key: cord-0059846-y6r0z5md
authors: Di Leo, Jeffrey R.
title: Coda
date: 2020-12-12
journal: Catastrophe and Higher Education
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-62479-8_11
sha: e754c2136cac5897795bd28d93de9063f78b33ed
doc_id: 59846
cord_uid: y6r0z5md

The humanities without critique might meet the needs of neoliberal academe, but it does not meet the needs of catastrophic education. Our aim is to avoid catastrophe through education not to perpetuate it through education. The future of the humanities is tied to the fate of theory. Without the aid of diverse and critical forms of theory, higher education is always already vulnerable to the formidable and destructive forces of economic neoliberalism. Left to its own designs, these destructive forces will continue to eat away at the educational center of academe and replace it with a vocational training center. And once the educational center of higher education is replaced by this lower form of education, the argument for a bachelor’s degree rather a training certificate becomes increasingly more difficult to make. In sum, higher education under neoliberalism is an educational catastrophe.

These include but are not limited to the many mass shootings including those at public schools and universities, the bombings of theaters and markets, and the widespread violence by police against blacks. This situation has been further revealed in the national response to the catastrophe of the Coronavirus, which on the one hand gives lip service to the various tragedies within the commons including the deaths of thousands of people in the United States, while on the other cannot help but emphasize the neoliberal prioritization of the market at the expense of the people to "get the economy moving again." Again, if September 11, 2001, announced the age of terrorism and neoliberalism, then the national Coronavirus response has further shown us the catastrophic consequences of following a philosophy based on the maximization of fear and capital via the free market.

Emerson was right in his 1837 Phi Beta Kappa address when he said "Fear always springs from ignorance." It was a message that he would deliver many times over in addresses and lectures to writers, scholars, clergy, students, and as many other people who would listen to him. From 1837 to 1844, he was in full out defiant revolt against his times, hoping that "Amidst a planet peopled by conservatives, one Reformer may yet be born." Much of the fear that drives neoliberal thought is also grounded in ignorance. It is a fear that the terror of neoliberalism feeds upon as it continues its catastrophic decimation of democratic values and the public good.

H. G. Wells faced a much different situation than Emerson when he decided to write a textbook to save the world from catastrophe. World war of the scale experienced by Wells was almost unfathomable in Emerson's time. Still, they would both concur that the "world has failed" and that it is also "sick." Also, while they would agree about the relationship of fear to ignorance, after seeing the ravages of the First World War, Wells would raise the red flag of warning even higher by replacing "fear" with "catastrophe" in his own thinking. The immediacy of the catastrophe facing the world and the amount of ignorance that needed to be overcome were such that Wells believed the most expedient response was to publish a book, rather than attempt to alter the course of history through lectures and addresses that he would deliver. Like Emerson, Wells too was in a revolt against his times, but he believed that it was through publishing that he would make his contribution to catastrophic education.

Wells's Outline of History would start a revolution in publishing where many other individuals would contribute their own "Outline" or "Story" to help fill in educational gaps. Arguably, this publishing enterprise was grounded in the Wellsian idea that in order for the world to avoid catastrophe, education in all areas of knowledge that is publicly accessible both intellectually and financially is necessary. The need here was felt to be urgent, and writers and scholars from many different areas contributed to this project. While some of them are still well-known today such as Bertrand Russell and Will Durant, many others have been long forgotten even though at the time their contributions were massive. A great example of a publisher and writer whose work held sway worldwide from the 1920s through the 1940s but who is virtually unknown today is Emmanuel Haldeman-Julius.

This publisher answered Wells's call for help in the avoidance of catastrophe through worldwide education more effectively than anyone else at the time. His Little Blue Books carried information and edification that would revolutionize publishing with the aim of catastrophic education. Short, inexpensive, and easy for all to obtain through the postal service, Haldeman-Julius's Little Blue Books would make him the greatest publisher in the world in terms of the sheer number of his books that would find their way into the hands of a global population desperate for education in all areas of knowledge.

One of the most difficult but important of these areas is philosophy. When Haldeman-Julius began his publishing project, there was not a survey of philosophy that met the demands of catastrophic education. Namely, a survey that was both authoritative and accessible. At the behest of Haldeman-Julius, Will Durant would provide such a book in the form of the Little Blue Books that would later become The Story of Philosophy. Though its authority has been widely challenged including by Durant himself, the book almost single-handedly popularized philosophy in America at a time when it desperately needed more thoughtfulness and less ignorance.

For the record, I will add one of my own complaints here about the volume, namely, that it did not include a chapter on Emerson. In fact, there are only a few passing references to him, and only a few facile quotes from him including one in the introduction: "Do you know the secret of the true scholar? In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him; and in that I am his pupil." 1 This particular passage though is not from Emerson's great Phi Beta Kappa address, "The American Scholar," rather it is from a grab bag of materials from his uncollected writings, which his London publisher was intending to publish without consulting him. Though he tried to stop the publication of the volume, he agreed to oversee it in the last years of life, albeit, writes J. E. Cabot in his preface to the volume, with a "heavy heart, partly from a feeling of repugnance at being forced into an enterprise which he had not intended, but still more perhaps from a sense of inability, more real than he knew, which was beginning to make itself felt." 2 Moreover, Emerson even disclaimed credit for the book from which this quote is taken, giving it all to Cabot.

But such are not matters for Durant in his volume. Rather, using a quote that clearly empowers the reader to believe that even they have something to teach the great American philosopher Emerson is important to the project of giving the lay reader confidence to soldier on in their catastrophic education. And this of course is the spirit of the education afforded those who venture into the historical publications of Wells, the philosophical ones of Durant, and the general publishing corpus of Haldeman-Julius: catastrophic education is achieved not by scholarly exactitude but by just getting people to read and think about areas of knowledge that will ultimately help them become more responsible and responsive citizens of the world. The educational bar here is a general one not a scholarly one. In this setting, an amateur historian such as Wells, a self-published writer such as Haldeman-Julius, and Durant, a school teacher and public lecturer on almost every subject under the sun, who moonlighted with "extension courses" at Columbia University, would become major voices for areas in the humanities all around the world.

Arguably, in spite of their scholarly deficiencies, work in this vein increased the audience for the humanities during this period of catastrophic education. Today their work reveals some of the opportunities and challenges for both the humanities and education as we face our own set of catastrophes. While it is important for the university to maintain the highest levels of scholarly excellence in the work published by its faculty, there is still a disconnect with this type of scholarship and the kind of writing read by those not attuned to or with the patience for the intellectual ideals of academe. History, philosophy, and literature today all benefits from the work of writers who masterfully popularize and update these and other areas of knowledge for readers who are not required to meet the educational demands of a university humanities curriculum but who nonetheless are eager to get a taste of the fruits of higher education.

Catastrophic education in the tradition of Wells and Durant often sacrifices rigor for recognition, precision for popularity, and authority for accessibility. Yet in spite of these scholarly concessions, work in this spirit is able to engage a wide swath of readers with the humanities without them feeling belittled as non-scholars for not dedicating more of their life to study in this area. The wide dissemination of these works is important because they espouse key values of the humanities such as cultural diversity, democratic citizenship, and critical inquiry. In times of catastrophe, the associated values of social and economic justice are significant only if they are acknowledged on a national and global scale-and not just reserved for the intellectual elite. The progressive and transformational advances in the humanities in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century including considerations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability were not mere scholarly exercises. Rather, the hope was and is that they would reach a wide audience who would then assist in overcoming the various forms of oppression associated with them.

Neoliberal academe though has become an educational catastrophe, rather than catastrophic education. The difference here is quite significant. Catastrophic education in the tradition of Wells, Durant, and Haldeman-Julius is education aimed at avoiding catastrophe. It is education that promises to lead us away from catastrophe-not into it. As such, catastrophic education is greatly different than the kind of vocational training advanced by neoliberal academe that place little value on education in the humanities. The study of history, philosophy, and literature is only as important in neoliberal academe relative to its ability to increase ones earning and career prospects. So, unless you plan a career in history or philosophy, which, of course, is in direct opposition to the telos of neoliberal academe, then education in these areas is not encouraged. This is just one of the educational catastrophes of neoliberal academe: the irrelevance of the humanities to higher education.

But the educational catastrophes of neoliberal academe cut much wider and deeper than just the marginalization of the humanities. Neoliberalism aims to privatize for profit all public goods including education. For public institutions of higher education, this has resulted in much less state support for its colleges and universities, and therefore skyrocketing tuition and student debt. Faced with the prospect of a life entombed in debt, some students have considered not paying back their debt. This places them in the dilemma of choosing between morality and debt, a catastrophe that is made even worse for those not subject to privilege such as people of color, queer or trans people, women, people with disabilities, and the poor. The cycle of educational catastrophe is then recycled by a neoliberal higher educational system built to produce and reproduce this privilege.

Notice again this catastrophic cycle by playing it backward: privilege thrives and reproduces itself well under neoliberalism. Those of privilege without need for racial, economic, gender, sexuality, and disability justice are not concerned with its disappearance in the curriculum in neoliberal academe. Arguably, the presence of these oppressions provides neoliberal man a competitive economic advantage. Areas such as the humanities that have advocated for identifying and ending oppression of all types are no longer an educational priority in neoliberal academe. Therefore, building the case for higher education as a public good that needs to be well-supported by the state becomes very difficult in this environment. The educational catastrophe is then completed with students, who are strapped with massive amounts of debt contemplating ending their commitment to morality. This is an educational catastrophe proportional to most any catastrophe imaginable.

Nevertheless, tools for resisting educational catastrophe are readily at hand for those who so choose to fight back with them. Whereas the traditional publishing world held relatively few opportunities for resistance because of the extremely limited catalogue of its product, the rise selfpublishing puts virtually no constraint on its opportunities for resistance. However, it too risks being coopted by both the corporate publishing industry as well as the extreme individualism of neoliberal man. One of the axioms of neoliberalism is that everything is for sale and everything can-and should-be plundered for profit. Self-publishing has been subject to a high degree of profiteering and effectively plays to the individual vanity of neoliberal man. Right now, there does not appear to be a Haldeman-Julius among us who has figured out how to harness the power of self-publishing to the ends of catastrophic education. But the situation here is not without hope. The same however cannot be said about the forces within the humanities who attack the very thing that provides catastrophic education with hope: namely, critique.

Postcritique has managed in the period of just a few years to turn back the progressive clock of the humanities fifty to seventy-five years. This reactionary effort by some humanities scholars is an educational catastrophe of the highest order. Advances in the humanities made particularly in the final quarter of the twentieth century under the name of "theory" offered the hope for a critical humanities powered by the kind of philosophy fit for a world tempered by neoliberal catastrophes. From critical climate change and queer theory to disciplines ranging from the social and natural sciences to the humanities, theory was coming to make its mark through the application of its formidable powers of critique. This all came to a grinding halt in the minds of a new generation of antitheorists who felt that the way to save the humanities was to embrace neoliberalism, rather than work to reject or overcome it. Postcritique is a life-denying approach whose pessimism needs to be replaced by a more life-affirming one. While critical pedagogy offers one such approach others too might be offered. But what is not negotiable here is the role of critique in the university.

The humanities without critique might meet the needs of neoliberal academe, but it does not meet the needs of catastrophic education. Our aim is to avoid catastrophe through education not to perpetuate it through education. Catastrophe and Higher Education argues the future of the humanities is tied to the fate of theory. Without the aid of diverse and critical forms of theory, higher education is always already vulnerable to the formidable and destructive forces of economic neoliberalism. Left to its own designs, these destructive forces will continue to eat away at the educational center of academe and replace it with a vocational training center. And once the educational center of higher education is replaced by this lower form of education, the argument for a bachelor's degree rather a training certificate becomes increasingly more difficult to make especially if the immediate earning potential of the certificate is greater than the bachelor's degree. In sum, higher education under neoliberalism is an educational catastrophe. Higher education under neoliberalism becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers

Preface to the First Edition