8 ms·
It's interesting reading a pseudo-critique of the "new cultural elite" coming from an author who lives in that elite and an institution that represents that eli
by Banthum 9y ago
It's interesting reading a pseudo-critique of the "new cultural elite" coming from an author who lives in that elite and an institution that represents that elite globally.
It's like a weird ritualistic self-criticism exercise, to demonstrate goodness and status. Like watching a beauty pageant contestant answer a question about her flaws. Which is part of the virtue signaling that article is about! It's so meta.
And it's nothing like what an outsider to that subculture would write.
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I'd actually say that getting a useless degree in an intensively political field is one of the more interesting 'new' forms of conspicuous consumption.
Back in the day, people used to get tutored in Latin or Christian theology to have upper-class cred. Now they get gender studies or "whiteness studies" degrees.
In each case the message is the same: I am so wealthy that I can spend all my time doing things that don't economically benefit me at all and are entirely focused on elevating my morality in the dominant activism of our age. It's a sort of ritualistic destruction of your own ability to earn a living, to demonstrate you don't have to earn a living. Like Chinese foot binding.
- greglindahl 9y agoCollege is not necessarily a vocational school -- many people with "useless" degrees go on to become knowledge workers... using the skills that they learned and applied in their "useless" degree. That's an economic benefit from the "useless" degree. One example of this is all the physicists working as programmers. There are also a ton of examples of humanities students becoming lawyers, or product managers, or school teachers, or ...
- Banthum 9y agoOf course, some degrees are direct training, and some are more generally useful. But there's a spectrum. E.g. philosophy and "gender studies" are both considered generally useless. But I'd say that philosophy at least can be applied to various types of work, and the course doesn't make a student less useful as a productive human. With "gender studies" the student is actually becoming more useless by having his head filled with a bunch of moralisms, victimhood ideologies, and objectively false lies about the world. A naive highschooler is more useful in any workplace than a "gender studies" graduate. It's more useful to know nothing than to know things that aren't true, or be full of propagandized anger at various identity groups.
- greglindahl 9y agoWow, you're really doubling down on making stuff up and then being critical of it. My sister is an example of someone who studied gender studies as an undergraduate, and she's currently a quite successful high school English teacher.