My talk on Romola went well. If I am to believe the feedback, I was totally in control of my paper, gave a very engaging and cogent explanation of complex material. It was totally awesome, and I can’t wait to have my own students.
I do not expect ever to have them, though. We had a speaker at the college yesterday, and his presentation, the subject of which was how to get through our PhDs while being mindful of getting jobs as the end goal, and his message was very bleak. You all know the details. It was actually even worse than normal because he is a scientist and it is generally taken as a platitude that however bad it is in science it is worse in the humanities.
Despite the success of my talk, I went home to my apartment with this in mind: In the increasingly material world we live in, cut off from the meaning of our ancient superstitions, values, and ancestors, we are increasingly unable even to express why it is that we even study the humanities – people like Gladwell (just an example of our current state of affairs there are others) just convert everything into numerics and chances and statistics, and authority in those terms is the contemporary replacement for philosophical authority. There is no concern about justice, because it seems to satisfy us that if “most” people have “fair” outcomes according to our own subjective meanings of fairness, itself only a definition by example, then the entire conversation is taken to be a wasteful use of money, time, and resources. Our contemporary brand of capitalism is completely fine because freedom means ability to buy and justice, hence fairness, means the ability to work. And because we can measure these things and plot them with standard deviations, all we have to do in order to define and control freedom and justice is to make sure that an acceptable number people are working and buying. This is the new essence of our civilization, and any kind of conversation about it at the academic level is a waste of the very time and resources we might better use to train people to work so that they can buy. Civilization as defined by our intellectual traditions as they have been known is a useless and idle commodity sitting prone in the crosshairs of two guns: from the right points the gun of accused godlessness and anti-capitalism; and from the left points the gun of averages and enforced minimums. The contemporary conversation taking place between the figures with their fingers behind the triggers is only a conversation over who will claim the right to kill. The death is in any case already imminent.
Discuss.
