Martha Nussbaum profiting on the sub-humanities

My ancestors were priests. However, to thrive they had to study the Humanities- Literature, Music, Dance- as well as 'Arthashastra' or Economics. This was not difficult. They belonged to the right caste and enrolled with teachers whom they paid by soliciting alms- i.e. begging- from the local people. The shade of a tree provided the classroom. Leaves were used to inscribe texts. Higher Education was a virtually costless affair, and continued even after Muslim invaders destroyed Universities and Libraries. Indeed, during the reign of Emperor Akbar, it was not difficult to find a steady stream of 'snataks'- Graduates- able to supply a newfangled taste for Ind's ancient literary and artistic culture. Some were outstanding 'shatavadhanis' with prodigious memories and linguistic and poetic skills.

Why did Indian Brahmans and other learned castes give up on this cheap method of instruction? Sadly, the answer is that it simply wasn't as good as the regimented British variety. Both could produce imbeciles- but the imbeciles got weeded out in the new type of school. By contrast, the Indian system was more humane. The imbeciles predominated. Thus a vaunted Pundit or Vaidya might be illiterate and utterly ignorant. Naturally, such people were haughty and deeply conservative. Hinduism stagnated as did Islam to a lesser extent. Macaulay was wrong about the Indians. They had no love for Western Culture or Science or Technology. What they wanted was the British School Inspector who would ruthlessly weed out incompetent teachers and withdraw funding for schools where kids did not make rapid enough academic progress. Why did parents desire this outcome? The answer is that there is an opportunity cost to a kid's time and effort. If the fellow is no good at academics, he must be found some utilitarian and remunerative employment.


Tagore protested this inhumane attitude to adolescents and set up Shantiniketan as an old fashioned 'Gurukul' where students could climb trees if they wished to escape instruction. Tagore was laughed at. Niradh Chaudhri pictures him as ageing Swann undone by an Odette who survives him to turn into an obese and respectable dowager. By this he meant that Shantiniketan was turned into a Central University. Its otherwise unemployable graduates could get grace and favor appointments as teachers and Govt. clerks thus further depressing the unpromising part of Bengal where it was located.

Some 10 years ago, Martha Nussbaum, inspired by Tagore, published a book warning of a terrible crisis facing Democracy. Apparently, the Humanities and the Arts are under attack.

Radical changes are occurring in what democratic societies teach the young, and these changes have not been well thought through.

Democracies appeared before there was any very large or 'well thought through' system of universal education. They thrived nevertheless. On the other hand, there were countries which did not become democratic despite having universal education and 'well thought out' Humanities programs. Germany only became democratic at the point of a bayonet. Yet it was ahead all other countries in the Humanities. Heidegger may have been an imbecile. But he knew his Greek and Latin. Indeed, he quoted Aescylus to explain why 'the self-assertion of the German University' required the expulsion of Jews and slavish obedience to Hitler.

An old story was told among the Greeks that Prometheus had been the first philosopher. Aeschylus has this Prometheus utter a saying that expresses the essence of knowing: τέχυη δάυάγκης άσ ϑєυєστέρα µακρώ (Prom. 514, ed. Wil). “Knowing, however, is far weaker than necessity.” That means that all knowing about things has always already been surrendered to the predominance of destiny and fails before it. 

Hitler was the Man of Destiny. The only knowledge licit for the Humanities was to acknowledge and accept the sub-human Destiny that psychopath wanted to inflict upon Europe.

Nussbaum herself is a Classicist. But then so was Leo Strauss. There is a curious similarity between the patron saint of the neo-cons and Amartya Sen's sidekick. Both distrust ordinary people. They uphold a version of the 'Noble Lie' doctrine. The masses must be bamboozled for their own good.

Consider the following-

 Thirsty for national profit, nations, and their systems of education, are heedlessly discarding skills that are needed to keep democracies alive.

Who is thirsty for national profit? Oligarchs? No. They are thirsty for personal profit. What about Dictators? They prefer to see their citizenry emaciated and exhausted from heavy labor. Monarchs? India had plenty of those and the condition of the Indian people was plain to see.

What sort of nations are 'thirsty of national profit'? Democratic nations composed of people who want a higher standard of living. But, Nussbaum tells us, this is very wrong. Democracy will die if it succeeds in being Democratic by delivering what voters want. This is like the Gandhian notion that having sex will reduce your virility. If you don't want to suffer the shame of impotence, remain a virgin all your life.

It is simply not the case that 'National profit'- i.e. increased productivity through the application of Knowledge- is incompatible with a Democratic society. On the contrary, higher productivity militates for greater Liberty and Security from internal and external threats.

If this trend continues, nations all over the world will soon be producing generations of useful machines, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticize tradition, and understand the significance of another person’s sufferings and achievements.

Nussbaum herself is a useless machine. She keeps churning out books. Have they prevented the rise of Trump or, her other bete noire, Narendra Modi?

The future of the world’s democracies hangs in the balance. What are these radical changes? The humanities and the arts are being cut away, in both primary/secondary and college/university education, in virtually every nation of the world.

Why? One answer is that Google makes us more knowledgeable than Professors of soft subjects. On the other hand, there is no way to acquire Mathematical or Medical knowledge save by an arduous course of instruction.

Seen by policy-makers as useless frills, at a time when nations must cut away all useless things in order to stay competitive in the global market, they are rapidly losing their place in curricula, and also in the minds and hearts of parents and children.

Why must Norway stay competitive? It is already rich and has an enormous Sovereign Wealth Fund. It increased funding for Humanites research but saw a decline in numbers- particularly among females. Why? Norwegians are a sensible people. They have no great love for 'bullshit'.

Indeed, what we might call the humanistic aspects of science and social science—the imaginative, creative aspect, and the aspect of rigorous critical thought—are also losing ground as nations prefer to pursue short-term profit by the cultivation of the useful and highly applied skills suited to profit-making.

Rigorous critical thought can't be found in the Humanities. Its Professors are too stupid. All that can be found is apple polishing and bullshit.

This crisis is facing us, but we have not yet faced it. We go on as if everything were business as usual, when in reality great changes of emphasis are evident all over. We haven’t really deliberated about these changes, we have not really chosen them, and yet they increasingly limit our future. 

Nussbaum's future featured a Trump presidency. Her past featured a Nixon presidency and a Reagan Presidency. How did this correlate to the fate of the Humanities? The boomers who got a Liberal Education voted for Reagan and now vote for Trump. If they voted for Obama it was because they wanted to 'put a nigger in the White House to scare Wall Street straight.'

Nussbaum mentions Tagore- who didn't go to University and founded Shantiniketan as a place where cramming bullshit would not be required of students.

 In March 2004 a group of scholars from many nations gathered to discuss the educational philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore—winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, and leading innovator in education. Tagore’s educational experiment, which had wide influence in Europe, Japan, and the United States, focused on the empowerment of the student through practices of Socratic argument, exposure to many world cultures, and, above all, the infusion of music, fine art, theater, and dance into every part of the curriculum.

Which is great if you want to be a musician or a painter. Tagore himself was both. But India needs Doctors and Engineers and Managers. That is why Indians spend a lot of money sending their kids to Chinese Medical Schools. By contrast, Shantiniketan is for retards. A local newspaper reported that 'the premises of Santiniketan, mainly Amra Kunja and Ashram Math is littered with empty liquor bottles, Codex cough syrup and used condoms'.

The truth is, the place declined after the poet's death. In the Fifties, the novelist Sudhin Ghosh was beaten up by students there. At the time, this was unusual. In this sense, Shantiniketan set the trend.

In India today, Tagore’s ideas are neglected, and even scorned. Participants in the conference all agreed that a new conception, focused on profit, has taken over— in the process sidelining the whole idea of imaginative and critical self-development through which Tagore had formed so many future citizens of India’s successful democracy.

Imaginative and critical self-development can be done in one's leisure hours in between running the family business. That's what Tagore himself did. Mahatma Gandhi, too, did not go to University. They made money during the day while cultivating their soul in the evenings.

India's poverty can't be tackled by putting young people into Liberal Arts Colleges. They need to be earning money and acquiring work skills.

Would democracy in India survive today’s assault upon its soul? Faced with so much recent evidence of bureaucratic obtuseness and uncritical group-think, many participants feared that the answer might be “No.”

15 years later we know the answer was 'yes'. Did anyone in India bother about this Conference? Of course not. The thing was a shite-fest.

 In November 2005 a teachers retreat was held at the Laboratory School in Chicago—the school, on the campus of my own university, where John Dewey conducted his pathbreaking experiments in democratic education reform, the school where President Barack Obama’s daughters spent their early formative years. The teachers had gathered to discuss the topic of education for democratic citizenship, and they considered a wide range of educational experiments, studying figures ranging from Socrates to Dewey in the Western tradition to the closely related ideas of Tagore in India.

The school charges $33,558 tuition which is more than most working Americans make. It is fifteen times more than most Indians earn. Clearly, if this sort of education is essential for democratic citizenship- even America can't afford it.

But something was clearly amiss. The teachers—who take pride in stimulating children to question, criticize, and imagine—expressed anxiety about the pressures they face from wealthy parents who send their kids to this elite school.

The poor parents have to keep their mouths shut because they get a rebate of up to 85% of the fees. But it is the poor who have a greater interest in seeing their kiddies get well paid jobs. The 'Trustafarians' are welcome to do Basket Weaving at some tony Liberal Arts College.

Impatient with allegedly superfluous skills, and intent on getting their children filled with testable skills that seem likely to produce financial success, these parents are trying to change the school’s guiding vision. They seem poised to succeed.

Actually, they had already succeeded. A lot of the parents work for the University. They ensured that STEM subject teaching was top notch.

Nussbaum has visited India. She knows that many people in Tagore's Bengal don't have adequate food and clothing. Yet she writes-

  We are pursuing the possessions that protect, please, and comfort us—what Tagore called our material “covering.” But we seem to be forgetting about the soul, about what it is for thought to open out of the soul and connect person to world in a rich, subtle, and complicated manner; about what it is to approach another person as a soul, rather than as a mere useful instrument or an obstacle to one’s own plans; about what it is to talk as someone who has a soul to someone else whom one sees as similarly deep and complex.

Bengal has witnessed terrible famines. What 'rich, subtle and complicated' manner of inter-connection are starving people capable of? What about the sick and the malnourished? Does their soul gain super-powers in compensation? If so, Paideia should aim at making a country as poor as possible.

The word “soul” has religious connotations for many people, and I neither insist on these nor reject them. Each person may hear them or ignore them. What I do insist on, however, is what both Tagore and Alcott meant by this word: the faculties of thought and imagination that make us human and make our relationships rich human relationships, rather than relationships of mere use and manipulation.

Starving people may want to use and manipulate well-fed people into giving them some food. By contrast, well-fed people probably feel genuine affection for us if they drop by and stay to dinner.

When we meet in society, if we have not learned to see both self and other in that way, imagining in one another inner faculties of thought and emotion, democracy is bound to fail, because democracy is built upon respect and concern, and these in turn are built upon the ability to see other people as human beings, not simply as objects.

Monarchy and Fascism and Communism and every other sort of political system requires exactly the same thing. Why? It is the only way human beings can see each other. There may be some rare medical condition such that a person thinks other people are items of furniture. But this requires Scientific Research into a cure.

Speaking generally, there is no need to teach kids how to become bigger kids and, eventually, turn into adults. There may be exceptions to this rule- but that is a subject for Medical Science.

Given that economic growth is so eagerly sought by all nations,

as opposed to what? Economic collapse? Widespread starvation? An epidemic which wipes out the population?

especially at this time of crisis, too few questions have been posed about the direction of education, and, with it, of the world’s democratic societies.

Too few questions have been posed about why the Moon orders Chinese food on Tuesdays.  Why can't it just have pizza like a normal person?

With the rush to profitability in the global market, values precious for the future of democracy, especially in an era of religious and economic anxiety, are in danger of getting lost.

Just as the Moon is in danger of poking its own eye out while trying to use chopsticks. Why is NASA not sending a rocket to the Moon to try to convince it to stick to eating pizza? Improper education of Satellites is an increasingly urgent problem in our Solar System.

 My concern is that other abilities, equally crucial, are at risk of getting lost in the competitive flurry, abilities crucial to the health of any democracy internally, and to the creation of a decent world culture capable of constructively addressing the world’s most pressing problems. These abilities are associated with the humanities and the arts: the ability to think critically; the ability to transcend local loyalties and to approach world problems as a “citizen of the world”; and, finally, the ability to imagine sympathetically the predicament of another person.

There is no evidence that education in the Humanities and the Arts confer any such ability. Communist and Fascist countries may be superior in these fields. On the other hand, the fact is, Democratic Countries have led in STEM subjects. Why? Information flows more freely and people can vote with their feet or through the market. The Nazis frowned on 'Jewish Science'. The market found it very useful. Indeed, they found that Jews were very good at all sorts of things. This was also the case with Black People. Adorno may have objected to their Music, but Adorno was a highly credentialized cretin. Nobody rates him as a Musicologist now.

 At one time it was thought that Soviet Science could overtake that of the West. We now believe the opposite. Why? Consider the Western ARPANET which became our internet. Kitov & Glushkov in the USSR had an even better 'neural network' type idea. In theory, implementing it should have been easy and highly remunerative for the Soviet State. Socialism should have won the race and thus fulfilled Samuelson's prediction that it would beat Capitalism in raising living standards. Sadly, the Soviets failed because incentives were misaligned. That's all that mattered. Glushkov was very much a citizen of the world who could think critically and defend his views by quoting large chunks of Marx and Lenin. But what he was proposing would not help a crucial clique. They lacked the incentive to promote 'the greatest good of the greatest number'. Meanwhile the gum chewing Americans, their brains addled by silly TV shows, raced ahead of the cultured and cosmopolitan Soviet intellectuals. Some of the smartest people in the world moved to Silicon Valley and took up gum chewing and watching baseball.

Meanwhile Nussbaum was visiting India and feeling so much sympathy for the malnourished people there that she decided that Indian Democracy could only be saved if its people studied the Humanities and the Arts and ended up as unemployable as Shantiniketan retards.

To think about education for democratic citizenship, we have to think about what democratic nations are, and what they strive for.

Nonsense! If citizenship is democratic then education can't matter at all. Why? By its nature, a few will have a lot of it while most will have little of it. It is a different matter that countries need to educate their population so as to be secure and prosperous. But this is as true of a Communist or Fascist State as a Democratic one. No doubt, a part of the school curriculum will cover 'Civics' just as a part of it will cover the country's Geography and History. That is purely idiographic. Nothing nomothetic is necessarily involved.

What does it mean, then, for a nation to advance?

Productivity rises.

In one view it means to increase its gross national product per capita.

No. Depreciation has to be accounted for. Income is that which is net of Depreciation. It is based on productivity.

This measure of national achievement has for decades been the standard one used by development economists around the world, as if it were a good proxy for a nation’s overall quality of life.

It shouldn't be. Depreciation includes reduction in the stock of 'free goods' as well as the wearing away of Human, Institutional, and Social Capital.  Some years ago, it was discovered that the US had 'forgotten' how to make H bombs. That is an example of Depreciation. It was very costly to fix it. There are similar worries that many nations have forgotten how to do big infrastructure projects of the sort we will surely need in the near future. But all this is STEM type stuff. It isn't about the Humanities or the Arts.

The goal of a nation, says this model of development, should be economic growth. Never mind about distribution and social equality,

It  takes a lot of resources to 'do' Distribution and Social Equality. Like Venezuela, you may be killing off the golden goose. A temporary rise in 'Capabilities' may herald an utter collapse of living standards. Only a proper accounting of 'Depreciation' can help us avoid this.  Sen-tentious shite is utterly worthless.

never mind about the preconditions of stable democracy,

they are the absence of a significant internal or external threat to the State. But these are also the preconditions for any type of political stability. A failed State may be a Democracy but it isn't Democracy which causes it to fail. Rather, it is an improper accounting of Depreciation. Consider France & England in 1939. They realized too late that they had not accounted for the Depreciation in their National Security position. They should have had much higher taxes and military spending for the previous decade.

never mind about the quality of race and gender relations,

which aren't preconditions for stable democracy- as the history of every Democratic country proves. On the other hand, race and gender relations may improve quite dramatically under a tyranny.

never mind about the improvement of other aspects of a human being’s quality of life that are not well linked to economic growth. (Empirical studies have by now shown that political liberty, health, and education are all poorly correlated with growth.)

These 'empirical studies' are junk social science.

One sign of what this model leaves out is the fact that South Africa under apartheid used to shoot to the top of development indices.

Because productivity increased.

There was a lot of wealth in the old South Africa, and the old model of development rewarded that achievement (or good fortune), ignoring the staggering distributional inequalities, the brutal apartheid regime, and the health and educational deficiencies that went with it.

So, this is a good reason to ignore indices.

Today’s India offers a revealing laboratory of such experiments, as some states (Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh) have pursued economic growth through foreign investment, doing little for health, education, and the condition of the rural poor, while other states (Kerala, Delhi, to some extent West Bengal) have pursued more egalitarian strategies, trying to ensure that health and education are available to all, that the infrastructure develops in a way that serves all, and that investment is tied to job creation for the poorest. Proponents of the old model sometimes like to claim that the pursuit of economic growth will by itself deliver the other good things I have mentioned: health, education, a decrease in social and economic inequality.

In India, that is precisely what happened. Kerala had good health outcomes because it exported Medical Services just like Cuba. Inequality does not matter. Absolute poverty does.

By now, however, examining the results of these divergent experiments, we have discovered that the old model really does not deliver the goods as claimed. Achievements in health and education, for example, are very poorly correlated with economic growth.

For an obvious reason. If you can get a good job at 18 you do so. If you can't and end up with a PhD at 30 you end up competing with 18 year olds. It is bad economics to divert money into Higher Education when the only reason people are pursuing it is because they were unemployable at 18 and will remain so.

Health is poorly correlated with Income coz all the nice things we like to buy are bad for us. During the Cuban Famine, health outcomes went up.

Nor does political liberty track growth, as we can see from the stunning success of China.

Political liberty can mean everybody burning buses till there are no buses and so no one can get to work.

So producing economic growth does not mean producing democracy.

Nor does producing anything else mean producing democracy. What matters is how political liberty will be used. If people suspect it will involve all the buses getting burnt, they won't want anything to do with it.

Nor does it mean producing a healthy, engaged, educated population in which opportunities for a good life are available to all social clas­ses.

Nothing produces 'a healthy, engaged, educated population' save a population united in wanting to produce this. Poor people who don't want their kids to be poor don't have babies by the dozen.

What about the arts and literature, so often valued by democratic educators? An education for economic growth will, first of all, have contempt for these parts of a child’s training, because they don’t look like they lead to personal or national economic advancement. For this reason, all over the world, programs in arts and the humanities, at all levels, are being cut away, in favor of the cultivation of the technical. Indian parents take pride in a child who gains admission to the Institutes of Technology and Management; they are ashamed of a child who studies literature, or philosophy, or who wants to paint or dance or sing. American parents, too, are moving rapidly in this direction, despite a long liberal arts tradition.

Education was a positional good. If a guy could quote Virgil, it was likely he was a gentleman. The trouble with the massive expansion in Higher Education was that you started to get waiters quoting Virgil and living in the same trailer park as their functionally illiterate parents. Thus, Democracies rejected the Humanities. By contrast, STEM subjects improved everybody's lives. What could be more useless than Pure Maths? When my Great Grandfather was young, the mathematician Ramanujan was a figure of fun. He was bright, but hadn't gotten a Degree and joined the Audit Service. Maths appeared useless. By the time my father was born, Maths was known to be useful but Law or Government Service seemed a better bet. However, by the time I was in School, I was scolded by an Uncle for not getting 100 % in my Maths exam. Clearly, I lacked some specifically Iyer gene. The best I could hope for was Chartered Accountancy or some useless type of Government job as an Economist. My Uncle, I am sorry to say, was right. The Humanities are shit. Smart people don't just learn Maths, they understand why Economists who use Maths are wrong because they aren't good enough mathematicians. Look at the way Freeman Dyson has turned evolutionary game theory on its head! That's not a result a Sen-tentious type could have guessed at.

But educators for economic growth will do more than ignore the arts. They will fear them.

Nonsense! The Arts are high 'value adding' in nature. Economic growth is about moving up the value chain. Industry snaps up artistic talent. Compare the Ahmedabad National Institute of Design- set up on a play drawn up by the Eames brothers- with Tagore's Shantiniketan. The former more than pays for itself in increased tax revenue to the Govt. The latter is a money pit. Just recently, a NID alumnus got a starting salary of 100,000 dollars. Meanwhile, the prospects of Shantiniketan graduates have plummeted. While Gurudeva was alive, Princes would happily employ his students. Even after he died, there was a steady demand for painters and musicians. Now there is nothing but political patronage to get Government jobs in the District. But that is part of the reason the area is so backward.

For a cultivated and developed sympathy is a particularly dangerous enemy of obtuseness, and moral obtuseness is necessary to carry out programs of economic development that ignore inequality.

What of Nussbaum's own moral obtuseness in talking about an expensive education of the sort she herself enjoyed as being essential for democratic India? Clearly, she thinks she understands what Democracy requires better than the Indian voter. This is a highly racist and undemocratic view.

It is easier to treat people as objects to be manipulated if you have never learned any other way to see them.

Nonsense! To manipulate others you have to be able to convince them you aren't seeing them as objects. Indeed, it would be foolish to think other people are objects whom you have to physically move from place to place. Nussbaum may indeed have been taught this at School or College. However, everybody else didn't need any such instruction.

As Tagore said, aggressive nationalism needs to blunt the moral conscience, so it needs people who do not recognize the individual, who speak group-speak, who behave, and see the world, like docile bureaucrats.

Pakistan displayed 'aggressive nationalism'. Tagore's own people were chased off their estates in East Pakistan. But the Pakistanis did not see the world like docile bureaucrats. Few had more than the most rudimentary education.

Art is a great enemy of that obtuseness, and artists (unless thoroughly browbeaten and corrupted) are not the reliable servants of any ideology, even a basically good one—they always ask the imagination to move beyond its usual confines, to see the world in new ways.

That's why Hitler became such a nice guy when he took up painting.

So, educators for economic growth will campaign against the humanities and arts as ingredients of basic education. This assault is currently taking place all over the world.

Very true. Finger painting has been banned in State funded Kindergartens. All over the world, 'educators for economic growth' are barging into Primary Schools to snatch crayons out of the hands of little kids. Language instruction- which is part of the Humanities- is similarly under assault. A teacher can be sent for jail to teaching grammar. Wake up sheeple! This is happening at a school near you!

 If a nation wants to promote.. humane, people-sensitive democracy dedicated to promoting opportunities for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to each and every person, what abilities will it need to produce in its citizens?

Nations don't produce abilities in citizens. Citizens do.

At least the following seem crucial:

• The ability to think well about political issues affecting the nation, to examine, reflect, argue, and debate, deferring to neither tradition nor authority

Nussbaum lacks this quality. By contrast, the people whose votes made democracy viable were very poorly educated and knew little of 'the Humanities' though they may have had considerable Religious knowledge.

• The ability to recognize fellow citizens as people with equal rights, even though they may be different in race, religion, gender, and sexuality: to look at them with respect, as ends, not just as tools to be manipulated for one’s own profit

This ability may prevail in a Dictatorship, or a conquered country, yet be absent from a Democracy.

• The ability to have concern for the lives of others, to grasp what policies of many types mean for the opportunities and experiences of one’s fellow citizens, of many types, and for people outside one’s own nation

Again, this is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for Democracy as opposed to Monarchy or Dictatorship. What is important in Democracy is that voters reveal their true preferences. Otherwise there is a 'preference falsification' problem. Suppose all of us like cake but think that others prefer biscuits. If we take a vote on what to order, we get the optimal result only if people are self-regarding and vote 'cake'.

• The ability to imagine well a variety of complex issues affecting the story of a human life as it unfolds: to think about childhood, adolescence, family relationships, illness, death, and much more in a way informed by an understanding of a wide range of human stories, not just by aggregate data

WTF? Everybody has this quality. That is why we watch soap operas. A few people are good at examining 'aggregate data'. Amartya Sen isn't one of them. That's why he hasn't made billions- and paid hundreds of millions in taxes- by running a hedge fund.

• The ability to judge political leaders critically, but with an informed and realistic sense of the possibilities available to them

The British lacked this ability. They chose Churchill who was old, alcoholic and wholly unprepared to do a deal with Hitler- though not so with Stalin. Yet, with hindsight, Churchill was the ideal choice.

Sadly there is no evidence that anybody has the 'ability to judge political leaders'- or business leaders or leaders of fashion or anything else- with an 'informed and realistic sense of the possibilities available to them'. If this were not the case, people with this ability would be running things. But, this would be because they could predict the future.

Who would have thought that Reagan would be considered a great president while Gorbachev would be considered a shmuck?

• The ability to think about the good of the nation as a whole, not just that of one’s own local group

If this ability is vital then Democracies should be small. The USA should be split up. Nobody knows what is 'good for the nation as a whole'. Economists might make guesses, but guesses are all they are.

Democracy can work well if there is subsidarity and people vote in a self-regarding manner. It's no good saying 'I personally have no animosity against Jews/Blacks/Iyengars, but for the sake of the nation, I think, they should be gassed or forced to perform slave labor.'

 • The ability to see one’s own nation, in turn, as a part of a complicated world order in which issues of many kinds require intelligent transnational deliberation for their resolution This is only a sketch, but it is at least a beginning in articulating what we need.

What about the ability to see all Life on earth as a finely spun web of mutual dependence? But why stop there? Why not the ability to see the Earth as part of Solar System? What about the ability to see how sub-atomic particles relate to each other? Surely these abilities are far more important. In politics it is enough that there is subsidiarity and self-regarding preferences. In Ecology, much more is required. To prevent the Earth being obliterated by a collision with an asteroid, we need a higher type of ability. To travel beyond the stars we need something more fundamental yet.

The Humanities and the Arts have never endowed anyone with the abilities Nussbaum lists. It is instructive to read Hansard debates from 1914 and compare them to their German equivalent. The first thing that strikes one is how often Members of Parliament would quote Latin and Greek texts. The rhetoric on display was on the Classical model. You had finely balanced sentences and the appearance of scrupulous fairness in assessing different points of view. Nothing could be more decorous and civilized. Yet what was the upshot? The Europe of Crowned Heads and bildungsburgertums and beamtenliberalismus came crashing down. War and Famine stalked the Continent. The Humanities had initiated this Gadarening rush. Plenty of good chaps went to their deaths in the trenches with a volume of Theocritus or Tagore in their pockets. Science and Technology, however, decided the outcome. If Europe's future was to be free of War, it would only be because Science could purge the thymotic stain of the Humanities by a more elemental type of Pity and a wholly apocalyptic vision of Terror.

One result of the Second War was the G.I Bill and the enormous expansion of Higher Education. A lot of it had to be 'Humanities' based because that shite is cheap to teach. But the thing was useless because Humanities Professors declined in quality. As Edward Said pointed out 50 years ago, Liberal Arts Professors were seldom fluent in a second language- forget about knowing Latin and Greek- and could not order a meal in France or conduct a pogrom in Germany. Nussbaum's own scholarship is no great shakes. She pretended, in Court, that the word 'tolmema' expressed no repugnance. She was caught out in that lie. Nowadays, thanks to Google, anyone can catch out any vaunted Professor in a similar lie. Thankfully, tenured cretins have thick skins. Otherwise they would all have hanged themselves for shame at their brazen imposture.

Nussbaum & Sen regard themselves as cultured and the rest of us as sub-human. It is their proclivity for the Liberal Arts which sealed them to this doom. In a globalized market for crap, they have turned a profit on their meretricious calling. But, their respective Democracies have rejected their views. Young people may still study their worthless oeuvre. But it is because those young people know they are stupid and can aim at nothing higher or more utile. Good luck to them. All we ask is that they not masturbate in public. As I have often said, the chief function of Higher Education is to get young people to stop touching themselves at least for the duration of the lecture. This is why the Liberal Arts must focus much more intensively on Basket weaving and finger painting. Failure to do so will result in the hoi polloi jizzing all over the place causing elderly people like myself to slip on the pavement and break our hip. Democracy can't afford hip replacements for everybody over the age of 55. So, get your hand off your todger you little shit. I know why you read this blog. It's like the Porn version of Social Choice 101. Well, I'm not putting up any more Veena Malik pics. Make do with this one of the gorgeous pouting P.Chidambaram-