Fall\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waxing Blood Moon<\/p>\n
Walked the fence today, checking for limbs, plants I’d missed.\u00a0 Sure enough, about a third of the way around a large fallen tree branch pressed against the chain link shorting the fence and creating a hissing, popping sound when nudged.\u00a0 The air smelt of burnt plastic fibers.\u00a0 A visit with the chain saw fixed that problem.\u00a0 Later on I tightened up the rope from a place where it had sagged.\u00a0 After turning the fence off of course and putting Rigel in her crate.<\/p>\n
This fence is a great metaphor, but for what I’ve not yet discerned.<\/p>\n
On a topic close to my heart a professor of English for forty years wrote this essay:\u00a0 The Decline of the English Department.<\/a> Mr. Chace places yet another shot across the bow of careerism and the practical major while trying to suss out just what went wrong.\u00a0 He puts his finger on the fragmentation of the humanities into gender, race, media and technology studies as well as the lack of passion for books and the traditional humanities.\u00a0 In general I appreciate a man who takes responsibility for the dismal thing that has happened and I like Mr. Chace’s posture in this piece.<\/p>\n While I would like to blame the victims, too, the politically wracked departments attempting to right ancient wrongs in scant years by creating university departments, I find it lets off the hook the real culprit.\u00a0 A relentless scanning of the horizon for opportunities to make money without regard to the social or environmental costs lies at the bottom of this debasement of education.<\/p>\n Crass instrumentalism has invaded every aspect of our lives.\u00a0\u00a0 Witness the prosperity gospel.\u00a0 The growth of the mega-church. The new business orientation of medicine where patients are now consumers and doctors employees.\u00a0 The rank greed filleted for all to see as the great economic crisis unfolded last fall.\u00a0 The loose expansion of credit with fine print so dense not even its creators understood it.\u00a0 Partisan politics make the party a blunt instrument for personal and factional advancement rather than a representative tool for negotiating compromises amongst civilizations conflicting interests.\u00a0 Professional sports now have contracts in the quarter of a billion dollar range.\u00a0 Tens of millions are not unusual for catching or throwing a football.\u00a0 Educators at the elementary and secondary levels now teach to the test, a strategy created to insure that they meet federal standards and that their students pass high stakes tests.<\/p>\n It is this coarsening of the social fabric, gone from a workmanlike denim for the post World War II economy to a scratchy burlap in this age of the derivative, that has led to a pushing aside of any thing that does not promise economic or political gain.<\/p>\n This is not new.\u00a0 A friend of mine has a neighbor in his condominium who was hired to teach philosophy at West Point.\u00a0 In the time period before he began teaching a widespread cheating scandal unfolded.\u00a0 The honor code had no clothes.\u00a0 Leadership at West Point told him, “We can’t believe it, but we just never thought to teach our students ethics.\u00a0 You have to put together a group of experts and develop a curriculum.”\u00a0 Ethics is one of those disciplines that you can be taught, that you can know well, and that will have no affect on you at all unless you have the will to apply it.<\/p>\n It is not enough, in other words, to teach justice and critical thinking and wisdom and equality if there is no social will to honor them.\u00a0 That social will comes from a shared conversation about our past, about our common destiny and our mutual responsibility.\u00a0 Instrumental thinking places all the emphasis on results with means receiving attention only as they bend circumstance to the result.\u00a0 This is a recipe for disaster as any historian, English or philosophy professor can tell you.\u00a0 It is not new, it is not a new thing under the sun.\u00a0 Rather it is a lesson learned by Moses when he came down from Mt. Sinai and found even his brother Aaron bowed before the golden calf.<\/p>\n Judgment came then and it will come now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fall\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waxing Blood Moon Walked the fence today, checking for limbs, plants I’d missed.\u00a0 Sure enough, about a third of the way around a large fallen tree branch pressed against the chain link shorting the fence and creating a hissing, popping sound when nudged.\u00a0 The air smelt of burnt plastic fibers.\u00a0 A visit with the … Continue reading More on the Humanities<\/span>