Universities no longer produce educated people, and educated people are ceasing to exist. It is an interesting question, not to be discussed here, whether the disappearance of educated people is cause or result of the rise in barbarity that is engulfing the world.
Wherever one looks one sees degeneration. From Bach, Mozart, Beethoven to four-letter rap. Literature has ceased to be written as well as read. Art has become scribbles attesting to meaningless. Both the inclination and ability to read are declining. Fewer people can use their language. University students’ essays are written by insentient AI. People no longer understand the metaphors and allusions used in language, because they have been denied literature.
Great literature explores the human condition and prepares people for an aware life. It protects against naïveté. It teaches the richness and usefulness of language, enhances communication skills, essential skills lost to today’s technical training and “customer service” AI.
Communication today is nonverbal, shorthand text messages. The digital revolution, artificial intelligence, and transhumanism are eliminating human communication. Increasingly humans are forced by “customer service” to communicate with an unthinking programmed voice that cannot recognize any question, an answer for which it has not been programmed. Just think how difficult it is to deal with a service provider. What once was a matter of a three minute telephone call answered by the third ring, can now be a multi-hour and even multi-day enterprise. The lack of Internet security means that even if a human is reached, no decision or solution can be made. It has to go up a level as fewer and fewer employees are trusted to make a judgment.
The digital revolution has brought an explosion in crime and scams. Florida, for example, has so many that they don’t want you to report another one.
The digital revolution was sold to businesses as a way to drop cost by replacing customer service representatives with AI. But AI is not sentient and cannot deal with anything for which it is not programmed. The main purpose of AI “customer relations” is to make it too expensive in time to correct an incorrect bill. It is cheaper just to pay the overstated one.
There are fewer and fewer service companies where you can contact a human with the ability to correct a problem without an investment of hours of time. My favorite is when the Internet is down and you call the service supplier and are told to contact their chat on their website.
Years ago Shakespeare was accused by the Israel Lobby of being anti-semitic. Shakespeare lived during 1564 and 1616. The term anti-semite did not exist and there was no Israel Lobby. This did not prevent Shakespeare from being labeled an anti-semite in the 20th century and removed from high school and university literature courses. Consequently, the most remarkable use of the English language has been denied to students who have been deprived of understanding portions of their own language because of Jewish objections to Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s literature, of course, is not a literature of anti-semitism. But here and there he says a few things about Jews that everyone then believed and many today still do. In literature the same thing happens to every ethnicity, but it is only Jews who complain.
The World Economic Forum, an evil institution to which Western politicians and corporate executives long to belong, has a transhumanist operative who says that AI has made human life unnecessary and inconvenient. The need to dispose of superfluous humans has led to discussions of a legislated lifetime. I predicted many years ago that abortion would lead to enforced euthanasia.
Ask yourself whose hand is driving geeks to make humans superfluous. Why is it more important to have AI answer a phone than a human? If humans are to be disposed of, who is to purchase the products of robots? Don’t you think it is extraordinary that the AI advocates have never asked themselves this question? How does it advance humanity to forever find new ways to transfer the human function to a robot? How did it come to be that the main agenda of science is to make humans irrelevant?
Over the course of my life I have watched a dark age gradually engulf the world. Trump says he is going to make America great again, but how is he going to do that when the building materials no longer exist? What is Trump’s definition of great?
The disassembly of our civilization has left a barbaric people who would not be able to understand Shakespeare if they were to read him.
If truth can be acknowledged, it was literature professors and critics themselves who destroyed great literature by pumping into the works all sorts of modern nonsense, distorting and destroying the meaning of the works.
And now it is Princeton University that is going to misinterpret literature, history, and architecture through the lens of LGBTQ+. Gone with the Wind will be rescued from the banned list, and we will learn that Scarlett O’hara, a transgendered lesbian, wanted to make love to the black servant Prissy, but was deterred by feelings of white racist supremacy.
As Literature is phased out of university studies, pornography moves in
This report from The Guardian describes the plight of education in England:
“The announcement that Canterbury Christ Church University in Kent is to stop offering English literature degrees has set several hares running, most of them in the wrong direction. The university said in effect that hardly anyone wanted to study English literature at degree level any more and the course was therefore no longer viable. If you can’t do EngLit in the city of Chaucer and Marlowe, where can you do it?
“Canterbury’s tale is a familiar one. EngLit is in wholesale retreat at A level, with numbers down from 83,000 in 2013 to 54,000 in 2023, and there has been a decline at university, too, over the past decade, though statistics are disputed because the subject gets studied at degree level in many guises, including creative writing and linguistics. Overall, humanities subjects seem to be losing their appeal, with only 38% of students taking a course in 2021/22, down from nearly 60% between 2003/4 and 2015/16.
“Tuition fees and the need to study a subject chosen to recoup a student’s substantial investment are likely to be behind the fall. The perilous state of university finances is also leading to deep cuts – resulting in the loss of the well-regarded chemistry course at Hull last week. But most concerning is the widespread closure of arts and humanities departments – art, music, drama, dance – with institutions such as Goldsmiths, Oxford Brookes and Surrey shedding hundreds of academics. [In other words, society no longer needs educated persons. Instead, universities produce people with skills needed by corporations.]
“EngLit might seem an easy target. Studying Beowulf is no longer quite as attractive as it was when the state paid. Meanwhile, those on the liberal side of the argument blame Michael Gove’s 2013 curriculum reforms, which ushered in an era of content-heavy courses assessed by final exams. Successive Tory education ministers also extolled science and technology while deriding the career prospects of arts graduates.
“Studying literature is inherently a good thing. Virginia Woolf, who was mortified by her father’s unwillingness to let her go to university, saw books as a way of transcending the self. University should be concerned with encouraging rational inquiry and the free play of the intellect; it is not about the creation of useful drones and it’s unfortunate that tuition fees have made the experience to some degree transactional. Courses should challenge students, emphasising the decoding of texts over superficial skimming. [Decoding of texts helped to destroy literature.]
“The closure of Canterbury Christ Church University’s course coincided with a National Literacy Trust report revealing that only 35% of 8 to 18-year-olds enjoy reading for pleasure — a drop of nearly 9 percentage points in a year. Reading rates are falling, the gender gap is widening and causes range from social media’s dominance to library closures and shrinking attention spans. (Should we read anything into the brevity of this year’s Booker Prize winner? How would Our Mutual Friend have fared?) Some school teachers suggest replacing Dickens with social media studies, but, as Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop might counter: “Up to a point, Lord Copper”.
“We should be concerned about the closure of the EngLit course at Canterbury. Universities are in a shocking state, and the new government has barely begun the herculean task of stabilising the sector. This is more than an institutional failure. It signals a cultural shift that risks leaving future generations without the critical, empathetic and intellectual tools provided by literature. “There is no friend as loyal as a book,” Hemingway said. Reliance on Instagram influencers can only get you so far. We still need Our Mutual Friend.”
By Paul Craig Roberts