Purpose

Anyone rooting for Bernie Sanders in 2016 was surely unsurprised by Trump’s first victory. My wife and I were in the United States on holidays in the weeks leading up to election day and those that followed. We had had many conversations with American commuters from all over the country who were using the Amtrak network. On the sleeper trains, Amtrak has an annoying practise of forcing complete strangers to dine with one another. This made for an uncomfortable journey for two introverted types. But all the same, we met many all sorts of people on the California Zephyr and Sunset Limited. Not a single one was a contented Clinton supporter. Many of our acquaintances were Trump supporters, some of them rabid, but everyone we spoke to liked Sanders or at least appreciated his anti-establishment politics. Yet, the news media had skipped a step and was busily discussing the incoming Clinton presidency. We were in Philadelphia on election night and, having fainted from traveller’s exhaustion, learnt of the result from a few distraught phone calls from people who thought the continent was being literally sucked into hell. The front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer at breakfast appeared in stark contrast to the quiet clientele and forlorn staff.

Now it’s all happened again. There is nothing to add. The Democrats belatedly engaged in a re-run of the 2016 campaign strategy to bring about the same result. But the emergence of Trumpism in its fully-fledged form has caused a crisis for anyone not caught up in in the frenzy. Is this what happens when postmodernism takes hold? Is this ‘late capitalism’? A post-truth or post-literate world? Has fascism emerged once more? Can humanity survive climate change? What kind of world will be left for my children? And other questions come to mind.

My main motivation these few years as a researcher has been to remediate my lack of knowledge; a deficiency first exposed to me during a brief career in politics. One would have thought the expensive undergraduate studies I had accrued would have prepared me for practical politics, but no. At some point, scientific management (Taylorism) took hold of universities so that education became fragmented and directed at training undergraduates for particular occupations or otherwise providing them with skills. As a result, many academics are overly specialised in their knowledge to the point they are unable to identify patterns over large timescales. Not that this stops many an expert waxing lyrical in the manner Socrates once observed: the more expert one becomes, the more one erroneously feels their expertise applies broadly.

So, I’m embarking on a years-long journey through human history to discover for myself the modern paideia (ideal education). The purpose of this blog is to catalogue and share what I have been learning through my re-education. I’m sure no one will read it, which provides its own comfort. But if someone ever did read it – perhaps, late one night, being pervy or doomsurfing the internet – and found themself wanting to make a suggestion, then I hope they would feel free to make reading recommendations or provide comment.