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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

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I mean sure, but I don’t think most people wou be materially hampered because they didn’t get exposed to philosophy or history or art history. There might be the odd tool (personally, I think formal logic is a very powerful tool for understanding the world, and the same is true of probability and statistics and so on) but unless such things are related to daily work in some way, it’s mostly a vestige of the leisure class view of college as finishing school and at that point, you can make a case for teaching manners and dance as part of making a person suitable to the upper class. But this, again is silly, and really doesn’t lead to gains for anyone. It’s a waste of time, and to be fair, most of this is something that could be done for nearly free using resources available cheaply online.

But it’s mostly about the grift. You have to pretend that you’re now a better person because you know some history of Asia, or read a bit of Kant, or wrote an essay on indigenous peoples.