Modern Education and the Death of Leisure

Many believe that the good of the public requires that ordinary citizens be exposed to better-quality discourses that can provide them with a more nuanced view of the world, over and above the cliched or banal insights often fed to them by the education system and mass media—including social media influencers. This, in some way, is a reaction to the state of Philippine public education, as well as a certain distrust in corporate media concurrent with other trends around the world. 

Ever since the advent of the mass-communications industry—beginning with what Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (2006) referred to as “print-capitalism”—there has been a steady rise in demand for the fruits of advanced research and study to be communicated in a way that people can understand. The “democratization” of knowledge, however—though extolled as a hallmark of true civilization—obviously comes with its own pitfalls. 

On one hand, the mass communications industries attached to the fields of inquiry—those which now heavily rely on influencers as they once did on radio and TV—continue to feed into a culture of oversimplification, encouraging the public to remain satisfied with the “broad strokes” on a particular issue without making further attempts to approach the subject matter with due precision. This is as true for apologetics as it is for international relations. 

On the other hand, many people are unable (or unwilling) to put in the effort to grow in the intellectual virtues necessary to understand nuanced perspectives. The people do not want theologians, but apologists; not polymaths, but commentators. They read neither dissertations nor treatises, but rather the summaries of the summaries of these great works—some of which, admittedly, remain untranslated from their original languages. 

The truth of the matter is that the formation of intellectual virtue requires leisure, and leisure comes at a great material cost. Some say that time is capital, but the converse is also true: Capital is time. For this reason Aristotle in book VII, chapter IX of The Politics excludes certain people from citizenship on account of the fact that they are unable to engage in leisurely activities, which can also be said analogically for those who pursue the arts and sciences for the sake of profit (ibid., book VIII, chapter II). 

For this reason the historical granting of scholarships to the poor and bright was usually in the context of a certain lifestyle that entailed living in common as members of the clergy, as was the case in King’s College in Cambridge or the Colegio de San Juan de Letran in Manila. Otherwise, it was only the man of property who could dedicate his or her time to obtaining an education fit for the development of intellectual virtue, usually by way of private tutoring. 

The industrial and managerial revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth century respectively have decreased opportunities for leisure worldwide. The “euthanasia of the rentier,” as Lord  Keynes put it in The General Theory (1936), also implied the death of the leisured classes, i.e., those who could wholly dedicate themselves to the formation of intellectual virtue without having to busy themselves in a trade out of necessity. 

In the stead of the men of leisure came the professional-managerial elite, a collection of highly-paid employees who possess just enough intellectual knowledge to know how to manage the increasing complexity of mass society. Like the gentleman of leisure, the modern professional must know something about a wide range of subjects; but unlike the gentleman the broadness of their knowledge often consists in knowing random factoids here and there. 

The entrepreneur follows suit. One of the historical hallmarks of bourgeois society is its general aversion to the ‘life of the mind.’ Over and against this philistinism the managerial elite began to push cultural relativism which, in the words of Samuel Francis’ Leviathan and its Enemies (2016), “implied a rejection of all standards by which moral, social, political, and economic behavior could be evaluated and which allowed for the development of a hedonistic ethic” (155). 

The ethos of Professional Man thus relegates the arts and philosophy as niche specialist topics from which Mass Society vaguely draws upon in order to ensure some form of cultural cohesion in the face of increased societal complexity. It purports to hold both as value-free, all the while using them as tools to create, as Ernest Gellner observed of the nation-state in Nations and Nationalism (1983), a national “high culture” to be imposed on the entire population. 

The value of education in mass society is no longer found in the prospect of contemplation, but rather in the promise of “structural empowerment” and other functionalisms. With respect to the arts, this manifests itself in the exaltation of the primal and rhythmic to “get you pumped”; whereas in philosophy this takes flesh in those short-and-sweet discourses or slogans which serve more to excite the masses to continue the (Death) March of Progress rather than providing them with a framework to get ‘deeper’ into things.

It is very telling that hardly any school, college or university teaches Aristotelian logic. The phenomenon of a post-truth world, in the end, comes from the societal demise of the truth-seekers—men (or women) whose lives are oriented for Truth for Truth’s sake. Without truth-seekers, there are only ‘influencers’ and well-informed slaves.

Daniel Tyler Chua is the founder and president of the Collegium Perulae Orientis.