One thing that determines if a person is an elitist in terms of life roles is whether or not he engages in useful work. And by useful, I am primarily talking about practical work. For instance, a welder, a plumber, a carpenter, a policeman and a fireman all do practical work. On the white-collar level, a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant, an architect and an engineer also all do practical work. And, of course, anyone who owns a business or works for one would fit into this category. Ideally, one should be able to immediately see and describe the practical benefits of the work they do.
Now there are some kinds of work that according to this way of thinking would be considered borderline practical. Being a school teacher up through high school is somewhat useful if also intangible, insofar as it supposedly makes people literate. This is considered necessary to help people to function properly as citizens of a modern technological society. Nevertheless, particularly for high school teachers of the humanities and the social sciences, it is difficult to clearly define any concrete practical benefits that may result from studying subjects in these areas.
At the beginning of this article, I mentioned that there was a profound change occurring in American attitudes towards the liberal arts. However, the change is one of degree rather than kind. Americans are becoming profoundly more anti-intellectual than they have ever been before the introduction of modern consumer technology. And this attitude is manifesting itself in the cutting of funding for liberal arts programs in colleges and universities. The emphasis now is going to be on majors that can get people solid paying jobs after graduation or that can lead to solid paying jobs after further studies in graduate school. There is no longer any pretense of having students become well-rounded people in order to become solid knowledgeable citizens in American society. Anyway, people need to have well-paying jobs in order to pay back the student debt that they accumulate, now that colleges and universities have become so expensive. Increasingly for students, it’s just not worth the cost to take a lot of liberal arts courses. And particularly since for many of these students, taking the required courses in liberal arts was an onerous burden anyway. Because of the anti-intellectual attitudes that they had acquired, it was a relief for them to be excused from what they considered to be fairly useless courses.
For those who, in spite of the cultural prejudices that they have encountered much of their lives, still love the liberal arts and would still like to major in one of the subjects included in them and maybe, just maybe, later find a job connected to one of them, the increasing lack of availability of liberal arts courses and liberal arts majors has to be a very difficult situation. Before, a person wanting to study majors in the humanities and the social sciences often had to contend with the negative attitudes of family members and friends for studying in such impractical areas. But, at least, he had the opportunity to pursue his studies without major structural difficulties in the curricula in the college or university that he was attending. Now it’s different. The liberal arts courses are disappearing.
So why is there such an emphasis all of a sudden on the practical and the useful in college majors and careers? One reason is that, because of right-wing changes in tax laws, there is less government money available for a safety net for people. So, when people finish their studies, they are, as it were, on their own. There is no welfare money anymore. So, their studies had better prepare them for a good job or else they will starve.
Perhaps this change in focus also relates to a remodeling of the way that people perceive the world on the most fundamental level. In a vacuum and tension-pocket living environment, people’s perceptions become geared to focusing on defined discrete entities that float through the vacuum, sometimes hitting against one another and sometimes not. In such an environment, there is little grounding and little of the floating blendable continual intangible organic stimuli that emanate from such grounding. Such stimuli correspond to the stimuli that come from the subject matter found in the humanities and the social sciences. But without a backdrop of such stimuli in one’s living environment, a person loses his capacity to properly absorb them, even though he needs them in order to survive.
Conservatives are people who have lost their capacity to absorb the organic stimuli of compassion and charity and therefore are too numb to feel any community obligation to help those who are less fortunate. This is what happens to many wealthy people who float in the experiential vacuum created by modern technological society. Their money has created lives for them that are excessively mediated and excessively frictionless.
As for today’s students, they adhere to the abrasive stimuli of more practical courses, because these stimuli are simply a reflection of the stimuli in the world that surrounds them, the stimuli with which they are familiar. Even though without the balancing influence of organic stimuli, certain problems can develop. A student uses the abrasive stimuli of more practical courses to pull himself out of the numbness created by the experiential vacuum which is his foundational base. But without some balance from the more organic courses in the liberal arts, a student can be simply worn down and dehumanized.