Literae humaniores

Or: the most useless degree a 21st century politician could do.

Boris Johnson read Literae humaniores at Oxford, a degree often known as 'Greats' and now officially as 'Classics'¹.

Classics (Literae Humaniores) is a wide-ranging degree devoted to the study of the literature, history, philosophy, languages and archaeology of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. It is one of the most interdisciplinary of all degrees, and offers the opportunity to study these two foundational ancient civilisations and their reception in modern times. The degree also permits students to take extensive options in modern philosophy, a flexibility which makes Oxford’s Literae Humaniores different from most other Classics courses. [Text from link above.]

So, what about these 'foundational ancient civilisations' is so important to study today?

Both ancient Greek and Roman civilisations were built upon slavery on a huge scale. Relatively small numbers of free men (and women, who were seldom free) lived off the labour of large numbers of slaves. Some people today might find that unacceptable.

The ancient Greeks were often paedophiles, and paedophilia was certainly widely accepted. Perhaps this is not something we should seek to emulate.

Both societies treated women as property.

Torture was a common punishment.

Apart from some brief episodes of democracy (well, democracy if you were male and one of the relatively tiny number of people who were not slaves, so not actually democracy) these societies were nasty mixtures of absolute monarchies, plutocracies² and other forms of intensely antidemocratic rule by tiny elites.

The Romans were rather keen on public exhibitions where people were torn apart by animals for entertainment.

These societies also consumed relatively tiny amounts of physical resources in a world with what must have seemed a vast plethora of them (albeit, they often failed to feed themselves as their technology was so rudimentary). This is the diametric opposite of what is the case now.

In the middle ages the myths and legends of these civilisations together with the ruins they left behind must have seemed something worthy of deep study and admiration, and they certainly were so: mediaeval western civilisation was in most ways at least as primitive as those of the ancients³. Three-quarters of a millennium later the only reason to study these societies should be to learn what not to do.

These 'foundational civilisations' were, in fact, barbaric⁴. Looking backwards at them admiringly might have been appropriate in 1300: to do so in 2021 is a joke that was not funny five hundred years ago. Studying and admiring societies based on slavery, absolute power, and watching people get killed and eaten by animals is not a good preparation for running a modern liberal democracy.

It's also just useless: anyone running a country in the early 21st century needs to understand how to run societies which are large compared to the environment in which they live, the complete opposite of the situation in the ancient world. They need some basic level of numeracy: to understand, for instance, how exponential resource consumption crashing into finite limits works and be able to formulate strategies for avoiding the resulting catastrophes. If they don't understand that they are simply not able to make competent decisions. Literae Humaniores does not prepare you for that.

The only thing for which Literae Humaniores does prepare you is using rhetoric: using you golden words to control people. That provides you a path to power, perhaps. But, sadly, viruses do not listen to rhetoric, the climate does not listen to rhetoric. And so you spout your golden lies, and people die.

Once again: the only useful lesson from Literae Humaniores is that this is not how to rule a country in the 21st century.

And so Boris Johnson, who has of course not learned that lesson, vomits forth his golden cascade of lies, and we die.