a simulacrum of scholarship in a field that should not exist, then why is the tragic injustice that Arday could not flourish within it? Why should this magnificent storyteller have wanted its professorships, titles, salaries, prestige, and symbolic capital? Why are we supposed to care either way that a conman came to a bad end in a den of thieves?

Let me put it this way. If Arday had been a colorless fifty-eight-year-old departmental administrator with a bad comb-over and clothing from Kohl’s who fabricated precisely the same material, I strongly suspect nobody would be writing elegies about his Promethean imagination. But he was not. He was young and photogenic, with “exquisite locks and threads and general self-display.” (George Santos’s self-invention, by contrast, looked tacky, ridiculous, and grasping. He did not receive the aesthetic subsidy of tragic grandeur. He was short, pudgy, and worst of all, a Republican. No paeans for him.)

Aside from the absurdity of seeing a philosopher pompously proclaim vacuous refrigerator-magnet slogans about “a single human life,” this is what repulses me the most: seeing one becoming so enchanted by charisma, style and transgression that the dull virtues begin to look contemptible by comparison. If all it takes to make those virtues seem petty is a handsome man in eyeliner, then perhaps the bean counters are not the people displaying the shallower moral imagination.

To the Mind Through the Stomach

By in books, education, foolosophy, lin yutang

A “scholar’s” writing consists of borrowings from other scholars, and the more authorities and sources he quotes, the more of a “scholar” he appears. A thinker’s writing consists of borrowings from ideas in his own intestines, and the greater thinker a man is, the more he depends on his own intestinal juice. A scholar is like a raven feeding its young that spits out what it has eaten from the mouth. A thinker is like a silkworm which gives us not mulberry leaves, but silk.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

Lin wrote before we started talking about the gut like a parliament of microbes, but the metaphor only gets nastier and better. Most minds are ecosystems: some are rich with good flora, others are overrun with citation-bacteria that turn every sentence into gas. The difference isn’t whether you borrow. Everyone borrows. It’s whether you ferment. The scholar tends to preserve: he jars the past neatly and labels it. The thinker allows a controlled spoilage. He leaves ideas in the dark long enough for them to change, for sweetness to become bite, for borrowed sugar to turn into alcohol. That’s why some writing tastes “alive” and some tastes “safe.” One has a living culture in it; the other has been sterilized to survive committee review.

He mentions raven and silkworm; you can think of others. There is the ruminant scholar, solemnly chewing the same cud until it becomes an approved doctrine; there is the tapeworm scholar, living off other people’s meals while contributing nothing but appetite. But there is also the bee-scholar, worth defending: he gathers widely and gives honey.

I’m not a great thinker by any means, but I’ve found meal-planning essential if I want to keep up any decent supply of “intestinal juice.” Left to myself, I’ll snack on whatever’s loudest and sweetest and call it dinner. So here’s a sample menu for humane digestion and steady mental recomposition. For protein, a small serving of Nietzsche — spicy meatball material, best taken in bites, not by the bowl, unless you want to be up at 3 a.m. arguing with God — followed by Isaiah Berlin as the corrective salad that keeps you honest and un-drunk on your own rhetoric. Tolstoy is the slow-cooker stew: a once-or-twice-a-week meal that leaves you full, moral, and slightly inclined to judge your own life. Eric Hoffer is plain, sturdy carbs: beans-and-rice prose. Not fancy, not frosted, but it sticks to the ribs and does what it came to do. Montaigne is the daily bread and cheese: steady, companionable calories that keep you from getting weird. Henry James is the fibrous greens: you chew longer than you think you should, and then you notice your attention has gotten stronger. Samuel Johnson is roast beef and strong tea, for days when your mind needs to sit up straight. Proust is the weekend prix fixe: you don’t do it on a rushed Tuesday, but when you do, the aftertaste lasts for days. And Wodehouse — Wodehouse is sponge cake and champagne. Almost no nutritional claims, just joy and fizz and impeccable timing: a palate-cleanser that keeps the whole regimen from turning into a penitential diet.

Higher Cred

By in education, fresh hell

From the NYT obituary of Tom Stoppard, emphasis mine:

A voracious reader but otherwise remarkably undereducated for a writer of such voluminous knowledge and understanding, Mr. Stoppard found both inspiration and provocation in his literary predecessors. His work alluded to, commented on or borrowed from classic works of literature and philosophy, from the Greeks and Romans to Samuel Beckett and Vaclav Havel. He often drew on consequential historical events and real-life figures of intellectual power and influence.

“William Shakespeare, though never having completed an MFA program…”

Obiter Scripta, no. 140

By in books, education, foolosophy, obiter scripta

When you see the many and manifold institutions for teaching and learning and the great crowd of pupils and masters which throngs them you might think the human race was much occupied with wisdom and insight. But here too appearance is deceptive. The latter teach to earn money, and strive not for wisdom but for the appearance of it and to be credited with it; the former learn, not to achieve knowledge and insight, but so as to be able to chatter about them and give themselves airs. Every thirty years a new generation appears which knows nothing and then sets about trying to gulp down summarily and as fast as possible all the human knowledge assembled over the millennia, after which it would like to think it knows more than all the past put together. To this end it resorts to universities and reaches out for books, and for the most recent ones too, as being its own contemporaries and fellows of its own age. Everything quick and everything new! as new as it itself is. And then off it goes, loud with its own opinions!

— Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms


Wait, is this the Eternal Recurrence? Am I reading Schopenhauer or Nietzsche? Dear God! This was written in 1851, and it could have been written yesterday. There’s no hope! It’s always been like this! On the other hand, this was written in 1851. There’s no need to despair; it’s always been like this. That’s the good news and the bad news. The lesson here is: neither hope nor despair, but maintenance — and earplugs.

Huey Reviews and the Jews

By in education, the geist of the zeit

Niccolo Soldo:

The most important element here is that Ackman and co. rejected a special carve-out for Jews in favour of trashing the DEI system at Harvard altogether. If this position holds, then DEI could fall like dominoes across academia, government, and business as well.

It does not answer the question of free speech on campus, especially how it has already been eroded, nor does it answer their concerns about anti-Semitism on campus either.

It would be prudent to inform Ackman and co. that any attempt to acquiesce to a special carve-out for Jews on campus would be immediately non-functional, as the ideology underpinning it sees Jews as Whites and therefore “oppressors” and “colonizers”. It simply would not compute. The pushback to such a compromise would be enormous, and even threats from donors to withhold funds would not be a trump card either. This conflict is not financial, but it is ideological, and goes right to the heart of the values that made America the wild success that it is today and has been for some time now, but that also allowed men like Bill Ackman to prosper.

If I had dreamed of a modern Hercules capable of flushing out the Augean stables of academia, I wouldn’t have pictured a billionaire hedge-fund CEO, but if that’s who the trickster god has chosen for the task, I suppose I’ll get used to it.

Misplaced Tycoons

By in bricolage, education, eric hoffer

Just as stomach ulcers were belatedly discovered to be caused not by stress but by a humble bacterium, historians of the future may well discover that the real reason campuses erupt in fanaticism is the prosaic fact that the rest of us have started shoveling money at them. The first round in the 1960s took place at a time when the number of college students in America had increased by a factor of five in the space of three decades. Naturally this swollen demographic became conscious of itself as a bloc and wanted to throw its weight around, like new money. The administrators and professors had their heads turned, too, by newfound cultural importance and flush budgets, and so they let them.

— Helen Andrews, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster

****

On October 4, 1957, the Russians placed a medicine-ball-sized satellite in orbit. It needs an effort to remember how stunned we were when we discovered that the clodhopping Russians were technologically ahead of us, and that we would have to catch up to them. We reacted hysterically. We set out to produce scientists and technologists wholesale by shoveling billions into the universities. And where the billions went there went also millions of people who were not primarily interested in learning but wanted a piece of the action. Thus Khrushchev’s Sputnik toy brought about a change in the tilt of America’s social landscape from the marketplace to the universities. After October 1957, many young people who would normally have gone into business ended up climbing academic ladders and throwing their weight around in literary and artistic cliques from Manhattan to Berkeley, California…They were going to wake up the academic world and turn the university into an instrument of power. They were going to make history, which is an acceptable substitute for making and losing millions. It was these misplaced tycoons who set the tone and shaped events in the 1960s.

— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath

Lowbrow, But I Rock a Little Know-How

By in education, foolosophy

Naomi Kanakia:

Notice, I leave aside the question of whether knowledge of the Classics makes you a better thinker or more capable leader. I would argue that it probably does but that, in most eras, the wisdom conferred by the Classics is more likely, as Tocqueville noted, to discourage you from pursuing paths to power. As we can see in our own culture, nuance and wisdom are nowhere particularly desired. This is a time for anger, action, and black-and-white thinking.

Moreover, during this time, power is increasingly wielded only by the few, and they wield it due to their birth rather than their merits. It’s obvious in the biographies of our politicians, our business leaders, our actors, singers, biographers, and academics. Increasingly, only the extremely well off and well connected are achieving prominence and wielding power. In this environment, only the education of those few can be a matter of public interest. For the bulk of Americans, who are destined to be employees rather than bosses, and whose public role, even as citizens, has been increasingly devalued by the slipping-away of our democracy, there is little need to concern oneself with their education, nor do I think it will be possible to get them to ignore the fact that the wisdom conferred by a Classical education will be useless to them in the life of precarity and drudgery to come.

I participate with great reluctance in the rote recitation of identity so common to these tedious essays (this one included), as if any of you should care who or what I am, but: as one of those mythical working-folk who also enjoy reading old classics, I particularly appreciate hearing a severely-educated MFAer living in an overpriced slum like San Francisco opine about the lives of “precarity and drudgery” we lead out here in the “Here There Be Carhartt Coveralls” section of the map, foolishly believing that wisdom is worth striving for even, or especially, if it doesn’t lead to wealth or political power. Imagine combining an autodidactic hunger for knowledge with a university education and still remaining within the limited imaginative horizons of a petty political functionary!

Unhappy Ever After In the Marketplace

By in bricolage, education, eric hoffer, work

Until I was forty I lived as a true bohemian, considered financial matters beneath me, and never really understood why I was always in debt. As with everything in my life, the shift from that phase was abrupt and total, and a sort of law of conservation of vice that governs my existence ensured that the overcoming of spendthriftness could only be bought by quick transition to an obsessive, all-consuming preoccupation with my ledger-books. I rush to add that I hate capitalism much more than I ever did in my bohemian phase. I hate it because it forced me, finally, to submit to it, though I always believed it never could. Capitalism broke me like a mustang cornered in a pen.

— J.E.H. Smith

****

Capitalism’s greatest predicament is that several paradoxes of the human condition combine to turn capitalist successes into failures… Take mass education: it was the capitalists and not the intellectuals who initiated and promoted mass education. In capitalist America every mother’s son can go to college. Most capitalist societies are being swamped with educated people who disdain the triviality and hustle of the marketplace and pray for a new social order that will enable them to live meaningful, weighty lives. The education explosion is now a more immediate threat to capitalist societies than a population explosion.

— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath

****

Marx, a Victorian intellectual, predicted that capitalism would be undone by its immiseration of the proletariat. Actually, capitalism has done more to jeopardize itself by annoying intellectuals. Many of them look down their upturned noses at the marketplace, and therefore at those who thrive in it. The intellectuals’ disdain is a manifestation of resentment about the fact that markets generally function nicely without the supervision of intellectuals. Their disdain is, among other unattractive things, ingratitude. The vulgar (as the intellectuals see them) men and women of commerce who make markets productive also make the intellectual class possible. As George Stigler (University of Chicago; winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Economics) said, “Since intellectuals are not inexpensive, until the rise of the modern enterprise system, no society could afford many intellectuals.” So “we professors are much more beholden to Henry Ford than to the foundation which bears his name and spreads his assets.”

— George Will, The Conservative Sensibility

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Smell the Rich Mahogany

By in education, jests japes jokes jollies

Intellectuals are the bureaucrats of thought.

— Theodore Dalrymple, Midnight Maxims

Two things: One, the good doctor has a new book out consisting of 365 maxims composed during a period of insomnia. I’ve enjoyed it, and you probably will too. And two, this witty quip reminded me of a tweet that I only vaguely remembered and feared I’d never see again, only to stumble upon a screenshot of it this very evening. Look at this. This should hang in the Louvre with Dalrymple’s maxim below it:

Furrowed Brow

By in education, foolosophy

Phil Christman:

What intrigues me about the use of the concept of middlebrow, in these and other writers, is that they write of it with a warmth and respect that one can barely imagine anyone bringing to the concept of the highbrow as such (though people do, of course, still write lovingly about particular highbrow works). It is hard to coax a single definition of middlebrow out of all these essays, but there are a few threads we can pull together. Middlebrow unifies; it mediates; it educates. It addresses both heart and mind. (So do opera, ballet, epic poetry—but once we’ve called something “highbrow,” we no longer need to look at it.) Middlebrow is good for you. All of these writers frame middlebrow as a thing in need of defense, even though the specific works they want to defend seem quite safe—safer, surely, than the opera, the ballet, or the long, allusive, heady, postmodern novel. They talk about middlebrow in the way we talk about things we feel in danger of losing through a failure to appreciate them. How did a word that sounds like an insult come to acquire such emotional coloring? To answer that question, we must look to its history.

Having just mentioned middlebrow culture in a recent post, I had to smile as Christman’s excellent essay came along to make clear to me that I don’t exactly know what I meant by the term, or even how I feel about it. While I’m sitting here in my ambivalent confusion wondering if I know anything at all, you might enjoy reading the essay yourself.

Well, It Took a Lot of Work to Be the Ass That I Am

By in education, fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies

Bruce Bawer:

Which brings us, as it happens, to the real thrust of Epstein’s essay. At bottom, it wasn’t a dig at Jill Biden. No, that was just Epstein’s way of introducing his actual, and serious, subject. And that subject was the increasing meaninglessness of advanced degrees in the humanities and social sciences.

“The Ph.D.,” Epstein lamented, “may once have held prestige, but that has been diminished by the erosion of seriousness and the relaxation of standards in university education generally, at any rate outside the sciences.”

For the record, I have un-remembered every essay of Epstein’s that I may have read, I have deleted every post in which I quoted him, and I have used all of his books for kindling. It’s the least I can offer to help undo the grave besmirchment our clerisy has suffered from this insolent autodidact.

Exodus

By in education, foolosophy

Justin E.H. Smith:

Nor am I being facetious when I say that it may be time to start thinking about alternative institution-building. If universities don’t want to teach and to preserve real humanities, then those of us who do may have to go and do so elsewhere under a different arrangement, one that permits us to pay attention to the things we study in the way that they merit.

This would not be the first time. From roughly 1610 until about 1780, universities were not the centre of the action — newly founded scientific academies and informal salons were. The broad historical shift underway right now echoes the one that was happening then: both periods are characterised by tremendous instability resulting from a revolution in information technologies. The early modern period endured what Ann Blair calls a crisis of “information overload” at least as significant as our own.

Smith is an academic philosopher by trade, but one who has managed to avoid having all the intellectual passion (and writing ability) squeezed out of him. He’s also one of the latest to abandon the neglected inner city of WordPress blogging for the temptations of a slightly-more lucrative existence in the Substackurbs. Personally, I find the newsletter-blog model to be comparable to dining out during the year of the batplague — rather than sit down in a public place and partake, if only indirectly, of the presence and sound of other people, we have our intellectual meals delivered contact-free, straight to our inboxes, where we consume them silently and alone. I’m not a fan of this trend, in other words. But I do enjoy Smith’s thought-provocations, so perhaps you might like to read them too.

Reversion to the Mean

By in books, education, socmed, the statusphere

Peter Murphy:

The third-hand dealing in ideas occurs within a tiny social bubble. Twenty-two per cent of American adults use Twitter. Ten per cent of those produce 80 per cent of tweets. Eight per cent say that what they post is related to politics. In short the class of third-hand dealers is 2 per cent of the adult population. The rest of the people on Twitter and other social media follow celebrities and repost cat videos. Little more than 1.5 per cent of adults comment on politics. Outwardly that tiny figure is almost unchanged from the first stirrings of democracy in the nineteenth century. Then 2 per cent of the population defined the reading public. These were persons with a high degree of literacy who read books. A century ago that group substantially overlapped with the opinion class.

The Public Education Acts of the nineteenth century had the rationale of making the whole population literate and numerate. This justified the expansion of the democratic franchise. The reading of newspapers and then books did expand through to the 1940s. Then began a steady decline. We still have 2 per cent of dedicated readers today. But the project of expanding serious reading not just to the entire population but even to the 15 per cent of persons who make up today’s professional-managerial and technical-administrative classes has died. As this occurred, a gulf opened up between the opinion class and the reading class. The opinion class no longer reads. It emotes.

As Susan Jacoby once wrote, “what has been lost is the culture of effort.” Through a unique confluence of historical circumstances, there was a time when the middlebrow ideal of striving to improve oneself through self-education, especially reading, was widespread and generally respected. That ideal is now generally an object of mockery. Most people don’t care about achievement per se so much as achievement relative to others. Literacy is far too common to be high-status anymore. When garbage collectors and truck drivers can join the Book of the Month Club and be exposed to the same classic literature as university students, well, how are the latter supposed to feel special now? Like a village in Vietnam, they had to destroy the ideal of aspirational reading in order to save it. Now that the garbage collectors and truck drivers are safely occupied with thumbing their phones and reading Facebook memes, books can regain their earlier prestige as a mark of distinction between the screened and the unscreened.

Obiter Scripta, no. 48

By in books, education, obiter scripta

Undergraduate education is probably best begun at the age of forty, when one is a bit wiser about the world and so can better test the wisdom of both books and teachers.

— Joseph Epstein, “Time on My Hands, Me in My Arms,” With My Trousers Rolled

This is certainly true in my case. It is a poignant irony that I only realized how suited I would have been to the life of a humble scholar once that door had been long closed to me. Like the dog in Aesop’s fable, I was too busy snapping at illusory bones, like a musical career, to fully appreciate the one I already had in my mouth, namely a passion for learning kindled by philosophy class. In the ancient Hindu conception of the four Ashramas, I’m firmly situated in the Grihastha stage. But since I already did most of my big-picture philosophizing and spiritual-seeking in my teens and twenties, perhaps I can trade and use the upcoming Vanaprastha stage for devoted scholarship instead.

Everything That Needs to Be Said Has Already Been Said. But Since No One Was Listening, Everything Must Be Said Again

By in education, foolosophy

Damon Linker:

These are classical subjects that centuries of people have written and thought about while reading the great playwright and poet. What’s new to say about them? Probably nothing. Instead, reflecting on such themes entails a rediscovery of knowledge that past readers may have possessed but that must be reacquired by every reader, by every student, anew.

By definition, that’s not “progress in knowledge,” since it denies that a contemporary scholar necessarily knows more on the subject than a reader from a previous century. It presumes that the only form of “progress” is each individual’s advancement in coming to understand the perennial problems and puzzles of the human condition, and it looks to great writers of the past for help in acquiring that understanding.

This explains the resistance shown by many conservatives toward efforts to achieve progress in knowledge by expanding the canon: They tend to presume that the authors and books that come down to us as “great” will provide more guidance than those that have disappeared into obscurity. It also explains why many conservative academics prefer to teach at small liberal arts colleges, where they can spend their days poring over the same old books by the same old writers, making their own personal progress toward understanding, in part by leading new generations of young people to begin their own personal progress toward the same goal.

But this means that the culture of the research university stands in considerable tension with what motivates many conservatives to pursue academic study in the first place.

When a friend of mine told me that his unfinished dissertation was on aphorisms in history, I was excited to read it. I was young and naïve at the time, though, so I was expecting a more general overview. It turned out to be a specific focus on a particular use of aphoristic sententiousness in a particular section of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, not the sort of thing that will ever make its way into ordinary conversation. By contrast, when I came across James Geary’s book The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism, I thought I had finally found the fulfillment of my earlier expectations, only to find myself quoting Julius Caesar upon finishing it: “Nice. Nice. Not thrilling, but nice.” It was the sort of pleasant book that passes easily through your eyes and out of your memory like so much fiber through your digestive tract. It turns out that while aphorisms in particular are fascinating, there just isn’t much to say about aphorisms in general, as a genre. It’s better to just go straight to the source—read the practitioners themselves. rather than filter them through intermediaries.

Linker’s piece is excellent, and I think he’s exactly right. When people complain about the lack of conservatives in academia, they’re referring mostly to the humanities. But the culture of the research university incentivizes the wrong sort of attitude and approach to humanistic learning. That same sort of approach — seeking a counterintuitive, novel perspective on old topics, attempting to build one’s own name by tearing down an established predecessor — permeates a lot of popular writing online as well. While thinking about Thoreau the other day, I had a vague memory of having seen yet another recent viral piece attacking him for…well, who knows. Whatever it was, it’s easy enough to find things to upbraid him over, if that’s the angle you want to take. But we’re still talking about Thoreau centuries later because he was a fantastic writer, whereas the twenty-something gender studies major who’s currently getting clicks and praise for denouncing his problematic views on this, that or the other won’t even be remembered five years from now. Well, if I may repurpose the words of a famous prophet, those hack writers have received the reward they’re most interested in. But for those who are willing to shut the door on academic careerism and trendy contrarianism, greater rewards can be found by quietly studying in private with the great minds of the past.

I mean that quite literally — there’s no need to take on massive financial debt just to study the classics and apply their lessons to everyday life. In fact, the sunk costs of doing so will almost irresistibly incentivize you to become yet another tenure-chasing ideologue. We’re fortunate enough to live in an age when both the materials and a supporting community of like-minded people (if you’re so inclined) are a few mouse-clicks away. I’m picturing something like Morris Berman’s “new monastic individual” (minus the almost cartoonish bitterness and despair that Berman evinces in his more recent writings). There’s no need to cast down this culture’s idols of progress. Just refuse to offer them prayers.

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