Thanks for the clarification - and sorry to go full tilt at rebutting an argument you weren't making! (Though it was fun to cover the territory.)
You're right that without any aesthetic sense, everything gets bleak. Are things that dire, though? With the business media getting obsessed about unicorns, $1T market caps, etc., it's easy to believe that money fever has infected everyone. It hasn't. Friends who teach, make movies, deliver social services, write, etc. are still keeping some sense of goodness alive.
Re:The Humanities Are in Crisis
by whatshisface on Saturday September 15, 2018 @05:22PM
(#17996101)
>Or, why worry about engineering good quality products if goodness doesn't exist?
Why bother reasoning from our intuitions about what we want when we could just pursue our subconscious goals directly? Who needs to be convinced that they want a product to be good-quality?
Humanities education made a lot more sense when the subject of the humanities was believed to exist. Then there'd be reason to have many openings for humanities professors, spin off education jobs in public education, private education, etc.