Michael S. Roth - Beyond the University - Why Liberal Education Matters (and it does matter)

 As this year ends I am thinking about a liberal education, which I believe in, and which has now, due to the cost of higher education, taken second fiddle to a vocational focus in education.  Perhaps inevitable, but certainly unfortunate for the state of our society.

Several founding fathers saw a liberal education as a road to independence and liberty.  P. IX

Jefferson believed in education, yet he was a blatant racist even for his times.  We could spend the rest of our American history reading life talking about Jefferson, but enough is enough.

Was Jefferson wise or naive about the importance of an educated populace?  Trump prefers the uneducated.

Jefferson's university was not for everybody: only for the most talented, with which I agree.  P. 35

Yet his hypocrisy regarding race and gender is legendary.  P. 35

Jefferson linked education to freedom, but if people of color, women, and natives were not to be citizens, they were not to be educated.  P. 35

The best that can be said of Jefferson is that he was inconsistent.  P. 35

Universities were to develop leaders, and for Jefferson woman were entirely domestic, not political or business leaders.  P. 36

His views on Native Americans were contradictory and not worth delving into in detail.  P. 36-37

Jefferson believed in the eventual extermination of Native Americans.  P. 37

In his Notes  he called for an end of slavery yet was clear in asserting the intellectual inferiority of Africans.  His Notes is totally embarrassing to modern readers  P. 38   

For me the importance of a liberal education is personal for personal satisfaction and a personal quality of life.

A liberal eduction requires, demands a lifetime of learning and self-improvement.

I am not sure how to appreciate and understand Emerson. P. 47

Emerson was the apostle of self-reliance.  P. 48

Emerson stressed self-knowledge.  Does everything worth knowing come thru self-knowledge?  P. 48

Emerson thought that a liberal education should be transformational. Indeed, it has been so for me.. P. 54

Have the courage to trust yourself. (Emerson) P. 58

Jefferson and Emerson wrote from the point of view of the middle and upper classes. Booker T. Washington from the view of those who first needed to make a living before they could be liberally educated. P. 63

Does the Washington - DuBois debate have any relevance for today?

The Talented Tenth. (W.E. B Du Bois) P.68

There is more to life than the almighty dollar. (W.E.B. Du Bois) P. 69

 This country has been tenuous from the beginning and it continues to be so. Future historians will earn Phds by the dozens offering explanations if advanced objective formal eduction survives in the open. Otherwise, future historians will be digging up our remains in secret if they can find any.

 

The Slow, Inevitable Death of the Bowl Game

KEITH O’BRIEN

The atlantic

The Santa Presidency

Trump is trying to fix the economy—by handing out cash.

TOLUSE OLORUNNIPA

 What does the fox and the hedgehog mean?

The distinction comes from a saying of the ancient Greek poet Archilochus: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Hedgehogs have a single grand idea that they apply to everything, while foxes come up with a new idea for every situation.

I am definitely a fox. The problem is that, yes, I know many things, but most of what I know ain't worth telling. My new ideas dissipate quickly.

 Heraclitus taught that character is destiny. In Trump’s case, his sociopathy is destiny. His narcissism; his lack of conscience, remorse, or empathy; his pathological lying and grandiosity; his sense of entitlement, impulsivity, and aggression; his cruelty, predatory behavior, and sadism—these are the forces that drive him. If we don’t understand that, we understand almost nothing of importance about him. And beware: When a man with Trump’s personality feels caged in, when he feels besieged and abandoned and begins to lose control of events, he becomes more desperate and more dangerous.

-Peter Wehner in The Atlantic

 Is deep reading, probing texts for meaning, over? Is AI destroying writing and thinking?

Probing a text can be enjoyable but also tiring, even borderline painful. That’s good. Exhausting our mental faculties, such as through deep reading or effortful writing, is what makes them more potent. Physical exercise works the same way. AI, by contrast, promises knowledge without effort, just as many people see in GLP-1 drugs the possibility of weight loss without willpower. Although both have legitimate uses, their widespread adoption has diminished our capacity to appreciate, let alone endure, the sustained and challenging work required to flourish beyond the level of simple appearance. Only through difficulty do we improve our powers of thought and perception, which we carry with us in every endeavor. This is the true source of the humanities’ relevance.

Camus’s great realization was that, in a meaningless world, we create our own meaning and quality through willed struggle—a lesson that AI threatens to obscure but the humanities are uniquely poised to teach. Sisyphus is assigned to roll his rock for eternity, Camus writes. Yet he can still be happy so long as, each time he comes to the bottom of the hill, he’s the one who chooses to turn around and rise back up.

-Thomas Chattterton Williams in The Atlantic

Learning is Hard

 As a humanities professor myself, the biggest danger I see to the discipline is the growing perception, fueled by the ubiquity of large language models, that knowledge is cheap—a resource whose procurement ought to be easy and frictionless. The humanities, which value rigorous inquiry for its own sake, will always be at odds with a world that thinks this way; that’s why relevance is a futile goal. For humanities departments to continue to matter, they must challenge the modern world rather than accommodate it. Indeed, the most useful lesson the humanities have to offer today is a profoundly countercultural one: Difficulty is good, an end in its own right.

-Thomas Chatterton Williams in The Atlantic

For humanities departments to continue to matter, they must challenge the modern world rather than accommodate it.

Camus Invites

 Camus invites us to imagine Sisyphus happy. I find it hard to imagine on a cold morning like this, and this world being the way it is right now.

Our Make-Believe World

 We live in a Make-Believe World now, but it's only make-believe if you're MAGA.

“Starting the day I take the oath of office, I will rapidly drive prices down, and we will make America affordable again,” Donald Trump told rallygoers in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in August 2024. “We’re going to make it affordable again.” He said it over and over and over. “Starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again. We’ll do that. We’ve got to bring it down,” he told a Wisconsin crowd that October.

Well. Guess what? Prices are up. And they’re not just up, at least in some cases, because of random, impersonal market forces. They’re up because Trump raised them, through his tariffs. But mostly, they’re up because politicians, even presidents, don’t have the power to lower prices quickly and unilaterally.


I thought everyone knew this. I thought everyone was at least sophisticated enough to understand that inflation is kind of complicated and has to do with a number of factors that can’t be easily erased or reversed. I mean, that’s not a particularly advanced political or economic concept. A president can’t just say, “Beef prices, I command thee down!” and beef prices go down. We live in the real world, not some fairy-tale land; there’s no legal limit to the snow here, as there was in Camelot.

-Michael Tomaska

What Can You Live Without?

 Part of growing up is learning what you can safely live without. Know what you need to know, of course, but just as important especially in today's overly stimulating and annoying world is knowing what you can live without.

I learned yrs ago that I can live without television, and by television I mean TV shows. The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Rockford Files are long gone, and after TV entertainment like that nothing ever came along to fill the void.

Another thing that I can avoid is trying to keep up with everything that is going on in the world. I have discovered that I don't need to know "everything." What a relief!

My interest are more refined, so if something is not in my intellectual bandwidth, I've learned to let it go. At the same time, I like to think I am as intellectually curious as I've always been.

Quiet times to think and reflect, read books, interesting conversations, contemplation of every short, yes, there things I could never live without.

 Early on at least by the time I was 14, I was dubious about Santa getting down that chimney. I was a quick learner you see.

 Reminder: This is not a good time of yr to be your usual self-righteous self. Give it a rest. There are at least 7.5 billion people on this Earth, and at least 2/3 of them are not Christians who don't give a flip about Christmas. So keep it all in perspective.

 I have often thought that being a book reviewer with people sending me books for free in hope that I would publicly review them favorably would have been the perfect calling for me, like being called to preach. Well, I may have been called, but I was never chosen.

 I suppose I have a digital footprint, but I have no digital self, and have no desire to have one. The digital world is killing us.

 There is a difference between inheritance and action. I cannot help who my ancestors are, but I can make my own choices. That so many Americans chose to place in power a man who holds people in contempt on the basis of race, religion, and national origin; that so much of the mainstream media conveys this bigotry through tired, obfuscating euphemisms; that there is so low a political price for the president’s racism that he and those around him see little risk in its expression—well, that does say something about America, and Americans. Immigration isn’t breaking our society. That’s a job Americans can do on their own.

-Adam Serwer in The Atlantic

Laura K. Field - Furious Minds -The Making of the MAGA New Right

 This is a real game changer.  I had no idea of this Right Wing MAGA world.  Shocks me.  Incredible stuff.

Donald Trump is not a big thinker, but his 2016 presidential victory presented a grand opportunity for people who are, and it set off a radicalization and reconfiguring of the American conservative world. This book outlines what happened in the regard with names like Patrick Deneen, Christopher Rufo, Peter Thiel, and J.D. Vance.  Their agenda is built to last, and it has dire long-term implications for liberal democracy.  

The New Right has precedents in America history, yet it is very new also.

The author has a PHD in political theory from UT-Austin.  Very impressive.  With a Leo Straussian background.  Lots of talk on Allan Bloom and Harry Jaffa.  At this point I still do not understand the appeal of these three heavyweights, how and why they have been so influential.

The Old Right is a base of today's conservatism, but it seems to me it's mostly archaic.  Goldwater seems mostly harmless today.

I have never heard of conservative Harvard Professor Harvey Mansfield.  P. 60

Post liberalism features Patrick Deneen  I bought his last book, but never read it.  Post liberalism, actually a version today's conservatism, so far is not worth my trying to understand it.  P. 70

The MAGA new right is too busy and complex for me to waste too much intellectual blood on.

Trump has new right MAGA support.  I had no idea.

Steve Bannon is an admirer of the Greek Historian Thucydides and Sparta.  I seem to be behind what I should know.  He holds degrees from Georgetown and Harvard.    P. 124

Bannon and the Alt-Right, associated with Sparta and Thucydides.  P. 125

The complexity of intellectual conservatism and right -wing politics is totally new to me.  I had no idea.

The infamous John Eastman story.  P. 147

The entire "Stop the Steal" gambit was bogus from the start.  P. 160

Issues today in higher education  (SB).  I don't know that I can understand.  P. 171

About Trump's awful 1776 Report.  P. 180

The New Right scholars succeed with these kinds of arguments because of the growing insularity of their growing intellectual world.  This is a world, not the only one for sure, that is self-sealing and self-congratulatory composed of people who long ago who gave up on the idea of engaging seriously with mainstream scholarship, and whose work is always suspect.  Main result is America's racial history, which is decidedly unwoke, hopelessly biased, and untrustworthy as a result.  P. 189

 

Having only vapid thoughts this morning. If I had something better to do I’d be doing it. If I had some words of wisdom I’d present them to you. It is not yet beginning to look a lot like Christmas, so I still have time to properly prepare.

 The publisher of the OED has named "rage bait" as its new phrase of the year. Examples are plentiful. You can easily I"m sure supply your own examples. I can at least see 40 a day on the internet.

 Increasing irritation from uninvited popups on my computer screen. My books have no popups. I read at my own pace, think at my own pace, comprehend at my own pace. If I"m feeling lazy, i might listen to a podcast, but not likely.