The Decline and Fall of the English Major

Furthermore, the idea that an engineering major is in any way less intellectual than an English major is ridiculous. And if that's not what you meant by the term "Philistine", then I suggest you pay more attention to the spirit of its definition less to the letter. A Philistine was once upon a time a person who had never studied philosophy, but this as only the case because every student once studied philosophy.

Since that's totally unproductive and not an appropriate response to a sophisticated argument such as yours, I'll abstain.

I'd also like to acknowledge that at the end of my remarks, we're unlikely to agree fully. But I'm hoping I can demonstrate my perception of these phenomenon that you specify, my perception of your perception, and in that, why I think you're mistaken on a few fronts.

1. Your classical education failed you if you can't identify one of the most important reasons visual art has changed so much.

>I remember touring the Vatican museum... If you stop and look around, you see people from all over the planet, young and old, looking around jaws agape at some of the wonders. Near the end of the tour you end up in a modern gallery. Most of it is devotional art, most of it looks like reassembled garbage and random tossings out of paint can. Nobody, not a person, stops and pays any attention to it. If you stop in these galleries and watch people as they move through it, the only sounds you hear are snickering and sighs as people try to escape the crushing irrelevance of it all.

I'll start by pointing out that I happily do stop at these galleries. Western visual culture was essentially devoted to cultivating photo-realism for centuries. Then the camera (and its derivatives) came into prominence and set off a powerful debate, primarily academic, about what the goal of visual art and its means should be. I think this controversy is a very interesting one and I enjoy watching it-- but you have to be aware of the controversy for a lot of it to make sense. I posit that we should teach it because it's part of our culture and has been for decades.

On a more personal note, a lot of modern art is trash in the way that a lot of pre-modern art was too. But a lot of it also speaks to me, and I don't appreciate what I interpret as your weirdly simultaneously faux-populist and faux-elitist suggestion that I'm being insulted.

2. I dispute your implicit claim that high art ever had that tremendous an audience. In raw terms, it's actually larger today than it was a hundred years ago-- think about the number of people we educate today versus then.

3. I'll quote you again: >I found it troubling that as the liberal arts came into the modern age, I think they became more and more irrelevant to describing and enriching the world: philosophy, once a guide for humanity into the frontiers of law, ethics, science, has become a circus of irrelevant navel gazing; high-music became random and unpleasant fist slamming; literature because trite political regurgitation or stream-of-consciousness vomitus...

Which philosophers are you accusing of navel gazing? Perhaps we'll agree, perhaps not.

And who do you consider high-music? Again, perhaps we'll agree, perhaps not.

I perceive you as lamenting the decline of high art culture while simultaneously lashing out at people who do try to improve it with a vaguely populist criticism not well grounded in any historical-empirical data about popular art appreciation.

Post script, you can like pop and Bach at the same time and there's precisely nothing wrong with that.

Most artists are acute observers of the human condition. They distill the products of such observation into artistic truths and evolve forms to freshly present their insights.

The problem is that there is only so much an acute observer can learn about the human condition and share with us. Have we really experienced many people who have pushed the limits of such acuity materially further than did Shakespeare? I think not. It takes tools to advance beyond casual empiricism. And this is why science has indeed outstripped art as a lens with which to wonder at the world.

For a person who has recognized that his/her time is finite and who wishes to drain as much understanding of the wonder of the world as possible in this short allotment the density of insights to be gained from reading scientific journals is many times greater than that to be had by reading even the most brilliant of novelists. Once you've read Shakespeare, Tolstoy and some more of a greats (a worthy business to be sure) diminishing returns soon sets in. Look to science for brighter lights.

Cold statistics are one thing, but everyone has trouble actually chewing them over when every part of your environment is telling you "all you need to do is go to college, and everything will work out fine." If you know the ins and outs of how post-college employment works, you're working from a position of stark informational privilege compared to someone who doesn't. The people who succeed as English majors are much louder than the large majority who don't, and the people selling the English majors certainly aren't telling them they have a decent chance of ending up immiserated.

If you genuinely enjoy English literature and writing, it's easy to fall into that trap. Many people here majored in CS, and that's awesome and has worked out well for them. But I would also take a gander that, going into college, those people weren't blank slates who had no love of CS and just did a mechanical calculation as to what would generate the most time-discounted income years. They had worked with computers in the past and loved it. It's very easy to overlook how much emotional or arational factors plays into your own choices while condemning those whose arational choices end up tossing them into another bin.

Obviously the choices people make aren't totally ignorant of economic factors, but they also aren't determined by them.

We all think that; it's a cognitive bias. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_wobegon_effect

One of the benefits of writing classes is the chance to improve in response to third-party feedback. Our arguments are rarely as tight nor our prose as clear as they seem to us.