Humanities Past and Present

I am slightly wary of wading into what appears to be a multi-part series by Dracontius before he finishes, but I have a few initial thoughts in response.  In general, let me note in passing that I find the idea of a "new courtliness" intriguing, and would like to see it developed more.  In the meantime, here’s a partially congruent, slightly different, and probably not very novel interpretation of the historical development:

(1) The "vertical" liberal arts of the Middle Ages obviously had as their end philosophy & theology.  The seven liberal arts were divided in to the "language" arts of the Trivium and the "mathematical" arts of the Quadrivium, the latter being higher than the former.  Of the arts of the Trivium, logic seems to have been the dominant/highest, right?  This makes sense both in that it is the most "mathematical" of the language arts, and therefore naturally leads to the higher arts of the Quadrivium, and also because it was the best propaedeutic for scholastic theology.

(2) The Renaissance seems to be when grammar truly dethroned logic among the Trivium.  That is, grammar was always prominent, but in the Renaissance logic was seriously downplayed, and grammar played up, by the humanists. This seems to be when we really shift from seven liberal arts to two (or, if you prefer, 1 1/2: grammar + a rump of rhetoric).

There are two possible causes for this, it seems.

First, the rise of the "New Science."  The arts of the Quadrivium are, of course, the more scientific of the seven, and with the surpassing of ancient science by modern science, the traditional method of teaching them (that is, both traditional in the sense of customary method, but also in the sense of teaching traditional scientific knowledge via received ancient texts) was swiftly supplanted.  Hence, no one really argues for restoring geometry (even in the Classical and Medieval sense, in which it was closely related to geography) to a prominent place in the Liberal Arts curriculum.  Why bother, when the scientists cover all this stuff much better?  Thus, four of seven are removed.

More cynically, one might also note that the scientific arts are no longer truly "liberal" in that they are now largely married to a mechanistic view of both the universe and the human person....

Secondly, the dethroning of philosophy and theology as the ultimate goal of education resulted in the atrophy of logic and its ultimate replacement as the most important of the Trivium by grammar.

This is what "humanities" were: an education founded on grammar and, to a lesser extent, rhetoric that did not aim at the divine.  And this is why, as noted previously, the liberal arts of the Renaissance become "horizontal": because they were not designed to direct the mind upward toward God, but rather toward the Classics.

(3) The Renaissance humanists initially wanted to study the Classics in toto.  But this was not to last.  Instead, the supplanting of sacred texts with secular and pagan texts in the curriculum simply led to a new set of disputes about canonicity.  Just as the early Church fought about what should be included in the canon of Scripture (although, let us acknowledge, not nearly so much as Ehrmann, Pagels, et al.  would have us believe), so the new curriculum gave rise to an endless series of fights about what should be included in, what anathematized from the canon of the humanities.

This fight, despite what many current culture warriors would claim, is not something new.  The first stage, as already mentioned, was probably the dethronement of the Quadrivium and with it the ancient scientific and technical texts with the rise of the New Science.  The Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes thinned the canon further, as many texts which did not meet the aesthetic criteria of the Early Modern era were effectively dropped.  Romanticism saw some further works removed (and a few restored or newly emphasized).  Etc.  But the general trend over history was toward an ever-narrower set of ancient texts, which were judged mostly on the basis of contemporary aesthetic, political, and philosophical criteria.  So, works which fell in disfavored periods ("Silver Latin," "Hellenistic Greek") were mostly excluded, and some ancient works which were among the most important and influential from Antiquity through the Renaissance in Western Europe (say, Ovid's Metamorphoses or Statius' Thebaid and Achilleid) barely register on standard "Great Books" curricula of the 20th century.

Postmodernism upended much of this, for both better and worse.  Worse, in that it exploded the idea of canonicity in its entirety.  But better, perhaps, in that works which had been excluded from, or which held only a marginal place in the early 20th-century canon are receiving renewed attention.  (I realize that in this framing, I am suggesting that the situation of, say, Silius Italicus or Apollonius of Rhodes is parallel to that of the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas.)  In any event, the Canon Wars of the latter 20^th century were partially a new thing insofar as there was an attack on the very idea of canonicity, but partially a continuation of a pattern in that we were once again fighting about what might be included in a notional canon mostly on the basis of our own aesthetic and (mostly) political standards.

(4) Until we come to these times, in which we can endure neither our vices nor their remedies....

So, why have I rehashed all this (pretty conventional) history?  I want to make two suggestions.

a) Ultimately "humanities," as an historic curriculum and as an educational idea, is a wholly traditional: its aim, both in its Renaissance origin and in its attenuated High-Modern-Canon form, was to receive knowledge from the author(itie)s of the past.  This is why we are scrambling for new definitions, and have ended up at incoherence.  The progressives are trying to salvage the name of a system which they and their forebears have always really rejected.  I suppose if there was any subject which might have been considered the telos of the Renaissance humanities curriculum, anything which the humanists put in the place of theology, it would have been history.  But what is the point of truly learning from history if you are a techno-progressive and have already surpassed it?

Perhaps the most coherent thing for the progressives to do would be to opt for the third of the Trivium, and to emphasize not the logic of the scholastics nor the grammar of the humanists, but rhetoric as their main curriculum.  If language has no fixed meaning, but is all about asserting power (as we learn from both the post-structuralists and from those who currently wish to use state power to redefine terms of cultural significance), then the key art for the ruling class to know should be rhetoric.  And we do see some small moves in that direction, both in terms of a new emphasis on rhetoric in the humanities and in the growth of jobs that might be considered “rhetorical” in a broad sense.  But the moment for rhetoric may have already passed.  Even this might be overly liberal, in the classical sense, for our data-driven times.  For if optimal policy outcomes are reached not by persuasion but by technocratic nudging, why bother even with rhetoric?  The unapologetic technologists (both conservative and liberal) have basically seen this and are mostly urging use to abandon the humanities, philosophy, and college as a whole, or even trying to replace the humanities outright with modern science, but then still somehow dub what they are doing “Humanities.”  In response, the internet is littered with defenses of the use of the humanities (I provide a few easily-Googled examples for all of this, but this exercise could easily be repeated almost ad infinitum), but we should be honest about our situation.  The liberal arts, as definitionally non-servile, will always lose a utility-maximization argument.  And, while I appreciate the defense of the humanities coming from many quarters of the left, the “progressive humanities” as a project have always been somewhat unnatural and incoherent as a development of the historical humanities curriculum.  And they are in serious trouble.

b) Cultural conservatives, and Christian conservatives in particular, should be far warier of the historical humanities curriculum and of the Great Books than they typically are.  In the first place, the canon has always been defined to some degree on the basis of contemporary aesthetic and political criteria.  So defending the canon as it existed in the postwar era is something we should do only if we accept the cultural and aesthetic beliefs that underpinned the postwar West.  1950s nostalgia is a powerful force on the American right (and left!), and there is something to be said for it.  But the era from 1945-1962, while admirable in many ways, was hardly the best of all possible worlds, and we should be wary of adopting its canon before examining the presuppositions which generated that canon.  (At the very least, we should question its aesthetic judgment.)

On the Christian side, it should be noted that this is a system which, ultimately, does not aim at the study of the divine and which enthroned a secular canon to serve as focus of study and cultural authority in place of the canon of scripture.  This is not to say that the two cannot be reconciled; certainly, the Church Fathers managed to do so.  But the standard list of Great Books as it existed in the 20^th century deliberately downplayed Medieval and Christian texts.  And Christianity and the Western Canon as it has come down to us have a more fractious relationship, and their reconciliation would be a more complicated process, than is usually acknowledged.

Nobody Really Cares About the Liberal Arts: Part 1

The 'humanities' is a problematic term . . .

Since we don't know what the humanities are, it is natural to suggest in their place the hallowed and venerable liberal arts.

The arts are seven in number, as every schoolboy used to know, comprising the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic and the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Nitpickers love to point out the arbitrary selection - famously the Roman polymath Varro seems to have included medicine and architecture to bring the total to nine. This canon had no discernible effect, beyond giving ammunition to bores and pedants from the time of our Vandal Renaissance man Martianus Capella to the present. The fact is that these seven arts were always privileged, and given the status of the number seven in Pythagorean and broader Hellenistic culture, we were probably foreordained to have seven, a three and a four.

These liberal arts form the basis of most forms of western education from the Roman through to the twentieth century, although often considered merely propaedeutic. The Romans thought that the other arts were propaedeutic to rhetoric, and rhetoric ultimately to statesmanship and law; the medievals, like Hugh of St. Victor, thought of the liberal arts as propaedeutic to the sacra pagina. 

We can imagine the liberal arts both vertically and horizontally.

The horizontal model is perhaps the older one - it is this model that informs Martianus' De nuptiis, or On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury, perhaps the greatest of all works which fewer than three dozen people in the world have read since the year 1992. Mercury, Profitable Seeking, as it were, wants to get married - but all the best catches are already taken. Fortunately, he gets his fourth choice, the maiden Philology - who has seven handmaids, who hymn the bridal couple on the way to their marriage bed, that is, the seven liberal arts. If the seven arts lead anywhere for Martianus, they lead to consummation of the union of Profitable Seeking and Love of Language. Jupiter is rather eager for their children, but there is no notion of what their children might be. The conclusion is probably something like a late-Roman version of courtliness - quickness combined with learning leads to certain type of cultivation appropriate to a gentleman. With reason did C. S. Lewis observe that the cosmos "which has produced the bee-orchid and the giraffe" has brought forth "nothing stranger than Martianus Capella."

To find the vertical arts, we need to turn to the Middle Ages. One could point to the most famous example, Alan of Lille's Anticlaudianus, which in so many ways should be considered instead an Antimartianus, but I find Alan's turgid mannerism tiresome. A better example is the De exilio animae et patria, 'On the Soul's Exile and Homeland,' ascribed to Honorius Augustodunensis, which depicts a journey through seven cities, each commanded by a great authority, the City of Grammar commanded by Donatus, et cetera. The end of the journey, the homeland, is the study of sacred scripture itself. That precise allegory can be found visually, for example, in Biagio d'Antonio da Firenze's (15c) allegorical painting, now in the Musée Condé in Chantilly.


source

D'Antonio was coming at the end of an era. I happened to come across this example of a wedding chest (in true Martianian fashion) in a museum in Birmingham, Alabama, ascribed to workshop of Francesco Pesellino, a slightly younger contemporary of D'Antonio:

source

In terms of their figural components, these two depictions are exactly the same: both depict the virginal Ars with its corresponding master, Tubalcain for Music, for example, or Donatus for grammar. The difference is that they are all in row in Peselli's- if any interpretation of progression is possible, the centrality of Astrologia provides it, who alone gestures upwards, and who can seeming be reached either through the trivium or the other three arts of the quadrivium.

So the Renaissance returns to the horizontal conception of the arts. If they aim at anything, it is anchored in a totalizing conception of antiquity, an antiquity worth recovering for its sake, and which serves actively as a model for contemporary life. Succeeding generations survived only on the fumes of this enthusiasm - occasionally, perhaps, one needed to defend why Latin verse composition should take up so many waking hours of a twelve-year old boy's life, but in general no apology was needed. The arts were taught because that's what education was for. Someone might go on to the higher studies of divinity, or the lower studies of law - but neither were considered a determinative final cause for the study of the liberal arts.

At the same time, the arts narrowed. The delicate balance of the other six maidens was always in danger of being overwhelmed by the overwhelming height and girth of Donatus' mistress, the maiden Grammar. Grammar, broadly understood to include the study of literature, one by one dispatched the other arts of the quadrivium, reducing them to dilettante pursuits, suitable for airy old vicars and eccentrics, and perhaps the occasional specialists, but only necessary for the young in very, very small doses. The trivium fared better, and rhetoric held out the longest, given its connection with political and civic life.

Such are the conditions under which the modern (American) liberal arts college - which from its beginning, was really little more than a liberal art college, with its various faculty mostly specializing in one branch of grammar or another-English literature, ancient languages, modern languages and literatures, criticism, even composition, wrenched from the dying grasp of rhetoric, all branches of grammar traditionally understood. Oddly, history was its only serious competitor, even though venerable antiquity did not consider it a liberal discipline at all.

Certainly, they would have the odd math or science requirement, maybe a little fine arts, maybe even a stiffening of servile disciplines - but in no sense did they expect their graduates to really be masters of anything but Grammar.

It is no surprise then that the liberal arts colleges don't teach the liberal arts in their entirety, and certainly do not ensure that their bachelors are firmly grounded in all seven. Even laudable developments, like the slow spread of Great Books programs, accomplish little more than cementing the absolute dominance and centrality of Grammar in liberal arts education.

So if the liberal arts colleges don't really care about the liberal arts, does anybody? Will any one of the liberal arts' staunch defenders seriously maintain that these seven arts alone should serve a unique role in the formation of character? Will anyone propose a new verticality for our scattered and neglected arts?

Nothing has really changed since the Vandal Renaissance. If our liberal arts colleges aim at anything, it is once again a certain curious specimen of courtliness - an ability to listen to NPR and nod intelligently along, to become suitably breathless at the latest novel every one is talking about, and excited about what new device Apple will come out with next, a musical taste refined enough to appreciate the occasional underappreciated classic like Telemann and to sneer at Pachelbel's Canon, tapping one's foot assiduously to the latest folk-rock crossover album to come out of Sweden. Maybe even enough culture to whip out a smartphone on a starry night, to get those old constellations highlighted in red.

That is our courtliness - and for better or worse, it's the best our liberal arts education has to offer.

We Don't Know What the Humanities Are - Is That A Problem?

The identity crisis of the humanities has been long fretted over, as a special commission at Harvard did just over a year ago. What is the role of the humane disciplines in a changing world? How do we maintain our relevance in an environment of skyrocketing tuition? Should students major in the humanities or in something more immediately technical and lucrative? What is the value added of a humanities education? blah blah blah.

There is an unmistakable hollowness to these questions - in essence, they all seem to boil down to 'I was lied to, but it turned out alright - is it ok for me to lie to students and deans, and hope for the best?' The fact is that most humanities scholars really, truly have no idea what the humanities are. They know what their own discipline is, and they generally know which departments or faculties are contained in a humanities division. But knowing the accidental collocation of a number of disciplines in one administrative unit will never lead one, in Platonic fashion, to any notion of the idea of the humanities.

Take for example this pithy summary of that 2013 report by Diane Sorensen, the head of Harvard's humanities division:

The Arts and Humanities are the realms in and through which we define values, form relationships, express our thoughts, feel, imagine, process, and create.

Actually - with the possible exception of defining values - this is a description of the arts, not the humanities. Compare that with the notion of Rens Bod, in his recent book A New History of the Humanities - a glance at his subtitle will show you what he thinks of his subject: The Search For Principles and Patterns From Antiquity to the Present. Bod begins with a pragmatic definition of the humanities - one more intellectually honest than that of the Harvard report, though just as useless and unhelpful - the humanities are the disciplines studied in contemporary humanities divisions. Hence, since many European unviersities have separate schools of theology and philosophy, neither count as part of the humanities, nor of course would the fine arts be included. In short, everything Diana Sorensen imagines as the essence of the humanities - which is almost explicitly reduced to art and philosophy in the 2013 report - Bod excludes prima facie from the discussion.

Bod's humanities include, I jest not, "linguistics, musicology, philology, literary studies, theatre studies, historical studies (including art history and archaeology), as well as more recent fields such as film studies and media studies." Note again the perfect mirror image of the Harvard report - that report emphasizes the primary function of the humanities, that is, as creative of value, meaning, relationships, things; Bod's humanities are exclusively secondary - if the sciences study the world, the humanities study human constructs and creations. And in that narrow field, what Bod's humanities really accomplish is just finding, identifying, and classifying patterns - every humanist is really Pythagoras, snooping with their ear at the door of the blacksmith's shop, hoping to catch some regularity which can be qualified, defined, and made into a rule. And if that's the case - what would be the master discipline of the humanities, the purest representative? Linguistics, obviously! All humanists really just wish they were linguists, particulary say, computational linguists - such as, for example, Professor Bod himself.

There is little point engaging in casuistry or point-by-point comparison and critique of these two definitions -  all I would suggest is that these two opposite descriptions by eminent scholars and institutions respected the world over suggests an incoherence that reaches to the very heart of the modern humanities.

Students are told all sorts of things about why to study the humanities - and many of them, as William Dersiewicz pointed out in a recent jeremiad really boil down to technocratic qualifications:

Elite schools like to boast that they teach their students how to think, but all they mean is that they train them in the analytic and rhetorical skills that are necessary for success in business and the professions. Everything is technocratic—the development of expertise—and everything is ultimately justified in technocratic terms.

But I don't think that I would blame students for wanting to know what good the sophists soliciting their attentions have on offer. If you tell them, 'Well, it's all about the search for patterns, you know - linguistics, media studies, you name it,' you probably won't see stunning enrolment numbers. Then again, if you tell them that they are going to 'define values, feel, imagine, process, and create,' you undoubtedly will catch a few fish, though not I would guess the best specimens. Neither of those descriptions seems likely to convince your dean, newly hired from the University of Phoenix, not to cut a line or two from your department.

 What about the liberal arts? Can't we just go back to the trivium and quadrivium? That's a question for another day.

The Inevitable Tedium of 'Disruption'

It has been nearly seventeen years since Clayton Christensen's doctoral thesis was published as The Innovator's Dilemma. Yet his book ranks hegemonically, consistently among the most important business books published in the last generation. And yet he sits upon the cover of the Harvard Magazine this summer, as though the business of disruption were just getting off the ground.

The innovator's dilemma, according to Christensen, is that success breeds failure. Invent a widget, find (or invent) your market, and you're golden . . . till you're not. Disrupt everything.

It would be easy at this point just to cite Judith Shulevitz's essay "Don't You Dare Say 'Disruptive,'" and be done with it. Jill Lepore diagnosed the problem as well.

The "Innovator's Dilemma" brand, ironically enough, has continued to chug along without much alteration at all. The prescription is disruption, and disruption is the prescription.

Indeed, innovation is evidently the only business model that doesn't actually need changing. After the smash success of The Innovator's Dilemma in 1997 (which itself recycled the author's 1992 dissertation), 1999 brought Innovation and the General Manager, 2000 brought Disruption, Disintegration, and the Dissipation of Differentiability.

The new millennium stuck to the same script: 2001's Getting the Innovation Job Done: Matching the Right New Product with the Right Market, 2003 The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth, 2009 The Innovator’s Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care, 2011 The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out.

If changing the university's DNA isn't good enough, Christensen also coauthored the protoeugenic The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators.

Let's not forget 2013's The Power of Everyday Missionaries: The What and How of Sharing the Gospel. Nothing breeds faith like success.

Over time the gospel of innovation has grown tiresome, and this summer's Harvard Magazine presents Christensen, dressed in the traditional garb of the modern businessman, alongside the title "Disruption Rules."

Disruption means innovation that actually screws stuff up.

One suspects it won't be long till "disruption" loses its luster, whereupon the disruptors will have a chance to corral another innocent English word into their machines of creative destruction.

Indeed, disruption is now a registered trademark of the brand management consulting firm TWBA.

And that will, in turn, create a business opportunity for rehashing all Christensen's earlier ideas under the new label. We can't be too surprised that the innovations of innovation keep making the same people rich.

Though the book titles all speak for themselves, Disruption, Disintegration, and the Dissipation of Differentiability carries particular weight. It sounds . . . unsettlingly postmodern, like the effort of an early-'90s lit crit graduate student writing a prospectus, title in hand, stabbing in the dark, hoping to make collateral damage out of some book minding its own business.

The dissipation of differentiability? Is that a commentary on Jean-François Lyotard's Le différend (1983)? Or does the emphasis on dissipation recall Deleuze's theory of the rhizome?

The point is reminiscent of the pro-disruption web site disruptive-thinking.com, whose (unoriginal) motto is "Think the Unthinkable to Spark Transformation in Your Business." Oh? Think the unthinkable? Kind of like Thinking the Impossible?

Well, since the Sixties counterculture was at the root of postmodern theory, and since computer technology is the main locus of modern innovation, I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that the former shaped the latter. So much for the counterculture if it led nowhere but Silicon Valley.

And about those irrational postmodernists . . . if they were trying to diagnose the conditions of late-modern capitalism, and if late-modern capitalism keeps naively churning up the same themes—the unknown, the impossible, the unpresentable, differentiability, disruption—might it not be time to return to the maligned postmodernists for a diagnosis of our condition?

Today's disruptors are hardly better than the Vandals of yesteryear. Then as now, the only alternative to disruption is renaissance—a return among those who know, no matter whether the return goes unknown.

Google and the New Eugenics

Google recently unveiled details of its new project Baseline, intended to contr. . . —excuse me, map all aspects of human biological activity. (Who could object to mapping?) The goal is to find biomarkers indicating susceptibility to disease at a much earlier stage.

“Never mind us. We're just here mappin' your biomarkers. #don'tbeevil”

Naturally the main privacy concern being articulated is whether Google will know too much—or whether our future employers or spouses will pull our biomarkers, not just our credit reports. The objections to such a project pale, Google will assure us, in comparison to the benefits that will come from increased risk assessment and practical ability to control our future health.

But what about the project itself?

"The information," according to the Wall Street Journal, "will include participants' entire genomes, their parents' genetic history as well as information on how they metabolize food, nutrients and drugs, how fast their hearts beat under stress and how chemical reactions change the behavior of their genes."

Some MDs have been panning Google's new "moonshot". Baseline will begin with fewer than an hundred volunteers—hardly a large sample. Baseline's director is more commonly known as the owner of a ridiculous health spa in California, where wealthy patients can track their health in myriad exorbitant ways.
Criticism of Google is fun to watch, but when the substance of the objection is (1) "not enough people" and (2) "insufficiently clear goals" then perhaps we should abide by the adage: stick with the psychotic tech company you've got. Watch what you wish for, O scientists!

The direction this will go is evident in sports:

With some help from Zebra Technologies' location system, 17 NFL stadiums will use receivers and RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags inside player's shoulder pads to track movement. The setup provides real-time position data for each player, offering up precise info on acceleration, speed, routes and distance as part of the "Next Gen Stats" initiative for fans. . . . "Zebra's tracking technology will help teams to evolve training, scouting and evaluation through increased knowledge of player performance, as well as provide ways for our teams and partners to enhance the fan experience," says NFL VP of Media Strategy Vishal Shah.

Talk about having a chip on your shoulder . . .

So why not combine the two projects? Recruit NFL teams for Google Baseline. Chip 'em and chip 'em good—Googlestyle, with a little glucose monitoring here, some DNA sequencing there, and round-the-clock monitoring of every move you make.

(C) GoogleNFL 2014

Knowledge of what our players do on the field isn't enough. We need to know what they're eating and what they're thinking all the time. Aren't they, after all, the Platonic guardians of the empty soul of our society? They shouldn't really have privacy, should they?

The tendency thus points in two directions:

1. a protoeugenic desire to manage all aspects of human biological expression relative to the pursuit of some goal; &
2. an application of early contemporary tracking technologies to those in public life, with the details to be available to every viewer at any time.

There's only one tendency missing from the above list: the tendency of statistical knowledge to make the enjoyment of ordinary life impossible.

Google, to recall where we began, has stated that their inquiry is simply pathological, to study the origins of disease. Yes, yes, . . . it's pathological indeed.

The Remedial High School with the Research Centre Out Back

There is an adage about the manufacturing of bicycles: they can be cheap, they can be strong, or they can be light, but one bike can only ever be two out of three. You can get a strong and light bike, but it won't be cheap; you can get a cheap and light bike, but it won't be strong; and you can get a cheap and strong bike, but it won't be light.

This adage is capable of any number of analogous formations on any number of subjects. One permutation I think can shed considerable light on current debates about the availability and price of higher education.

University education can be cheap, rigorous, or widely-available; but it can ever only achieve two out of three.

If education is cheap and rigorous, it will not be widely available. This is the older model of higher education, which still prevails in some parts of Europe. On this theory, the cultivation of the most talented youth in society in the arts and sciences is a public good and worthy of public support. Therefore, it comes with a considerable amount of state funding and involves a minimal amount of accrued student debt. On the other side, however, it will only ever be available to a few. Entrance standards have to be high, and, unless you come from a patrician family, you would only ever have a shot at getting in if you were exceptionally talented.

If education is cheap and widely-available, it will not be rigorous. If the funding model of a institution, public or private, for-profit or not, big or small, is dependent for the very existence of the institution, on a steady year-by-year stream of reliable tuition fees, that will necessarily affect academic standards. What store would fail out its customers?

If education is widely-available and rigorous, it will not be cheap. This describe the current American regime of higher education at its best. Many colleges and universities have ridiculously luxurious student-faculty ratios of 15-1 or better. At many institutions, a decently motivated student really can have it all - one-on-one attention from faculty, comfortable surroundings, with resort-like amenities, a whole cadre of para-academic centres and administrators to help with everything from study abroad, to writing, to study habits, to conflict resolution. The need to bolster enrollments means that most students with a drive to attend college (and, in some cases, appropriate assistance at the high school level) can get in somewhere at a four-year institution. The amount of debt they will emerge with is exactly what one might expect from such a situation as this. A crippling usurious burden, almost heavy enough to outweigh whatever social or financial advantages a Bachelor of Arts or Science might expect.

The problem with most analyses of the student debt crisis and the intellectual decline of the American undergraduate is that they assume there is some way to have all three: a rigorous, cheap education available to all. It's not going to happen, and indeed, it cannot happen. There is a tacit assumption of the left and centre-left that somehow additional state support can fill in the gaps, and make universal university education affordable while maintaining standards. If you want to see what widely-available and free education looks like, look no further than the American K-12 system - pockets of excellence surrounded by a vast expanse of filled with at best mediocre schools.

It is no accident that state support for the public university system in America declined precisely at the time that access began to be widened. There was a fundamental shift in the status of higher education in America, a shift that will only reach its conclusion (if ever) when college becomes the new high school, a cheap, universally available, and perhaps one day mandatory, educational experience, which leaves no discernible trace on the minds of many of those who undergo it.

If you really want state-supported universities, then we need to go back to tracking, and tracking from an early age -  a system of Gymnasia or grammar schools, where students, deemed through assessment at a young age to be of academic promise, are educated in a truly preparatory fashion for University. The education of these children (who will generally be lower or middle class, since the uppers will still send their children to private schools) could be considered a public good, worth the greater expense to the treasury, which nonetheless would still be trifling considering the small number of students.

Somehow, that's an idea I don't expect will catch on . . .

And if not, we are either stuck with ballooning tuition or else the further degradation of our academic institutions into monstrous research-centres-cum-remedial-high-schools.

The Return of Soviet Astrobiology

Soviet science has long been the object of scorn and derision among the Western scientific elite. No word communicates pseudoscience better than the accusation of "Lysenkoism." Lysenko's name alone functions as proof that the way we "do science" is decisively superior to a system that judges scientific theories by whether they're bourgeois or proletarian. Just mention his name, and you've singlehandedly disproven the notion of manmade climate change.

But Lysenko, who has returned to the scene in the science of epigenetics, isn't the only Soviet scientist winning his triumph over Western minds.

The Soviet astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev proposed a simple scale for measuring the scientific progress of civilizations. Kardashev wasn't evidently a proletarian theorist of the stripe of Lysenko: he didn't derive genetics from Marxist-Leninist doctrine. But his theories were part and parcel of Soviet science in a different way. They were part of Soviet social science or political science—an extension of the Soviet philosophy of history to a ranking of the future scientific development of civilization.

The Kardashev scale divides civilizations into types 1, 2, & 3. Type 1 civilizations produce and consume energy roughly at the high level of modern civilization. Earth as a whole would become type 1 when all countries successfully modernized. Type 2 civilizations harness all the energy available from their local star, while type 3 civilizations harness all the energy available in their local galaxy.

Enter Michio Kaku. Kaku has speculated that human civilization will become type 1 within the next hundred or two hundred years, type 2 within the next thousand, and type 3 within the next hundred thousand years. Kaku's interpretation of Kardashev has now begun to draw the attention of transhumanists.

What better way to fuel your prophecy of technological development than a good old-fashioned philosophy of history?

Dream up what you want the future to be, and then punch out a sequential list of civilizational types. Voilà. It's science! And because you haven't said anything stupid about hard winter wheat, you'll never be called a Lysenko.

For just that reason, our own technoprophets are even worse than the recently rehabilitated Lysenko. Our ascent up the Kardashev scale depends on technology, technology comes from science, and you can't argue with that. Every advance in our energy productivity proves we're on the way up.

This development suggests a strange possibility. Lysenko's rehabilitation has come through epigenetics—the science of gene switching due to environmental (and thus also cultural) factors. "Grandma's Experiences Leave a Mark on Your Genes," says Discover Magazine. The iniquity of the fathers is visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, someone once said. So too their blessing.

What, then, are the epigenetic consequences of listening to the prophecies of today's technoprogressives?

By the time we can answer that question, the hour will be too late. We thought we were listening to the best minds of Western science, free from the pseudoscience which plagued Christianity and communism alike.

But the reality is that Michio Kaku and our technoprophets are nothing more than screevers, conjuring images of the future no better, and no more creative than spray-painted images gazed at by tourists.

Maybe it's not the images that intoxicate us, but instead the fumes.

Now that capitalism has begun to show its inner similarity to the dreams of communism, it's worth saying one thing on behalf of the communist system. At least it failed to achieve its goals.