The Inhumanities

Human nature finds a way

we love kyosai we love ukiyoe we love prints of frogs doing silly things and of people farting on each other

One of the ongoing debates in Economics Twitter, which has recently spilled over into the Argentine version, is whether the history of economic thought (abbreviated HET) is worth engaging with. The question is usually posed as why we should read Keynes, Smith, Hayek, or Marx, if we have NBER working papers and top five publications finding the same things, without the ideological baggage or the inaccurate parts. The answer is usually “well, because it’s important to understand the history of the discipline”, which reliedson presupposing the (lack of) value of economic history per se, which I think defeats the whole point of arguing - you’re just exposing past each other on things you believe and they don’t about those very things.

The other argument tries to bridge across values, by saying that yes, those books don’t have any interesting knowledge that isn’t on modern papers, but they’re still useful for two reasons: first, because it’s important to disprove the influence of those old books on political thinking of various kinds, particularly the crankish type. If you read Yanis Varoufakis’s Technofeudalism you might think the whole thing is stupid, as I did, but without understanding Marxist thought and Marxian economic history you cannot precisely argue for why it’s stupid. The other argument is that reading Old Books can produce new ideas or at least rediscover old ones: somewhat famously, 2023 Nobel Laureate Claudia Goldin borrowed most of her ideas from Friedrich Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (which she readily admits to) and, less famously, the Nobel-winning work of Daron Acemoglu and his two main coauthors is basically identical in its formulation to the work of Marxist “economist” (I’m not sure if he actually was one) Karl Kautsky.

So, the thinking goes, the old is like an abandoned Egyptian tomb, and we can be the prospectors that crack it open and plunder its riches. I have always thought the discussion was kind of weak, because the argument for HET has to be made admitting it’s completely useless, not acknowledging it has to be useful to justify itself. The question ought to be whether studying the history of economics produces insight that is otherwise lacking from contemporary statistical study, rather than whether it can provide new targets for the statistical methods. I think it does, for whatever it’s worth, but not very strongly.

The reason I bring this up is because it mirrors another ongoing debate in broader circles: what is the purpose of an education in the humanities, and particularly, whether an education in the Great Books is valuable or not, it’s current incarnation. Well, does it?

The book club

Recently, Ross Douthat (the token conservative on the New York Times payroll) interviewed philosophy professor Jennifer Frey on the question: why does a liberal arts education still matter? Frey’s answer was twofold: the first is that self-cultivation has an intrinsic value, and the second is that self-cultivation allows people to liberate themselves from small-minded, atavistic groupthink. I think both of those are unambiguously correct. But the problem, as this piece by Ángel Pinillos on the Chronicle of Higher Education points out, is that those are the very prepositions being argued - or rather, the argument is why those (inherently valuable) feats of self cultivation should be financed by universities and the government. Instead, the author argues, the humanities should be defended on the basis of the economically important marketable skills they provide: a “real, identifiable competence” that can only be acquired by “spending years reading difficult texts, being forced to defend your interpretations of them in writing, and being told, repeatedly, that you have not yet made your argument as well as you could.” I think this is a good, persuasive argument. I’ve made a similar case, that the core human competence AI does not and cannot posess is the power of interpretation. I think it has the problem of the “Claudia Goldin read Engels” idea: it tries to defend the values of the humanities using the values laying siege to them. It’s Ravenna trying to say that the barbarian thing to do is not razing the city to the ground. Tough luck.

The idea that one ought to learn the humanities by engaging primarily with the Great Books, or some broader cultural canon, is one, on this day and age, mostly associated with the political right, for a variety of reasons: the first is that they claimed that space very aggressively, and the second (and why they claimed it) is that it dovetails with their aggressive “defense” of Western heritage (which is, in fact, an assault on core Western post-Enlightenment values in favor of Third World caliber racial tribalism). The idea they propose is that education in the liberal arts needs to center on the integral development of the citizen, a citizen that is developed in harmony with a broad-based societal project of The Good Life and the ideal regime (of public, civic, and political life). But if you look at the conservative project it’s… not been especially successful. As laid out by Ann Manov in Harper’s Magazine, the explicitly conservative case for a Great Books education in the conservative liberal arts has been as much of a failure as the liberal liberal arts: the professors are bedeviled by unengaged students who don’t want to read 500 pages of Hobbes to get a degree in dentistry, the professors slash the reading list to chapters and excerpts to “meet students where they are”, and the standards for evaluation drop to essays under 2,000 words, rap videos, or ChatGPT. Manove interviews a philosopher, Oliver Traldi, who says “If you asked me ten years ago, I would say all these college students are reading too much Foucault and too much Judith Butler or whatever.” But these days, they’re watching fifteen-second TikTok videos about how Charlie Kirk isn’t really dead; they “can’t even read Foucault and Judith Butler.” This mirrors the original critic of woke bias in higher education: Allan Bloom (well, the original was William F. Buckley, but he was an obnoxious whiner who thought Paul Samuelson was a communist). Bloom’s whole thing in The Closing of the American Mind, beyond a bunch of old man complaints about how rock music has the tempo of sexual intercourse, is that as an educator you would want your students to arrive with a series of thoughts about the subject, which you probed and undermined to make them reach enlightenment on their own, compared to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. In Bloom’s time, a common complaint was that students were too “politically correct” to be able to be questioned; besides that, true or not, Bloom (correctly) identifies a much bigger problem: his students don’t care. They get to class to get laid, get high, and get a diploma. They don’t go to learn about anything. You can’t get pulled out of Plato’s cave if you don’t care about whether you’re in a cave or not, or what happens in it.

Bloom’s critique is surprisingly similar (at least as far as I read from secondary sources and talked about it with a guy I was dating who read both, before a really messy breakup) to Christopher Lasch’s in The Culture of Narcissism: the rise of “privatism” and the imposition of market logic over moral and community values led to excessive, pathological levels of individualism in an increasingly permissive culture. This particularly manifests in universities, where the pressure for ideological gamesmanship is uniquely high. To quote Lasch: “The “new tribalism,” (…) appears on the scene at the very moment when tribalism has ceased to have any substantive content. “Tribalism” is the latest fashion thrown up by a consumerist capitalism that is replacing neighborhoods with shopping malls, thereby undermining the very particularism that it eagerly packages as a commodity.” Lasch’s point very closely mirrors a recent debate had over the Mellon Foundation, following an article in The Atlantic by Tyler Austin Harper: Mellon is a very left wing foundation, though one founded and funded, paradoxically, by a hard-right union buster who caused the Great Depression, and as such focuses on left wing topics of the day like gender studies and Black trans poetry. For Harper this is problematic for a variety of reasons, some of them the usual pointless “alienating conservatives with progressive issue positions” bullshit, some more interesting regarding the empty pablum Mellon makes its grantees churn out over actually substantive work. But the obvious critique of the Tyler Austin Harper article on the Mellon Foundation (as pointed out by Christopher Newfield) comes from… the Tyler Austin Harper article on the Mellon Foundation, particularly one of its final paragraphs: "The humanities are in the mess they’re in because of federal budget cuts, and because of administrators who care more about the football team than about William Faulkner, and because of the toxic pragmatism of an American culture that has a hard time valuing anything that is not immediately, aggressively useful. But the humanities are also in this mess because those of us who care about them have often preferred hunkering down in a defensive crouch…”.

An obvious example of the problem with education is grade inflation: college graduation rates and grades have increased consistently since the 1990s without any real increase in student quality, institutional resources, or composition of the education sector. This phenomenon has a large number of fairly complex reasons: unlike more cultural ones (for example, that schools are “coddling” their students to try and raise their self esteem),the most convincing explanations focus on facts such as top schools having gotten more selective; changes to student practices (fewer classes taken outside of major and fewer classes taken in general, withdrawing to avoid a fail) and better teaching practices, but also of just more generous grading. Well, but why have grading practices changed? When asked “why”, an economist answered the question asked the simple question of qui bono - “Who is the constituency for tougher grades? I can tell you as a professor, my students are definitely interested in higher grades”. In particular, since getting good grades is so important, students tend to choose classes where they can get higher grades; at the same time, universities are incentivized to improve numbers (retention, graduation, etc.) for basically financial reasons - especially because “inflated” grades are not actually easy to notice. The reason, then, why nobody is doing anything is that this is a coordination problem: any professor that gets more demanding would hurt their own career by getting lower evaluations (which are systematically linked to strictness), which can be seen in the fact that schools with more untenured faculty also have worse outcomes.

For the New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann makes a case similar to one made by Eric Hayot and Matt Seybold in the Chronicle: universities, in general, just don’t have any money for research anymore. The Trump presidency in particular pushed for especially punitive cuts to research funding (regardless of university behavior on political or culture war topics), but state governments of both parties over time have done the same thing; as mentioned above, the conservative war on academia goes back to William F Buckley’s 1948 God and Man at Yale, which is almost exactly as far back as government support for universities has existed in the United States. Universities simply do not have any more money, even without the feds cutting them off to spite Palestinians and trans people, which has affected both the humanities and the hard sciences. There’s a really long and complicated history here, but I don’t think you can say that there’s been a crackdown on Thomas Jefferson’s house, where he owned slaves, acknowledging that he owned slaves and that his treatment of his slaves was bad, because five years ago some random annoying person said something stupid in a bad academic paper nobody has read. Like, if you don’t want to hear about how Jefferson’s personal life figured into his work, don’t go to his fucking house.

The issue that all of these people point out, and that nobody trying to make a liberal or left wing or even conservative case for the humanities can articulate, is that we don’t know, as a society, the value of education anymore. To quote Lemann (about the political right): “When it comes to higher education, the house of conservatism has many mansions. One is filled with burn-it-down insurrectionists, like Rufo, who see universities primarily as enemy territory, a stronghold of the left. Another is focussed on making a university education cost less and teach job skills, not the liberal arts—hence the Trump Administration’s efforts to eliminate student loans in fields with a low “return on investment.” Yet another is made up of the small cohort of conservative professors. They may be pleased that universities are at last paying attention to their complaints.” Lemann’s article points out that the American university has a mission of at the same time creating the American and world elite (“in a completely fair way”, he snides), offer access to the elite to that elite, make a lot of money, serve the public, serve social justice, and be liked and supported by the public. Basically none of those goals are, even in principle, compatible with each other.

And they’re also not compatible with what the public wants from education: writing for the Harvard Crimson, Alex Bronzini-Vender notes that the main problems people had with Harvard and other higher education institutions were monetary: too much cost, and too little reward. It is, of course, true that elite institutions create the elite (children of non-elites who attend elite institutions are 21% more likely to attend high-status schools and 8% more likely to attend elite colleges), and that being an elite comes with a notable set of perks and benefits: elite education reads as more valuable regardless of the skill content, meaning more money in early career positions (but not necessarily later on). But it would be ridiculous to expect the mission of education to be to select the elite; first, because the whole problem is it cannot consume the amount of elites it produces, and second, because basically nobody, by definition, is an elite. China and India, two countries with notably difficult university entrance exams, are not more successful at promoting a broad-based humanistic education; South Korea has become a giant death march to the university entrance exams to the point it’s probably tanking their fertility rates. And like, not to toot my own horn, but you people seem to think I’m smart enough to be worth reading, and I do not have an elite education: I went to the University of Buenos Aires, a public university without any entrance requirement that has between a third and half a million students. Most of the faculty teaches for free, or practically for free given how bad academic pay has been for the last decade, and there is no tuition or anything like that. The admissions process is show up, wait in line, fill in a form, go to class.

Are we human or are we dancers

This idea, of course, is very controversial. Until fairly recently, though, it wasn’t. Between the Renaissance and the middle of the twentieth century, the defining mode of engagement with culture was humanism. Humanism is one of those words that seem to have no consistent (or useful) definition, but broadly, it can be defined as a way of thinking that centers humanity as an agent in the world, and particularly, that centers humanity’s ability to engage with human reason and its outputs. In this sense, humanism is basically a civilizational project centered in the literary canon - a sort of universal republic of letters.

In Existentialism is a Humanism, philosopher and author Jean Paul Sartre roughly argues that, since human existence predates the essence of life (because humans are, unlike objects, not created with a set purpose), then the project of humanism is to determine what human freedom and human action should be for. In contrast, another philosopher, Martin Heidegger, in his first public piece of writing since being banned from teaching and philosophy for being a Nazi, rebukes Sartre: in his Letter on Humanism, Heidegger points out that trying to find a purpose for humans was exactly what Sartre thought made humans different - that they weren’t created with a purpose. Heidegger was particularly against the idea that human reason is a resource to be managed and not inherently dignified, and that humans as a “rational animal” are therefore just another animal. His solution was, in true continental philosophy fashion, to focus on Being as a category (I’m not touching that one) - what does it mean to be. Thus, the point of human existence isn’t to be the master of other physical objects through reason, devotion to god, or the mastery of Being itself - rather, a peaceful existence that safeguards the openness of Being. What this means is… not clear. But basically Heidegger’s bit is that, rather than seeing humans as part of some vertical chain, we need to see them all as equals engaged in spiritual and transcendental contemplation. What separates humans from everything else is their capacity to be the “shepherds of Being”, in some sort of giant prairie (the mental image here is some Minecraft prairie where Being is the cows and sheep roaming around). In particular, what sets humans apart is the capacity to use language and use and protect it for its own sake, in philosophy and literature.

Sweet, the Nazi agrees with me. But not to be outdone, another German philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk, also drops his two cents in 1999: in Rules for the Human Zoo, he elaborates on that whole human husbandry business. Particularly, tracing again the extremely tedious history of humanism as a republic of letters engaged in a civilizational process, he arrives at this quote from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra: “Virtue is that which makes them modest and tame: it is that that turns the wolf to the dog, and men themselves to mankind’s best pet.”. Both of the Germans are, here, describing humans as the dogs of other humans - “modern men are primarily profitable breeders who have made out of wild men the last men”. Sloterdijk, who was described in some blog I read about him as the Lady Gaga of philosophy, decides to go full edgelord: for him, the topic of human husbandry is the central topic of philosophy, the way in which humans make humans out of apes, and he describes two ways of doing it: the first is Lektion, “lesson”, the humanistic mode of education, and the other is Selektion, “selection”, which is more or less explicitly eugenics. The term “selektion” is itself extremely controversial: it has a Wikipedia page, titled “Selektion (Holocaust)”. To not get distracted by edgelord antics, we can go to a much less (or much more) controversial thinker, Leo Strauss, who rather than being a Nazi was just a conservative, and whose big idea, as far as anyone can understand it, was that society needs to have some sort of elite in charge to handle the real knowledge and the task of what knowledge can be shared with the normies. Another relevant contemprary thinker here is some guy named Bronze Age Pervert, a Nazi (this time self-identified) who wrote his doctoral thesis in philosophy on eugenics, basically, and who does the same reading of Nietszche as Leo Strauss but won’t admit to it for some insane reason or another (likely, that Strauss was Jewish - of course, “BAP” is a gay Romanian, not exactly ubermensch material).

Anyways, we have two clashing ideas: the first is the egalitarian humanistic one where education develops the human soul, basically, and the second is the aristocratic one about cultivating a natural-born elite that is usually but not always explicitly racial. Who’s right? Unsurprisingly, not the Nazis. The central claim there is that cultural transmission is almost always vertical: there is a class of people who make norms and a class of people who receives them, and the task of education is to select and create them; teacher to student, professor to teacher, and parent to child. It’s why there is suddenly a ridiculous demand that movies be didactic and “about good people doing good things” - the central belief is that people are usually stupid and need to be told what to think, because they cannot think themselves or with each other. That’s the weak part: people educate each other constantly. There is a good amount of teaching from the top to the bottom: the conservatism of managers at work has an enormous impact on the gender pay gap, while beauty pageant winners promote unhealthy physical standards in their audiences, and the attitudes about women working of parents are important for the attitudes of their children, as well as the attitudes of other trusted adults in the community. But you also see the exact opposite: children changing the views of their parents, and coworkers changing the views of other coworkers, as well as managers changing the views of other managers. The response that people have to male and female authority figures is also not univocal: sometimes having a woman boss makes employees more progressive, and sometimes it makes them more conservative. Fathers are more likely to take parental leave if their coworkers or brothers take it first. I’ve written a long post previously about the importance of having friends, particularly economically: the more ties between people, usually, the better off a place is, particularly if those friends have different socioeconomic backgrounds. And, somewhat obviously, people can be persuaded to change their mind: Christian missionaries changed the viewpoints on ethnic kinship of the people they converted or preached to, while having Arab/Muslim neighbors tends to reduce hostility and prejudice against those groups both in particular and in general. Even the much vaunted gender wage gap in cognitive ability is, in many respects, fake: it emerges basically all at once in the first grade, and, on a more macro level, has narrowed significantly if not disappeared in most developed countries.

A case in point is the Grit saga (a book title missing an F): Angela Duckworth, an American psychologist, wrote a book titled Grit in 2016 about how schools shouldn’t teach people things like reading and writing and instead should teach “grit”, an ill-defined concept with very shaky empirical and theoretical foundations. Regardless, there is some truth that perseverance is a valuable skill: a 2024 paper about tsunami survivors finds that there isn’t much of an impact of being a tsunami survivor on educational attainment, which reflects both the successful reconstruction effort but more importantly “enormous resilience among survivors who bore the brunt of the tsunami”. However, the idea that you can just teach people valuable personality traits is kind of disproven at this point: a 2015 paper titled Promise and Paradox: Measuring Students’ Non-Cognitive Skills and the Impact of Schooling was published shortly before the book came out in 2016 and it completely dismantles the Grit thesis: “Conscientiousness, self-control, and grit are unrelated to test-score gains at the school level, however, and students attending over-subscribed charter schools [which the study finds have better results] score lower on these scales than do students attending district schools”. The interesting thing is that one of the authors of this paper… is psychologist Angela Duckworth. That’s right: she debunked her stupid self help airport book about how people can just be taught to have certain personality traits.

So like, the whole idea that people can simply be told directly what to believe by their "betters” is completely asinine. People will receive whatever lecture you wish to give them and then leave, go to the pub, and be un-lectured by their mates. In fact, the limits of vertical transmission of norms are the whole problem with wokeness. The entire project was that, if you changed elite institutions in both their demographic composition and their speech and behavioral norms, then you would change all of the most important power brokers in society and that would trickle down to regular people. This project was, for fairly self evident reasons, extremely unsuccessful and the entire project not just tumbled down but also might have engendered a backlash strong enough to destroy the (already weak) institutions it tried to use as vehicles for change. In contrast, similar progressive movements founded on mass engagement with material realities during the same period of time were a lot more politically successful and have had longer-lasting results even when facing a similar amount of political blowback. Of course, the idea that people are just told what to believe by Harvard is something that, paradoxically, both the most and least woke people seem to affirm: if you take control of “the Cathedral”, you take control of everyone’s minds. The closeness of the woke and anti-woke project in this regard can be seen in a single historical figure: the American feminist activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a radical abolitionist who believed that the equality of intellect of all human beings entitled them to equal rights in the political arena. But her thinking was so firmly anchored in intellectual ability it quickly turned very ugly: once it became obvious that the post-Civil War political settlement would expand rights to former slaves but not women, Stanton became increasingly racist, saying that the United States was at risk of putting “educated refined women . . . in the humiliating position of supplicants at the feet of serfs, peasants, plantation slaves, paupers knaves drunkards, all the ragged ignorant foreign and native riff raff in the country” in 1869. An early victim of cancel culture, she was pushed out of the suffrage movement shortly after.

The power brokers

American historian Robert Caro is widely considered one of the world’s most important experts on power, having written two extremely extensive biographies of two of the most important wielders of it of all time: urban planner Robert Moses, and legislator and President Lyndon B. Johnson. In The Power Broker, Caro says Moses was corrupted by power: he entered a young reformist enthusiastic with cleaning up government and delivering for people, and left a corrupt racist obsessed with preserving his own power as an untouchable ruler. This contrasts with one of his better known quotes from his LBJ biographies: “But although the cliche says that power always corrupts, what is seldom said ... is that power always reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, concealment is necessary. ... But as a man obtains more power, camouflage becomes less necessary”. So what he presents are two incompatible visions: one in which power corrupts, and one in which power only reveals the existing corruption. But if you read The Power Broker with sufficient attention, you know that Robert Moses was never corrupted: in one of the less discussed episodes of the book, Moses is in grad school in Oxford, when he gives a speech in defense of colonialism based on the inability of some people to govern themselves; he is booed and basically chased out by his classmates, and while Caro doesn’t explicitly say it, it is obvious Moses rooted his argument in racial disparities. His final projects, in both Princeton and Oxford, were basically about how an elite unelected bureaucratic corps could be established and why doing so was desirable. So, to recap, a young man with racist ideas about how a bureaucracy of unelected elites should have absolute power gets power as an older man, and implements a regime where… racist unelected elite bureaucrats have absolute power. The striking thing about Robert Moses, and why I never wrote about The Power Broker at length, is how unimportant he was: he was, of course, determinant for the fate of New York, but the same things attributed to him by Caro and generations of readers have plagued basically every other American city: redlining, car-centric infrastructure, slum clearances, corruption. In the end, Robert Moses was just a convenient scapegoat for the endless errors of technocratic liberalism.

Moses was, of course, an elite, with an elite education and a series of elite job postings. His whole thing was that the best and the brightest should control the switches and levers; this was, at the time, a widely held belief. The obvious question about the humanism debacle is why, then, it was replaced by technocracy starting in the 1940s. The date already gives you the answer: humanism was completely untenable as a system of ensuring human flourishing. In The World of Yesterday, Stephan Zweig notes that everyone had the utmost trust in Europe’s rulers at the start of the First World War, because of decades (if not centuries) of education had to have perfected both the system of governments and the ones who governed, such that they presided over a safe, stable, prosperous world. Thirty years later, nobody harbored such delusions: the deadliest war in human history was followed by the worst economic downturn in human history, as well as several hyperinflationary episodes, which deteriorated trust between and within Europeans to the point they allowed, if not elected, to take office people who promised to exterminate each other like cattle, a promise they fulfilled while launching the world into an even deadlier war. One of the more interesting short stories of Jorge Luis Borges is Deutsches Requiem, in which a nebbish bookseller named Otto Dietrich zur Linde becomes, basically, an omnicidal Cossack who glorifies war and murder for their own sake; the whole thing is, of course, an allegory for Nazi Germany, but also a reflection on whether he could have become a Nazi had he been German: the characterization of the entire thing is reminiscent of one of his better known stories, El Sur, which is about a nebbish librarian who joins a knife fight among some cowboys after suffering a head injury (or maybe just dreams it and dies like a little bitch in the hospital). Juan Dahlmann, the main character of El Sur, is generally understood to be a placeholder for Borges himself, who saw himself torn between his paternal grandfather, who was a military leader who died in the War of the Triple Alliance, and his great uncle, a poet and philosophy professor (as well as his mother and grandmother, who he was close to); likewise, Dahlmann is torn between his German grandfater who was a priest and his Argentine grandfather who was a military hero.

The decline of humanism, thus, came from its inability to prevent (or ability to cause) the tragedies of the World Wars, the Holocaust, and the Great Depression. What good were the great philosophers and the great poets? Germany, the most educated nation in the world, had become the most barbarous. For Heidegger (who, again, had been a Nazi), the problem with Nazism (and also with non-Nazism) had been its relationship with “nature”, understood as like, everything else. Heidegger separated knowlegde between techne, “technics”, the ability to do things for humanity, and technology, the system of social organization around technics. This implies a way of revealing the world, that is, a worldview, which saw living objects as mere resources waiting around to be used, which crowds out other, more important ways of knowing and understanding the world. Think of a mountain: you might see it as an object of great beauty for a hike, but technology only sees it as a pile of minerals waiting to be mined. Importantly, this also had profound “cognitive” effects, because enframing (the way technology understands objects and subjects) is irresistible and affects thinking radically, that is, from its very inception. The rest of Heidegger’s critique is blurry and imprecise for the purposes of a blog mostly about economics and politics, but it’s worth pointing out that it’s very similar to a much sharper vision: the Frankfurt School critique of technology and of “instrumental rationality”.

Herbert Marcuse’s “Social Implications of Technology” argues that the regimentation of life under mass industrial society, and the exertion from regimented industrial labor was sapping people’s critical and rational faculties. These faculties had, in the past, been critical for eradicating superstition and creating science and technological advancements (Marcuse would call them technical advancements, since he does that annoying philosophy thing of not calling technology technology); however, living in a rationalized industrial society required extensive degrees of training, regimentation, and repetition, which fostered numbness, alienation, and social conformism, which in turn required lower and lower use of people’s higher cognitive faculties. This is enmeshed in a broader attack of the Frankfurt School on “rationality”: going back to Max Weber, there’s generally understood to be a difference between “formal-procedural reason”, the exclusive focus on efficiency, as opposed to “value reason”, which centers the intrinsic worth of actions and their consequences. The Frankfurt School, retools this into three kinds, with instrumental reason (formal-procedural reason), subjective reason, and objective reason; in The Eclipse of Reason, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer basically argue that instrumental and subjective rationality have replaced the question of how to lead the good life and how to live in a good society with “how do I do what I want to do as quickly as possible”, which eliminates concerns about values or justice beyond considering them yet another subjetive preference. This excessive rationalization of society eventually destroys itself, because it produces a world in which nothing can be criticized beyond as a means to some particular end because any substantive criticism would need appealing to objective higher values that reason has siloed off from itself. For them, this obsessive focus on efficiency without any values besides subjective wellbeing results in unimaginable atrocities sooner or later, because nobody has any language to think of a way to criticize the people proposing those atrocities.

But the Frankfurt School critique leads to someone I think is a lot more interesting, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas (who I’ve touched upon in the past). For Habermas, the central aspect of political life was a space known as the public sphere, where private individuals could argue relatively freely about matters of public political interest, with a structure designed to ignore the status, wealth, and prestige of people. This public sphere was completely devoted to objective value rationality through rational debate; it is built on communicative reason, the idea that all statements made are also made with the sincere intention to defend them rationally if interrogated instead of pulling rank or guilt tripping someone. For Habermas, the rationality of communication is presupposed by communication itself: a speaker intends to produce a belief in a listener by trying to understand how this intention will affect the listener, including by acknowledging that the intention of persuading itself is part of the effect. This means, to put it more succintly, that the norms of speech are inherent to speech itself, because no speech that tries to do something can also try not to do it while remaining valid. However, at a certain scale, societies cannot be organized via rational deliberation, and need steering media (money and power) that coordinate action without the need for purposeful communication - if you want to buy something you don’t need to agree on the inherent value of the transaction as per social traditions. This also separates coordination from deliberation in way that permits for more social complexity and more differentiation between social spheres: between science and religion, between the sciences, between subfields of the sciences, etc. But this complexity leads to autonomous systems of money and power, with their own internal logic and their own imperatives, to begin needing to restructure the lifeworld itself to achieve those aims. This leads to, for Habermas, one of the most serious pathologies of contemporary life: the colonization of the public sphere, where money and power begin supplanting communication in order to achieve their own aims; in particular, money and power replace the logic of communicative rationality with the logic of instrumental rationality, transforming the honest pursuit of truth into the consequentialist pursuit of impact and self interest.

Conclusion

I was kinda stuck on how to finish with this until I read an article in the Los Angeles Review of Books that gave me a path forward: it’s titled “The Consensus Sublime” by Ebadur Rahman, and it’s about The Guardian’s list of the best 100 novels of all time (topped by Middlemarch, Beloved, and Ulysses). The author’s gripe with the list is that it’s superficial and built around legibility to a very narrow Anglo-American slice of tastemakers who have a very specific cultural and economic agenda behind them, which is true. But I don’t think those (fairly obvious) points are what drew my attention - it’s the following paragraph, the second one:

Raymond Williams’s description of the canon as a “selective tradition,” offered in his Marxism and Literature (1977), remains indispensable to any honest engagement with exercises of this kind. Williams understood that canons do not simply preserve excellence; they preserve the forms of excellence that institutions already know how to teach, translate, and consecrate. But the selective tradition never feels like selection. It feels like inheritance: the apparently natural accumulation of worth over time, the slow geological settling of greatness. This is precisely its authority, and precisely its danger. Every canon believes itself to have transcended the misjudgments of its predecessors, and this conviction is among the oldest and most persistent of aesthetic errors.

You see it, right? The LARB ran an essay about the literary canon that was almost certainly entirely generated by AI. If you run any two or three paragraphs on an AI detection software (which are not 100% reliable, like anything done by AI - but I tried with a few paragraphs from this draft and got 100% human-generated, which they were), you typically get a 100% AI generated score. I don’t really like going through the stylistic beats, because “using three examples” “using dashes” and “using weird words” are just decisions an author can make too. I think the main problem is the depth of the concepts: the piece has a segment about Ulysses that seems to… not have anything to actually say. The premise is that Ulysses has become something of an albatross for the Anglo-American literary world because of its difficulty to less professional readers (maybe true), which is why they only gave it third place (but the segments below and above say ranking things is dumb), and so it’s become necessary to create a huge number of intermediaries to explain Joyce to normies, which might “diminish” the novel - but wait, doesn’t that contradict the thesis of the entire piece, that just putting together a random list of novels and calling them the canon is bad? Like, it would be good that Ulysses has produced an enormous amount of secondary literature about it because that’s the kind of thing that justifies the place of a novel in the canon.

The main problem here isn’t really that the article is wrong (it isn’t) or that it's incorrect (it’s mostly not) - it’s that the author didn’t even think through their own ideas about the canon. The problem with AI writing is that, in almost all cases, it doesn’t actually reflect any thoughts: it’s just text produced to fill space and read well without any deeper or underlying understanding, because it’s written by a machine and not a person. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use AI or anything, but rather, that you cannot produce real meaning without real thought. This brings me to another article, from The Atlantic, about the end of reading: in 2023, only 16% of Americans read for pleasure; in 2025, 57% placed a bet on sports gambling. A recent statistic I saw was that, in the same year, Americans spent more on sports gambling (which is bad!) than on movies, books, and music combined. The article at The Atlantic, by Rose Horowtich, finds countless examples: even at the most elite colleges and universities, people simply do not want to read. In film school, infamously according to Twitter anecdotes, students don’t want to watch movies. Back in the day, you’d have arguments about whether the things in one Thomas Piketty paper contradicted another one (who can forget how the EITC is welfare when looking at taxes and is a tax cut when looking at welfare), and now it’s stuff like “this chart of an inflation adjusted variable is adjusted for inflation, yes”.

There is, of course, much to be said about this. Education is a deeply political institution with major implications for not just knowledge, but also background cultural phenomena; it’s a widely known fact that countries used compulsory universal public schooling to shape the national character (as effective, or ineffective, that can be). I have said it a few paragraphs ago, but the purpose of education cannot be to produce “skills”, or careers, or any concrete goal; the role of education has to be to teach people things. Kind of hysterically, that we are being kept from our core faculties and possibilities by the overwhelming but shallow pleasures derived from technology is the whole point of Toy Story 5. The problem, as my 7 year old cousin pointed out after we left the movie theater, is that the movie tries to sell what it is condemning; it’s an entertainment product playing on a screen saying to go play outside instead of being entertained by a screen. This mirrors the problems with the idea that education has to justify its own existence in “functional” terms like skills or careers, or that it has to adopt an explicitly anti humanistic system of goals and speech norms to continue existing: the two are equally hypocritical and equally unconvincing. This line of argument can’t fool someone who can barely read and write; it shouldn’t fool people who write for prestigious publications.

The most successful prosecution of the case for a humanistic education comes from Daniel Walden at the Chronicle: defending explicitly the Great Books tradition from an explicitly left wing perspective (featuring the unbearable tedium of Paulo Freire), he makes an explicitly humanistic case for the humanities: “It is not snobbish to say that a person with lungs must breathe or that a person with a stomach must eat, nor that a person with a mind must think. It is not snobbish to show someone how to love something new — it is a gift”; additionally, “We reclaim our humanity by laboring, by doing what is proper to rational and social creatures, and what is most proper to us — what is most uniquely our own — is the depth of cognition made possible by language and the extended social life to which language gives birth. We are most human when we are thinking together, and only by doing this and habituating ourselves toward doing it can we change the circumstances that deprive us of this shared humanity.”. The case to be made here is not that a humanistic education is valuable in terms of skills or that a humanistic education is valuable because “valuable” is defined in humanistic terms; rather, it’s valuable because it engages the most fundamental human abilities in the ways and spaces that they ought to be engaged with.

This refusal to accept the most fundamental human ability, the ability to think, and to offload it to computer programs and machinery is mirrored by another refusal, the refusal to accept the equality of these abilities to all humans, not in fact, but in principle. At the same time as humans are giving up what makes them humans for comfort and pleasure, they are accepting the separation of humans into human and animal; into people with rights and people without them; into “elites” and mindless masses. The original point I was thinking to make was about the explosion of eugenics talk, of people calling others “cattle” and insisting that an illustrated liberal elite had to take absolute control over society. The fantasy of the technocratic despot is as old as the idea of technocracy; of course, very rarely you get an educated technocratic despot; most of the time you get a midwitted thug like Moses, whose ideas were not particularly original and whose all-powerful force was… completely irrelevant, given how no other city had its own Robert Moses but all of them had their own slum clearances and giant highways.