Jerry Seinfeld Just Articulated the Problem

Not Only With Movies, But with "Higher Education"

Seinfeld was interviewed by GQ. I did not read that interview, but I did read The Daily Wire’s precis of it.

Seinfeld says there’s a spirit of confusion over Hollywood that his rhetoric indicates is permanent.

No one seems to know what they’re doing anymore.

My wife and I went to the movies a couple of times recently. The ticket person didn’t know who Anthony Hopkins was. I do a pretty damn good Rain Main impression/bit, and they didn’t catch that one, either. It’s not just the ticket people. My recent students haven’t gotten them, either.

Who would have thought that someone like me, a Republican academic, would find common ground with Jerry Seinfeld, a New York Democrat comedian, on something like this ? We are living in strange times.

Higher Education is over in a similar way. It has been replaced by a spirit of confusion.

Asked what has replaced the great movies’ place in our popular culture, Seinfeld answered, “Depression? Malaise ? I would say confusion. Disorientation replaced the movie business … Everybody I know in show business, everyday, is going, ‘What is going on ? How do you do this ? What are we supposed to do, now ?”

The same is true on the college campuses. The libraries, with their books—you know, real books—are wrongly assumed to be vestigial organs, like the appendix. Every college has one, just like every person has one. But no one knows why. Some colleges find them to be a source of infection, and so have them removed to cyberspace. Like tonsils, they’re considered, well, pests.

Except, the analogy doesn’t hold, because libraries are the point of Higher Education—the development, protection, containment of the pursuit of knowledge (which entails the past pursuits, written down and documented for us) and intellectual virtue for future generations.

The classroom, too, is considered to be a vestigial organ. What happens there has newly been regulated by monsterous and litigious patterns hostile to honesty and truth. Nothing but confusion and disorientation about what a university is can possibly follow.

The Democratic Party of old was obsessed with image and surface, not substance. That’s the heart of its racism. That same old spirit has come back to haunt us all through the current Democratic Party. It’s the spirit of the skin-deep, a spirit of distraction from the deep things that help human beings flourish. It’s a spirit of confusion and disorientation.

And we’re all paying for it in more than just one way.

Luke, for TRP