A couple of weeks ago I said that we had no rights. This caused a considerable discussion over at TC, where Alte pointed out that one has to have some rights to give them away.  And then I thought about how Catholics consider natural law and natural rights, while Calvinists think of covenant.

Today’s text suggests that we were all fools. Because there is a clear command. To give our rights away, to sacrifice them.

Matthew 16:21-28

²¹From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. ²²And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” ²³But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

²⁴Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. ²⁵For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. ²⁶For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?

Today EW linked to the story of Stacie Crimm, who delayed chemotherapy to save her child, and died two days after the babe was born. Hearthrose then talked about how sacrifice used to be ordinary…

Women’s sacrifice used to have to do with their children. Every woman knew that childbed might be a deathbed, thus the use of the term “safely delivered”. My great-great grandmother died after giving her husband several children. This was not uncommon.

Common life involved personal sacrifice from women – a century ago. And then modern wonders appeared, each one reducing the personal sacrifice that a woman gave to her family. Woman had her sacrifice, man had his. They were different… but equally sacrificial. (Small tiny example, but to her dying day, my grandmother professed her preference for the back of the chicken, this so our family could all share one chicken at dinner).

New sacrifices were asked, and they were progressively lighter – and more self (and other-woman) centered, rather than for the benefit of husband and children as expressed BY the husband and children. Status-sacrifices, if you will.

And then we started being told that motherhood itself was a sacrifice rather than a joy, and too many women believe that.

So we end up with women who have grown up never having given one moment’s thought to personal sacrifice… is it surprising what they do with that ignorance? Most humans are happy to pour the weight of pain on some other human, if given excuse… and women are given piles and drifts of excuses now.

It’s fairly clear that we are still called to put others before us. To put Christ before us. To  take no pride in our achievements.  To count others better than ourselves. To give forward, as our parents and grandparents (note to all: I am Late boomer/ gen X and my Dad is a depression babe, so the Boomer meme of looking after oneself is rejected). To care for your body and mind so you are fit to serve. To see self-esteem as a kinder and gentler term for Pride.

And to honour those men and women who lay down their lives for others. For this world will remain risky while it exists.

Patriactionary has a thread up about the Liberal Arts degree. The current system is fairly dead, and as I commented there, there is a history around this. The real arts degree was killed in the 1960s and 1970s, and we are left with some technical courses of worth, but no coherent purpose.

The liberal arts degree was about rounding out the education of a gentlemen so that he could take the role of a country squire. Check your Austen. Seriously. In that period, there would be but two or three gentlemen in most parishes — the vicar and the landowner, who was frequently the justice of the peace.

As such, the inculcation of culture into these men was seen to be of some importance. They were the bulwark of England. From them came most of the clergy, most of the officer class, and most of the administrators of the empire.

Now, n those days most people learnt Latin and Greek… but the texts included geometry, philosophy… theology (read in Latin, which was the language of all educated discourse). Modern languages? Meh.

But the ancient texts taught logic and the old Roman virtues of (Virtuus, dignitas).

This model led to the US 4 year degree. It was initially softened to move from Ancient Languages to English or English translations of the classics, This lead to the Great Books period — the university insisted that you worked through a reading list in English.

This really was redundant, because only the elite could go the university, and good high schools had covered many of these books beforehand.

Since the 1960s there idea that the Arts degree equips a person with an education about their culture has been politically incorrect. Exposing young minds to the best, and teaching them why this is the best, is not acceptable.

As a result, the Liberal Arts degree is now meaningless. It is instead a series of technical subjects taught within a faculty (such as Psychology and Anthropology) and waffle (Black Studies, Women’s studies, etc).

The rot has spread from the US… there are some hold outs (PPE at Oxford is hard, for instance), but the rot has not spread to STEM because of the very nature of the work, where you are either right or wrong. And you need to work really hard.

So the university can now be divided into two : a kindergarten for late adolescents to fornicate (the Arts faculty) and the STEM. Where I live, the serious people all go STEM, or straight into professional degrees (Medicine, Law, Nursing, Architecture …). The Arts people can live in their ghetto: we have people to teach and research to do.

I’m alluding to other people, of course. Some people tried to stop the rot. David Stove did try to do this in Sydney, but by 1986 he was writing…

THE FACULTY OF Arts at the University of Sydney is a disaster-area, and not of the merely passive kind, like a bombed building, or an area that has been flooded. It is the active kind, like a badly-leaking nuclear reactor, or an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in cattle.

Just as a few spots are often improbably spared even in the worst disaster-areas, there are still a few departments in our Faculty of Arts which are passable-to-good. And the disaster I am speaking of has not overtaken the Faculty of Science, or any of the science-based faculties, such as Engineering or Agriculture.

This disaster in Arts has all happened in the last twenty years. In 1965 the Faculty as a whole was undistinguished, as it has always been. But it was not, then or earlier, what it is now, an important source of intellectual and moral devastation. Of course the disaster is not confined to Sydney University. Far from that, it is common to the Arts faculties of most Western universities. So far as there still survives anything of value from the Western tradition of humanistic studies, it is in spite of most of the people in the universities who are the heirs of that tradition.

So the Arts degree is basically dead and the faculty killed it. It walking around like a zombie, and (as generally the faculty cannot bring in grants) as the enrolment into Arts subjects decreases, the size of various departments within the faculty goes down. There is no underlying theory of what an Arts Education should look like and what people should know.

This is not a disaster. Groups who know what they want to teach have already subverted the system (from the left) destroying the culture. Groups of traditionalists can develop institutes of rigour.  And they will be known.

Pragmatically, the US is so credential-led and driven by concerns about race and equity that anything interesting is taught at graduate school. This is unlike the rest of the world, where after stage I you are heading towards your honours dissertation, which is research, and then either employment or a higher degree.  If you are a true scholar, find the course with the highest rigour (it will not be at a university with a football team) and passing that means you will achieve well in graduate placement tests. If you want a profession, go to the commonwealth and enter a professional school after an intermediate year. If you want a trade, apprentice yourself.

Leave the Arts degree to the trust fund kids. They can afford to party for four years. You cannot.