Sitzfleisch

A Riff on the "The Lost Ritual"

Lawrence Alma-Tadema Spring (1894)

In The Lost Ritual, Johann Kurtz offers explanations for two of the great mysteries of our age: the strange survival of the undergraduate college à l’américaine and the pernicious persistence of the most prominent of its diseases. The peculiar institution, he submits, has survived its many self-inflicted wounds because it serves as a coming-of-age ceremony. Likewise, he adds, the wokery that feeds upon our bachelor factories thrives because it offers an especially intense version of this four-year (or five-year, or six-year) quinceañera.

This hypothesis accords with the argument, made often in this blog, that education and schooling are two very different things. At the same time, it suggests that one of the definitive purposes of Extra Muros, the encouragement of young people to eschew the conventional college experience in favor of a combination of practical pursuits and systematic self-tuition, may be a fool’s errand. After all, if four (or five or six) years of drinking second-rate beer from red plastic cups does for the office-bound folk of North America what fear-filled rites of passage do for members of the bone-in-the-nose set, then I might well be sailing against the wind.

Upon second thought, I find hope in the possibility that the parasite (or, to be more precise, the cancer) promoted by d’Angelo, Kendi, and company will soon deal the coup de grâce to its mortally-wounded host.

The coming-of-age ordeals of warrior tribes demand that boys who would be men prove possession of such martial virtues as courage and self-command. The rites-of-passage of the modern middle classes, however, require that postulants demonstrate a mixture of conformity, conscientiousness, and, to a diminishing degree, intelligence. (Readers familiar with the oeuvre of economist Bryan Caplan will recognize the source of this troika. However, it is worth noting that, while Professor Caplan will occasionally tip his hat in the direction of the campus-based building of basic brain-power, he devotes far more attention to the collegiate cultivation of the two components of Sitzfleisch.)¹

The cult of Marx, Mao, and Marcuse demands complete compliance, not only with its basic tenets, but also with any changes in the party line that, from time to time, may occur. (I am old enough to remember the days when campus commies of the caucasian persuasion could don dashikis without facing charges of “cultural appropriation.”) Thus, those who sit at the feet of the acolytes of critical theory learn an art of great value to people who wish to thrive in a large organization, that of discarding the old hat, and putting on the new one, at just the right time. (Think, if you will, of the mid-level employees of the McDonalds Corporation, who, over the course of the last four decades, were obliged to alter their opinion of the McRib sandwich more often than they changed the oil in their cars.)

In the world of work, however, simple conformity to the current thing, however agile it might be, rarely answers the mail. Rather, compliance only succeeds when spread over, in the manner of the fabled special sauce, on the Big Mac of getting things done. Thus, when the woke disparage punctuality and punctuation, when they displace tasks that require attention to detail with rant-filled struggle sessions, they inhibit the development of the skills, habits, and attitudes that, not too long ago, led employers to hire recent college graduates.²

1. Bryan Caplan The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018) pages 9-21

2. For a sense of the speed with which this change is happening, compare Nearly Four in Ten Employers Avoid Hiring Recent College Grads in Favor of Older Workers (which came out in 2023) with Dismissed by Degrees (which rolled off the press in 2017).