Nobody Really Cares About The Liberal Arts: Part 2

One could accuse me, justly perhaps, of being too hard on liberal arts colleges. But I think that it is a legitimate question to ask what in fact liberal arts colleges do teach if not the liberal arts? Remember that we turned to the question of the liberal arts precisely because of the imprecision, and indeed the incoherence, of the term humanities.

I suggested that the good our liberal arts colleges have on offer is certain kind of courtliness: a narrow cultivation, but one sufficient to make a bachelor a lifelong member of a certain cultural clique. Like any courtliness, it aims at forming tastes rather than intellectual habits.

There is nothing wrong with being courtly - courtiers are often pleasant company, after all. Corteisie gives its devotees a stake in culture and its preservation, and can indeed be extraordinarily productive of literature and art (yes, Malory and Woody Allen do have something in common).

This post has been delayed because every few days brings a new piece on the crisis of the humanities. William Dersiewicz and Harry Lewis discuss the former's book at the Chronicle; No-Foie-Gras Kristof meditates on the deep and profound effects of his meaningful engagement with contemporary humanists - people in fact are different, and don't be mean to animals - in the Times; and the liberal arts college is being disrupted by yet another dull pedagogical technological innovation in the Atlantic - the answer (spoiler alert) is a proprietary seminar software. This all speaks to an identity crisis - an identity crisis I would argue that results precisely from the incoherence of any notion of what the liberal arts education is for.

Studying medieval history may indeed lead to a successful career in tech and a less successful career in politics. Chattering abounds in anecdotal evidence of success in business following a liberal arts degree - while at the same time, there is still insistence that the purpose of the liberal arts is not job training. Left defenses of the liberal arts have been notoriously weak (as Dersiewicz points out), but there is something comic when they claim that the partially genuine right wing attack on the liberal arts is a nefarious plot aimed at functional disenfranchisement. Both left and right seem to agree: liberal education is the education of a free citizen to participate in self-government. And yet this is just servility sneaking in the back door - it's still as technocratic as arguing that the liberal arts form critical thinking skills which allows one to flourish in a rapidly-changing economy.

Maybe true, maybe false - but in either case irrelevant. Both of these fall victim to the law of incidental benefits: certain goods can only be achieved when they are obtained as a corrollary to an actual goal. As Robert Putnam showed us, the real good of bowling leagues may have been the cohesiveness and community - that is, the social capital - they fostered, but that benefit was only achieved when people were focused on the more prosaic goal of bowling together. Good citizenship and critical thinking skills are often valuable results of a liberal arts education; but they can only be by-products. Make them the goal and you will fail. If you want students to learn to think critically, force them to think about the justice of the city of the Republic, or the conjugation of a -mi verb, or the metrics of Catullus, or the syntax of Thucydides, for that matter, or even the forms of the syllogism - Barbara, Celarent, and on - or the propositions of Euclid, or Ptolemaic cosmology. Somehow, at the end of it, you will have students emerging with a headful of profoundly use-less knowledge, who somehow manage to have the skills of critical thinking.

But if the benefits of liberal arts education are solely incidental, we need to have a reason to pursue them. And that precisely is the question at hand, and that is precisely what modern apologists of the humanities have failed to articulate. Because deep down most humanists know the answer, and they are afraid to say it aloud: the purpose of the liberal arts is to manufacture, from the raw material of the philistine, vulgar, bigoted, and callow, people just like themselves.

And that is just courtliness, in another guise - not the courtliness of Cicero or Martianus, nor the courtliness of Malory, nor of Castiglione, but courtliness all the same.

The Humanities Are Relevant . . .

because they have taught me not to eat foie gras.

So Nicholas Kristoff in the Times. If you need any further proof that the real purpose of contemporary liberal arts education is nothing more than courtliness, look no further than this article.

With friends like these, what need could we possibly have of enemies?

Body and Soul, from Lady Gaga to Katy Perry & Ariana Grande

Lady Gaga's 2013 hit "Do What U Want" gives carte blanche to her lover. But Lady Gaga makes a distinction not always drawn out in contemporary pop—at least not in the same way.

"Do What U Want" draws a line between the sexual and romantic use of Lady Gaga's body and access to her soul. "So do what you want / What you want with my body" may be the song's continuous refrain, but Gaga's verses distance her from the body.

"You can't have my heart / And you won't use my mind but / Do what you want (with my body) . . . / You can't stop my voice cause / You don't own my life but / Do what you want (with my body) . . ."

R. Kelly, Lady Gaga's interlocutor in the dialogue, scarcely picks up on the significance of Gaga's declaration. He's more than happy to oblige her request—to "do what I want / Do what I want with your body." He doesn't even express frustration at lacking access to Gaga's heart, still less to her mind.

Gaga's lyrics bring together the stereotype of modern romance—R. Kelly's flat dream to be "Back of the club, taking shots, getting naughty"—and a complete rejection of the faux eroticism of modern romance. We shouldn't expect any less from the composer of "Bad Romance"—the only modern romantic anthem to accept that licentiousness brings consequences which cannot be shunted aside.

Gaga stages her rejection of modern romance with an indication of her awareness of the philosophical problem at stake. "Yeah / Turn the mic up," says R. Kelly or someone in the background—Gaga's points might go by silently otherwise. "I feel good, I walk alone / But then I trip over myself and I fall / I, I stand up, and then I'm okay / But then you print some shit / That makes me wanna scream." Gaga replaces the fall of Thales with a self-caused stumble. She wasn't unaware of the human things as Thales was. Rather, she was all too aware, and the song expresses her philosophical awakening.

Her libertinism masks her scorn for the body. She is a Platonist after all.

Or rather Gaga suggests that ordinary romance, the love-songs of Katy Perry or Ariana Grande, suffers from a kind of twisted Platonism. Looking down on the body doesn't necessarily lead to asceticism. You can disregard the body by valuing the soul, or you can extract whatever you can from the body for the time being.

Katy Perry's "Dark Horse"—a sophomoric commentary on the Chariot allegory of Plato's Phaedrus—is the critical parallel of "Do What U Want" in almost every way. Instead of R. Kelly, Katy Perry dialogues with Juicy J. But instead of giving him carte blanche as Lady Gaga does (while retaining the most sacred things), she insists that Juicy J "make me your one and only / But don't make me your enemy, your enemy, your enemy." It's either one or the other for Katy Perry—"It's a yes or no," she says, "no maybe."

But what is the "all" that Perry demands her interlocutor give? She is, after all, the dark horse of the irrational appetites. So the "all" she wants isn't the hylomorphism of body and soul. It's body alone that she wants. She happens to think that's all there is.

Only Ariana Grande, still early in her philosophical development, has begun to explore the same tension identified by Gaga. She, too, explores the body and soul in dialogue with a contemporary rapper (in this case, Iggy Azalea) in her song "Problem."

While putatively a reversal of Jay-Z's "99 Problems," Ariana Grande's "Problem" is quite different. It's not only, as the song says, that she realizes she's got "one less problem without ya" (a refrain spoken by her now-lover Big Sean). When Iggy Azalea draws out the implications of Ariana's thesis, she says "Iggy Iggy / To biggie to be here stressin' / I'm thinkin' I love the thought of you / More than I love your presence / And the best thing now / Is probably for you to exit."

"Problem" is then no mere celebration of reclaiming the power of separation and flaunting its use. It's the precise frustration laid out by Gaga, the tension between body ("your presence") and soul ("the thought of you").

The insights aren't Ariana's but Iggy's, however. "Head in the clouds," says Ariana Grande, "Got no weight on my shoulders / I should be wiser / And realize that I've got (I've got) . . ."

If like Gaga's Thales Miss Grande retrieves her head from the clouds, she might discover the problem of body and soul, and the pseudo-Platonism, the "angelism," the disembodied body-exploitation of the age.

"Tacticool" Cops and Assault Weapons Bans

Alan Jacobs over at The New Atlantis has some brief but insightful comments about the ways in which our militarized police ape the aesthetics of first-person shooter video games:

 I want to suggest that there may be a strong connection between the visual style of video games and the visual style of American police forces — the "warrior cops” that Radley Balko has written (chillingly) about. Note how in Ferguson, Missouri, cops’ dress, equipment, and behavior are often totally inappropriate to their circumstances — but visually a close match for many of the Call of Duty games. Consider all the forest-colored camouflage, for instance:

AP/Jeff Roberson

It’s a color scheme that is completely useless on city streets — and indeed in any other environment in which any of these cops will ever work. This isn’t self-protection; it’s cosplay.

Read the whole thing.

The militarization of our police is something that should be of concern to all citizens.  But the tendency toward over-militarization of weaponry, the emphasis on martial-video-game aesthetics over function is not simply a police phenomenon, but is also widespread in American civilian gun culture.  Indeed, gun aficionados have even coined a (usually disparaging) portmanteau for it: "tacticool."

The phenomenon was once small-scale and after-market: once, the would-be tacticool operator had to purchase a plain old rifle and then do his best to modify it until it looked something like this:

But it seems to have become much more common over the past couple decades, with gunmakers manufacturing elaborately tricked-out versions of their own weapons for the wannabe-militarist weapons consumer.  And for a variety of reasons - the influence of video games and other media; a kind of "arms race" with a feared government or militarized police; the sheer desire for bigger, better toys; etc. - a certain segment of civilian gun owners in America loves this stuff. Which is, on the whole, not a major problem: this is mostly a "boys with toys" phenomenon, and virtually all of these gun owners use their weapons recreationally without harming anyone.

I'd like to take this opportunity to revisit a somewhat dated discussion.  Just a couple of months ago (millennia in news cycles, now all but forgotten) we were having yet another debate about banning "assault weapons" in the wake of yet another mass shooting.

The debate about assault weapons is pretty well scripted by this point.  For a mix of reasons the left perennially proposes an assault weapons ban as both a desirable policy option and as a potential solution to the problem of mass shootings.  The right in turn notes that the term is a legal fiction, and there is vanishingly little evidence that assault weapons as a category are necessary for mass shootings or in any way make them more likely.  They then usually go on to make laughable counterproposals (e.g., armed guards in every school) and openly carry rifles to Target and Starbucks to prove a point.

On the question of “assault weapons,” I think that the criticisms of the category are clearly right.  The definition has virtually nothing to do with the functioning of a weapon, and has almost everything to do with cosmetic, military-seeming features.  Indeed, it seems that our political class is more interested in banning “tacticool” features of weapons than actual killing capacity.  And the motivations for the ban, while partially legitimate, seem also to arise from the cultural elite’s alienation from and scorn for gun culture, as well as from a cyncial desire to exploit a term that is poorly understood by both elite and commoner alike for political advantage.

(Seriously.  I have personally had at least three conversations in the past year with well-educated, media-literate progressive American academics who were surprised to learn that “assault rifles” were not fully automatic machine guns.  The plural of “anecdote” is not “data,” of course, but still....)

And yet.

Prof. Jacobs’ point about video-game reenactment makes me think about school shootings.  In the most notorious school shootings of the mid-20th century the perpetrators acted more as snipers or hunters: think of the 1966 University of Texas massacre, in which Charles Whitman fired on students from the observation deck of the university's Main Building, or the Cleveland Elementary shooting of 1979, in which Brenda Spencer fired on children from her home across the street.  But in recent years, the pattern of mass killings seems to have shifted, and the perpetrators behave much more like characters in a first-person shooter video game.

This is almost certainly the result of media influence.  Indeed, there is a disturbing way in which recent killers have acted out scenarios that previously existed in fictional form.  The similarities between the 1997 North Hollywood Shootout and the shootout scene from the 1995 film Heat. The possible influence of the classic first-person shooters Doom and Wolfenstein on the Columbine killers.  The way in which the recent Santa Barbara killings seemed to echo the wild, violent sprees of the Grand Theft Auto franchise.  (Even the way that the escalation of violence in the latter – beginning from killings with ad hoc and melee weapons in the perpetrator’s home, then moving on to firearms at a discrete other location, and finally sprawing into a townwide shooting spree – eerily echoes the escalation of weaponry common in the semi-tutorial stages with which many modern video games begin.)  I could go on providing examples, but it would serve no real point.  In no single instance is the connection beyond doubt, but the pattern seems clear.

What I am not doing here is “blaming video games” in the usual sense.  That is, I am not claiming that video games made these people violent, or even more violent.  The idea of media desensitization has some appeal to me, but the evidence seems to be mixed at best.  And I have no doubt that the perpetrators, disturbed individuals all, would have committed some act of violence even without watching movies and playing video games, even without access to “assault weapons” of some sort.  But media affect (/effect) our inner narratives, and that the kinds of media we consume seem to have shaped the violent fantasy scenarios which these individuals went on to enact.  Absent the first-person shooter, it is unlikely that the nature of our killings would be what it is.

In that light, I might be inclined to give the left the benefit of the doubt, and might suggest that there is one possible justification for some form of assault weapons ban, albeit not one that I have heard anyone on the left use.  Insofar as the cosmetic features of weapons seem to be a part of fully realizing the fantasy – you obviously want badass weapons like your character in the video game when you go on your killing spree – there may indeed be reason for regulating the cosmetic features of our weapons.  I wouldn’t necessarily support such a ban, any more than I would necessarily support a ban on first-person shooters, but I might be able to see a rationale for it.

The danger of “tacticool” weapons, then, may be that they make it too easy to blur the line between video-game fantasy and the real world, for the good and evil alike.  For a police officer, the inner impulse to protect and serve every citizen must be in tension at times with the impulse to maintain public order through violence.  At least, it seems to me that such a tension would exist in me, were I a police officer.  And the carrying of military equipment would make it more likely that I would act out scenarios after the manner of the latest Call of Duty game.  Likewise, for the violent or mentally ill, access to tactical weaponry resembling what they have used only in video-game form may make it psychologically easier for them to channel their violent impulses into acts that, while all too real, ape the virtual.