In a practical world with a practical people, we demand a practical education.  So goes the thinking of most Americans, even if they mean different things when they suggest it.  And so goes the sad state of the humanities.  We’ve blogged much before on this much maligned human endeavor, and we will again, after reading this nice essay in The Wilson Quarterly titled “The Burden of the Humanities.”  First, the author explains how the humanities, these days, are like the “Ottoman Empire of the academy”:

[…] a sprawling, incoherent, and steadily declining congeries of disparate communities, each formed around one or another credal principle of ideology and identity, and each with its own complement of local sultans, khedives, and potentates.

So that’s one reason they struggle, because there’s no uniformity to them, no guarantee that what one means or professes in this humanities department (say, English) has any unity with something to do in another humanities department (say, Law or History).  Humanities used to mean one thing.  Now it means many things.  Who can wonder at why their study is failing?  It’s important to note that study of the humanities doesn’t preclude study of the more immediate arts of engineering, applied science, etc.  To support the humanities isn’t to spit in the face of physics.  Finally, the essay closes with suggesting a very practical, although not immediate, use of the humanities:

One of the ways that the humanities can indeed save ­us-­if they can recover their ­nerve-­is by reminding us that the ancients knew things about humankind that modernity has failed to repeal, even if it has managed to forget them. One of the most powerful witnesses to that fact was Aldous Huxley, whose Brave New World (1932) continues to grow in stature as our world comes increasingly to resemble the one depicted in its pages. In that world, as one character says, “everybody’s happy,” thanks to endless sex, endless consumer goods, endless youth, ­mood-­altering drugs, and ­all-­consuming entertainment. But the novel’s hero, who is named the Savage, stubbornly proclaims “the right to be unhappy,” and dares to believe that there might be more to life than pleasure: “I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” In the end, the Savage is put on display as if he were a rare zoo animal: the Nietzschean “Last Man.”

And I suppose you could suggest that the humanities are nothing but history’s collection of stories about and by the human race, telling of what it means to be human.  And if the humanities are stories, then they will never die, no matter how impractical they may seem, no matter how much funding they lose.  Stories are free, after all, but of course it doesn’t hurt to throw a little money at those who write them down for us.

Here’s a good piece from John Miller, former head of the State Department’s trafficking office.  He didn’t work with cars and highways.  He worked to eradicate something most of us thought ended in the 19^th century: slavery.

Because slavery is universally ­illegal-though ­it was banned in Saudi Arabia only in 1962 and in Mauritania in 1981-its existence is subterranean. There are no reliable estimates of the number of people held in bondage. The U.S. State Department and the International Labor Organization put the figure in the millions. The State Department estimates that as many as 17,500 slaves are brought into the United States every year, from many different countries, and it is likely that trafficking within the United States involves several times as many people. As is the case elsewhere in the world, most American slaves toil in brothels, massage parlors, and other sex businesses, or as domestic servants. A large proportion of those who come from abroad arrive by perfectly legal means, often in the company of “handlers” who help them obtain tourist or business visas.

His imperative thesis is: Call it slavery.  It may not mean that people are hauled off en masse and in chains, but it’s still slavery, and in this article at The Wilson Quarterly, he looks to William Wilberforce for ideas about how to eradicate it globally.

In most countries, what distinguishes the victims is not their color but their foreignness or otherness. Most of the survivors I talked to were attracted by the promise of a job in a distant land. Once there, they found themselves in unfamiliar surroundings and unable to escape. It is difficult to flee when you know neither the local language nor the geography, and when you have no friends or family outside your small world to turn to for help. I rarely met survivors who had been enslaved in their own community. Moldov­an women are enslaved in Dutch brothels, Indonesian men on Malaysian construction sites, and Filipinas in Saudi Arabian ­homes.

And he closes by reminding us that the United States has “probably done more than almost any other country to eradicate this scourge at home and abroad.”   But as of yet, there is no 21st-century Wilberforce to champion the problem. 

In this unusual essay, Anders Henriksson, an assistant professor of history, has assembled a collection of some of his favorite paragraphs from the history essays of his students.  He teaches on the college level, mind you.  Here are some of my favorite lines:

• “History, a record of things left behind by past generations, started in 1815.”
• “During the Middle Ages, everybody was middle aged.”
• “In the 1400 hundreds most Englishmen were perpendicular.”
• “Victims of the Black Death grew boobs on their necks. The plague also helped the emergance of the English language as the national language of England, France and Italy.”
• “An angry Martin Luther nailed 95 theocrats to a church door.”
• “Louis XIV became King of the Sun.”
• “The enlightenment was a reasonable time.”
• “At war people get killed, and then they aren’t people any more, but friends.”

All this, out of the mouths of our nation’s college students.

Vanity Fair wants to know, “What will liberal bloggers do if Obama wins?”  That is, Andrew Sullivan, Arianna Huffington, and DailyKos “face the peculiar prospect of actually agreeing with the president.”  Oh, and also a Democratic congress.  This piece compares the liberal bloggers to the upstart conservatives in the sixties and seventies.

[I]t took about 40 years, beginning with the Goldwater campaign in 1964, for the Right’s roots to be forged into planks and those planks reduced to wooden nickels.

In the resulting vacuum, another movement is already threatening to graduate from inspiring to oppressive: the Netroots putsch and its sounding board, the liberal blogosphere. Together, these forces bear a striking resemblance to the enemy. Just as Nixon, Reagan, Gingrich, and Bush depended on developments in new media-direct-mail campaigning, talk radio, cable news-so the new wired Left, with its disheveled assortment of journalist-activists and activist-journalists, has mastered the Internet.

Of course, all this assumes Obama will win.  And the voting hasn’t happened yet.

Suzanne Braun Levine, former editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, writes in The Nation about how the most important news is often the least reported.  She says the most important news in her family is how her 15-year old won’t do his homework, and one of her friend’s most important news stories is his sick mother.

Much ‘real news’ is ostensibly about civic life, which sounds like it should reflect how families function within the community, but most of the stories are bloodless reports about buildings–the Board of Education, City Hall. Bloodless but, perhaps to attract the attention that gray stone doesn’t, brutally confrontational. E.J. Dionne pointed out in Why Americans Hate Politics that the way the media typically report politics–titanic struggles between irreconcilable forces and scandalous behavior by unworthy leaders–only polarizes the issues beyond recognition, and beyond resolution as well.

Here at WMB, we often write in very polarizing ways, but we also try to show more nuance where much of the news doesn’t or can’t.  Levine continues:

A handful of journalists are beginning to rewire the newsgathering process. One is Jeannine Guttman, editor of the Portland (Maine) Press Herald. When she realized that her paper was covering news only if it was ‘novel, unusual, or counterintuitive,’ she changed the ground rules. She began assigning reports from what she called ‘third places’–the supermarket, the playground, the coffee shop–where people hang out and talk about things. Then she required that political stories include citizens among the ‘active players,’ along with lobbyists, lawmakers, spin doctors, pollsters, experts, and analysts. And she required that stories about controversial issues include quotes from people who are undecided or ambivalent as well as those who firmly support one side or the other.

Read the article to find out what kind of stories she’s talking about and how it might change the news and the way we read the news.

Inspired by a similar game in a David Lodge novel, some writers at New York magazine recently played “Humiliation,” where you sit around in a circle and admit what classic novel or movie you’ve never seen.  Some films they admitted never having seen were E.T., Schindler’s List, Gone With the Wind, and Citizen Kane.  So what about you?  What great films have you never seen?  I must admit, I’ve never seen a Hitchcock film in its entirety.  I saw the first ten minutes of the first two Pirates of the Caribbean films and found them terrific bores.  I’ve never seen a film with Marilyn Monroe.  Admitting such is not necessarily a humiliation, but films do make the fabric of much of our national cultural mythos, and so it’s interesting to hear what stories haven’t shaped our experiences and imaginations.

What do the men on the following list have in common:

Ludwig van Beethoven
Nicolaus Copernicus
Rene Descartes
Edward Gibbon
Horace
Soren Kierkegaard
Sir Isaac Newton
Blaise Pascal
George Santayana
Adam Smith
Leonardo da Vinci
St. Paul

Two things, really.  First, they are some of the great minds and talents of Western Civilization.  Second, they were all bachelors.  In this piece in The New English Review, Christopher Orlet considers the benefits of bachelorhood.  Marriage has its champions, but not all were meant for it.  And I’ve known many good men who have been called to a life of celibacy (not that all bachelors are celibates, by any stretch).

Some years ago a noted Japanese researcher analyzed the biographical data of some 280 famous mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and biologists and discovered that all peaked professionally in their twenties, at which point their careers spiraled downward. Married scientists suffered the worst decline in productivity. However, those who never married remained highly productive well into their fifties. “Scientists tend to ‘desist’ from scientific research upon marriage,” the researcher told an interviewer, “just like criminals desist from crime upon marriage.” One theory suggests married men lack an evolutionary reason to continue working hard (i.e., to attract females). Though it likely they similarly lack the prerequisite time and solitude.

I might qualify Orlet’s statement to say that married men don’t suffer a decline in productivity.  They just produce other things that are more commonplace: babies, families, other kinds of work.  But I can testify: my most productive years of writing - at least regarding quantity - were in my twenties, in graduate school, when I was without wife or child.  I worked 18 hour days, mostly writing and reading and talking about both.  Those were halcyon days.  I still write now, but in far less quantity and hopefully far more quality.  Nevertheless, I am productive.  I have the human beings to show for it.

Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, has just written a book that bemoans the condition of the young people in America called The Dumbest Generation, in mock homage, I suspect, to Brokaw’s book of a similar title. The problem, says Bauerlein, isn’t just the internet. It’s also the glorification of youth culture since the sixties, which – as Flannery O’Connor would say – put the bottom rail on top.

The glorification of youth was strongly reinforced by “progressive” educational theories emanating from our leading schools of education – theories insisting that the proper role for teachers is to act simply as “facilitators” who guide students in “constructing their own knowledge.” Supposedly, active young minds would do that if they were free to follow their own natural inclinations.

That theory took hold first in the lower K-12 grades and rapidly spread upward. Many college professors resisted it and continued to assign challenging reading material, only to discover that students either wouldn’t read it or if they tried, just couldn’t grasp it. As a result, professors have widely lowered their standards to accommodate the a-literacy of their students. In turn, that means that our supposedly highly educated populace actually contains a small and declining number of people capable of functioning at a high intellectual level.

Based on the review at The Pope Center, Bauerlein’s book isn’t your typical Kids-These-Days book. It’s a solid, reasonable, balanced assessment of why kids don’t really care to learn much these days and who’s to blame for it. All of us, in some way or another. The teachers who refuse to work hard at keeping high standards. The parents who complain when Johnny gets a bad grade because one teacher did have high standards. The school administrators who crave high admission rather than high thinking. The citizenry who mock intellectualism as elitist. And on and on.

If you’re looking for something to watch during your office lunchbreak today, try this video debate between Dinesh D’Souza and Michael Shermer, founding publisher of Skeptic magazine.  A perusal of the comments underneath the video suggest it was a fair debate and may be worth watching.  Among others, D’Souza also debated Christopher Hitchens last year at King’s College.

Rod Dreher, author of Crunchy Cons, and Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food, have a nice discussion here about conservatism, agribusiness, the “Slow Food” movement, global “hunger,” the real cost of food, and the family dinner:

Look at what food marketing does to the family dinner. The American food industry spends $32 billion a year marketing 17,000 new products to us. They are trying very hard to undermine parents’ roles as gatekeepers of the family diet […] Food marketers work very hard to get us to eat 24/7, and if you look at the images on television, you see families too hurried to cook a meal. They’re so busy that all they can do is grab a cereal bar on the way out the door. All of this emphasis on snack food has the effect of eroding the crucial institution of families sitting down together. One of the great blind spots in American conservatism is not appreciating the role of consumer capitalism in eroding values such as the family dinner.

It’s a long discussion, and one more to add in your “Why to Garden” file.