In school I devoted myself to math and physics and avoided history and English as much as I could. What no one told me then—and I didn’t discover until much later in life—is that the vocabulary we learn in math and science, while well suited to describing the physical world, is entirely incapable of introspection. The mind needs routine maintenance to ward off triviality and error. And there is no way to perform that maintenance without tools. What are the tools we need? Words. In particular, words that describe mental existence.
Once upon a time our universities offered an aristocratic form of education, in which the mind of a young student was seen not merely as a means, but as a significant and important end in itself. Occasionally a lucky student still receives such an education as an undergraduate, but in graduate school that’s all over. Graduate school doesn’t see the mind as an end in itself, only as a useful organ to be sacrificed for the greater good. In master’s programs, the aim is to train the mind to make a contribution to commerce; in doctoral programs, a contribution to knowledge. Ample time was allotted in my graduate program to give my mind the vocabulary it needed to precisely describe and control the trajectory of electrons. No time was allotted to give my mind the vocabulary it needed to describe and control its own trajectory.
Some philosophies attribute to the mind a desire to understand and express itself, not for any external purpose, but for its own sake. In these philosophies, the human mind is not an instrument. It is as an end in itself. Aside from a few shining exceptions like Emerson and Thoreau, these philosophies have never been particularly influential in America. Unfortunately for the world, the Pax Americana is driving them into oblivion everywhere.
Humanists are fond of lamenting the anti-intellectual tendency in American life. This, in my opinion, is not a sufficiently precise description of the problem. The master isn't anti-slave. He's all in favor of slaves, so long as they never imagine they are free. It's not that Americans are opposed to mind. We just want to make sure it doesn’t put on airs and imagine it’s an end in itself. It must know its proper place.
A rich vocabulary is the soil in which the mind grows. To exile a mind into an arid specialized vocabulary incapable of self-reflection is cruel. Philosophy, psychology and poetry are the nutrients a mind needs to flourish. To withhold nourishment from a mind capable of assimilating it is cruel.
Just as cattle are herded heedlessly to their deaths so we can have our beef, young minds are herded into graduate schools where they suffer a slow, painful intellectual disfigurement so we can have magnetic resonance imaging machines and cellular phones. And just as the gleaming metal corral leads the cattle happily along to death, scholarships and stock options led me happily along to my intellectual disfigurement.
Occasionally one of the cows figures out where the corral leads. But, lacking the vocabulary to describe the slaughterhouse, she can’t incite a riot. When our leaders have their way, when technical education entirely supplants the humanities, humans will lose the vocabulary we need to tell one another about the intellectual slaughterhouse we’re all being led to. Or, even if the humanities aren't completely eliminated, they may end up being lobotomized with their own technical vocabulary, so they too lose the capacity for intellectual self-examination and self-expression.
If democratic sentiment inspires us to give every human mind an aristocratic education that treats it as an end in itself, it is admirable. If democratic sentiment inspires us to abandon aristocratic education because it is “impractical” to give to everyone, and therefore must be given to no one, it is contemptible. Can we treat every human mind as an end in itself rather than a sacrificial cow to be disfigured for the greater good? I don’t know. But I know I will not sacrifice myself. I know I will not lead anyone else to sacrifice. What is practical depends, after all, on what one wants to practice.
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