Wow, that’s a narrow-minded view.
Indeed, economists and medical professionals are much more highly valued in the economy than artists. That’s a plain fact, judging from who gets paid what, and who has a job and who’s languishing and hustling in the gig economy. (Mind you, some actors, pop stars, and novelists are rich too.)
But you’ve ignored the criticism I lay out in the article. The question is whether Americans especially are right to value those professionals more than the creative class. Suppose, for example, the technocratic, scientistic, Philistine society in which economists and medical doctors excel and most artists fail is perfectly self-destructive. Suppose these preferences lead to consumerism which destroys the ecosystem, and to a savage Trumpian backlash and civil war. In that case, celebrating the fact that the technical experts have “economic viability” would be like celebrating the fact that a dagger is valuable to a serial killer.
You see, the humanities are supposed to tell us what we should value or to help us think more clearly about what we should do in life. Without those personal skills, we flounder from one professionally created crisis to the next, from the Vietnam War to Bush Jr’s Iraq War, to the 2008 housing bubble, to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, and perhaps to the Covid pandemic. We destroy the ecological balance because we’ve allowed the corporate elites to infantilize us. We become hostages to demagogues like Trump because we’ve lost sight of what’s sacred.
Economic utility is purely subjective and empty of normative force because it’s meant to be part of an objective, scientific description. There’s no prescriptive evaluation there of what economies value. Economists just identify value with what people are willing to pay for something. As to whether a society’s valuations are wise, that’s where the arts are supposed to come in. If the arts are lost or if we pay them little mind, that might be a sign our culture is in severe decline, regardless of our mere economic wealth.
I see from some of your other writings that you’re something of a libertarian. My advice to folks of that stripe is to be upfront about the social Darwinian implications of that “I’ve got mine and you’re entitled to no handouts” stance. What you want to say is that all talk of higher values is a scam. There’s only the animalistic struggle to survive, it’s always been like a postapocalyptic nightmare, and everyone should fight for their exclusive rights regardless of the long-term costs to anyone else.
That libertarianism entails a world with no values or rights at all. It’s a disenchanted world in which you’ll lack any normative reason for why a thief shouldn’t steal all your possessions. It’s just might makes right. Is that the world you believe in? Once you introduce the right to private property, though, you’ll have no principled defense of libertarian selfishness. The talk of rights isn’t so easily contained.
You think I have an unrealistic view of how the universe works and I’m rationalizing my resentment with fantasies? But what’s so unrealistic about how I say the world works? My view is naturalistic, atheistic, cosmicist, existentialist, and free from as many mass delusions as I can identify. Are you sure you’ve read enough of what I’ve written to be justified in making that accusation?
