What’s up people, welcome to Office Hours with the
Brofessor: the show that’s proudly irrelevant.
You’re probably thinking, wow: Proudly Irrelevant. What a cool new catchphrase! Well, thank you. My last one, The Show Where I Say Things, I
got from the brilliant theological comedy channel Lutheran Satire. Check them out if you haven’t, especially
“Frank the Hippy Pope”. The old
catchphrase fit the show pretty well, because that’s what it is: a show where I
say things. My friends kept encouraging
me to start a Youtube show because it would give me an outlet for stuff I would
otherwise yammer on about at parties. So
the original concept was really just a show where I talked about whatever topic
was my flavor of the month. Still, I
like “Proudly Irrelevant” more because it really captures the show’s essence:
nothing here is applicable to modern, everyday life, and I hear people all the
time saying there’s no point to knowing this stuff. Well, guess what?
I DON’T
CARE.
I think it’s
too bad that people belittle the Humanities for their supposed lack of
relevance. Whether or not something is
marketable or timely shouldn’t matter, as long as it’s cool and
interesting. Just as an example, the
other day I was talking to some German gap-year kids at a hostel in
Vientiane. They were talking to me about
how studying languages was boring. So, I
started talking about the ancient correspondences that exist between Germanic
languages, and from there to Proto-Indo-European, and the prehistoric cultural
concepts that live on in the words we use every day. All of a sudden, learning foreign languages
seemed a lot more interesting. Now, what
I told these guys isn’t going to help them order in a restaurant or give
presentations at work, but it is going to give them a contextual frame for the
language points they do learn—and, more importantly, it’s cool and interesting,
and instills a love of the language.
As another example,
let’s talk about classical knowledge.
It’s appalling to me that students aren’t taught Latin and Greek in
school anymore. It robs students of the
intellectual heritage of Western civilization.
I use the verb “rob” deliberately—I really feel that the modern
educational system steals a treasure of enormous value from students in not
teaching them the classical languages of the West. An important component of this knowledge is
literature. So even if you did read
Homer in school—I didn’t—you probably didn’t read him in Greek, unless you were
very lucky. If you were one of those
lucky ones, a baton was passed to you that has been carried for three thousand
years over the yawning depths of history.
Reading Homer in Greek or Virgil in Latin, or the Eddas in Old Norse—
or, for that matter, the Popol Vuh in Classical K’iche—connects you to
something larger than yourself, a connection sorely needed in this generation
of egotism and fatuousness.
But what, in
our day, do we say of this knowledge of the ages? “It’s not practical” and “it’s not
relevant”. That’s not the point,
dingus. The point is that a) the
knowledge of the ages connects us to something greater than ourselves, and b)
by nature of that connection, it’s badass and cool. It’s worth learning for its own sake. This, I think, is the thread that connects
everything I talk about here, whether it’s prehistoric hominid behavior,
Xiongnu word etymology, or Ket shamanism.
It’s knowledge that intimately connects us to the greater narrative of
human existence, and consequently ignites within us a sense of wonder. So it doesn’t really matter if this stuff is
“usesful” or not—it’s still worth learning.
That’s the message of my channel, and that’s why I’m “Proudly
Irrelevant”.
Anyway, I
know that was a bit of a rant, but thanks for bearing with me. Next time, it’s back to cavemen!
