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This post comes from thoughts reflected after reading Justin's blog.
It seems to me that I lack any motivation to do anything because I constantly feel more intellectually informed than those around me. It is not often I find an equal in intellectual capacity, and when I do, I can frequently talk for hours with them. The only thing, really, I am motivated to do is to sit at home, read, digest, and swallow books whole. Perhaps not the most practical of things to do, but I enjoy doing it.
I wonder if taking these first year political science courses this summer was a mistake. I've read two of the three texts one of my courses offers (Thucydides and Machiavelli, the other being one of Gandhi's) and the course thus far does not at all seem appealing. In fact, the professor thus far treats the class like a bunch of idiots. Which some people have expressed problems with.
I personally feel that they weren't listening in class... because the class *is* made up of a bunch of retards. Not all of them, obviously, some remain well informed, but the rest make as to impress their own views upon others without realizing that their views are coloured, as I have said before, by their own unique natures.
Nor are they often factually correct.
I suppose that's the problem I've had with the Humanities program the last year, the fact that, despite the intelligence of the majority (certainly not all) of the people involved, their minds remain closed to all but a specific path of knowledge that the outline leads you towards.
The specific ordering of the texts and the omission (and ridicule heaped upon) other authors and texts points to a very narrow field of study, when I had originally thought that Humanities would broaden my horizons, rather than forcing it into one view of conservative thought... its roots in platonism and its ends in late Republicanism.
I think the realization of this oversight and this ... cultural elitism, for the lack of a better word, only really came to the forefront of my thinking (whereas it lay dormant as doubts expressed only on occasion with frustration) when a professor made the claim that everything past Descartes was garbage... and after that I slowly realized, as I examined the curriculum and talked to friends who are currently in the process of graduating from the program, that many texts one would think key to understanding much of modern thought were glaringly missing and leaving gaping holes... and texts that emphasized certain views were placed rather neatly in logical order.
As I read more of what we skipped of Aristotle and other thinkers in the past year, what we learned of Aristotelean thought itself seemed a little shaken. Not overly much so, but enough to cast slight doubts.
I'm not going to rant on about this, because I have simply done it far too often and with far too many people... but it's a shocking thought when I consider that for the last two years I have been guided onto a line of thinking so narrow that I was almost myself sucked into it, and that while it has not been a waste (as I have, undoubtedly, learned a lot of what colours much of those particular modes of thought)... I honestly needed to rethink where I was in life and what to do next.
Yet as of this moment I have yet to figure out a program that isn't infantile in terms of pace or content. Humanities may be the best there is, at least here at Carleton.
Perhaps if I doomed myself to a life of academia... gods... let that not be my future.
You know what, I'm bloody tired, so this post sucks. Read what I wrote on May 2nd, if you haven't already, but otherwise... wait till I have the time and energy to write something worthwhile. Right now I'm swamped with a lot of other work.