Education, the arts, metaphysics, and robber-barons – inspired by "I'll Take My Stand"
Here's another excerpt from Donald Davidson's essay, "A Mirror for Artists," in I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930), with my thoughts inspired thereby, following:
"Education can do comparatively little to aid the cause of the arts as long as it must turn out graduates into an industrialized society which demands specialists in vocational, technical, and scientific subjects. The humanities, which could reasonably be expected to foster the arts, have fought a losing battle since the issue between vocational and liberal education was raised in the nineteenth century...'
"The more they indoctrinate the student with their values, the more unhappy they will make him. For he will be spoiled for the industrial tasks [and the same could be said of technology, or the "service economy"] by being rendered inefficient. He will not fit in. The more refined and intelligent he becomes, the more surely he will see in the material world the lack of the image of nobility and beauty that the humanities inculcate in him."
Maybe this is the true reason that so many colleges and universities seem to be trying to re-envision themselves as glorified vocational schools! The proximate cause may be the (arguably laudable, on the face of it) desire by institutions of higher learning to make themselves more "relevant" and help their students get jobs with their diplomas.
But it may be that the ultimate cause is the desire of the puppeteers that pull the strings in so many aspects of society – the globalist, corporatist plutocrats, the vulture capitalists and profiteers, the robber-barons of the 21st century – to suppress aspirations toward the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, in favor of their (un)holy trinity of Production, Consumption, and Profit.
It certainly would suit those whose goal in life is to make money by selling "stuff" (whether goods or services) to promote the creation of a society of mindless drones who are numbed by the technological equivalent of "bread and circuses" into a passive existence where getting said "stuff" and being entertained (mostly electronically, which doesn't even require a person to leave the house) becomes the goal of an otherwise largely futile and nihilistic existence.
They certainly wouldn't want people to be seriously wrestling with questions like "what is the Good?" or "how do we reach it?" or "what is the proper end of a human being?" Or struggling with attempting to discern the meaning of Truth, or which volitional (self-willed) acts of a human being are ethically virtuous, and which are ethically vicious. Or even grappling with the characteristics of genuine Beauty, and the relationship between and among Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, the classical Three Transcendentals.
Best not to even admit that there might be such a thing as transcendence. Certainly under no circumstances should they be led down trails which might lead them to the consideration that there may be some sort of actual, objective Divine Reality, outside the constraints of our physical-sensory universe (although in significant ways immanent within it) – and especially not one which is personal, concerned with humanity, and which has both plans for, and expectations of, us humans!
Human beings concerned about such matters would be lousy consumers of "stuff," since they might begin to suspect that there may after all be higher aspirations which are, in the long run, more important...