A medical doctor sent me an article, which I did not accept for publication, but which did have merit in its various points. One of them related to educational specialization and the demise of metaphysical vision. After citing Jacques Maritain on the increasing technical organization of life and its attendant need for specialization, he writes: "To be unable to pass reasonable and intelligent judgment on any matter that goes beyond specialized competence leads to a progressive barbarism of the human mind."
It is one of those coincidences of reading and study that only an hour earlier I had been reading in José Ortega y Gasset's Revolt of the Masses about the same barbarism that one finds among specialized men (not all!). The new barbarism of the new "mass-man" is found across all social classes and has nothing to do directly with wealth or academic credentials. The new barbarism belongs to the mind that lacks metaphysical sense of the world, has lost any real informative connection with history, and lives with only a grasp on the details of a very narrow field of study, enough to do his task. This is true even with scientists, many of whom have no grasp of the cosmic questions and the lessons of history, but have been trained to experiment and conjure up data. (Much data and experimentation could be performed by robots....) The barbarism of today is a return to a state of existence in which "now" and "today" is really all one lives for, with the head bent down to the earth, and higher notions foundational to the building of culture and civilization are, to the extent that they are known, taken for granted, or otherwise unknown or forgotten. Those who live in a civilization but have forgotten or do not know what it actually took to build that civilization will not long be able to maintain it. They are the "veritcal barbarians," who have dropped down right into the midst of the civilization, lacking the will and the means to maintain or rejuvenate what is becoming decrepit. Sounds alot like Washington, DC, politicians to me. They take for granted the USA, assume that its existence today is simply a matter of fact and nature, and have mastered the machine-works of writing laws, collecting taxes, filling their coffers, lining up the votes, but are clueless barbarians when it comes to maintaining a constitutional republic of states as states, let alone protecting a civilization or fragile human liberty. They think fixing the economy is a matter of lining up jobs by passing new laws, when the problems are much deeper and relate to a loss of vision deeper than can be addressed by election-year campaign slogans.
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