But the individualist solution is not really the issue. We do not, and this is my point, have a culture that produced and educated class of people who are at home in the languages Chris has learned and in the cultures, literatures and arts of the societies that produced those languages. Nor, for that matter, do we (or did we ever) have a scientifically literate class of people who are at home in the physical, biological universe in the way that, say, Fermi or von Neumann was.
And my point is that this is a loss. You cannot create a humane culture of people who share a classical education by learning a lot of languages and reading a lot of books by yourself. No one will get your allusions, your metaphors will go over the heads of even the university educated. You will just be a guy who had read a lot of books and knows a lot of languages, as I, operating outside the scientific community, was just a guy who knew a lot of physics.
I don't think we will ever get back the circumstances that created the sort of classical education Marx or Lukacs took for granted, and took for granted that would be understood when they deployed them. Of course those circumstances were circumstances of privilege that the demise of which in themselves in no loss. But the effect of that demise was to take out much that was was priceless and irreplaceable. And replace it with what?
That is part of why I cannot celebrate capitalism's destruction of culture so blithely as Doug.
--- On Mon, 12/15/08, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> From: Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Progress? (Was . . . Re: Catholicism, )
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Monday, December 15, 2008, 3:16 PM
> Anybody who wants to can learn those languages. I did.
> (Although my Latin sucks.)
>
>
> > At 08:44 PM 12/13/2008, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> >
> > > Nonetheless, I cannot bring myself to celebrate
> the
> > fact that we can no longer produce as a matter of
> course
> > fairly decent numbers of men and some women who are at
> home
> > in Latin Greek, German, English, French, and probably
> > several other languages,
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk