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7/1/2025, 4:01:55 PM
>>24511437
Conservative efforts to fix this tend to be deeply flawed. They simply try to cut off all funding from the humanities and all requirements involving them, often focusing on education as merely "job training." The notion of freedom here is simply freedom to consoom, and what is lost is the way these texts show us how self-rule and self-governance requires cultivation. People do not just become free by avoiding major disaster and turning 18. As Epictetus, the great philosopher slave put it, a slave might become free, but most masters are slaves to their passions and appetites.
Reformation volanturism certainly plays a role here, as do many other modern pathologies, including a straight jacket intellectualism that reduces the Logos to formal "systems."
That, or conservatives see the chief value in the classics as supporting classical liberalism and capitalism, the very things that have bulldozed culture and birthed post-modernism. So it's a self-undermining effort. The solution to liberalism's ills is just more liberalism, rereading Virgil and Augustine as classical liberals.
No doubt, liberalism and capitalism brought many good things. But that doesn't mean they are ideal or that they don't tend towards negating themselves. The denial of any human telos ultimately makes civilization impossible in the long run and we have only gotten on so well because Christianity and the classics were still the backbone through inertia. We are only now seeing the fruits of embracing full nihilism and skepticism.
Conservative efforts to fix this tend to be deeply flawed. They simply try to cut off all funding from the humanities and all requirements involving them, often focusing on education as merely "job training." The notion of freedom here is simply freedom to consoom, and what is lost is the way these texts show us how self-rule and self-governance requires cultivation. People do not just become free by avoiding major disaster and turning 18. As Epictetus, the great philosopher slave put it, a slave might become free, but most masters are slaves to their passions and appetites.
Reformation volanturism certainly plays a role here, as do many other modern pathologies, including a straight jacket intellectualism that reduces the Logos to formal "systems."
That, or conservatives see the chief value in the classics as supporting classical liberalism and capitalism, the very things that have bulldozed culture and birthed post-modernism. So it's a self-undermining effort. The solution to liberalism's ills is just more liberalism, rereading Virgil and Augustine as classical liberals.
No doubt, liberalism and capitalism brought many good things. But that doesn't mean they are ideal or that they don't tend towards negating themselves. The denial of any human telos ultimately makes civilization impossible in the long run and we have only gotten on so well because Christianity and the classics were still the backbone through inertia. We are only now seeing the fruits of embracing full nihilism and skepticism.
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