Solomonic Solutions & Turtle Stacking

My undergrad is known for its mandatory core curriculum that places a really heavy emphasis on classical humanities studies, and is often criticized for producing a bunch of snobs who can feel proud about having read Plato and listened to Stravinsky, and it was many a time said to me, while I was there, that we were being trained to sound smart at self-congratulatory cocktail parties. Maybe. Personally I don't really care if that WAS the object of my education -- there are more important things going on in the world than the perpetuation of categories of elite based on knowledge of philosophy and music, like the much more insidious privileging of elite categories based on religion, passport colour, breast size, and skin pigmentation.

That said, I do not think that this is what our education was serving to do. I think that what we were given were a set of storied, tools maybe, that we could use subconsciously to think analogically about the world around us. I just came to this, today, when I was one of the only people in our comparative con law & human rights class who "got" the reference in the article to the world being built upon infinitely-receding stacks of turtles [edit: having doubted myself, I spent the past hour googling it to make sure that I was right about its Hindu origins], and there was also a reference, in the must-read Makwanyane Case from South Africa (and again in our reading, today) to "Solomonic Solutions," that I did not get before reading the Makwanyane Case, but which is now a useful tool in my conceptualization of certain choice options. Knowing about Plato's Cave is not about feeling smart while eating fondue in your Pookie's Greenwich Village apartment; it's about being aware of a structure (for lack of a better word) that appears, in one instance, in the form of a cave, shadows, and an allegory of ignorance and "true" contemplation of forms, and can appear, in another instance, to describe the neoconservative blogosphere in the US and the caves in which many neo-con libertarians find themselves ;p [sorry to any neo-cons reading this]. Studies in humanities provide us with invaluable structures that contribute to the vocabulary (if not in words but in more abstract relational descriptions between things) that we can use to decipher our own world.

VC