A very erudite commentary by Goldman.
I’m sure the three or four people who will read and understand it will be suitably impressed.
The Great Qustions asked of mankind are not easily answered. They require a great deal of contemplation, and contemplation requires free time. It requires lots of free time.
We live in a world with several billion people who do not have the time, energy, training or inclination to contemplate the Great Questions. They are trying to put dinner on the table and keep a roof over their heads. If you want people to take some of their precious time and follow the Liberal Arts, then you must show how it is of benefit for them to do so. And you must explain it in a way that several billion people without the benefit of years of philosophical training can understand.
You can’t force a person’s head into a plate of Liberal Arts stew and expect them to enjoy it. They must be brought to it.
The way to do this is to show them how enjoyable a poem or a painting or a book can be. Once they taste fine poetry, they will hunger for more. This will lead them to consider what it is that causes the poet to write the poem. This opens up a new world.
One of the biggest fights here on Free Republic is the fight over the purpose of education. Many people rightly claim that education should be training for a vocation. But is all life merely the drudgery of work? Is that the ultimate goal?
And so much Liberal Arts education is so poorly done. It must support the revolution or stroke the instructor’s ego.
Yes, a Liberal Arts education is good for everyone, but it must be done well and it must be shown to be of benefit.
I disagree that people can’t contemplate “Great Questions” unless they are free from daily care. That certainly wasn’t the condition of the original audiences of most great works of literature, including the sacred scriptures of every religion that has any.
What are great works of literature about, after all? Life and death, eternal damnation, war, family, lust, status conflict, futility ...
This is what rock music is about, too, and popular television series, and Western movies. I’m not saying these are works of comparable quality and depth to the “Iliad.” However, I am saying that people are always the same. They are socialized in different ways, but they all fear death. They all experience anger, lust, greed, love, ambition, and they can participate in the exploration of these experiences in literature.
There is no great ability or life of leisure needed to appreciate the Volsungasaga or the Odyssey or the Trojan Women or the Book of Kings.
And that is the core of the problem. Not all have succumbed, but too many of the faculty have apostatized, and when the instructors go over to the enemy, the students are lost.
The humanities used to be understood as the study of the good, the true, and the beautiful, acknowledged as universals and regarded as mutually reinforcing, given the ultimate unity of the good. This tended inherently to draw students out of themselves and to search for common ground with others, anchored in the best the culture has produced over time.
It is difficult to imagine anything more antithetical to the liberal arts than the modern preoccupation with particularistic, self-indulgent identity and grievance studies, or the rejection of the canon because contemporary hackwork seems more "relevant" to whatever itch is rotting the current crop of professors.