“…those who erect walls, as Jorge Luis Borges reminds us, can easily have books burned.”

Written in 2013, Nuccio Ordine’s “little masterpiece” The Usefulness of the Useless is filled with Post-Trump aha moments like the quote above.

It also dovetails into a debate being waged in the universities and colleges of America even as I write this. My youngest daughter Morgan became one of the last to be able to graduate from my alma mater, Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, with a Classics major. Imagine, a traditional Liberal Arts college without a Classics major.

Drawing upon the works of some of our greatest philosophers and writers, Ordine reminds us of the importance humanities, the arts, and philosophy play in battling the dehumanizing nature of a society and culture based on the marketplace and money. In doing so he reminds us again and again how the madness that is Trump could have happened. And most importantly points to the cure: the Classics and the liberal arts.

There is a movement at colleges these days to reduce traditional core-Humanity courses that once marked a person as well-educated and to emphasize “career” curriculum. Everywhere there is an concerted assault on the only defense we have against Trump and One-percenters. What is most important is being marginalized. What is least worthy of esteem is celebrated. Truth is sacrificed again and again on the altar of capitalist doctrine. And we, I am afraid, will not be able to recover.

Some Favorite Lines from The Usefulness of the Useless

“Rousseau once remarked that the ‘ancient politicians talked incessantly about customs and virtues; ours talk only about trade and money.” (p.4)

[Quoting Tommaso Campanella in The City of the Sun (1623)] “wealth makes men insolent, proud, ignorant, traitors, assumers of what they know not.” (p.29)

[Quoting Giacomo Leopardi, 1832] “(a society of dominated by ‘storekeepers and other men devoted to money becomes a society in which people come to coincide with money:) Almost as if men, disagreeing in all other opinions, agree only in the esteem of money: or almost as if money were in the substance of the man; and nothing but money….” (p. 51)

[Quoting Eugene Ionesco] “a country in which art is not understood is a country of slaves and robots,  a country of unhappy people who neither laugh nor smile, a country without mind or spirit; where there is no humor, where there is no laughter, there is anger and hate.” (p.70)