The Useless Tree

The Multiversal Dao

Seems like theoretical physicists have worked themselves into futility.  Or that, at least, is the sense that emerges from Alan P. Lightman's piece in Harper's Magazine, "The accidental universe: Science's crisis of faith." 

The search for ultimate theoretical explanation of the universe has, essentially, hit a dead end.  Actually, it might be better to say it has reached point of infinite, and inexplicable, variation: the multiverse. In short, if I understand this correctly, in order to adequately account for the dynamics and development of the universe, it is now necessary to invoke the existence of an infinite number of other, alternate, universes, each with its own unique and self-consistent set of principles and parameters.  The total of all these universes is, then, the multiverse.  Lightman highlights the problems this possibility poses for science:

Alan Guth, a pioneer in cosmological thought, says that “the multiple-universe idea severely limits our hopes to understand the world from fundamental principles.” And the philosophical ethos of science is torn from its roots.....

Evidently, the fundamental laws of nature do not pin down a single and unique universe. According to the current thinking of many physicists, we are living in one of a vast number of universes. We are living in an accidental universe. We are living in a universe uncalculable by science.

Science strives for explanation and calculation.  When it encounters what appears to be an inexplicable and incalculable problem it has failed in its most fundamental mission.  And that seems to be where physics is now.

Of course, none of this is surprising from a Daoist point of view.  Daoism tells us that our knowledge, indeed our language, will always be insufficient to capture the fullness and complexity of Dao (Way):

Longing to take hold of all beneath heaven and improve it... I've seen such dreams invariably fail.  All beneath heaven is a sacred vessel, something beyond all improvement.  Try to improve it and you ruin it.  Try to hold it and you lose it.... (DDJ, 29)

As Lightman points out, when science fails at cosmology, a door is open to religious interpretation, in this case "intelligent design."

If such conclusions are correct, the great question, of course, is why these fundamental parameters happen to lie within the range needed for life. Does the universe care about life? Intelligent design is one answer. Indeed, a fair number of theologians, philosophers, and even some scientists have used fine-tuning and the anthropic principle as evidence of the existence of God. For example, at the 2011 Christian Scholars’ Conference at Pepperdine University, Francis Collins, a leading geneticist and director of the National Institutes of Health, said, “To get our universe, with all of its potential for complexities or any kind of potential for any kind of life-form, everything has to be precisely defined on this knife edge of improbability…. [Y]ou have to see the hands of a creator who set the parameters to be just so because the creator was interested in something a little more complicated than random particles.”

This has never made sense to me, from a Daoist perspective.  Both the scientists and the theologians seem to believe in an absolute binary here: either there is a singular scientific explanation for the universe or there must be a god-like designer who planned out the minutia that makes our current reality possible.  Both abhor the notion of randomness.  Why is there so much anxiety about randomness?  Yes, the partiuclars of the universe, the very fine margins of the basic forces, are marvelously narrow; a very slight variation would have meant that life as we know it would be impossible.  But why shouldn't we believe that what exists now is the result of trillions and trillions of random events and interactions taking place over billions and billions of years?  

If we accept randomness we then require neither a multiverse nor a God.

Daoism, I believe, indeed ancient Chinese thought more generally, is much more comfortable with randomness and inexplicability when it comes to cosmology and cosmogony.  Here's a quote from Fredrick W. Mote's little book, Intellectual Foundations of China:

The genuine Chinese cosmogony is that of organismic process, meaning that all parts of the entire cosmos belong to one organic whole and that they all interact as participants in on spontaneously self-generating life process... Needham, analyzing that Chinese model, calls it, "an ordered harmony of wills without an ordainer."  As he describes the organismic Chinese cosmos, it emerges to our full view as one in striking contrast to all other world conceptions known to human history.  It differs from other organismic conceptions, such as classical Greek cosmologies in which a logos or demiurge or otherwise conceived master will external to creation was regarded as necessary for existence.  And it contrasts still more starkly with the ancient Semitic traditions that led to subsequent Christian and Islamic conceptions of creation ex nihilo by the hand of God, or through the will of God, and all other such mechanistic, teleological, and theistic cosmologies....(15-16)

"Spontaneous self-generating life process."  No "Big Bang," no beginning, no end, just being and non-being, time and timelessness merging one into the other... In a sense, it is a resignation that we will never understand certain aspects of the universe.  And, in fact, we do not need to know certain aspects of the universe to live our lives now.  Instead of seeking a singular theoretical principle to guide us deductively, we can very well work from the ground up, inductively, in engaging the particulars of our existence.  Yes, theoretical physics can be fun (or so I'm told...) but we needn't take it so seriously.

For me, then, the interesting question is: why are people so nervous and afraid of randomness and uncertainty?

While I have no answer for that question, it is amusing that Lightman hits upon a metaphor that brings us back to Zhuangzi.  He writes:

If the multiverse idea is correct, then the historic mission of physics to explain all the properties of our universe in terms of fundamental principles—to explain why the properties of our universe must necessarily be what they are—is futile, a beautiful philosophical dream that simply isn’t true. Our universe is what it is because we are here. The situation could be likened to a school of intelligent fish who one day began wondering why their world is completely filled with water. Many of the fish, the theorists, hope to prove that the entire cosmos necessarily has to be filled with water. For years, they put their minds to the task but can never quite seem to prove their assertion. Then, a wizened group of fish postulates that maybe they are fooling themselves. Maybe there are, they suggest, many other worlds, some of them completely dry, and everything in between.

This brings to mind this passage from chapter 17 of Zhuangzi (Watson translation):

Chuang Tzu and Hui Tzu were strolling along the dam of the Hao River when Chuang Tzu said, "See how the minnows come out and dart around where they please!  That's what fish really enjoy!"

Hui Tzu said, "You're not a fish - how do you know what fish enjoy?"

Chuang Tzu said, "You're not I, so how do you know I don't know what fish enjoy?"

Hui Tzu said, "I'm not you, so I certainly don't know what you know.  On the other hand, you're certianly not a fish - so that still proves you don't know what fish enjoy?"

Chuang Tzu said, "Let's go back to your original question, please. You asked how I know what the fish enjoy - so you already knew it when you asked the question.  I know it by standing here beside the Hao."

Hui Tzu, the logician, seeks to prove and disprove.  Zhuangzi, the skeptic, understands better the limits of knowledge, even his own.  So when challenged, Zhuangzi embraces a kind of perspectivalism: he knows what he knows based on his particular position in a specific context.  Writ large, that is what the fish in Lightman's metaphor also suggest.  We really can't know much beyond our circumstances, whether that is a universe or the River Hao.

Mao and Confucius

A nice little piece by Didi Kirsten Tatlow on "Mao's Spell and the need to Break It" in yesterday's NYT.  She focuses on Robert Bellah, the venerable sociologist of religion (see review of most recent book here), and his thoughts on the revival of religion and the prospsects for Confucianism in contemporary China.  Bellah sees Mao as obstructing the return of Confucius:

But according to Robert N. Bellah, one of the world’s foremost sociologists of religion, to establish true freedom through a societywide, ethical framework that is connected to Chinese traditions, the country first must break the tyrannical spell cast by Mao Zedong, who led the Communists to victory in the civil war in 1949 and ruled with an iron fist until his death in 1976.

This strikes me as a key issue in determining the extent to which Confucianism can come to have a significant cultural impact in China today.  To be clear: I am of the mind that China is not now a Confucian society.  It is too deeply ensconced in modernizing projects for something like a genuine Confucian ethic to have more than a marginal effect.  Clearly, there has been a certain social tendency to revive some aspects of the Confucian tradition to supply a deeper cultural meaning for contemporary life.  But that effort is limited by the powerful material interests and incentives that work to undermine a fuller expression and practice of Confucian ethics.

Bellah's point thus highlights another aspect of the problem, the political aspect. It is rather simple: Mao was not a Confucian, indeed he was a resolute anti-Confucian, and his continuing symbolic presence at the center of political life - right there over the main gate of Tiananmen - is a major obstacle to the renaissance of Confucian philosophy-as-a-way-of-life in China.  Bellah doesn't pull any punches:

“I think China has to face the fact that Mao was a monster, one of the worst people in human history,” said Mr. Bellah.

He compared China’s situation today to that of Germany and Japan after World War II.

“In a curious way, it’s like the war guilt of Germany or Japan. I think in Germany they’ve come to terms with it, whereas in Japan there’s almost a dramatic lack of any sense of responsibility,” said Mr. Bellah, who is also a Japan scholar.

“There is so much self-pity in China about the Western powers and the 150 years of imperialism, and about the Japanese aggression” of World War II, said Mr. Bellah. “And it’s justified in a way.”

“But God knows what Mao did can’t be blamed on the Westerners or the Japanese,” he said. “The Chinese have their own guilt, and it requires a complex symbolic, ideological and psychological change, and that’s hard.”

This is where Chinese nationalism runs up against Chinese tradition. To be true to the revived tradition, it is necessary to destroy an icon of modern nationalism.  My sense is that Mao will continue to win because he, and his historical legacy, is more important to the CCP than is Confucius.

The depth of the problem can be discerned in a China Daily op-ed from earlier this month.  Zhang Zhouxiang reports on Bellah's recent lecture in Beijing and reflects upon the revival of tradition.  He starts to wander into dangerous political territory (dangerous, that is, when confronting CCP censors) when he writes:

While many scholars claim Western traditions to be the source of the modern concept of rights and obligations, Bellah says that similar themes exist in Confucianism. "Confucius urged the exercise of power through li, not through punishments, which will only encourage the people to be devious."

An essential element in Confucius' social design, li is emphasized by Bellah as a rights pattern, a mutual obligation between rulers and subjects. While justifying the ruler's right to rule, li also requires him to do good to and take care of the ruled. The ruled are asked to maintain order, but they also have the right to choose another ruler if the covenant is broken.

The allusion here is to Mencius, who does not really put forth a generalized "right to rebel" but does offer an idea that the elite (ministers from royal families) have an obligation to remove a tyrannical leader.  But the way Zhang expresses it here - "the right to choose another ruler..." - is inching in the direction of democracy.  That's a fairly common move for certain readers of Menicus (I'm looking at you Kim Dae-Jung), and with a little interpretive help Mencius can be made consistent with liberal democratic principles (even if he was not a liberal democrat himself).  There is no one necessary political form that Mencian Confucianism must take, and an electoral system need not be contradictory to the spirit of the text.  But this is not the direction the Party wants to move.  Indeed, the Party continues to limit the protection of legal and civil rights.  

In the end, the Party is really not interested in li - 礼; propriety, ritual. Rather, it is more interested in li - 力; power, force, strength - and li - 利; interest, profit .  And these lis are not at all what Confucius and Mencius value.

Another Daoist Christmas

...And in honor of the day, here is my annual reflection:

I have blogged on a Taoist view, or my Taoist view, of Thanksgiving.  But what about Christmas?  What would a Taoist make of that?

    First, and most obvious, a Taoist would stand apart from the central function of the holiday: celebrating the birth of the earth-bound expression of a singular, transcendent God.  On both the question of birth and the question of God, a Taoist would have reservations.

    Philosophic Taoism does not recognize a transcendent God in the manner of Christianity.  God might be found in Taoism (i.e. we could read Him into Taoist texts), but God was not a part of the Taoist worldview in ancient times, and need not be a part of a modernized Taoism.  As to birth, the Tao Te Ching tells us that Tao (Way) encompasses both being and non-being; so, the passage from pre-birth (whatever that might be) to birth, and from birth to death, are not all that important. We (or the stuff we are made of) are still part of Tao even as we make these transitions.  That is why Chuang Tzu was able to get over the death of his wife fairly quickly: he realized that she had simply moved into another form along a ceaseless path of continual change.  Birth, then, need not be celebrated, and God need not be celebrated.  Not much room there for Christmas.

    But there may be one element of the Christmas story that a Taoist could relate to: the child in the manger.

     Taoism views the infant as closer to Tao than most adults.  As we grow, we fill ourselves with all sorts of human learning, much of which takes us away from our natural selves and catches us up in shallow social conventions.  The mind of an infant is empty, and it is precisely that sort of emptiness that Taoism strives for.  Thus, in passage 55 of the Tao Te Ching, we read:

Embody Integrity's abundance
and you're like a vibrant child

hornets and vipers can't bite,
savage beasts can't maul
and fierce birds can't claw,

bones supple and muscles tender, but still gripping firmly.   

    The child, in all of his innocence, cannot be harmed by human knowledge and practices, which are utterly alien to him.  The child, then, is something to celebrate.

    And the idea of a poor child, a child of meager means, born in a manger, resonates with the Taoist notion that the low will be high, the dark light, etc..  All the more reason to rejoice at the Christmas scene.

    But the purpose of Taoist rejoicing (which, in any event, would be circumspect) would not rest on the promise of the ultimate transcendence of the Christ child.  Rather, the child would be celebrated for his immanence; that is, in recognition that each thing holds within itself the fullest expression of itself and, under sufficient conditions of freedom, will grow into itself fully.   

    This may not be too far off the Christian message of the equality of all things before God, just without the God.  Chuang Tzu tells us that in Way (Tao)  everything "moves as one and the same."  Each thing has its place in Tao, its Integrity, and Tao is the perfect summation of all things.  Each thing thus deserves equal respect.  Furthermore, we should strictly limit our actions, lest they interfere with the integrity of other things.  The meaning and significance of each thing comes from within it.  We cannot improve upon anything and we should nothing that might dominate or impose our expectations on it. 

    So, it would be in that spirit - a cautious, respectful, inward-looking spirit - that a Taoist would celebrate the integrity and beauty of the child in the manger.

     Merry Christmas!

Kim Jong-il was not Confucian, Kim Jong-un is not Confucian

Heard the news today (oh boy...): The Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il, is dead.  Not much of a surprise really.  He had been seriously ill for a long time and had already set up his son, Kim Jong-un as a successor.  But such transitions are never wholly set in stone.  Get ready for some North Korean politics in the coming months...

I have a particular interest here, however, one that I have expressed on various occasions.  And that is: we should not look at North Korea as some sort of demonstration of political Confucianism.  Or, to put it more bluntly: North Korea is not Confucian.  I do this because, from time to time, we see in the press stories that construe hereditary succession of tyrants as some sort of illustration of political Confucianism.  This is wrong on several fronts.

First, we cannot assume a simple historical continuity in North Korea running from the Confucian past to the Stalinist present (if I were to pick a single political term to summarize the NK regime, "Stalinism" would come the closest...thought Stalin had a bit of a problem with succession also...).  Korean culture now, especially North Korean culture, should not be assumed to be a revised expression of what came before.  The twentieth century, with Japanese colonization and horrible war and national division and modernization, is just too much of a disjunction.  There may be certain historical continuities but they would appear to pale in comparison to the events and institutions created in the past one hundred years.  Thus, contemporary North Korea political culture owes more to the dictates of the modern Stalinist state than it does to the values and principles of The Analects and Mencius.

Second, "Confucianism" when it is invoked in relation to North Korea, is often simply reduced to obedience to authority and respect of elders, especially older political leaders.  This is, of course, not what Confucianism is all about.  For a country to more accurately be labeled "Confucian," there would have to be an extensive and voluntary public enactment of Duty, as flexibly defined to suit particular social and familial situations, according to Ritual (the conscientious and constant attention to right action) to move toward Humanity (ren - 仁 ).  I don't see anything like that in NK, dominated as it is by the authoritarian, or even totalitarian, regime. 

Third, on the particular matter of hereditary succession, there is nothing particularly Confucian about this.  It is to be found in virtually every part of the globe at various historical times.  It is not the ideal form of political succession for Confucianism, which would champion something closer to a meritocracy based on virtue, as expressed in the story of Shun.  It is true that Mencius certainly accommodated his political thinking to the aristocratic society that surrounded him.  He warned us "...don't offend the great families" (126) and gave only royal ministers the duty of overthrowing a tyrant.  But these were compromises to the political realities of his day.  In the best of all Confucian worlds, hereditary succession would not be the primary mechanism for regime reproduction.

So, please, don't say North Korea is Confucian, or that the succession from one Kim to another is somehow consistent with Confucianism.

I have been looking at the press thus far this morning and I can report: so far, so good.  I have only found a couple of invocations of Confucianism, and they have been conditioned and qualified.  Take this, for example, from The Guardian:

In a country that, despite its communist doctrine, retains a Confucian respect for seniority, Kim Jong-un could have expected to give way to his older siblings, but reportedly emerged as his father's favourite after impressing him with his single-mindedness and leadership qualities.

This is a stretch: if the supposed "Confucian" expectation (choose older siblings) doesn't appear relevant under the circumstances, and in the context of "communist doctrine," why even invoke it?  

Or this from the National Journal:

There is a reason why the regime of the Kims survives while, all around it, the Soviet bloc disintegrated and the Chinese opened up and reformed. The North Korean regime's ideology, called juche, is often simplistically defined as Korean self-reliance and ridiculed in the West. But to the North Korean elites, juche is still a powerfully intoxicating brew of traditional Korean xenophobia and nationalism, Confucian respect for authority and utopian Marxism-Leninism. The party embodies all of these ideals--nationalism, filial respect, utopia. Exploiting this confluence of philosophies and experiences, Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il created "an impermeable and absolutist state that many have compared to a religious cult," wrote longtime Korea observer, Don Oberdorfer in his 1997 book, "The Two Koreas."

Here's a question: why do people in NK "respect authority"?  Is it because they have some deep-seated traditional understanding of Confucianism?  Or is it because they have learned that if they challenge authority they are as good as dead?  I don't think you can simply assume the former when the latter is such a strong possibility.  So let's just avoid the facile invocations of "Confucian respet for authority."

To all my journalist friends out there: don't do it.  Don't make the lazy move to describe NK as "Confucian."  I'm watching, and I will call you on it.  Of course, if you want to dig a bit deeper and sort throught the historical disjunctions and show how something like "Confucianism" (which would have to be defined clearly as something more than simply respsect for authority or hereditary succession) may tell us something about contemporary NK, by all means do it.  But be ready for a critique...

Because saying NK is Confucian is pretty much like saying DR Congo is democratic...

UPDATE: This NYT piece gets it about right:

The only precedent is the last transition in the current ruling dynasty, when Kim Jong-il took over after the 1994 death of his father, Kim Il-sung. In that case, the son observed a three-year period of traditional mourning before formally taking over control of the nation, a move that reflects the regime’s odd mixing of the trappings of ancient Confucian monarchy with a 20th-century Stalinist cult of personality.

"Trappings" is about as Confucian as it gets...

Sunzi and Soft Power

I guess when you get quoted in The Economist you should post a link to the story.  And so, here it is: Sun Tzu and the art of soft power. (I don't appear until about 2/3 of the way down).

The gist of the piece is that China has been barking up the wrong soft power tree (so to speak) in its attempts to develop Confucianism into a soft power resource:

But Confucius is problematic. Mao and his colleagues regarded Confucius’s philosophy as the ideological glue of the feudal system they destroyed; and so attempts to promote him are vulnerable to the growing split in the Communist Party. In January, with great fanfare, the National History Museum unveiled a bronze statue of him standing 9.5 metres (31 feet) high in front of its entrance by Tiananmen Square. Three months later the statue was quietly removed. The sage’s appearance so close to the most hallowed ground of Chinese communism had outraged hardliners. They saw it as an affront to Mao, whose giant portrait hung diagonally opposite.

As regular readers of The Useless Tree (both of you) know, I have pressed this argument further, and anyone interested in just how far I press it can look at this post on "Why Confucianism will not provide 'soft power' to the PRC" 

I also think The Economist piece gets it right on Sunzi.  Generally, Sunzi is easier to integrate into contemporary modernist and post-modernist political and social practices.  Indeed, it has already been so integrated, as evidenced by its invocation in business and military and political and, even, dating books (I haven't read it - obviously - but I'm sure Confucianism will not produce a title quite like this: The Art of War for Dating: Master Sun Tzu's Tactics To Win Over Women).  This may seem frivolous but I think that "soft power" cultural resources have to be flexible and popular and fun to create the kind of "attractiveness" that the notion implies.  And, long story short, that is a big part of the reason why Confucianism is just not working as a source of soft power: it is too serious and demanding.  

But Sunzi, as the article suggests, poses a problem for the PRC's soft power strategy, because it does not project the image of China that Party propagantists want to project.  Notice these line:

Sun Tzu may have written about stratagems for warfare, but Huimin’s [in Shandong province] assembled scholars prefer to tout him as a peacenik. Their evidence is one of the sage’s best-known insights: “The skilful leader subdues the enemy’s troops without any fighting.” What better proof, say his fans in China, that the country has always loved peace?

Of course Sunzi is not a "peacenik".  He is a military strategist who believed that battles can be avoided if the protagonist has amassed such superior power and strategic positioning that the adversary simply recognizes the futility of a fight.  It is a very "hard power" calculation.  But the idea that China has "always loved peace" is a political and historical fiction inscribed into contemporary Chinese national identity, and it is a theme that Party and military powerholders find useful in propagating, especially to other regional states, like Vietnam and Japan, that are concerned with the growth of PRC military capabilities. 

Thus the paradox of Sunzi's "soft power:" the strategic vision of Sunzi is widely known and studied and respected, but it creates an image of China as a potentially devious, deceptive (remember, for Sunzi, war, and by Clausewitzian extension, politics, is all about deception) and self-interested power, not quite the picture Beijing wants to paint.  Better to have the avuncular smile of Confucius than the calculating glare of Sunzi...

And here, for posterity, is the textual equivalent of fifteen minutes of Economist fame:

Yet a closer look reveals Sun Tzu’s flaws as a tool of soft power. Chinese attempts to remould him as a man of peace stumble over the fact that his book is a guide to winning wars, avidly studied by America’s armed forces as it was by Mao. Sam Crane of Williams College in Massachusetts says that during the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq he delighted in telling students attending his Sun Tzu classes (some of whom were preparing to join the army) that the “Art of War” advised that prisoners be treated kindly. But, he says, “I think the thing that makes [the book] universal in a grim way is war and competition. War is not a Western construct: the Chinese have been really good at war for a long time.”

The Commodification of Education

I'm a teacher.  A college teacher.  Every day, or just about every day, I am engaged in the dissemination and creation of knowledge.  I put dissemination first because, as a teacher, whatever knowledge I create is often (not always) bound up in the process of disseminating knowledge to, or provoking knowledge in, my students.  It's a good gig.

But it is not my job to get my students jobs.  I say this because, apparently, some people out there think that I, and my colleagues, should somehow be held responsible if our students do not get jobs.  This, at least, is the message in an op-ed by conservative blogger Glenn Reynolds (I usually ignore Reynolds as just another right-wing ideologue, but this argument requires some response...) (HT Sullivan) .  In regard to the growing problem of student debt, which I recognize as a problem, he writes:       

Student loans, if they are to continue, should be made dischargeable in bankruptcy after five years -- but with the school that received the money on the hook for all or part of the unpaid balance.

In other words, if students have not been able to find sufficient employment to pay off their college debt five years after they graduate, the school should be responsible for some portion of that debt.

This assumes that the primary purpose of a college education is to secure post-graduate employment and a certain level of salary and benefits.  But that is not the purpose of a college education.  The purpose of a college education is to further one's education, plain and simple.  What a student does with that education is not the responsibility of the teacher.  Confucius understood this:

The Master said: "I never instruct those who aren't full of passion, and I never enlighten those who aren't struggling to explain themselves.

"If I show you one corner and you can't show me the other three, I'll say nothing more.  7.8

Students, by these lights, must take responsibility for their education.  A teacher can, to use a different metaphor, open the door, but the student has to walk through.  If the student does not take the initiative, then learning will not happen.  Period.  And the teacher is not responsible for whether the learning actually happens or not.  We make learning possible, we cannot guarantee its accomplishment.  We can show one corner, but the student has to show the other three...

Similarly, what a student does with his or her knowledge (assuming he or she has gained some) after college is beyond the duties of the teacher. The teacher must strive to teach well but he or she is powerless to effectuate actual knowledge within the student or to shape the student's memory and use of the knowledge in the future. 

Now, it is true that higher education tends to provide people with intellectual skills that can yield relatively high earnings in the future.  But that is not our purpose, especially at a liberal arts college like the one that employs me. I never think about how my classes might be directly useful to jobs after college.  Indeed, when I teach ancient Chinese philosophy, my mind is far, far away from such instrumentalist concerns.  I am not producing a commodity that can produce a certain exchange value.  I am engendering an understanding of texts and ideas in and of themselves. 

Of course, colleges will, for recruitment purposes, endlessly promote the argument that a degree is an economically useful thing, leading to higher salaries, etc.  That same argument is used to justify high costs of college education.  And that's bad.  The materialist promotion of liberal arts is an effect of the broader society in which we are embedded, a society that demands that just about everything be justified in materialist terms.  I, for one, am happy to ignore all that, and simply assert that knowledge has its own rewards.  I am a fervent defender of the useless. And, yes, I know, it's easy to say that when someone is paying me to be, effectively, useless....

Daoist irony aside, while there is plenty of knowledge that is instrumentally useful, and that knowledge can be found in college curricula, we must be accepting and protective of knowledge - like ancient Chinese philosophy! - that is not useful.  If we were to descend into complete instrumentalism we would lose much that is essential to humanity.

Finally, exorbitant college costs are a major problem.  Prohibitively high tuition is an obstacle to learning, excluding good students from the opportunity to learn.  Confucius recognizes this:

The Master said: "I never refuse to teach anyone, not even those so lowly they come offering nothing more but a few strips of dried meat."  7.7

So, yes, debt-free financial aid must be more widely available.  This doesn't mean, though, that we should make colleges, and teachers, responsible for the post-graduate employment and salary of their students.  How about going back to the not so old idea of progressive taxation to support public goods like access to education generally?  I suspect Confucius, and especially Mencius, would be open to that idea.  Reynonlds, not so much...