Don’t we need dreams outside capitalism?

AS someone currently employed as an academic (getting paid to read, think, and write about history), I’ve given some thought to the business and privilege of the “leisure” arts, and while shot through with issues of class and discourses of national development, I’ve been thinking about this in the context of what a society teaches its youth to aspire to and to value. Education design is ultimately a question of what society one hopes to create in, for, and despite of the larger global context in which it is situated.

Only those from certain backgrounds with financial security and who lack the kind of middle class paranoia that drives people to secure constant employment and a safety net can afford to carelessly study philosophy, be a poet, major in something like comparative literature. These always have been the province of the gentlemen, the aristocracy, those in general who don’t need to work. The last places that preserve a world of “useless,” “non-compensating,” and “leisure” arts in our global economy are the PhD programs that pay full tuition and stipends to their students to make possible the continuance of that kind of scholarly work (and make it available for at least several years to anyone who qualifies, thereby somewhat enlargening the pool of people with the leisure and security to dedicate years to thinking about philosophy without monetary worries).