The Obsolete Man
This clip is a synopsis of a Twilight Zone episode called “The Obsolete Man.” It was one of their best episodes and has been embraced by numerous individuals who find themselves at odds with their society. (This particular clip was posted by a Christian millennialist.) I think that everyone who has a stake in higher education must be shown The Obsolete Man. If you are reading this, e-mail it to the president and trustees of your college or university.
Let me preface this by saying that I recently learned that Harvard’s Program in Religion and Secondary Education has been put on hiatus due to funding issues. Granted, I have selfishly given up the fight as a teacher. But the PRSE was one of few entities in my life that I feel a sense of loyalty to. Everyone else at Harvard engaged in sparring and infighting, but not the PRSE—because we had a real fight and it lay outside of academia (I realize that my peers thought of this as “helping people” but for me, meaning and struggle are intimately linked.) So when I saw this notice posted on the PRSE website, I felt a little like Yoda watching the Jedi academy burn down.
Then last night I saw this New York Times article with the headline, “In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth.” (The article has been moved to archives, but subscribers can read it here.) Reading this made me angry and, after sleeping on it, I’m still angry. Whenever that happens I write. This article brought up a lot of long-standing issues I have with the myth of an American meritocracy, titanomachy, and my realization after college that I am what Charles Dickens called, “surplus population.” (See previous blog entry “If a Thousand People with Master’s Degrees Died.”)
I am going to take up the gauntlet of “justifying the worth” of humanities. But the fact that this must be done is an incredibly pathetic comment on our society. Imagine an anthropologist who asks a tribesman about their gods and sacred stories only to be told, “Oh I’m pretty sure we have lots of gods! And stories too! But I don’t know them because learning about them is foolish––anyone who doesn’t fish for sixteen hours a day is a fool.” The tribesman might then ask, “You not only learn your own stories but try to learn those of other tribes, also? Your tribe must be the weakest, laziest, most pathetic people in the world! We’ve been talking for five minutes now and you haven’t caught a single fish!” At the center of this tribal village, naturally, is a heaping pile of rotting fish.
We are rapidly becoming this tribe of demented fishermen. The humanities are under attack because of a misguided consumer model of education, failure on the part of educational institutions to defend their own principals, vague fears or losing our technocratic dominance, and a failure to understand the division of labor.
THE CONSUMER MODEL OF EDUCATION
The primary argument that humanities should not be taught comes from a market perspective on behalf of the students (and more importantly their parents). It goes like this: as consumers, students expect their education to result in a lucrative career. As producers, institutions are obligated to respond to consumer expectations or else the market will destroy them. Colleges that do not teach humanities will prosper: Those that do will have no enrollment and will perish from the earth.
There are so many things wrong with this argument I hardly no wear to start. While it is true that college graduates have higher average salaries, studying something “practical” is no guarantor of financial success. In 2001, I used my BA in religion to drift from temporary job to temporary job. But I stood in line with people who got their degrees in engineers and computer science. By the end of it, former Enron managers were interviewing for the same crappy office jobs as me. So nobody got a job, but at least I studied something interesting and had some wisdom to console me in my misery. The computer science majors didn’t even have that.
Furthermore, this is a country that prides itself on the success of its drop-outs. I once saw a CEO tell a room full of high school students that “the world is run by C students!” The people who praise Bill Gates for dropping out of Harvard to start his own company are the same people who expect college to guarantee financial success.
It actually may turn out that the higher salaries of college graduates are largely a result of networking while in college. Bill Gates did meet his future business partner Steve Ballmer before dropping out of Harvard. For many students, leaving their neighborhood and meeting people from around the country may be as much a boon to their careers as the education they receive.
It is also illogical for institutions to cater to this demand. In fact, I will go out on a limb and say that whenever educators alter their curriculum to accommodate the demands of parents, the result is a watered down curriculum, a devalued degree, and dumber graduates. If the consumers of education really believed that college was simply about vocation, they would send their children to technical colleges, which are far cheaper. But they don’t.
I once met a girl at a party who had just graduated from the University of Texas at Austin. She asked me what my major was and when I said, “religion,” she answered, “Whoooah!” I found out that her major had been communications. I asked, “What exactly do you learn as a communications major?” She said, “You know . . . like how to make a PowerPoint presentation and stuff.”
I couldn’t believe it. PowerPoint was designed so that anyone can teach themselves how to use it. Charging to teach someone PowerPoint is like charging to teach someone how to pee. The state of Texas owes this girl several thousand dollars and an apology. Why did her family send her to a university to learn something she could have learned at a community college or from her 13 year old neighbor? Clearly her family wanted her to learn something “practical” and yet she probably went to UT for reasons that have nothing to do with education—possibly because they have a good football team.
The point is: if Americans were going to abandon the university model in favor of cheap, “practical” education they would have done this long ago. The fact that everyone does not attend a technical or community college proves that institutions do not need to cater to this perceived “market.”
THE ROLE OF EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS
The point of education has NEVER been as a means to making money––this is at best a pleasant side effect. The desire to learn seems to be part of the human condition and there is no consensus as to the nature and purpose of education. Free public education was instituted in this country because it was seen as necessary to the survival of a republic. Socrates said that, “Education does what it does.” Educational institutions are aware of this and it is their duty to explain this debate to the American public. That they have capitulated towards a consumer model of education is cowardly, pathetic, and shameful.
If thousands of families were willing to save for a generation to send their students to a college that taught courses on the history of NASCAR––would Harvard rush to start a NASCAR program? Would Yale cut its English department to hire experts on stock cars? If institutions are really following the consumer model of education, then logically they would.
Institutions of higher learning are supposed to stave off barbarism, not cater to it. If Americans really don’t want their minds to be challenged, or to think about life’s larger questions, then colleges and universities rightfully should be destroyed. At least then they would die with honor. Better no university at all than a university that teaches only PowerPoint.
People still want to go to universities: maybe for the network, maybe for the football parties, maybe to get stoned and go to drum circles. Who knows what draws the masses? But as long as they are coming, institutions should defend their philosophy of education. Not to do so is to be guilt of huckstering.
This doesn’t mean that universities should continue to do what they have always done. The Ivory Tower has fueled this wave of anti-intellectualism. This is not defending humanities–this is taking a stand on the nature and purpose of education. Universities must produce and support public intellectuals and must emphasize that their work fosters a strong republic.
TECHNOCRATIC DOMINANCE
What I found most upsetting about the New York Times article was the suggestion that the humanities are a luxury that our country can no longer afford. This is a separate argument from the consumer argument but it is equally absurd.
Let me start with the article’s use of the phrase “technologically complex world.” The implication is that students trained in humanities will lack the technical skills to compete in the job market. This suggestion seems to come from the same school of thought that would charge thousands of dollars to teach someone PowerPoint.
It also implies that America’s technocratic superiority is a function of our number of science majors. This is a fallacy too. Technological breakthroughs are achieved by individuals with natural talent, intelligence, and creativity. In 1954, the federal government spent millions on math and science education in secondary schools. They spent this money because the Soviets had launched Sputnik and they wanted to train a generation of Tony Starkes––children that would build futuristic weapons to protect us from the Russians. But all this curriculum did was inundate students with tedious lab work that taught them to hate science. The result is that many graduate programs in the sciences have empty spaces. However, our military-industrial complex still manages to produce things like death rays and goats that make spider silk (see previous blogs). They can do this, because technological advances are still made by individuals––those few who loved science in spite of the tedious lab work. This emphasis on science over the humanities has brought this country to its current situation: a weak republic with devastating weapons.
OUR SURPLUS POPULATION
The national unemployment rate for January was 8.5%. However that number doesn’t factor in people who work only a part-time job that doesn’t pay the bills or people who have simply stopped looking for work. The actual number of unemployed people is probably over 10%. So 1 in 10 Americans isn’t going to work and we are supposed to think this has something to with the humanities? Does anyone actually believe that if these people had studied PowerPoint instead of Plato they would have jobs?
What these unemployment rates tell us is not that humanities are a luxury but that EVERYTHING is a luxury! We can fire millions of people and society still functions more or less the same. No one is essential, everyone is expendable. This really should not come as a surprise. Tibet was a technologically backwards country with absolutely terrible agricultural resources. And yet Tibetan farmers could support themselves as well as thousands of monks who––economically speaking––contributed nothing whatsoever. If Tibet could do that, how many useless philosophers could America support with our industrial farm equipment and our amber waves of grain?
We cling to the idea that our major in college will determine our financial success because we insist that this country is a meritocracy: The idea that all of our talents and training are ultimately useless and not needed by anyone terrifies us. But we cannot move forward as a society until we realize we have this surplus population and make logical solutions about what to do with it. What ought millions of unnecessary people do all day?
Traditionally, war has been the best way of getting rid of surplus population. In fact, ever since I graduated from college the military was the only entity that was always willing to take me. First they wanted me as a soldier, then as a chaplain. I always interpreted the army’s pitch as, “You are young and male, and we have too many young males. We want to kill you. You and all your brothers.” I have also noticed how many people from my high school are now lawyers. Maybe instead of wars we can simply occupy our surplus population with endless litigation.
Logically, the only thing to do in the face of this surplus population is to support as many bizarre and specialized pursuits as possible. If someone can read Latin and wants to spend their life reading old books––God bless them, that’s one less person you have to compete with for that PowerPoint job. This is the lesson of the Twilight Zone: The humanities professor, the president of the university, the engineers building the death-rays, the bankers who created this financial crisis, the journalists who report on it––they can all drop dead and the world will go on fine without them. We are all obsolete men and women.
