Joanna wrote:
>
> The simplest way to put it is this:
>
> If justice matters, the humanities are important. If stewardship of the
> earth is important, the humanities matter.
If "justice" is important, then it is important to be clear that the concept has no philosophicqal or theoretical foundation. As long as it is assumed that there is something 'objective' or 'real' out there named Justice, we are caught in an ahistorical world of mere subjectivity, with no actual basis for collectively attempting to change the world.
We need to see justice as a historical abstraction, abstract ed from practice, and meaningful only as a shared principle; it is a raising to theory of what we and other humans find ourselves doing, but it has no independent reality.
And I don't see how the humanities have any particular relevance here. As we examine what we and other humans have been doing for several millenia we find that the discourse of humans over the centuries is of great interest; that engaging in that discourse is both exciting and intellectually provoking. This of course offers no basis for a declaration that Shakespeare and Locke are important and the romance novels on the drug store shelf are not. What is the political basis for charging young workers huge amounts of money and several years of their lives before they can get a Permit To Earn a Living, and then making them spend some of that time reading and (worse) writing about Bleak House and Paradise Lost and Antigone. We do find that almost all humans are really interested in their own history (but careful: quite a few billion of them would rather take it from daily gossip at work and scraps of reading or tv-viewing here or there then from Gibbon -- and the history they think is important might turn out to be yesterday's scores in the Natioanal league or what Uncle Be was up to on his trip to St. Louis. On what grounds do we compel them to focus on the history of what men and women have written about the struggle for justice.
We are talking about compulsion here, as well as the allocation of both public resources and the private resources of those students sitting in the classroom. Lett's not be glib.
Carrol