https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=_OppspUNIHA
What advice can you give a student studying literature or any other subject with the humanities considering far left leaning university systems? So the question is what advice can I give to someone who’s studying the humanities given the state of our higher education system. When I went to university as an undergraduate, the first place I went to was a small college in northern Alberta and it was a feeder college to the University of Alberta. And I had very small classes and very good professors, like seven good professors the first two years I was there and it was all small seminars and that was unbelievably useful. But when I went to the bigger university most of the professors taught courses that weren’t very good and so then you might ask what do you do in a situation like that and well you still have the time and you have the books and I found people that I respected and asked them what they read and then I went read those books that was extremely useful and if you go to university to a large degree you have to educate yourself like I mean there are resources there for you to utilize including the professors and the lectures but in some real sense especially in the humanities the illness is on yourself. There’s great books and most of them are free and so you can read them and I have a list of a hundred books on my website and there’s some literary works and some scientific works. There are books that had a huge impact on me right they produced a fundamental shift not only in the way I thought about the world but also very frequently the way I acted in the world and and perceived the world and deep education does that it’s not it’s certainly not merely the acquisition of a set of facts about the material structure of the world. The sciences tilt more in that direction although even that’s an oversimplification but the purpose of a humanities education is to teach you how to be well fundamentally to be a good person, secondarily to be a good citizen you know tertiarily I think that’s right to be a good partner to your wife or husband and to be a good parent and all of that like that’s the purpose of a liberal arts education right and people are often this is something I don’t know all you people in here are interested at least to some degree in what I’ve had to say or wrote and so most of you probably have a bit of a tilt in a literary direction one of the things you might ask yourself is why bother studying literature and I laid out some of the answer today is that literature abstracts out patterns of perception and behavior and so in some sense it’s more real than reality itself and you kind of know that because when you go to a movie all you see is what’s interesting and life isn’t like that right there’s a fair bit of tedium in life and if you’re a reasonable person to be around when someone asks you what you’re up to you don’t describe all the tedium and the repetition you hit the high points right and you’re engaging in a literary exercise right there and so and then you still might think well literature who cares and I would say you should care because it’s literary critics that have torn your culture into shreds and that that’s really technically true because most of the ideas that are characterized by this excessive ideological possession and this insistence that nothing but power motivates people and groups in the final analysis that all comes out of schools of literary criticism and so you ignore that at your peril partly because we think in stories and we perceive the world through a story and we act out stories it’s like this isn’t trivial it’s the most fundamental thing and it’s very important to get this story right and that’s kind of what we were talking about today you know how could you conceptualize right is there some fundamental ground upon which the notion of correct right true rests it’s not mere accordance with a set of objective facts it’s it’s it’s not that it’s more like the specification of a pattern of behavior that guides all of us up it’s something like that and so you need to know that when you go to study humanities you’re going to learn to write hypothetically you’re gonna have to write essays and how should you do that and well the answer is honestly into the best of your ability and the reason for that is because that’ll train you to think and one of the things I’ve tried to tell my audiences as an educator and my students is you know our whole culture insofar as our cultures nested inside of Christianity and Judaism in a wider context so that’s thousands and thousands of years of nesting there’s a fundamental presumption of that underlying tradition and the fundamental presupposition is that the divine word creates what’s good and that’s probably true and if it is true then you should be careful with your words because when you use them you’re doing one of two things you’re either creating what’s good or you’re doing the opposite and so part of what you do when you go to become educated is to learn to respect the word yours and others and to train yourself to use it properly and that would mean I would say honestly that’s the first thing honestly and in the service of the the highest ethic that you can conceive and that’s the purpose of a humanities education and then you can think about that practically too because this is not impractical quite the contrary I know no one who hasn’t been radically successful who isn’t radically expert at communication and that also means they’re radically expert at thought because mostly we think in words and so and when you write you’re learning to think and when you’re using the language that you’ve strived to master you are literally generating the present and the past out of the future in the direction you’re aiming at that’s what you’re doing that’s what consciousness does and so you want to have respect for that I think it’s so sad especially I think this is especially sad in relationship to young men who are bailing out of schools and the education system en masse is that people don’t make this clear it’s like you want to take your place in the world you better learn how to use your tongue so and to construe it in terms of radical competence productivity generosity all of that like nobility I can’t understand why we’ve forgotten that maybe we never knew it explicitly right but we shouldn’t have forgotten it because I know I know nothing that’s more true than that so thank you yeah