Culture Requiem for the Humanities

[Curved_Sw0rd]

Some days ago I read an article on Quillette, called "In Defense of the Humanities" by Elena Shalneva. Detailing her own experience with the Humanities, and one of the more difficult sides of it, Philology. Reading through the article, I felt a sort of mounting sadness, knowing that courses like these were being used as and converted into ideological bludgeons, and thus funding seems to be pulling away, taking the proper courses with them.

At my last firm, about a quarter of the graduate intake happened to be PPE and Classics students. The justification for hiring them was their alleged “soft skills”—these guys were supposed to be collaborative, communicative, and empathetic. In reality, most of them were reclusive introverts keen to go home as soon as they finished the job. And can you blame them? Having just spent three years in a place where high minds met to contemplate matters of life, death, fate, and existence, they were now catapulted into a pothole of income statements, profit warnings, and rating downgrades. No wonder they withdrew. They did, however, add an extra dimension to corporate discourse and improve the quality of decision-making. Even with the handicap of studying a politicised modern curriculum, they were a head above everyone else in this respect and raised the firm’s intellectual bar.

Students of the Humanities offer something, even in recent days when there's a mass of propaganda to get through, one still walks away with a level of critical thinking and expanded knowledge. Critical thinking is a skill, it can be taught, and exercised like a muscle, which is what college courses are meant to do.

That doesn't mean there's no hope, however. One can very much take this into their own hands, albeit at the mercy of their own schedule and distractions. So perhaps the best question is, where does one start?

After all, why let ideologues take things away from you?

 

[Lanmandragon]

Surrendering the humanities was a serious mistake. 95% of all crap today us taught in humanities courses due to leftist control. This is one of the biggest reasons that the left hold soch cultural power.

 

[Deleted member 88]

Surrendering the humanities was a serious mistake. 95% of all crap today us taught in humanities courses due to leftist control. This is one of the biggest reasons that the left hold such cultural power.

Generational issues came into it, a generation of professors and scholars retired in the late sixties to eighties and the last in the nineties-coinciding with the Gramscian march through the institutions, and so the humanities were overwhelmed. And yes your absolutely right, the humanities are about 100% leftist politics, grievance, and agitation.

Part of the problem was that traditional readings of say Shakespeare were all done and dusted-this allowed deconstructionists, subjectivists and the like to market their nonsense as "new and fresh interpretations of important texts".

Anyway I'm not sure how to solve this problem, given that its pretty much a locked down fortress-no non leftist agitator is going to last long in academia and the humanities in particular.

 

[Lanmandragon]

Generational issues came into it, a generation of professors and scholars retired in the late sixties to eighties and the last in the nineties-coinciding with the Gramscian march through the institutions, and so the humanities were overwhelmed. And yes your absolutely right, the humanities are about 100% leftist politics, grievance, and agitation.

Part of the problem was that traditional readings of say Shakespeare were all done and dusted-this allowed deconstructionists, subjectivists and the like to market their nonsense as "new and fresh interpretations of important texts".

Anyway I'm not sure how to solve this problem, given that its pretty much a locked down fortress-no non leftist agitator is going to last long in academia and the humanities in particular.

Do what they did is really the only option. What sucks is that might not be possible.