Humanities Rant

 I got depressed at the symphony this weekend and had to walk out. All these pompous old people who in their final years think nothing of stepping over the young in line as though you're not there, all these young people who vote with their feet and clearly believe civic institutions aren't worth supporting. It's enough to make you want to curl up into reclusion forever.

The humanities are not about snobbery or self-congratulation, they're about history, they're about an unbroken continuity going back thousands of years. There is objective quality in humanities, and anybody who says otherwise is worth shaming. The humanities are about civilization and making us aware that civilization can break down so easily, and the greatest creators are people who know exactly what it means to feel grief, terror, horror, hatred, poverty, and yet they still bet on life and love and progress. That's what it means to listen to the ninths and thirds of Beethoven and Mahler, to read Crime and Punishment and Anna Karenina, to look at the later paintings of Goya and Van Gogh, to watch Children of Men and Pan's Labyrinth, to even watch The Simpsons, it's even what it means to listen to Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin, it's even what it means to read large parts of The Bible and the Mahabharata.. They teach us more about life than life can. It's more than just pleasure, it's more than just nerding out, they're about moral instruction, they're about our responsibility to do the hardest thing in the world: to view existence affirmatively in the worst circumstances, they're a spiritual prayer that has no need for a god.

People now say history is just a myth perpetrated by people in power. Bullshit. Stinking foul bullshit that landed us exactly here, yet again. There is objective truth in history. They can be boiled down to two.

1. Progress is imperative. The gain of rights and dignity, hearing the voices of the marginalized, the empowerment of the dispossessed, the anticipating of problems before they become existential, the wholesale embrace of people whose identity doesn't conform to your traditions. These are rights and not rewards for good behavior.

2. People are trying to take away these rights, often people who falsely think they're marginalized and consequently take others rights away. If they fight with force, they need to be met with force or else they'll succeed.

The reason the humanities is currently undergoing a thoroughly unnecessary and fanatical revolution? An older generation of complacent corruption prevents the gaining of #1, and consequently the younger generation turns into dangerous fanatics who don't see the terrors of #2, which turns the older gwneration into the same fanatics, only they have the power and the will to use it to kill off the younger generation through planetary heating, debt and deregulation. Combine it all and this is why the world now is what it is.

We have to bet on life and love and progress, but hundreds of millions of dipshits make it so very very hard.