Ah, the great and infectious American disease: materialist pragmatism. It requires one to only do what is deemed useful to themselves. Never mind that scarcely anyone really can say what is personally useful without taking a cue from others and without having the experience of trial and error. Wouldn't it be absurd if everyone followed Miller's rhetorical question (see below), answering it according to his (Miller's) prompts and learning nothing at all about anything for fear of learning something not useful? That would produce utopia of imbecility, which is precisely what the manipulators of vulgar culture aim at. Is there anything in our mountainous trash heaps (some as high as a Adirondack overlook) that was not advertised as supremely useful just yesterday or last year? What of learning for its own sake?
There are many good reasons to learn techniques or even skills that one does not ordinarily rely on. That is so abundantly obvious that it would be silly to list even a few. Some of them fit under the topic of "appreciation" which is a form of empathy or sympathy, often considered basic to aesthetic experience. In the former and better days of our civilization, one would seek a "liberal education", prior to specialization, for the benefits of having some access to human history, thought and technologies. Nowadays, it is rare to find one person in 20 who can recite a basic chronology of Western History, and maybe one in a thousand who knows anything of the world east of Istanbul or south of Mexico City, to say nothing of the history of ideas, of art or science. Thoughtless statements and leading questions are too often blurted out by cornered debaters in final, desperate efforts to save themselves. They go down. wc Are they "not for those who create paintings" only because they are not useful to them? Is there any point in non-painters talking about painting technologies at all? (unless "technology" only involves the ideas found in chemistry and physics) ____________________________________________________________ Weight Loss Program Best Weight Loss Program - Click Here! http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL2231/c?cp=NUYwmpAnZpIcN9-cmWh0QwAAJz6c l_zTaptgNR5c8Mer1v9kAAYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEUgAAAAA=
