Have our minds dulled between Empire and the present? It is a common belief that each subsequent generation is losing more knowledge than the last.1 Rather than a general decline in human knowledge over the past two hundred years, there has been an enormous increase in knowledge in all sciences and technical subjects. Then why do we believe that people are becoming duller? As the frontier of human knowledge expands, it appears that the frontier of the individual’s knowledge contracts.
The most significant change in education since the 19th century is in specialisation. When reading Harvard admission papers from the first decade of the twentieth century, it is apparent the university demanded what is today described as a “rounded Humanist education,” that is, more than a passing acquaintance with the Humanist scholars and a strong knowledge of the classical writers. Students were assumed fluent in the prose of the 1611 King James Bible. Some questions concerning the principalities of the Holy Roman Empire, and the great rivers of China appear. Today, much of this would be considered trivia.
The humanist education or rounded education is a product of pre-capitalist society. The Medieval and Renaissance minds were pre-capitalist and unspecialised. The Enlightenment amateur thinkers possessed the industry of the entrepreneur however, coffee and the salon are not as dynamic as electricity and the factory. John Maynard Keynes, albeit unintentionally, recognised this new intellectual direction which complemented the birth of capitalism. With John Locke; constructing philosophical foundations derived from Newtonian blueprint of the universe; and Thomas Jefferson; founding the American Republic on the foundations laid by Locke2; Isaac Newton is often seen, erroneously, as the first significant actor in the scientific revolution and the age of reason. The great Keynes in his lecture “Newton, the Man”:
Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child born with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonderchild to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.3
The bourgeois rationalism of the Capitalist Civilisation exiled the magician from life.
Capitalism specialises. Aristotle and Xenophon observed the necessity of the division of labour in even the most basic pre-capitalist civilisations. Adam Smith and the Classicals were still writing in the early development of capitalism. Smith’s observation of the division of labour is no more insightful than that of Turgot, and the Physiocrats4 before him. They understood that the division of labour was a necessity. The insight of Smith is that the growth of capitalism is caused by the efficiency of the division of labour, and Capital accumulation.
Most civilisations do not reach their full potential. They are ruined by the nomadic horse lords and lesser peoples that agitate in border provinces. No civilisation has reached the heights of the Capitalist Civilisation, its triumphs are unprecedented in the history of man. Capitalism is dynamic. The clergy and aristocracy that foresaw capitalism suppressed it. A refusal of what was at that time an inevitability. They foresaw a sublime and terrifying power, a hurricane that would devastate feudalism, a dynamic new world. Capitalism is the last stage of feudalism.
This Capitalist Civilisation drove industry to specialise via the putting-out system. Then, to coalesce into factories and vertically integrated firms that owned every factor of production. From the family potter to the great pottery factories of Stoke, from the monastery scholar to the university academic. Specialisation has naturally forced workers to specialise their skills. The natural capital that a worker possess and acquires though education must become narrowly defined to complement the worker’s specific role in production. Consider engineering: Mechanical, Electric, Civil, Nuclear, Petroleum, Aerospace, Maritime, Military, etc.. No longer do the master artists dirty themselves with the drawing up of designs for military fortifications, though for Durer and Rafael this provided a sufficient income. They much prefer, and are restricted to, their artistic specialty. This is true between forms within art. If you were to explore one of these general fields of engineering, you will quickly penetrate deep into a maze of innumerable sub-disciplines and sub-sub-disciplines. As technology becomes more complex, workers become more specialised.
What is the benefit of a oil-rig engineer that can quote lines of Virgil in Latin, over one that cannot? Perhaps it is important to those with a patrician’s disposition however, it is not important to capitalism. For capitalism speaks only the language of profit, efficiency and specialisation. Latin is equally dead, here, and in the jungles where the West is no more than an half-remembered dream.
The increased specialisation of jobs that follows from increased complexity forces students to invest many hours into their field. Educators simply do not have the time to waste on Virgil, Homer, and Dante.5 A deep study of Dante is necessary if a student is studying to become a Dante scholar, unessential if the student is studying to become a Nuclear Engineer. The inefficiencies are stripped away, and only the specific remains. Universities are becoming no more than post-industrial degree factories. Degrees and diplomas are required for hairdressing, tourism, dentistry, teaching, and so on.
Those members of, or those acquainted with, that Castalian Order populating the university-international are fully aware of the inroads capitalist specialisation has made into academia. While many attempt to escape, to cloister themselves, from the filthy and uncultured world of the Capitalist, Capitalist Civilisation is inescapable. The academic cannot protect himself from the vicissitudes of the market. Indeed, his own academic institutions have adopted in near totality the practices of the world he so despises.
Hierarchy and Specialisation of Sciences
It is worthwhile to briefly comment on the hierarchy of sciences within academia in order to understand the inroads capitalism has made within it. In Saint Bonaventure‘s The Journey of the Mind Into God, a hierarchy of sciences is presented that is almost entirely believed to this day. It is found in the utterances of the mathematician, physicist, and most S.T.E.M. students. Bonaventure outlines a hierarchy where the lesser sciences6 of motion and the natural world subordinated themselves to the higher contemplation of philosophy and ultimately, theology. The argument appears to run that since motion and interactions can, in the Aristotelian paradigm, be reduced to the “mover,” and this can be reduced, and so on until we arrive at the prime mover of God. This is not a concatenation of events, but a burrowing into the fundamentals of one event. All the lesser sciences gesture towards the divine, their existence is necessitated by the divine, which is fundamental to all knowledge. Significantly, all things can then be said to flow from the divine. In effect, the assertion is that reductionism implies constructionism. All things flow from the fundamental, and so our contemplations should be directed at this fundamental above all else. This view is still commonly held, consider the common hierarchy of sciences:
Mathematics → Physics → Chemistry → Biology → Psychology → Sociology → …
Mathematics is more fundamental and so occupies a more privileged position in the hierarchy. Mathematicians stand somewhat apart from other fields and do not seem interested at all at constructing the world again once it has been reduced. Mathematicians can seem like aloof Platonists.7
The most vocal proselytizers of this hierarchy are theoretical physicists. They are obsessives, and much of their time is spent searching for the arche. The belief among most is that a fundamental theory of everything will give the scientist power to construct the universe again. That from fundamental particles, or vibrations, complex phenomena can be explained and recreated. They seem to be waiting for new Mr. Newton to write a new Principia. Chaos has obliterated the hope that by reducing complex phenomena to simple principles man can to construct the phenomena from those principles. This so called “chaos revolution” in the last century should have done away with the obsession with attempting to construct complex phenomena from principles.8
The significance of this revolution is that each field cannot be meaningfully constructed from a more fundamental field. Each field uses its own models, and is mostly unique in this respect. Y is not simply applied X. This uniqueness is a fact revealed to us though inquiry and emphasised by capitalism.
The uniqueness of each field has enabled academics to specialise efficiently. Indeed, it is a fact often noted among academics that while a professor should be a leading expert in his field to ensure job security, ideally, he should be the only expert in his field.
Polymaths cannot exist in the true sense any more. One can be a novice of all but not a master of all, and not even a master of a few general fields. If we select a some polymaths: Aristotle, Vinci, Newton, Goethe, Mill, and von Neumann you should already observe their tendency to speciality. The artist-doctor-scientist-inventor-writer becomes the artist-writer or the inventor-scientist until eventually simply becoming a writer or scientist. After capitalism, true polymaths cannot exist. A complete reading of Aristotle will demonstrate the decline in general minds, from Aristotle to Bruno and then Goethe. John Stuart Mill, a genius and a “polymath” was no master engineer, doctor, or chemist. His writings were constricted to philosophy, politics, and economics. That was enough to be a 19th century polymath. Von Neumann influenced many sub-disciplines within mathematics (he also founded new sub-disciplines). His other contributions were limited to the quantitative sciences: Physics, Mathematics, and Economics. In the case of Physics it was mostly the sub-discipline of theoretical physics, and in Economics the sub-discipline of Microeconomics (in actuality the sub-sub-discipline of Economics: game theory). So even polymaths, those with the most rounded of all minds have still become increasingly confined to speciality by the rise of Capitalism and the complexity of human knowledge.
As knowledge becomes more complex, as in production, the academic, like the manufacturing worker, becomes more specialised. This specialty knowledge is encouraged as generality is inefficiency. Scientific and scholarly progress, the accumulation of knowledge, and technological progress are driven by capitalism.9 All areas of society are becoming specialised because we live in a capitalist civilisation. Each member of society is driven into deeper and increasingly complex specialties, that each operate in relative isolation. It will take a lifetime to master one sub-sub-discipline of physics, and so it can only be the case that all the efforts of the student should be trained on this one specialty (I can hear Schiller’s bones rattling). The general student is increasingly being driven out of the market by the specialist student,10 those that can compete, drive profits, and innovate are specialists, and so the dynamics of capitalism operating in a market will drive academia and production into ever deeper and more complex specialties. This should serve to explain why living standards, accumulated human knowledge, medicine, and technology can bound into the exponential while the average young man of every class is so astoundingly stupid. And note also how astoundingly ignorant he is of his own history, people, and customs. It is worth contemplating the (inevitable?) future. Will specialisation create an atomised white collar proletariat, a mass of workers that cannot prevent their institutions from evanescing because they are ignorant of them? will it produce a mass of workers for whom the future is impenetrable fog to be guided through by technocrats, and for whom the past is simply unseen?
A sedentary worker, under the fluorescent glare of modernity, gazes out of his office window at night and sees only his own reflection. Is this our future?
1. I am ignoring gnosis or a knowledge of oneself. I discuss predominantly the middle to upper-class, though this affects all classes. I am not foolishly comparing a random proletarian to a W.A.S.P.. I will try to explain specialisation from a manufacturing and an academic perspective. It is a common sentiment that only the elites should receive a broad elite education. True, only a few can appreciate high art, and it is foolish endeavouring to re-educate factory workers to listen to Buxtehude or some other nonsense of that sort however, this will become impossible to even those middle-class “aristocrats of the soul.”
2. Jefferson owned a copy of the Principia. Also note the use of “self evident” truths, or axioms: politics as a rational system derived from axioms.
3. http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Extras/Keynes_Newton.html
4. Alas, the great economists Cantillon, Quesnay, du Pont, and Turgot are criminally ignored. The Ricardians defeated the Malthusians, and many of these thinkers were consigned to the memory hole. I suspect the Pysiocrats are too aristocratic for liberal sensibilities, and too liberal for the Marxians. Much of their work is ignored. Beware of the econometricians; do not assume that economic thought progresses linearly. There are motifs that reoccur across the centuries, and every generation has its bien pensant. A great new mind can rediscover an old mind whose insights have been lost or ignored. I believe that the Physiocrats can refresh our understanding of economy despite the vast redundancy of their theories. Malthus was a fellow traveller, and, lamenting the oncoming storm of industry forty years after the publication of the Tableau Economique, wrote that “A great part of them [labourers] would have exchanged the healthy labours of agriculture for the unhealthy occupations of manufacturing industry.” Note: Malthus uses the term “unhealthy” to describe manufacturing, this is an influence from Quesnay whom classified manufacturing as “sterile.” I recommend a reading of Malthus, whose works read as sermons — it was after a reading of Malthus that Carlyle gifted to us the words “dismal science” to classify economics. Interestingly, Carlyle’s Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question is overwhelmingly Malthusian in its thesis.
5. To many readers, an education in the Provençal and Italian poets is certainly not a “waste of time,” however, I must restate that a study of Villon, Cavalcanti, and Dante is an inefficiency that is not tolerated by capitalism. It is only possible to remain efficient in a global capitalist market though specialisation.
6. Science used loosely to mean scientia, or “knowledge.”
7. A friend of mine studying mathematics at Jesus College once told me earnestly that he spends his days “in contemplation of the heavenly spheres.” Ah! The pomposity that reached its zenith in N. Bourbaki and the Parisian theorists is still alive in some it seems.
8. Although it seems to be fading out, and the fashion among physicists is no longer particle physics, atom smashers, and such. So much for those billion dollar colliders.
9. The industrial revolution and the capitalist revolution are inseparable.
10. The jobless 2:1 glut of general philosophy/Eng-lit/theory/etc. whose lack of employment should be no surprise given an understanding of this article.
West Coast Reactionaries 
Alex, you write how Bowden spoke, though more serrated; hardened; mechanical — it’s the high continental blood. Excellent as always.
Thank you. I am writing out some transcripts of rare, and unheard Bowdens this week.
As Nietzsche observed, specialists and intellectual piece-workers instinctively hate a synthetic intellect, since they intuitively (and correctly) perceive it as something aristocratic.
This isn’t an altogether bad article, and it raises some interesting questions, but I find myself disagreeing on its substance. Here are some unorganized thoughts:
“A rounded education is a good thing, and should be encouraged, at least among the elite.”
I am trying to make impartial observations. I would desire those with the best minds to be swept up and indulged in an elite, classical education. This education is passing into insignificance. It’s not that I like what is happening, it is better to go about curing a sickness after a correct diagnosis.
I’m afraid the old world doesn’t exist anymore. Capitalism smashed down these feudal hierarchies and the new capitalist hierarchies are comprised of bourgeois elites. In America, it is even more pronounced, where (in the 19th century especially) class is determined by wealth. The American elites “are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom”. They were not, and are not aristocrats. Of this bourgeois ultra-elite, most have made their wealth for themselves in the market, or are the sons of those that have. Most of the unproductive elite oligarchs survive for very few generations since the bourgeois elites are not stationary and have no birth right to their position. Our elites are constantly recycling themselves, and this is brought about by the aspiritual, rootless dynamism of Capitalism. If we were to take the serious elites, that could perhaps devote their life to the enjoyment of the arts, they would be forced to turn their backs on society (since the only way to influence society now is though the channels of the bourgeoisie and the methodology of capitalism), not have children, or bring children into a life of destitution. Besides, they would comprise less than a tenth of one percent. These “elites” you refer to are insignificant atoms when compared to the mass upheavals of Western society. An unnamed man scribbles a translation of Sophocles that is never read – big deal. There are much larger problems facing western man that need to be addressed and I doubt you believe that the heightened scribbling of a few oligarchs will cause a significant change in Western society (especially when half of our people don’t bother reading anyway). I believe it was Spengler that predicted the emergence of a small intellectual clique that would isolate themselves from their own collapsing civilisation, devoting their lives to the interpretation of the symbols of older civilisations. There is a lot of truth in that.
I mentioned “aristocrats of the soul”. If you are a noble minded, wannabe”patrician” from the middle-class, and you want to be “paid to read” as an academic, you will need to specialise. You cannot be employed as an academic to play the Glass Bead Game all day. You can devote yourself to study of other subjects in your own time but you will become a novice in a wide range of fields.
“Blaming this on capitalism just seems bizarre and ideologically driven.”
Perhaps you didn’t understand my point regarding knowledge. Capitalism drives technological progress using bourgeois rationalism. It is impossible to separate the industrial revolution from capitalism. As the capitalist-industrial revolution stormed into the 20th century, technology became ever more specialised, this causes knowledge to specialise. Mass industry, mass death, mass knowledge. It may appear contentious, even dangerously Marxian, but it’s a clear observation imo. Modernity really can be identified to begin in the commercial revolution of the 13th century; the commodification of land and labour, the creation of an agricultural proletariat, trade, merchant class, etc. There was scientific and technological progress within the subsequent centuries but it has most recently been carried exponentially by technology, which has been carried exponentially by capitalism. For what you write to be true, I would be forced to argue that there can be no, and was no “scientific” or technological progress in pre-capitalist societies. I do not argue that and I think you are arguing against your own misconception of my article. It is surely indisputable to say, that the material, technological, and scientific have been driven to their current heights by the indomitable expansion of capitalism.
“There’s nothing clearly wrong with specialization in the workforce, and why should the masses even be expected to have a well-rounded classical education?”
You ought to read the footnotes. Specialist work is preceded by specialist education producing: “a mass of workers that cannot prevent their institutions from evanescing because they are ignorant of them […] a mass of workers for whom the future is impenetrable fog to be guided through by technocrats, and for whom the past is simply unseen.”
“Of course modern men are still capable of placing value in things that don’t reward them financially, such as art, books, music, relationships, etc. The problem is, most plebs have shit taste.”
I’m sure they can. I do, and so do you. This article is partly concerning education. I’m not sure you read the footnote: “I am ignoring gnosis or a knowledge of oneself. I discuss predominantly the middle to upper-class, though this affects all classes. I am not foolishly comparing a random proletarian to a W.A.S.P.. I will try to explain specialisation from a manufacturing and an academic perspective. It is a common sentiment that only the elites should receive a broad elite education. True, only a few can appreciate high art, and it is foolish endeavouring to re-educate factory workers to listen to Buxtehude or some other nonsense of that sort however, this will become impossible to even those middle-class “aristocrats of the soul.” because you are again criticising your own misconception of my writing. You and I actually appear to agree on this.
The problem with “most plebs have shit taste”, when discussing education is that it implies that it is a waste of time to educate the plebs in the classics or arts. If we assume that most plebs are incapable of appreciating a noble education, observe that the function of modern mass education is to educate plebs that have been “liberated” by capitalism, and we further assume that your “elites” (I have now done this to death) move out of state into public schools, then how can you foresee state-education being anything but a utilitarian meat grinder? You appear to be contradicting yourself, and make reference to this “elite” again which I have addressed.
“The issue I have with capitalism is that it assigns value first and foremost to what the masses want.”
Hmm.. there is no “capitalist” value theory and capitalism does not “assign value”. I expect you are perhaps referring to the Marginalist theory of value, or perhaps the Austrian? In the Classical tradition of Smith, goods also possessed an intrinsic value independent of subjective value judgements from the masses. The Ricardian and Marxian view is similar, but value is measured in labour. Both Ricardo and Marx used bourgeois tools in their analysis. Ricardo was a capitalist and Marx was using the tools of classical economics to critique classical economics (Marx was the last great classical economist and almost the entire Neoclassical and Marginalist schools were a century long rejection of Marx). It is wrong to use the word value in this context, I expect you mean prices, but these are not, in the belief of Smith and others, the only “value” of a good. In respect to it being the “first and foremost”, you are discussing prices. The only real alternative is Socialism and even that operates on bourgeois 19th century abstractions of perfect competition. Perhaps a discussion for another day. Perhaps you’re some form of NS and want to use govt labour notes rather than bank currency, not going to work.
“The article also makes the mistake of assuming that most people should seek meaning and satisfaction through their work and study, when they should seek it through family and faith.”
Again I think a misconception. I am only observing and investigating the phenomena around me. Would you be posting on WCR if you thought most people are primarily seeking satisfaction through family and faith? besides, it is hardly controversial to observe that people need work to preserve a healthy mind. I don’t see anything wrong with the satisfaction a builder feels after he has built a bridge. And was it not the famously impious, and unlearned bachelor, Alfred the Great, that advocated man devote eight hours a day for for work, eight for study, and eight for sleep?
I hope I have managed to clear up some of the misunderstandings and address some of your criticisms. Thank you for commenting with your thoughts, they are always appreciated.
Excellent.
Before the Modern Era, the specialist was seen as obsessive and pedantic, underdeveloped and deformed due to lopsidedness. The question, then, is how we came to accept specialization. Capitalism and technology are not the causes, but are good propagators of the principles which fuel it. The metaphysical retreat from centrality led to the inevitable focus on particulars and the ever-increasing fracturing of knowledge. There is no longer a comprehensive whole, or logos, thus there is no structure into which all must be integrated, and each branch becomes an isolation. The hierarchy of the modern sciences is a usurpation, as there cannot be a true order until telos is reintroduced by the return of (proper) philosophy and theology, just as a tree without roots (or a trunk) isn’t really a tree at all, at least not a living one.
“Capitalism and technology are not the causes, but are good propagators of the principles which fuel it.” I’m not sure I understand the meaning of this. Do you mean, the principles that fuel capitalism or the principles that fuel the causes of specialisation? Are you referring to: “This uniqueness is a fact revealed to us though inquiry and emphasised by capitalism.”?
I agree that things can change. In order for the specialist to incorporate himself in this comprehensive whole, it is not necessary that society revert to generalities. He does not need to be taught conservative views on architecture, or a few lines of Greek and French. I think you rightly observe that all members of the West need to return to a proper philosophy of life.
Of specialization. It requires a spiritual degradation to accept such a societal degradation.
Hmm, not revert to generalities in the sense of going back to what once was, but he must reject the rejection of generality, if that makes sense. Accept that there is breadth, and it is desirable, even if he doesn’t have it.
I understand and agree in part. I’m ignorant of the existence of any practicable solutions though. Man should, man could, but does he have the will?
Societal solution is Restoration to the extent that it’s possible, but I’m not intelligent enough nor ambitious enough to say what that looks like beyond certain suggestions. Personal solution, though, is much more achievable. I suspect that’s part of why we’re all here.
“The general student is increasingly being driven out of the market by the specialist student, those that can compete, drive profits, and innovate are specialists, and so the dynamics of capitalism operating in a market will drive academia and production into ever deeper and more complex specialties. This should serve to explain why living standards, accumulated human knowledge, medicine, and technology can bound into the exponential while the average young man of every class is so astoundingly stupid. And note also how astoundingly ignorant he is of his own history, people, and customs.”
As someone who dabbles in multiple fields of mathematics, philosophy, science and engineering, this article definitely resonates. Fantastic piece. Does a technocratic/cyberpunk future await?
“It’s frightening to think with modern medicine and all the technique available to them they can’t really help you. In the old days, you know, you were better off because nowadays, they are all specialists. Everyone’s becoming better and better at less and less. Eventually someone’s going to be superb, at nothing.” – Kenneth Williams.
The question is: how does the exceptional or even the average young man find a way of living a normal life without specialising? It probably cannot be done.