This absence of literary culture is actually a marker of future blindness because it is usually accompanied by a denigration of history, a byproduct of unconditional neomania. Outside of the niche and isolated genre of science fiction, literature is about the past. We do not learn physics or biology from medieval textbooks, but we still read Homer, Plato, or the very modern Shakespeare. We cannot talk about sculpture without knowledge of the works of Phidias, Michelangelo, or the great Canova. These are in the past, not in the future. Just by setting foot into a museum, the aesthetically-minded person is connecting with the elders. Whether overtly or not, he will tend to acquire and respect historical knowledge, even if it is to reject it. And the past — properly handled — is a much better teacher about the properties of the future than the present. To understand the future, you do not need techno-autistic jargon, obsession with “killer apps,” these sort of things. You just need the following: some respect for the past, some curiosity about the historical record, a hunger for the wisdom of the elders, and a grasp of the notion of “heuristics,” these often unwritten rules of thumb that are so determining of survival. In other words, you will be forced to give weight to things that have been around, things that have survived.
Of course, at their best, universities and academic societies tend … train students and faculty alike in the art of giving credit, not the pseudo-art of accounting debts. We have unfortunately come to think of “philanthropy” as extrinsic to the work of the university, an absolutely essential activity that sustains the lives and vocations many of us pursue. However, that word should not be limited to fundraising, but ought, at least, to name what a university or school does at every level: all learning is philanthropy, and above all that of theology. If theology cannot teach this to its practitioners as well as to the other disciplines then the latter are pretty well hopeless in the long run. If the metaphor of “the queen of the sciences” is not taken in this sense—that is, as a benevolent dispenser and orderer of goods held in common—then it is a misapplied and abused metaphor. Theology is the queen of the arts and sciences if it shows what it means to give, if it teaches charity, if it elevates and perfects. But if the model of “queenship” is dictatorial, tyrannical, demagogic and possessive, then it is neither theology nor a true queen at all; it remains simply one more ideology at which universities have, of late, proven so proficient at reproducing ad infinitum.
RIP Oscar Niemeyer
But although my deceased father of happy memory, Grangousier, had bent his best endeavours to make me profit in all perfection and political knowledge, and that my labour and study was fully correspondent to, yea, went beyond his desire, nevertheless, as thou mayest well understand, the time then was not so proper and fit for learning as it is at present, neither had I plenty of such good masters as thou hast had. For that time was darksome, obscured with clouds of ignorance, and savouring a little of the infelicity and calamity of the Goths, who had, wherever they set footing, destroyed all good literature, which in my age hath by the divine goodness been restored unto its former light and dignity, and that with such amendment and increase of the knowledge, that now hardly should I be admitted unto the first form of the little grammar-schoolboys—I say, I, who in my youthful days was, and that justly, reputed the most learned of that age. Which I do not speak in vain boasting, although I might lawfully do it in writing unto thee—in verification whereof thou hast the authority of Marcus Tullius in his book of old age, and the sentence of Plutarch in the book entitled How a man may praise himself without envy—but to give thee an emulous encouragement to strive yet further.Now is it that the minds of men are qualified with all manner of discipline, and the old sciences revived which for many ages were extinct. Now it is that the learned languages are to their pristine purity restored, viz., Greek, without which a man may be ashamed to account himself a scholar, Hebrew, Arabic, Chaldaean, and Latin. Printing likewise is now in use, so elegant and so correct that better cannot be imagined, although it was found out but in my time by divine inspiration, as by a diabolical suggestion on the other side was the invention of ordnance. All the world is full of knowing men, of most learned schoolmasters, and vast libraries; and it appears to me as a truth, that neither in Plato’s time, nor Cicero’s, nor Papinian’s, there was ever such conveniency for studying as we see at this day there is. Nor must any adventure henceforward to come in public, or present himself in company, that hath not been pretty well polished in the shop of Minerva. I see robbers, hangmen, freebooters, tapsters, ostlers, and such like, of the very rubbish of the people, more learned now than the doctors and preachers were in my time.
If Harvard wishes to retain its primary existence as a gigantic profit-maximizing hedge fund, that is well and good, but meanwhile perhaps it should be required to provide a free top quality college education to a few thousand deserving students as a minor community service.
wwnorton:Before there was Pinterest or Mixel or any of the many online applications devoted to the art of virtual collage, Joseph Cornell was busy creating his own real assemblage works by hand. With snippets of magazines, pasted photographs and found objects, the fantastical universe of his imagination was realized in meticulously composed masterworks born out of everyday material.NYT review of JOSEPH CORNELL’S MANUAL OF MARVELS: How Joseph Cornell Reinvented a French Agricultural Manual to Create an American Masterpiece.Published by our friends at Thames and Hudson
Psychiatrists had a seat-of-the pants definition of a PD: “If your first impression of your patient is that he is an asshole, then he probably has a personality disorder.”And what kind of disorder was this anyway, an illness in which the identified patient thinks he personally is fine but is making everyone around him unhappy? This is not like psychosis.
You can see why the drafters of DSM-V, due this May, have despaired. They wanted something clinically relevant and that also would sound vaguely like science (which psychoanalysis certainly didn’t). It will be interesting to see how the APA sorts this out. Personality disorders exist not as natural phenomena but as cultural phenomena: We as a society need some way of identifying people who can’t quite get it all together. But is this an illness that psychiatrists can treat? In the way that they treat schizophrenia with Zyprexa and depression with Prozac? What do we, as a society in 2012, do with people who can’t quite get it all together? I’m asking you.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90TzDXjWTdo?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=250&h=187]
Oh yes. Oh very yes.
Books, I think, are dead. You cannot fight the zeitgeist and you cannot fight corporations. The genius of corporations is that they force you to make decisions about how you will live your life and then beguile you into thinking that it was all your choice. Compact discs are not superior to vinyl. E-readers are not superior to books. Lite beer is not the great leap forward. A society that replaces seven-tier wedding cakes with lo-fat cupcakes is a society that deserves to be put to the sword. But you can’t fight City Hall. I also believe that everything that happens to you as you grow older makes it easier to die, because the world you once lived in, and presumably loved, is gone. As I have said before, when Keith Richards goes, I’m going too. Same deal with books.
Elektroschutz in 132 Bildern (Electrical Protection in 132 Pictures) by Viennese physician Stefan Jellinek (1878-1968). (via 30 Ways to Die by Electrocution - Retronaut)