We Need to Do Better than Hum 1 & Soc Sci 2 in General Education

Promoting public reason in a kinda-sorta free-ish society; what would I do if I were Hum-Soc Sci nationwide General Education Czar?...

Promoting public reason in a kinda-sorta free-ish society; what would I do if I were Hum-Soc Sci nationwide General Education Czar?...

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It is probably not going too far to say that Matthew Yglesias thinks that the purpose of humanities departments, insofar as their undergraduate-education mission in American universities is concerned, should be to teach at least semi-triumphalist versions of:

• Hum 1 “Classics of Western Literature”

• Soc Sci 2 “Western Thought and Institutions”

• Plus other courses related to those two pillars, as they were set out by the post-WWII Harvard Red Book: Paul Buck & al.: General Education in a Free Society <https://archive.org/details/generaleducation032440mbp>.

To wit, here:

Matthew Yglesias: Thankful mailbag: ‘There’s just a big divergence between what most people see as potentially valuable in the liberal arts and what most humanities faculty think is valuable and important…. Educated professionals… it’s good for them to be inculcated with… values… the history of proto-constitutionalism in England and the classical republics… religious freedom… [which] develop[ed] out of the specific circumstances of the Protestant Reformation….

Historical events… Greece to Rome to “the Dark Ages” and the Renaissance and Reformation and the founding of America… philosophical lineage from Plato and Aristotle to Hobbes and Locke and Mill and Rawls… literary and artistic cultures… informed by these… and that also informed them…. That kind of traditional broad liberal education would of course involve some exposure to radical critics of Anglo-American liberal capitalism….

[But] current trends on campus are toward an atmosphere where the radical criticism predominates…. The critical theories themselves would tell you, there’s no way Anglo-American liberal capitalist society is going to sustain generous financial support for institutions whose self-ascribed mission is to undermine faith in the main underpinnings of society…

Thankful mailbag

I substantially disagree.

For one thing, I do not think Matthew has Ground Truth as to what is going on in American universities.

I have said this before.

And I do believe I have receipts:

(I have a suspicion, perhaps unwarranted, that Matt is viewing modern American universities only through the eyes of young whippersnappers who went into journalism and were hired by <http://vox.com>, anZ.)61d not through the eyes of those who went to work after graduation for J.P. Morgan, Microsoft, McKinsey, Ford Motor Company, or A16Z.)

And I do not think that a Platonic guardian-education values-implantation program is proper for American universities—not least because I think we have no idea how to do it any better than Plato did, and that there is much more value in teaching people true things and how to accurately reason about the world than to try to inculcate them with whatever your personal preferred version of IngSoc happens to be.

Trying to teach people that there was a “‘good’ west… [different from] the actual one that had marched into the First World War and onward…”, as Judith Shklar once snarked, is likely to backfire because it is not true. For one thing, there was never any such thing as an “‘actual’ west”. There was not any entity of any sort that was at all like a “west” historical through-line starting in Uruk, stopping in Babylon, Memphis, Jerusalem, Athens, Sparta, Rome, Florence, and London before winding up in New York. What entities there were were not conspicuously good. The did set up a chain of historical contingency in which we have been conspicuously lucky. And after the fact we want to pretend that we are the legitimate heirs, by descent or adoption, of those in the past who created things we like.

But that we like to pretend it does not make it in any real sense true.

Here we have Buck & al.:

Paul H. Buck & al.: General Education in a Free Society: ‘General education… has… to do with… the question of common standards and common purposes… preparation for life in the broad sense of completeness as a human being… education in a common heritage and toward a common citizenship?… In the area of the humanities… "Great Texts of Literature." The aim… would be the fullest understanding of the work read rather than of men or periods represented…. [It] might include Homer, one or two of the Greek tragedies, Plato, the Bible, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Tolstoy….

Western culture may be compared to a lake fed by the streams of Hellenism, Christianity, science, and democracy. A philosophical course based upon the study of these contributions might offer an extremely valuable way of considering the conceptions of a life of reason, the principle of an ordered and intelligible world, the ideas of faith, of a personal God, of the absolute value of the human individual, the method of observation and experiment, and the conception of empirical laws, as well as the doctrines of equality and of the brotherhood of man….

All students [should] take… "Western Thought and Institutions." We considered… as a title… "The Evolution of Free Society"…. The central objective… would be an examination of the institutional and theoretical aspects of the Western heritage… historical analysis of certain significant movements and changes… the reading of substantial portions of certain of the classics of political, economic, and social thought which those changes have helped to produce… [starting with] Plato and Aristotle…. The evolution of… representative government and the reign of law, the impact of the Reformation… the growth of religious toleration, the nature and legacy of the natural-rights philosophy, the growing confidence in the power of reason to deal with human problems, the expansion of humanitarianism, the rise of the laissez-faire philosophy… and the impact of the technological revolution upon industrial organization, the growth of populations, and the vast expansion of social and economic legislation….

Both as a sequel to the course on Western thought and institutions, and as a preparation for the responsibilities of citizenship, one of the most suitable courses which could be devised for the purposes of general education would be one to which the title "American Democracy" might be given… <https://archive.org/details/generaleducation032440mbp>

The keen-eyed Judith Shklar had, back in 1989, what seems to me the definitive take on such a program of education tracing a through-line of historical and logical development from Gilgamesh to FDR:

Judith Shklar: A Life in Learning: ‘A look at the famous "Redbook"… the plan for… general education… at Harvard, is very revealing. Its authors were determined to immunize the young against fascism… so that "it" would never happen again…. A reinforcement of The Western Tradition… presented in such a way as to show up fascism as an aberration, never to be repeated…. In the pre-war Depression years some of the young men who devised this pedagogic ideology may have been tempted by attitudes that eventually coalesced into fascism, and now recoiled at what they knew it had wrought. They wanted a different past, a "good" West, a "real" West, not the actual one that had marched into the First World War and onward. They wanted a past fit for a better denouement. I found most of this unconvincing... <https://www3.nd.edu/~pweithma/Shklar/Haskins%20Lecture.pdf>

(I would dearly love to know what Judith Shklar saw in the years after she got to Harvard in the late 1940s that led to that remark about “young men who… may have been tempted by… fascism, and now recoiled…”)

But to return to my main thread: As I have said before, the claim that humanities academia here in America is in a state where “current trends on campus are toward an atmosphere where… radical criticism predominates…” and turning humanities departments into “institutions whose self-ascribed mission is to undermine faith in the main underpinnings of society…” simply has zero correspondence with actual ground truth, at least with actual ground truth here at U.C. Berkeley—which really should be the Epicenter of the Woke Beast.

And I have receipts: what my receipts tell me is that what is being done here at Berkeley is, taken all in all, lots of smart people—many of whom I have profound disagreements with—teaching a lot of different things. What do I see to criticize? In my brief sampling, admittedly of only a few courses, I:

• do see a somewhat excessive mindshare given to Marx and his epigones—Frankfurt School, and, cough, cough, the not too smart and definitely unwise David Harvey—in Legal Studies and Media Studies;

• do see a little too much drinking of the old-fashioned “WESTERN CIV” koolaid in Classics; and

• ran across one History course I would put under the aegis of Matt’s “endors[ing] the radical critiques…” in a jejune and rather narrow-minded way—although I would add that what disturbs me is not the instructor’s position, but rather the narrowness of the reading list (but that is perhaps, or maybe probably, offset in lecture; I do not know, and rather than presume I should find out before I put my foot further into my mouth).

But there is a wide, wide, wide gulf indeed between Matthew Yglesias’s claims that we have humanities programs in American universities organized to undertake “radical criticism… [with a] self-ascribed mission… to undermine faith in the main underpinnings of society… “ and Judith Shklar’s image of the Red Book as dedicated to an unconvincing “show[ing] up [of] fascism as an aberration, never to be repeated…” by means of building out “a different past, a ‘good’ West, a ‘real’ West, not the actual one that had marched into the First World War and onward...”

You could reject Matthew Yglesias’s claims about what is actually ground truth. Doing so, however, does not commit you to teaching 3000 required-of-all-students versions of Sam Beer’s “Western Thought and Institutions” across the country (great as Sam Beer’s course was: my father took it, and I envy him).

You could buy Judith Shklar’s snark that the “‘good’ West… ‘real’ West…” of Beer and his contubernales is not built up out of the real past, and that any identification of it with the past of any civilization is an act not of historical inquiry or historically-based philosophical conclusions, but rather of mythmaking. Doing so, however, does not commit you to hoisting the Red Flag (or the Black Flag) and pledging allegiance to it in every classroom.

So what should you do for “General Education”?

If I were Czar, I would situate myself in 1500. I would briefly survey all of the High Civilizations of that gunpowder-empire age—what was good and bad about them, what they drew on in creating a useful and largely mythological past for themselves, and what they had added to the panoply of civilization. I would then focus on the societies, economies, and régimes within 400 miles of the port of Dover in southeastern England, and run forward the story of how things we now find to be of great value and utility evolved and developed there and in societies powerfully influenced by what had gone in inside the Dover Circle—along with things we now greatly, greatly abhor.

I would reach back before 1500 only in flashback, as ideas of the achievements and practices of previous civilizations were used alternately as models in building-up and as weapons in tearing-down.

But I am not Czar…

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References:

• Beer, Samuel. 1970. “Syllabus & Assigned Readings for Social Sci 2, 1970-71”. Harvard College. <https://www.irwincollier.com/harvard-syllabus-and-assigned-readings-for-indisciplinary-course-social-sciences-2-1970-71/>

• Buck, Paul H., & al. 1945. General Education in a Free Society. Cambridge: Harvard University. <https://archive.org/details/generaleducation032440mbp>.

• DeLong, J. Bradford. 2023. “Successful Future Humanities Programs Will Be Those That Provide High Literacy & Deep Numeracy”. Grasping Reality, November 29. <http://braddelong.substack.com/p/successful-future-humanities-programs>.

• Orwell, George. 1949. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Secker & Warburg. <https://archive.org/details/NineteenEightyFour-Novel-GeorgeOrwell>.

• Shklar, Judith. 1989. "A Life in Learning" .Haskins Lecture, American Council of Learned Societies. <https://www3.nd.edu/~pweithma/Shklar/Haskins%20Lecture.pdf>.

• Yglesias, Matthew. 2023. "Thankful Mailbag." Slow Boring, November 24. <http://www.slowboring.com/p/thankful-mailbag>.