This is a response to the YouTube short "The Conservative Argument for a Liberal Arts Education". YouTube sometimes issues mysterious "returned error" messages when attempting to post comments, without any explanation of clarification. I generally assume that my comment must be too long for YouTube, so I'm going to post it here instead and drop a link in the video comments for anyone who might actually care.
The problem is that most colleges offering “liberal arts” degrees are actually teaching liberal politics rather than liberal arts. Classes that claim to be teaching critical thinking only pass students who come to the same conclusions as the teacher and fail students who don’t. That’s not critical thinking, it’s just teaching students not to question things and to follow “authority” figures like sheep, by punishing them if they don't come to the same conclusions.
If U.S. universities’ liberal arts programs actually taught liberal arts, yeah, it would be well worth pursuing. But they don’t, so it isn’t.
If you want to learn real liberal arts, maybe start with the Federalist Papers. Read some Jane Austin. Read the Bible. Those are impressively good sources for starting out. Look up books that the Founders read, and read those. There are lots of gems in there, and you can learn why they designed the U.S. government the way they did. In college, I was looking for sources in a comparison I was writing of slavery in different cultures, and I came across a book in the university library from the early 1800s on how to best care for plantation slaves. Know what I learned? Most slave owners weren’t abusive tyrants. Most slaves didn’t hate being slaves. And slave owners generally understood that if you want productivity, you must ensure your slaves are well fed, get sufficient rest and free time, and are generally happy! Now I’m not trying to suggest this justifies slavery, but reading about history is a great way to actually understand it! I grew up thinking every slave owner beat their slaves regularly and murdered slaves for fun, and that all slaves were miserable being slaves and wanted their freedom. It turns out that’s just not true. Slavery is certainly tragic and exploitative. It should be avoided at most costs. But as bad as it was, many slaves voluntarily continued working for their masters after the Civil War, often for the same compensation they had as slaves (sufficient room and board to live comfortably and be healthy). And did you know that during times of war, when plantation slave owners had to ration their food, they rationed their own food aggressively, so that the slaves could continue to eat their normal diet or as close as possible to it? The slaves were the workers. They couldn’t afford to underfeed the slaves, otherwise they wouldn’t have energy to work. So instead they rationed their own food and that of their family, so the slaves could continue to get all of the necessary nutrition.
The best way to get a strong liberal arts education is to real a whole lot! Consuming a wide variety of media also helps, in moderation. I grew up watching Cheers and Star Trek, because that’s what my dad liked watching when I was young. In my teens, my parents started picking up boxed DVD sets of older TV shows, so I’ve watched a fair amount of The Andy Griffith Show, Hogan’s Heroes, I Dream of Genie, and a while slew of shows ranging from the '50s through the 1970s. We also sometimes watched stuff currently airing, so I’ve watched some Hercules, some more recent Star Trek, and other shows through the '90s. I moved out in the early 2000s, and I watch very little TV myself, but I watch the occasional movie, and I consume a moderate amount of YouTube and have since the late 2000s, so I never lagged too far behind. I also watched bunch of the original Dr. Who and bits and pieces of other older TV shows on my own in the 2010s (as well as some of the current Dr. Who series).
What this means is that unlike the typical Millennial (or any other generation), I have exposure to a massive timespan of American culture. I have studied the U.S. Constitution, in its original context. I’ve studied U.S. culture within difference parts of the 1800s (with significant overlap), in terms of politics, in terms of household cultures, and in terms of industrial, farm, and different work cultures.
On top of that, I’ve also studied Japanese culture, from the mid-1800s to now, and certain eras of the past. I’ve studied the Japanese Constitution and compared it with the U.S. Constitution (if you’ve never done that, you should; do while keeping in mind that the people who wrote it were American diplomats (not legal scholars), who consulted with the Japanese peasantry to determine what the majority of Japanese people wanted, rather than merely what the ruling class wanted; you may notice some very interesting differences between the Japanese Constitution and the U.S. one that only people with experience with the application of the U.S. Constitution would ever think of).
Very little of this is taught in any U.S. university, in liberal arts or anywhere else. The only element of this I learned anything on in college was the portion around the founding of the U.S., which I had already studied, aced all of the tests on, but did learn a bit more on. And I wouldn’t have had any classes on this in any other college in the world. I attended a religious college for a faith that holds freedom of religion and liberty in general to be extremely sacred. No other university cares enough about religious freedom and liberty to even consider it.
Now days, what is called “liberal arts” isn’t actually liberal arts. The only real option today is to take the effort to learn it on your own. It is well worth doing though. You will gain a much broader view of life and a better understanding of where we came from and how we got to where we are (politically, technologically, and such).
Technically, I’m considered an elder Millennial. (Elder, because I’m at the very beginning.) In reality, due in part to my upbringing and in part to my choice to educate myself very broadly, I don’t really fit into any particular generation. I’ve learned from generations spanning from George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin all the way up to the generations on popular media today. I’ve even learned from more ancient generations than that, through scripture, like the Bible, and published books by authors including Jane Austin, Edmund Spenser, and many others.
While I’m a Millennial by birth date, I am timeless by culture. This is largely by choice. I’m aware of Millennial culture. I could embrace it and be “Millennial”. But why? I can see so far back into the past that I’m fully aware of how absurd Millennial culture is. Even Gen X, Boomer, and Silent generation cultures are absurd compared to the sum culture of all humanity through the ages. Gen Z and “gen alpha” are no different either. Every generation seems to want to separate itself from previous and future generations (except in isolated tribes with no technology and small populations, that are so close to abject poverty that they have to be more concerned with survival than petty garbage like that). The result is always the same: A constant mix of cultural progress and cultural backsliding. Do you really think that the hippie free love movement was some huge new cultural invention? It’s not. The Romans did it, and when their leadership bought into it, they became so distracted by it that they let the empire decay into irrelevance. Before the Romans, there were civilizations that worshipped Isis/Ishtar (and other names), a fertility goddess, whose temples were basically centers of “free love”. It didn’t end up working out for them either, and when those civilizations collapsed, they were replaced with superior cultures that were more “prudish” and that survived much longer. Homosexuality is no new thing. Plenty of ancient cultures allowed or even embraced it. But those cultures consistently went extinct in favor of, again, more “prudish” cultures. Cultural evolution is at least as real as biological evolution. History shows us that destructive cultural mutations show up frequently, and the good ones stick around while the bad ones decline and disappear. All of these new trends of modern “morality” have all happened countless times in the past, and the reason our culture didn’t already have them is that past cultures that included them died out every time. The moral trends that always survived through cultural collapse or evolution are things like marriage, the sanctity of sex, the importance of family (not necessarily the “nuclear” family, but blood relation, and at least two generations living and working together), belief in a faith that emphasizes personal responsibility, a good work ethic (not necessarily the “Protestant” work ethic, but ideas like valuing quality and honesty in your work), binary gender roles, individual charity, and basically all of the values taught by Christ, whether those cultures were actually aware of Christ or not. Those are the cultures that survived. The ones that didn’t are the ones that embraced many of the things modern Western generations starting from the 1920s have embraced. If the supposedly hardcore feminist Amazons are so great, where are they now? Where is their culture? Heavily feminist cultures have existed in the past, but they’ve been rare and have almost never lasted more than one or two generations. They went extinct, because they weren’t fit in a battle of cultural survival of the fittest. (Some of those fertility cults where temples were basically free whore houses leaned that direction. Where are they now?)
And no, there is no, “But they just didn’t do it right.” All the ways that are necessary to rule these terrible ideas out have been tried! If a cultural idea is only valid if it is done just right, it’s not fit enough to survive. It’s too fragile. Communism is a great example. It’s destructive and oppressive, and it always tends toward collapse. “Oh, but no one has tried real Communism.” First, yeah they have. Read Marx and compare. All of these different “types” of Communism were done according to his definition (and Marx is the definer of Communism). They all failed. Second, a system that only works if it is perfectly balanced and doesn’t work otherwise, can never work, because there’s no such think as perfect balance. A system can only work if it works at least proportionally to how close to "pure_ it is. Capitalism and democratic government both work proportionally. More capitalism works better, but it still provides proportional benefits if you only do a little bit of it. Look at China. They’ve allowed a moderate amount of capitalism in certain contexts because it doesn’t need to be done “right” to work! A little capitalism works a little bit. But a lot of communism doesn’t work at all! A little communism doesn’t work either. Why would anyone think that “pure” communism would work, when there’s no amount of communism less than that that works? That’s absurd. Even if pure communism did work, there’s no way to keep it pure once we’ve gotten it pure, so it’s only a matter time, probably only a few minutes, before it’s rolling back down the hill. A perfect system that isn’t stable enough to last is a terrible system! It doesn’t matter if no one has done it right, because even if we could do it right and managed to get there, it wouldn’t be long before we are back to mass murder and extreme oppression.
This is the kind of stuff we can learn from studying liberal arts far beyond the scope of anything you could learn in college. I don’t think most liberal arts even belongs in college, because they can’t teach enough to be a significant benefit. If instead though, we taught personal responsibility, basic civics, and strongly encouraged people to study and read to improve themselves throughout their lives, maybe Americans would eventually have a good enough real liberal arts education that this stupid “generational” bull crap would end, and everyone could get along and “common sense” might actually be common.
