The United States is traditionally a practical place, being an overgrown British colony and dumping ground for European cast-offs of varying quality level. However, before the full onset of public education, the country was known for being unusually literate. The America of 1776 read at a higher level than the America of the early 21st century.

The post-colonial era up until public education annihilated our intellectual standards was one of surprising vigor in the liberal arts.

Even through the 20th century, the question of who would write the next ‘Great American Novel’ was a source of constant speculation. Although true reactionaries could quibble with the real quality of American letters on an absolute scale, for our purposes, the decline is what’s more important.

Most contemporary debate about the liberal arts is both insipid and toxic. This is true both on what passes for the right and the left.

The right tends to be of one of two schools:

1. The liberal arts are for stupid women and fags. We should not teach them anymore. Instead, we should train students in science and technology, so that they can get good jobs and pay taxes.
2. The liberal arts are these important great books which we must study as if they were museum artifacts, so that we can look cool in our tweed jackets and pretend like Communists don’t already run America.

On the left, it’s actually pretty similar:

1. The liberal arts are taking valuable government dollars away from how they really should be spent: training more engineers so that we can pay lower wages to our employees and keep more of the profits for ourselves. Work is dreary and it’s better to pay someone else to do it for you with freshly printed money.
2. The liberal arts are critical to fighting cishetero patriarchal homophobic oppression. Without teaching the liberal arts in our public universities, no one would read the great works written by trans-species authors of color.

My formulation of why the liberal arts are important is going to more crass and utilitarian than I’d otherwise prefer to frame it. I’m going to frame it like this because if I’m too delicate about it, I’m concerned that the message won’t be understood by various thickheaded conservatives.

The arts matter because they unify the culture

Culture tends to be what animates people, what keeps them from wanting to put a bullet in their own heads. It’s what they use to form important relationships with one another. Shared aesthetic sensibility is most of what draws one person to another, and what draws small clusters of people to larger groups.

Without people cooperating with one another, there’s conflict, anomie, unhappiness, and a lack of vigorous, happy cooperation.

Why do so many people want to kill themselves nowadays? Why are they having trouble remaining motivated? Why can’t they maintain happy relationships with one another? Why are they beset with vices and deficient in virtue?

It’s probably because the left has obliterated what was once a rich, animating cultural tradition which the American people took close to their hearts.

There is the sort of propaganda-poster unity common to socialist countries, and then there’s the unifying cultures indigenous to various European countries from pre-modern times. One is a unity that only exists on paper: in reality, everyone under Communism is out to fuck everyone else over. In a real culture, it’s a unity of attitudes, of life sensibilities, of morals, of stories, of vocal tone, and other intangible factors that prevent people within the country from behaving like vicious Communists eager to betray their neighbors.

People who share a common cultural framework are more apt to cooperate within their own groups. Preventing that common framework from forming, or forcing a dysfunctional framework upon the whole society, damages the ability of people within that country to cooperate with their fellows.

The study of the liberal arts should be an elite pursuit

When the highest standards of liberal education are not held by the political and social elite, their inferiors deteriorate rapidly, with no guiding stars to look up towards. Even a Napoleon is more respectable than a Snooki.

The left has denigrated the European cultural tradition, and has ceded it to idiots and junk-merchants. To care about culture is either to be a Social Justice Stormtrooper, or a hopelessly reprobate reactionary, out of touch with what’s important today.

Real elite people of Tomorrow’s Glorious Technocratic Future focus on their spreadsheets —

What crap is this? These idiotic proclamations are why the country has so often tended to veer towards inane, backwards-looking non-strategies which could have never succeeded. Americans are routinely bamboozled by people bearing spreadsheets with no sense of human life beyond that which can be modeled in Excel.

Part of this problem is baked into the American political design: if we’re all democratically equal, what sort of antisocial maniac says that the liberal arts shouldn’t be made democratically accessible? Isn’t this part of the whole centuries-long conflict between the animating philosophies behind Protestantism and Catholicism, bound up with politics, technology, and various local differences? Should the Word be equally accessible to everyone, or only through the interpretation of a hierarchical elite?

Well, yeah.

This is one of the reasons why there has been no meaningful resolution to the debate on this issue. The main premises are not being debated in an open way, because what passes for left and right share the most important premise in that education ought to have egalitarian aims, rather than aims that strengthen social hierarchy.

Because the aim of the liberal arts is to feed into the care and growth of a culture that strengthens a glorious civilization, the de-civilizing impulses glorified in just about every liberal arts department that matters in the US runs against their own proper aims. When conservatives think of the liberal arts, they tend to think of all the Communist petit-professeurs who tyrannize their students with their postmodern gibberish.

There can be no reconstruction of that hierarchy until conservatives realize that promoting any form of egalitarianism runs counter to their more important goals of living within a civilization that shares their values. The ‘everyone is equal’ value annihilates all other values in time.

Multiculturalism has many friends and a few passionate critics. In this post, I’m not going to criticize the conspiratorial Frankfurt School or similar high-level machinations intended to undermine European culture.

The main practice that I’m going to critique is that of attempting to gain exposure to many minor or superfluous works in many different foreign cultures as a substitute for learning deeply about one’s own culture.

It may be bad art, but at least it’s politically correct

 

The most absurd example of this is the genre of “world music,” which was especially popular during the 1990s as a way to show yourself as a tolerant, upwardly mobile person. You can still see this sort of approach to culture in the home decoration choices of upper middle class people in more liberal American suburbs and cities. You’ll see modern paintings and African fetishes. If they’re down class, you might see some half-ass impressionist landscapes and Hummel figurines. If you go down further, it’s sports teams posters.

It’s also seen in the art purchasing habits of the ultra-rich: to be fashionable, a rich white person will usually go with one of two choices — modern or foreign, which is really part of the same continuum.

When people take this to this pattern of cultural accumulation, what happens is that their cultural exposure becomes broad but simultaneously shallow and haphazard. This is only exacerbated by the à la carte approach to university education taken since the 1960s revolution, in which different graduates of the same liberal arts program may have no shared base of knowledge.

An undergraduate might be an expert in French homosexual novels, anal themes in Jamaican visual art, and about BDSM themes in contemporary Islamic film, but be ignorant of Dante. That’s actually the more likely outcome, because the Muslim bondage professor gives out easier grades.

The practical consequence of this is that it makes it so that conversations between people about culture must go to the shallowest available common denominator.

America’s ‘future leadership’ is at Buzzfeed’s reading level

 

Because even the educated elite has become atomized from one another in a way that they can’t quite bridge, even Ivy League students read Buzzfeed. They read Buzzfeed because Buzzfeed addresses the shallow acculturation that they are likely to find among the other people in their lives.

If the farthest that most people went was to read the Sparknotes for Hamlet to cheat on the exams in high school, it’s no wonder that the only thing that people can talk about is television.

These TV shows similarly can’t allude to anything that requires deeper study than their audiences are likely to have conducted. The audience may be ‘literate’ in blockbuster movies and other TV shows, but even the most educated types are likely to be cut off from the well of literary and artistic references that make up what was the Western canon. Although classic works are more accessible in terms of being able to retrieve the books as ever before, in terms of the culture, you just can’t expect anyone to be familiar with them in any kind of predictable way as was once possible.

Even demographically, the predictions that were once possible based on education level are no longer valid for people educated after the 1980s. So, whereas, a baby boomer may have been educated before the Revolution, anyone afterwards will have a very different mentality and acculturation.

Even when people do have a ‘liberal arts education,’ their tiny specialties in topics like transgender Chicano poetry between 1973-78 make it so that, if they leave the academy, they must focus on pop culture, because otherwise no one has any idea what they’re talking about. The jobless academic culture-worker of yesterday is the impoverished Tumblr activist of today.

Rather than upbraid the little people for their deficiencies, we must instead redirect our criticism to their superiors who have abandoned their duty to safeguard and feed the culture. Most of these have dedicated themselves explicitly towards the destruction of Western culture as a distinct entity. They attach adjectives like ‘problematic’ to the significant works and dismiss great artists of the past for being ‘white and male.’ The few remaining apologists for Europe tend to only do so with bowed heads and a thousand thousand caveats and apologies.

Culture sets the framework for thought

 

Culture is what frames our conversations with each other. Conversations have become coarser and conflict-ridden in part because we have lost the common cultural framework that used to frame our relationships with one another and to the greater whole.

In the past, a reference to the life of a particular saint might mean something. A contemporary work could truly resonate with the past with allusion. Today, fantasy and science fiction are more popular because the references (apart from someone like Tolkien) are intelligible even to the culturally ignorant.

One of the reasons why the organized left at the government, corporate, and activist levels expends so many billions of dollars each year on cultural manipulation is that it makes the exercise of power mostly superfluous, unnecessary. When everyone has the same sort of shallow, discombobulated acculturation, they’ll grab onto the cultural products with high production values that also speak to their state of mind — a broken framework created by the chaotic, stultified education system.

At its most bare level, stripping culture down like a modernist would, culture is what people talk about. It’s what frames their thoughts about themselves, the people around them, and morality. How their thoughts are structured and what they think about can be determined by the cultural institutions that they worship. It’s also the only meaningful link available that ordinary people have to history, without having to go through rigorous formal scholarship.

The restoration won’t happen until it becomes shameful to be ignorant of Western culture once again. Making it a matter of class distinction will be difficult, but the Lena Dunhams of the world have to be shuffled out of their high positions from which they set a hazardous example for the less privileged.

It’s a waste of time to pursue this through  the formal university system, because that system is a network of Marxist strongholds totally hostile to European culture, and racially biased against whites in an open manner, especially at the more prestigious schools. This open racial bias leaks out after the students graduate and find work in the media, where do their damndest to weave themes from bell hooks and Cornell West into listicles.

The universities have turned themselves into an inverted parody of what they think Western culture used to be, which could not be farther from the truth. What impresses foreigners to this day about Europeans is the reach for universal, transcendent values.

You can’t lead from on your knees

 

What impresses no one is the ethno-masochism and the broader cultural theme of self-loathing. It’s certainly unimpressive to rising powers in Asia. It’s pathetic. They laugh about it. They joke about it. Their kids to go to American universities and know that our country is riven by subversives who serve only to harm the broader culture. The irony is that what’s obvious to foreigners in Russia and China is mostly opaque to Americans, who mechanically approve of mass education as the foremost common value.

The chief practical argument for multiculturalism is that we’re in a ‘global economy’ and that ‘America has global responsibilities’ and that American students have a responsibility for ‘global stewardship.’ The last 10 years should be sufficient evidence to show that this strategy has failed on every possible level. One does not form a useful competitive position in a global economy by expressly promoting an inherently mediocre culture that has no competitive advantage.

The good news is that there’ll be no more American globe to steward pretty soon. The bad news is that correcting the situation will be unpleasant, costly, and conflict-ridden.