When many modern graduates receive their certificates of education, there tends to be a sense that they’ve actually learned very little. As people make their way through the ‘real world’ outside academia, it usually also becomes more apparent that what they learned in the classroom has little relation to the real world. Many academic theories, models, and methods are entirely self-referential. Even in the supposedly practical fields of technology and science, many academic disciplines are divorced from their industrial applications, making it so that any training in school will prove to have been useless at achieving its stated ends.
Much of what’s published on the internet — apart from the merely titillating — exists to at least try to provide some accurate information to people as a corrective against the enormous amounts of false, lossy, or noisy information which is on offer through more conventional mediums.
In Western universities, the humanities in particular have been taken over by left-wing political factions. Even courses which purport to teach the Western canon usually instead just teach semi-Communist dialectics about why Western Civilization is evil and deserves to be destroyed.
Although in many cases, the teaching takes, in others, something in the indoctrination process gets hitched up, and the people dissatisfied with those programs begin to look elsewhere for acculturation.
The fashionable thing to say nowadays is that the humanities are ‘useless,’ and that serious students should instead go on to learn ‘science, technology, and math’ so that they can go on to be good tax-paying citizens. This is only partially wrong — the West has forgotten the functional purpose of the humanities in terms of creating cohesion — both cultural and political — within a country’s elite class. The humanities aren’t actually useless subjects for stupid people which are graded easily on a curve. They’re necessary for creating a functional political economy with a coherent leadership class and a culture that can actually thrive.
Although today, it’s an either/or choice in many cases, in the past, much of the humanities instruction went on in the undergraduate years, which was followed by instruction in engineering, architecture, medicine, and other specialized fields. Further, it wasn’t seen as a universal middle class attainment, but a set of leadership training institutions from which the majority of even the youthful intellectual elite would be excluded.
The question isn’t either/or: it’s whether or not the country’s leadership in a variety of fields can even comprehend one another in order to avoid what’s typical for countries, which is for the leadership class to focus more on killing each other than administering a coherent political unit. Because our civilization is increasingly a technological one, that makes it even more important, not less, to develop and promote a coherent worldview for people who are also leaders in technical development.
Because people are often so dissatisfied with the instruction that they receive in over-funded schools, both public and private, they often turn to the internet for correctives. The complex that pollutes so much of our collective mental space with bad information tends to resent this competition, and dubs it somewhere between hate speech and heresy. But the demand for re-education remains insatiable, because when people try to apply invalid learning to the real world, they usually wind up failing, because their mental models of the world fail to map to reality.
Our writing here aims to be a corrective, starting where the misinformation is greatest and most damaging, and then spreading out from there. Bad information leads to bad decisions, and Western institutions charged with the guarding and promotion of truthful information generally focus on the opposite, even when the need for accuracy and relevance remains the same or becomes more urgent in the broader society.
NRx models the real world so much more accurately than anything taught in modern tertiary studies, and in order for smart people to make accurate predictions they need accurate truthful knowledge about the world. This means smart people will be attracted to NRx like a honey pot to bears.
However the cathedral doesn’t like competition, so I’ll make a prediction myself that this above anything else will be the single biggest reason why the cathedral will want to co-opt NRx for itself.
This sounds ridiculous now, but so was gay marriage only a decade ago, in the next decade the cathedral will adopt many NRx concepts. Not become NRx, rather adopt the same concepts and language to appear authentic, like it did with regular higher education. Maybe even make some concessions to HBD to appear even more authentic.
I see little reason why it wouldn’t necessarily become neoreactionary. Few people, save sociopaths, try to push ideas they themselves do not believe are true. If people begin advocating neoreactionary ideas, they will still have to make the push to make them into the “normal science” via a paradigm shift. That’s not something that just happens because of the odd court case or legislative hearing here or there, as with same sex marriage, rather, it’s a question of many interlocked and concerting institutions changing the terms on which they discuss humanities.
At the moment, for any at least conservative professor in the humanities, let alone a reactionary professor, the ways of proceeding are essentially threefold: firstly, you can pretend you are a progressive, buy into the paradigm of progressivism and only tell your closest circle of friends, or no one, your true political/scientific opinions; secondly, you can pretend to be apolitical, and simply make an effort to exclude and avoid the use of any of the current crackpot methodologies in your inquiries (in some circles, to forego mention of “gender” (i.e. sex) in an article or monograph is to welcome a swarm of criticism, even when such matters are either clearly unrelated to the topic at hand, e.g. geography of such and such a place under discussion, or where the only answer you could provide would be a reactionary one); thirdly, you could wait until you have tenure, and then begin using reactionary language. This is a brave choice, and I may even abstain from recommending it, considering the hounding that people who undergo such a procedure typically receive. Such an one may expect student newspapers to frequently write articles in affront to one’s integrity and honour, to have boycotts of one’s lectures and speaking events, to have occasional protests and threats to one’s safety, as well as a drop in invitations to conferences and events with the rest of the academic community, which, still being made up of people to whom dreams of being ’68ers are still relevant.
To Mr. Dampier, I would be interested in seeing more written on the place that he thinks the humanities does have. Precisely how did it create cohesion in an elite class in the past, and how can it do this in the future? This still remains unclear. In his latest post he stated that he believes the practical and abstract arts should be brought closer together, but this is also unclear. Does this mean, for instance, that those in the humanities should relate their work to natural sciences? Some examples would be of assistance.
For analysis of current events, independent platforms provide much needed non-Cathedral commentary. On the new role of universities, Roger Scruton recently published this piece: http://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/04/the-end-of-the-university
Even for applied sciences there is no automatic process of application. A new institutional structure could help, but as any inovation, needs time to implement and test it.
Are there any philosophers dealing with technology that the author can recommend?