Adam Kotsko has just written a viral forum comment that I hope will blossom into a fuller essay and maybe more. You should read the whole thing, but here’s one of many indispensable snippets, in which Adam describes the enemies of higher education:
They do not need to be told of the benefits of a liberal arts education. They have often benefited from such an education themselves and are happy to provide it for their own children—including at elite Ivy League schools that do not even have the kind of vocational programs that they recommend so fervently for everyone else. They are well aware of the potential of liberal arts degrees to produce engaged and informed citizens who can navigate an ever-changing job market with confidence and creativity. That is precisely why they want to keep a true liberal arts education as a preserve of the elite, consigning everyone else to narrowly vocational paths that teach them how best to serve those above them in the social hierarchy.
Yep, that just about says it.
We need to stop pretending that “everyone” agrees it’s good for “everyone” to have access to a good education. If “we” believed that, we’d spend our time and resources doing our best to recreate models we know to a certainty can provide a good education, be they Oxbridge or the best American liberal arts colleges or your local state university in its pre-austerity heyday. The elite already know what a good education is. They secure it for their kids every day, mostly using methods that have been understood for generations. They also know that they don’t want you to have it.
I try not to descend into fiery polemic too much in a newsletter dedicated to “having fun,” but let me get po-faced for a second. Adam’s argument is directly relevant to an ongoing project dedicated to Calvin and Hobbes and Netflix shows. It might even be relevant to my upcoming magnum opus, 5,000 words about the true meaning of CSN’s Southern Cross (not really—but maybe really?). That’s because Adam is doing an all-too-rare thing: Articulating the stakes of a true education, whether acquired in a university or elsewhere.
To be critical, to be incisive, even to truly understand a stupid teen melodrama—that is, to be educated—is ultimately to be dangerous. If this sounds hyperbolic or romantic, consider Adam’s point about the non-existent salary gap between holders of vaunted STEM degrees and those who study the non-science liberal arts:
In the New York Times, for its part, researcher David Deming agrees: “The advantage for STEM . . . majors fades steadily after their first jobs, and by age 40 the earnings of people who majored in fields like social science or history have caught up.” The reason for this is clear: the narrowly technical skills that students learn in such fields quickly shift from cutting-edge to out-of-date, while the broader and more flexible skills conveyed by liberal arts fields prove more durably valuable.
The war on the study of the arts, humanities, and humanistic social sciences has nothing to do with what’s “practical” for students. The simple reality is that there are powerful people determined to make sure as few of us as possible acquire the tools of critique. Not because you’re going to overthrow the prevailing order the moment you grasp the deeper meaning of Tiger King, but because we’re ruled by interests that want to keep us as stupid as possible. Pushing back against those forces is always worthwhile.
We can’t solve too many problems by engaging with “arts and culture,” the ostensible subject of this newsletter. I can barely handle my own problems, let alone yours, or those of Our Society. But we can get a little smarter, and begin to set the terms of our own “entertainment” and “enjoyment” and “expression” beyond the impoverished, often nefarious bargain set by The Culture Industry. Adorno probably went overboard in trashing all mass culture, but he at least reminds us to be vigilant—to become and remain critics.
All of which is to say, you should get in the comments to tell me how much of a dullard I am.
Calvin and Hobbes Corner
As far as I can tell, this is the first appearance of Spaceman Spiff:
Plooie!!
Calvin loves to lose himself in fantasy—in this case, pulpy sci-fi. Right at the moment when his inward narrative climaxes, he’s brought back into contact with the mundane. Reality is the true invader in C+H, more menacing than any space alien.
The fantasies with which Calvin combats reality work best when Watterson has the room to immerse us within the same imaginative realm as Calvin. You can start to understand why one of Watterson’s hobby horses was the creative price of shrinking the space given to newspaper comics. This strip might still work if Watterson didn’t have a chance to cycle through all those shades of pink and purple, but it wouldn’t be as instantly arresting each time you go back to it.
Spaceman Spiff is a parody, but a loving one. Exactly how loving? One of the upsides of Bill Watterson’s retreat from public life after Calvin and Hobbes ended its run in 1996 is that he’s not sitting around tweeting about all the Asimov or Heinlein or whatever he read as a kid. Incredibly, almost uniquely for a commercial piece of narrative art with a very-much-alive creator, C+H lets us draw our own conclusions. This is one of the joys of going back to the strips: There’s not an entire industry built outward from them to garner #takes.
So you can decide for yourself how fond a young Watterson was of space pulp. My guess would be “very fond,” but all that matters in this installment of C+H is Calvin’s fondness—and Ms. Wormwood’s eternal displeasure.
Other fun things
— Brandy Jensen, the best advice columnist online or anywhere else, is back after the demise of The Outline (rest in power). Jezebel is now hosting her sublime series Ask A Fuck-Up. You should read it and maybe even write to her—but definitely read it
— Colette Shade is working on what promises to be a fascinating book about mental health and capitalism, and here she is in The Baffler touching on the conundrum of gratitude
— Today we’re covering this Peter Watts story from a decade ago on my podcast. If you like John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), you’ll probably enjoy Watts’ clever, cerebral inversion of the story. We did an interview with Watts a couple of months ago that’s probably my favorite episode of the pod thus far, if you’re so inclined
A poem
You can never go wrong with Larkin
(Stole this one from Ryan Boyd)
Going to an elite private liberal arts school was and still is so prohibitively expensive and somehow I cannot imagine navigating my career without it. I also know like 100 lawyers more than anyone would ever care to know in a lifetime. The sad thing is that I wish I had a trade. I still pay for my Spanish degree with minor in philosophy to this day. But they sure think I'm smart what with my fancy words and transitional phrases, so I can't complain.
Good stuff regarding educational/career hierarchies.
I've worked for about four years in post-graduate education and I fully subscribe to the David Graeber "Bullshit Jobs" theory that upper class white collar careers often act as institutional walls. Although I think it's a little less intentional than the keeping people stupid wavelength, and more towards the protectionist nature of upper-class finance.
The benefits of being atop the hierarchy are numerous, but one of the more under-discussed elements is how easy it is for people in the upper tranche to fail and not have real fallback on their well-being, whereas the lower you are, the more deadly losing a job obviously is. My experience is mostly in the MBA field so I can say with varying degrees of confidence that many of the people in the industries nominally attached to the degree are not really "difficult" jobs; they're jobs many can learn if given decent training. But they're good jobs, walled off with the credentialism you mention in the form of Ivy League degrees and networking advantages (which is why the school of choice is so important for wealthy people).