Rush Limbaugh vs. The Classics

Kyle is filled with righteous indignation against Rush Limbaugh.

In case you had any lingering doubt that Rush Limbaugh makes a good charlatan’s living espousing half-baked pseudo-ideology slyly disguised as principled conservative philosophy, the winning radio host informs us that he doesn’t know what Classical Studies is, but he’s sure it’s a clever socialist plot. His faux-ignorant blather about the uselessness and insidiousness of studying Greek, Latin, Cicero, Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Virgil, the Bible—you know, the bulwarks of Western Civilization that any conservative worth his salt should have an interest in conserving—reveals that he has no regard for the origin and history of our ideas, for the development of the intellect, or for conservatism.

The source of the indignation is a rant which Rush apparently delivered on the air a week ago. Said rant was in response to this "We Are the 99%" plea which was posted in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement:

I graduate college in 7 months with a “useless” degree in Classical Studies. I have worked very hard and am on track to graduate with highest Latin honors. I am in a Greek organization with many volunteer hours under my belt.
MY JOB PROSPECTS?
0
I am one of the lucky ones, but I am still the 99%.
Welcome to the American nightmare.

Rush responded to this plea, in part, as follows:

[reads the above quoted "We Are The 99%" piece]

Now, do you think somebody going to college, borrowing whatever it is in this case, $20,000 a year to get a degree in Classical Studies ought to be told by somebody at a school that it's a worthless degree? ... [W]hy is it that no one in her life told her that getting a degree in Classical Studies would not lead to employment? In fact, how many college students do you think believe that just getting a degree equals a high-paying job? Probably a lot of them. Not that you can blame 'em. That's what they've been sold on. That's what they've been told. Ergo, that's what they expect. A college degree equals success, riches, whatever. Not work. This is key, now.
...
Now, I think the colleges ought to be held accountable here. You show up, you want a degree in Classical Studies, you need to be told what that really means. "Well, how do you want to use your degree in Classical Studies? Do you even know what it is?" "Well, yes, I want study the classics so that I can be an expert in the classics, so that I can then study them further, like, and, you know, help others." "Really? Okay, how much money do you expect to make doing this?" "Well, as a college graduate with a Classical Studies degree, maybe a Latin minor, $200,000 a year, enough to pay off my student loans in the first four years and then after that who knows."

"Can you tell me where do you go to apply for a job with a Classical Studies degree?" "Well, anybody who's interested in studying classically, I would think would be interested in my services because I'm going to be an expert." At that point somebody at the university ought to say, "Babe, you are wasting your time in a nothing major. We are stealing your money. You're gonna be qualified for jack excrement when you get outta here." But they don't. Now, this is part of the trick, this is the ruse, and it's actually clever.
...
Tell me, any of you at random listening all across the fruited plain, what the hell is Classical Studies? What classics are studied? Or, is it learning how to study in a classical way? Or is it learning how to study in a classy as opposed to unclassy way? And what about unClassical Studies? Why does nobody care about the unclassics? What are the classics? And how are the classics studied? Oh, cause you're gonna become an expert in Dickens? You're assuming it's literature. See, you're assuming we're talking classical literature here. What if it's classical women's studies? What if it's classical feminism? Who the hell knows what it is?
...
The socialists that run universities dilute the education, they offer useless majors, and then they lie about the quality of these useless majors. They lie about the happiness and the jobs and the money that awaits you after you get the degree in something like Classical Studies. Then -- and this is where the payoff is -- after a generation or two of such students, after a generation or two of such worthless degrees, after generation or two of deceived students with worthless degrees out in the world finding themselves very unhappy, very unemployable, and without money to do all the fun things they want, what do they then demand?

Socialism as a remedy. They demand that everybody else take care of them -- and, my friends, this is not an accident.

Now, I don't think there's a whole lot of question that Rush's ramble here is ignorant and anti-intellectual. Given his total lack of pretensions to intellectualism, I'm not sure that his clear ignorance of what Classics is is all that startling a revelation. As someone whose degree actually is in Classics, I can assure you that this happens pretty frequently. I once had an optometrist ask me, "So did you study classic films or classic novels?" A nice old lady once remarked, "Oh, so you must have read Gone With The Wind!" It shows ignorance of academia, but that's not exactly shocking in a studiously low brow radio host. It's not like the time that the new college president was touring the Earth Science department where my father worked and announced, "I'm so glad to see that you have classes in cosmology. I always like to know where I can go on campus to get a perm or have my nails done." (You can imagine that this led to rampant speculation that she was an affirmative action hire.)

Rush occupies a niche on the right which is something of a cross between the purposes that Michael Moore and John Stewart serve on the left -- which is to say that many people enjoy listening to him spout off, feel a certain agreement, but don't really take him all that seriously or expect him to present a fully coherent philosophy. (Personally, I listened to Rush daily back in high school, and used to catch parts of his program when the forklift guys out in the warehouse had him on at my first job out of college, but haven't heard him since. I lost the taste for his tone -- though I will say that he was generally more polite to his opposing callers than the liberal talk show hosts on the same station.) I prefer a more high brow approach to conservatism, but there's ample precedent this kind of low brow curmudgeonry within conservatism. Indeed, since we're on the topic of the Classics, this is something of the spirit which Arisophanes epitomizes in Greek drama. Arisophanes was a conservative within the Athenian context. And from that vantage point he savages Socrates and higher education in general in The Clouds.

That said, there is, I think, something to be said for a bit of what Limbaugh has to say in response to the "99%" plea. The idea that one should have a sure idea seven months before graduating college where one is going to have a job afterwards strikes me as a bit unrealistic. Maybe I was just too ready to accept the realities of being a Classics major, but I certainly didn't have any clear job prospects seven months before graduating, but the determination that I would find something. After I was done with classes, I flew back out to Los Angeles where we were planning to live after getting married, went down to a temp agency, and explained that I had experience using computers (Word, Excel, Access), doing phone customer service and sales, and that I had a college degree. I did a few interviews and got a job as a "sales and marketing assistant" for the princely sum of $14/hr. (This was not much to live on in Los Angeles, but compared to the misery of doing phone sales for $10/hr, I was glad to get it.)

My younger sister, who hit the job market six years later with a master from Oxford in English and the ability to read Old Norse and Old English took a moderately similar route: She worked at a Starbucks for a while and taught herself to design websites so she could create a book review portal. Then she used that web design experience to get an entry level job at a law firm putting documents on the web for them.

As these stories show, it's certainly possible to graduate college with what the 99-percenter terms a "useless" degree and proceed to get a "real job". As my experience over the ensuing ten years shows, it's even possible to equal or surpass the fortunes of one's compatriots who took degrees in fields like business, computer science or engineering. One must, however, be prepared to scrounge around a bit, deal with some uncertainty, and start out making half as much as some people with more vocational degrees.

This isn't because a degree in the humanities is "useless". I believe that learning Greek, Latin, history and philosophy was very useful to me. But it was useful to me in the sense that a liberal art is meant to be useful -- in allowing one to think like a "free man". It is not useful in the sense of providing instant and easy employment. I think that it would be helpful if colleges and departments were a little more honest about this. It would also be very, very helpful if people took it into account before blithely borrowing large amounts of money. (And if people were less blithe about borrowing so much money in order to fund college degrees, perhaps the absurd rate of tuition increase would slow down. You may be assured that one of the things allowing universities to make off like bandits is that people have the illusion that having a degree, any degree, is an automatic ticket to a "good job".)

Kyle quotes Rod Dreher, who says, “If Limbaugh were any kind of serious conservative, he would be trying to figure out how we can make Classics majors employable by fostering an appreciation for the Classics — this, as a way to restore a love for and knowledge of the cultural foundations of Western civilization, as a shoring up of our cultural defenses against what Russell Kirk called ‘chaos and old night.’”

Frankly, this still strikes me as far too commercial a view. I love the classics and would not have spent my college years any other way. But because I would see classical languages and the canon of Western Literature as being things worthy of study on the part of any free man, I don't think that the way to encourage their study is to urge that we somehow create more jobs "for classics majors". Classics is worth studying even if the job you take will never have anything practical to do with Classical Culture. Studying classics is, fundamentally, a leisure activity. It is not practical, but it enriches the mind and spirit. Rather than having "classics jobs", I would much rather have the people who will go on to be sales managers and advertising writers and loan officers and customer service representatives have spent some time learning about Western Culture during their college years simply because that is the civilized thing to do. Acquiring civilization is not something which should be dependent upon someone giving us a job as a reward.

Quote of the Day: Hayek on Individualism

From "Individualism: True and False" (1946)

...[T]he state, the embodiment of deliberately organized and consciously directly power, ought to be only a small part of the much richer organism which we call "society," and that the former ought to provide merely a framework within which free (and therefore not "consciously directed") collaboration of men has the maximum scope.

This entails certain corollaries on which true individualism once more stands in sharp opposition to the false individualism of the rationalistic type. The first is that the deliberately organized state on the one side, and the individual on the other, far from being regarded as the only realities, while all the intermediate formations and associations are to be deliberately suppressed, as was the aim of the French Revolution, the noncompulsory conventions of social intercourse are considered as essential factors in preserving the orderly working of human society. The second is that the individual, in participating in the social processes, must be ready and willing to adjust himself to changes and to submit to conventions which are not the result of intelligent design, whose justification in the particular instance may not be recognizable, and which to him often appear unintelligible and irrational.
...
Quite as important for the functioning of an individualist society ... are the traditions and conventions which evolve in a free society and which, without being enforceable, establish flexible but normally observed rules that make the behavior of other people predictable in a high degree. The willingness to submit to such rules, not merely so long as one understands the reason for them but so long as one has no definite reasons to the contrary, is an essential condition for the gradual evolution and improvement of the rules of social intercourse; and the readiness ordinarily to submit to the products of a social process which nobody has designed and the reasons for which nobody may understand is also an indispensable condition if it is to be possible to dispense with compulsion. That the existence of common conventions and traditions among a group of people will enable them to work together smoothly and efficiently with much less formal organization and compulsion than a group without such common background, is, of course, a commonplace. But the reverse of this, while less familiar, is probably not less true: that coercion can probably only be kept to a minimum in a society where conventions and tradition have made the behavior of man to a large extent predictable.

This essay is one of twelve collected in Individualism and Economic Order.

The Dignity of the Working Man

It is perhaps not a bad time to devote a few thoughts to the dignity of work. Work is not always seen in a wholly positive light. Many of us don't like going to work, and the rigors of labor are reflect in Adam's curse, when after the fall he is told that he shall eat only by the sweat of his brow, struggling to win sustenance from an unfriendly soil.

Yet we also recognize that that is an essential dignity to labor. Through labor we meet the essential needs of life, and labor is frequently a service: Husbands and wives labor for each others' sake, parents labor to support children, we share the fruits of our labor with our churches, with the less fortunate, with our friends and family. We rightly take great pleasure and pride in serving others this way. As a father, even the most tiresome or repetitive task can be a source of satisfaction to me when I know that by this means I am providing for the needs and pleasures of my wife and children.

It seems to me that human relationships are not merely fueled by affection, but also by this sense of being provided for. Children know their parents work to care for them. Parents love their children in part because they care for them. It is the action of providing for others and being provided for which gives strength to these relationships.

It is placing value on work, and on the web of relationships between those who provide for each other in some sense, that provides much of my conservative skepticism of social welfare programs. On the one hand, it is clearly in keeping with the common good to make sure that members of society are not without basic necessities. On the other, it concerns me when the providing of basic needs is systematically done through an impersonal means. In small societies, such as are arguably most natural to the human person, these kinds of assistance are easily provided without resorting to impersonal means. Some closed communities such as the Amish successfully continue this approach today -- with each community of Amish maintaining an emergency assistance fund to which all contribute according to their means, and members of the community providing direct assistance when needed for smaller needs. But such approaches become much more difficult in a mass, urban society -- and I fear that systems working along the lines of "All households making less than X may fill out form Y to apply for subsidy Z" end up sapping both the natural sense of responsibility the comes from providing for others, and any sense of community cohesion.

Clearly, compromises along these lines need to be made somewhere. It is essential that the most basic needs of members of society be met somehow, though hopefully in a way that preserves both dignity and work ethic. But the ideal most certainly is that through our work we provide for both our own families and for those nearest to us who are in need. Without work being tied directly to providing for those we love, it becomes drudgery of the most pointless sort. And without the sense of purpose that comes from providing for others, we too quickly become mere pleasure seekers.

Freedom vs. Choice

It's fashionable at the moment write conservatism's epitaph. Such epitaph writing is not my project here, but there is a sort of inherent tension in the recent history of conservatism which I would like to examine briefly.

For the last hundred years and more, conservatives have often found themselves arguing against those in the political and economic spheres who believe that we can achieve a great improvement in society by instituting some sort of centrally controlled state economy. Socialism, communism and fascism all attempted, in different ways, to create new and better societies through assigning people roles and resources rather than allowing their allocation to occur through a decentralized system of millions of individual decisions taking place independently every day.

Perhaps this is the great modern temptation. People looked at the incredibly intricate (sometimes seemingly orderless) organization of society resulting from custom and the summed decisions of millions of individuals and thought, "Now we have the ability to plan all this instead and do it better!" Various sorts of ideologues tried to impose various sorts of new order on society, and conservatives dragged their feet and tried to keep things as they were, allowing people to make their own decision as they saw best whenever possible.

I think that conservatives have been right in this, but the difficulty is that in the process of defending freedom, we often fall into defending the ways people use freedom. We go from defending freedom to defending choice.

The example that springs most readily to mind is when a pro-life organization we donate to brought out Laura Ingram as a speaker a couple years ago. In her talk she made the toss-off comment, "Of course the Democrats in congress are wanting to increase environmental standards, so my broadcasting team and I all put in together to take out a lease on a new Hummer."

Now, I tend to think that CAFE Standards and other attempts to regulate the mileage cars get don't work very well. (Indeed, arguably the whole SUV craze was kicked off because fleet mileage regulations created and incentive to get customers who didn't like micro-cars into "light trucks".) So in regards to cars I'm in favor of freedom and against regulating behemoths like the Hummer out of existence. And yet, I see no reason to like the big ugly thing, which provides virtues neither of cargo capacity nor seating capacity. I'm against regulating against Hummers not because I'm in favor of Hummers, but because I don't think regulating against that sort of thing works very well. We should only regulate against things which represent a truly grievous harm to society and are easy targets for legislation.

The difficulty is, it's mentally difficult to defend against regulating people's behavior without slipping into actually supporting the behavior itself. And so it's easy to find oneself celebrating Hummers to spite the environmentalists, celebrating cigarettes and fatburgers to spite the health regulators, and declaring we have no obligation to help the poor to tweek the social democrats.

And yet many of the ways in which some people choose to use their freedom (over consumption, fiscal irresponsibility, lacking any sense of responsibility for other members of the community) in turn create the demand for just the sort of massive society-shaping programs which as conservatives we oppose. If we fail to stigmatize (or even celebrate) the bad behaviors which we maintain people's freedom to engage in, we create the environment in which people no longer see those freedoms as worth their cost.

I don't have a policy recommendation here. I don't suggest that we stop upholding personal freedom and distributed decision-making networks, nor is it possible to summon up a set of social stigmas from no where. But I do think that it's important that, even while opposing top down solutions to social and political problems, we make sure that we don't applaud choice simply because we uphold freedom. Somehow we must build a set of social judgments and stigmas such that we encourage people to use their freedom rightly. Otherwise we simply open the way for collectivist solutions which will try to use the blunt force of the law to regulate the most minute every-day decisions.

Reflections on a Defeat

So we lost. I don't like it a bit, but it's not exactly a surprise, and there it is. What is one to make of it all?

The Historic Moment
A great many people have commented on the historic nature of a black man being elected president of the United States -- when in some states he would not have been served at many lunch counters fifty years ago.

I'm glad that those who are deeply inspired by that are having their moment -- people should realize that skin color is not a barrier to achievement in the US and if that helps people (black, brown and white) realize that, all to the good. I must admit, as a 29-year-old who grew up in the working class suburbs of Los Angeles, I've figured for basically all my life that it's simply a matter of time till we had our first black president, our first hispanic president, out first female president, etc.

And I can't help feeling a certain cynicism about this because I can't imagine that if a Clarence Thomas type figure had been running for the GOP and won, there would be all this rejoicing at "barriers coming down". Sure, I'd consider it an extra bonus if a candidate whom I supported and who belonged to a once-oppressed minority won the presidency, but I'd care a lot more about him (or her) being someone I thought would be a good president than about the color of his skin. Call me colorblind, but there it is.

Divided We Remain
I'm already very tired of hearing people tell me what a wonderful day it is for America and how we can now all come together and heal the divisions of the last eight years. I hate to disappoint those who imagine that we're standing on the brink of some sort of brave new world in which all is peachy and keen, but the fact is that elections are pretty much a zero sum game. The fact that you won means that slightly less than half the country lost. Those of us who did are in no more mood to come together and rejoice over the result than you were in 2000 or 2004. So stop telling us you're looking forward to rejoicing in dawning of Obamerica with us -- it makes us cranky.

That said, for those of us who do find ourselves sorely disappointed with the country's leadership for the next four years (and especially the next two) perspective and even a little bit of graciousness is in order. We lost. We know how incredibly annoying, offensive stupid people looked who couldn't stop shouting that Bush-chimp was Hitler for the last eight years. We must not be those people.

And if we can avoid the excesses of shrillness and conspiracy theorizing that some conservatives fell into during the Clinton years, we stand a much better chance of keeping our time in the wilderness short.

Obama-voting Pro-Lifers
Some professed pro-lifers seem to think this is exactly the moment when Obama could be persuaded to reach out to them for some kind of middle ground:

“Now is the time to dialogue with Obama on the issue of life. Now that he is victor, the next stage is to work with him. This also means to be critical, to be sure, but also to engage what he has said. I think a petition or letter which quotes ALL that he has said positive about working with pro-lifers for removing the causes of abortion, and even of his support for restrictions on late-term abortion, needs to be made, before he is in office, and somehow got to him. It needs to suggest that 1) FOCA and his quotes do not go hand and hand, and 2) better postpone FOCA and let the dialogue happen and see what comes from it, especially since it would contradict his notion that abortion can be restricted. The time is now. “

Yeah, well, good luck with that.

I strongly suspect that Obama has now heard all that he wants to hear out of his pro-life supporters until around August, 2012. If Obama takes any positive act specifically towards reducing abortion (other than coincidental factors like the economy starting to improve in late 2009 -- which is roughly when I would expect a recovery regardless of who won) I will happily eat a hat of your choosing.

Where Obama Finds Himself
He won, and won convincingly. Given that the stock market is down 40% for the year, unemployment is rising, the incumbent's approval ratings sit under 30%, and the Republican brand is rocked by scandal and corruption over the last few years -- it would have been pretty pathetic if he'd lost. And indeed, that the fact the election was even competitive underscores that the Obama candidacy was very nearly an over-reach for the Democrats. They bet their best chance since Watergate that they could get in their ideal candidate rather than a compromise centrist, and their bet paid off.

Obama now finds himself a president elect with a strong majority in both houses of Congress and a very, very enthusiastic base. However, he's run as a sort of hybrid candidate, promising a few goodies for the political and cultural left (card check, Freedom of Choice Act), promising a big give away to the broad center (you can keep your current health care and I'll make it cheaper -- or if you can't get any I'll give you something great from the government), and even making traditionally conservative promises which are popular with the wider population (a broad tax cut for most Americans, reducing spending, balancing the budget). His problem now is that his promises are mutually contradictory, especially given that the current recession will probably not level off in terms of safety net expenses for another year, and tax revenues will plummet as the rich (who provide most of the tax dollars) take a hit.

There's no question that Obama is a very smart guy, and I'm sure that he doesn't want to repeat Bill Clinton's mistakes by overreaching in his first two years. He'd probably like to stick with fairly popular ideas for the first couple years. However, his most popular ideas are all very expensive. That leaves him the option of either doing fairly little during his first few years in office (and goodness knows, he's proved himself adept at looking good while doing very little indeed) or else appeasing his base by signing a bunch of highly partisan liberal priorities. If he does the latter, I suspect that the mid-term elections will go hard for him.

Perhaps he could just tour Europe for a few years? They're supposed to love us now.

Is This The End of Center-Right America?
One thing is for sure, come January we shall have a government somewhere between center-left and just plain left. And yet in the same final Pew poll that showed Obama sailing to victory, far more Americans described themselves as "conservative" than as "liberal". Add to that the fact that Obama ran, on paper, a hybrid left/right campaign in which he consistently hammered the Republican nominee for not cutting enough people's taxes or having the right approach to balancing the budget, and it seems hard to argue that the outcome of the election represented a significant shift to the left.

And yet, while Obama did not run as a leftist, his actual record certainly suggests that he actually is one. And there's no question but what the Democratic congress at his back will be eager for left wing legislation -- though we've been spared the embarrassment of having Al Franken in the Senate making things even more absurd there than they normally are.

So clearly the US is in for a period of center-left rule, though I think the country is arguably still clearly center-right now. The question is, will the country come to like center-left rule over the coming years, and thus become a center-left country, or will it remain essentially center-right in orientation?

I think it's rather early to start imagining that the US will become a Sweden or even a France any time soon, though. Recall that in the thirty years since 1980 the right has managed to define the viable political spectrum on a number of issues: taxes, welfare to work, gun control, capital punishment, etc. Other areas are hardened into seemingly permanent strife: abortion, gay issues. Few issues have settled into a leftist status quo.

Whither Conservatism?
Well, that's the question, isn't it, and one probably addressed in future whole posts than in the last section of this long one. However, one thing seems clear to me: While the country is still clearly open to conservative ideas, the old standards which have been milked for the last eight years are running out of steam.

Taxes have already been cut to the point where they can't go down much more until America kicks its addiction to government programs -- something which is still very much in the future at this point.

There is still a constituency (even in "blue" states) for social conservatism, but a significant number of those who hold traditional views on social issues are Hispanic or African American. The GOP would be especially wise to find a way to appeal to socially conservative Hispanics. The best way of doing this would probably be getting behind an agenda of massively simplifying the immigration process, increasing immigration quotas (especially for Central and South America), and at then enforcing the law rigorously.

Conservatives need to find a way to seem like they care (and the amounts of time and money conservatives put into social issues show that they do care) without advocating big government solutions to local problems. Bush simply went the big government route, with programs like No Child Left Behind and the Prescription Drug Benefit. What we need is instead an approach to a range of "safety net" issues which, like charter school and vouchers have done for education, can be a national issue yet a force towards localization.

As Reagan said after losing the primary in '76: It's time to get to work.

[Cross Posted]

Douglas Adams, Conservative

If someone was to ask me to sum up briefly why I am generally skeptical of government solutions to large social problems, I would be tempted to reply with this section from the original Hitchhikers Guide of the Galaxy radio plays:

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this, at a distance of roughly ninety million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet, whose ape descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has, or had, a problem, which was this. Most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small, green pieces of paper, which is odd, because on the whole, it wasn't the small, green pieces of paper which were unhappy.

If you haven't heard the original Hitchhikers, or if you did long ago but don't have them on MP3, you can find them here:

http://www.sadena.com/hh/
[Warning: Google says this is a known attack site using javascript vulnerabilities -- though I downloaded the MP3s from here some weeks ago without any problems.]