Are we post-classical? and why it matters

What we learn and how we approach knowledge matters: it shapes the rules in which we operate and how we try to understand the world. Two trends are moving the West into post-classical thinking: elites education; and technology.

Classicism in a nutshell

Classicism is any cultural movement drawing inspiration from an idealized version of cultural antiquity. Think Washington D.C.: 200 years back they built the congress like it’s 2000 years back. It comes in phases, with ‘renaissance periods’: Charlemagne, Otto, the Italian Renaissance, the Enlightenment, some strains of Romanticism, official ‘power’ art in propaganda architecture mid-1900.

All these periods are sandwiched between anti-classical periods, as if in the West we can just develop on classical ideas before growing tired and experimenting with the opposite. Classicism gave us ideas like universal human rights, the rule of law, and analytical thinking. These also came to the expense of other organizational principles in which people found comfort: those who opposed it were often squished like grapes. The argument ‘we have always done it this way’ is of little use against laws and regulations and the rationalization of productions.

A general quotes Horace

In 1944 the island of Crete was still occupied by the German army. Cretan resistance and the British special forces organized a high-profile snatch: the kidnapping of General Karl Kreipe by Major Leigh Fermor. Fermor’s book Kidnap in Crete details the hazardous crossing of Crete’s central massif.

Stopping for the evening, the German general looks at the mountain range and starts talking latin:

“Vides ut alta stet nive candida Soracte?”

He muttered the first exameter, and Major Fermor completed the stanza: “Nec iam sustineant onus | silvae laborantes geluque | flumina constitering acuto”. It was ode 1.9 from Horace. The text is not particularly piercing and roughly translates: “See how the Soratte [a mount close to Rome] rises white because of the deep snow | how the tired trees can’t support the weight | and how the rivers are stuck because of the severe freeze”. The relevance of this episode is not in the words.

The two soldiers didn’t bond over the Latin language and certainly were not discussing trivial epicurism. The two were bonding over classical education: for a moment all the divisions of a global conflict were set aside over what constitutes a common understanding across all of the Western world.

The shared classical curriculum united enemies and friends and made it so that the elites of different countries could understand and share an ideological space together. Two military men at war look at the mountains and finish each other’s sentences quoting Horace in Latin.

Economics is the new Humanities

The shared classical curriculum is now gone from the mental landscape of the elites. After WWII people in power started defining themselves in economical terms: knowing the ins and outs of business and management meant access to the top echelons. Upholding classical values in a world defined by economic output has still benefits.

Humanities are institutions. They give value to society by studying human cultures, expressions and values. They create a shared understanding of history – where we are from, where are we going, what makes us us -, and frame collective action – why are we doing this, why we do not do that -. All these questions trickled down into anthropology, sociology, and philosophy and help explaining how we human beings operate.

On the other hand, business and management guarantees the efficient use of resources. So efficient, in fact, that in times of abundance even institutions become redundant and the ultimate goal is to increase the standards of living of the people – or at least of the people involved in that trade. For the children raised after WWII – the baby boomers – trade, peace, and money were the goal: a new set of schools provided them with the tools to get them.

The history of managerial education is well researched. Business and management explained how people in power made successful decisions, and got the elites ready for success. Peter Drucker and Michael Porter, Philip Kotler and Edward Deming became the new business classics of the 1980s and 90s: the business bests nursed GenX into being. Nevertheless, the most striking distance with the curricula of the past is on the universalism of the humanities against the contingency of business education. In my view it is the classicism of Plato against the (anti) classicism of Aristotle.

Plato and Aristotle: Ideas and patterns

There are two main models of dealing with knowledge. The first uses abstractions to make sense of the world; the second observes the world to come up with some sort of rationalization. The school of abstraction-deduction connects best with Plato. The Greek thinker built his understanding of the world around few steps:

1. there are universal principles;
2. we can know stuff by identifying the ideas governing the world;
3. we can deduce local applications as a logical consequence of these ideas.

Platonism is found in hard science. Think of old physics: we can predict how two celestial bodies will behave because we have a theory around it. We use a universal understanding with formulas that we can apply to every system. We use the idea of gravity, and of time – although nobody really knows what they are -. We operationalize a theory and test it to see to which cases it applies best: consequences are deducted from big ideas.

The alternative way of seeing the world is inductive. The school of observation-empiricism connects with Aristotle. This approach to knowledge is more flexible and works rather well to explain a limited number of cases:

1. Reality is what we experience;
2. We can recognize patterns in our observations;
3. We can generalize these patterns to know stuff.

Aristotle is useful in social sciences, to investigate phenomena we do not want to think by abstraction: deductive scientists have no problem in approximating their models with perfectly elastic spheres (the spherical cow joke); social scientists don’t want to approximate people to objects in a deterministic mechanism. Empiricism allows the scientist to explain decisions, behaviors, and actions and is the epistemological underpinning of management studies. It is great at that since it brings method and structure to otherwise anecdotal evidence.

The quest for patterns gains the upper hand

The two methods work really well in tandem. Using both methods guarantees feedback and disproves wrong theories: it studies both the immanent (the object) and the transcendent (the representation) and sets aside wonky theories. However, the feedback loop is not all that smooth.

Recently, we started trusting inductive reasoning as the main source of knowledge. In my opinion, it is due to two main reasons:

• we changed media consumption. Social media and the internet fragmented our society in small islets of understanding, and it is easier to find groups by agreement. Not everybody agreed with the evening news in the 2000s; but by the 2010s everybody gets a small clickable newsletter they agree with. Such change led to a new interest for the specific and the limited, away from universal theories.
• we discovered inductive technology. The search for patterns is what propelled machine learning: AI is trying to investigate patterns and discover connections between anything. Spurious correlations are investigated and become trustworthy information. The next step is not to infuse it with ideas but rather to find ever larger datasets to train on. “Training” means generalizing patterns.

Recent technologies supercharged the search for patterns. Large language models (like OpenAI’s ChatGPT) are the outcome of searching for patterns through large fractions of the internet. Now entrepreneurs eye personal datasets to ever expand the number of patterns available for analysis. Not that patterns are proposed without meaning: there are weights (parameters) by the trillion in the best performing models. In other words, the search for patterns has never been so widespread: nature tells it all, and we shall search for patterns not for abstraction.

In this environment, the universal may still exist and yet it doesn’t matter. The individual perspective is (in this great number of cases) far more telling. Even in our consumer behavior we start from a case and then we extrapolate a connection to the general: we are fascinated with the individual, the feeling (e.g. normalize being happy/angry/proud/anything), the experience. The universality of human rights gets tramped by the individualism of self expression.

I am not making an argument for suppressing the individual while enforcing an abstract idea. Much suffering has been inflicted on the divergent by virtue of consolidating an idea (of manhood, of success, of society). I am making the case for considering both sides (experiential cases and abstract theory) as mutually reinforcing perspectives for understanding the world around us. The fragmentation of the media and the chance of crunching data should promote theory building to a new level. And yet classicism seems marginal.

Without ideas, what is left of us?

Classicism Platonism starts from the ideas which keep us together. In this view, reality is not an obstacle to the abstraction: America’s founding father wrote that all Men are created equal yet women and slaves weren’t part of the writing process. Yet the common principle of equality was established so that the society could follow. Ideas are true, and reality will adjust itself to them. Humanities were the curriculum of the elites.

Nowadays knowledge of humanities is something for a supervillain or a retiree. We should run for the hills when politicians start quoting the classics. The individual case is the new modern taste: personalization, authenticity, and tailored offers command a premium in sales and in the arts. An example: as long as a movie or picture tells a story of individuals, we shrug off its pitfalls. My personal favorite is Amazon’s The Rings of Power in which Tolkien’s orcs are seen as poor displaced refugees instead of an allegory for barbarism and destruction. The idea of the orcs is washed away to show a loving orc husband with his family. Show the individual and shove the idea.

The dangers of rejecting universalism are beyond artistic taste. Generalizing the individual is as dangerous as individualizing the general. While we are post-classical in our education, we shouldn’t forget the principles that bind us together and the institutions (i.e. the ideas in society) that make these working.

In science and social studies, understanding the world works best with a mix of the two approaches, balancing out deductive approaches and inductive approaches. It takes long to master but is really valuable: we shall not generalize the individual experience; and we shall not quote Horace while wearing a nazi uniform.