The Reported Death of the Humanities

A friend and colleague passes on a link to this piece from The American Scholar, titled “The Decline of the Englsih Department.” It announces and mourns the death of the Humanities in the American University. Since 1970, the proportion of college students who study humanities has roughly been cut in half, from 30% to under 16%. At the same time, business enrollments have grown dramatically, from 14% to 22.

I agree with most of what it says. But I'd like to chip in some of my own thoughts.

The biggest problem with Humanities departments these days, it seems to me he does not mention. It is that they have stopped teaching the Humanities.

The Humanities departments have turned instead to politics--radical, self-indulgent, crazy, elitist politics, too, stuff discredited everywhere else, and of no interest to the average person. Post-colonialism, feminism, “queer studies,” postmodernism, Marxism, Freudianism, any-passing-ism. Junk politics; and getting ahead, in turn, des not involve any longer demonstrating any knowledge or skill in the Humanities. It comes with conforming to specific political positions.

It is not, therefore, at all clear that fewer young people want to study the humanities. It is more likely that more do than ever before. With growing prosperity, one ought to feel more leisure to consider the eternal questions. What is it John Adams wrote? “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.” With growing prosperity, the segue should not be from philosophy to business.

If it is, it may be simply that business departments have become the only remainig haven from the crazy politics of the modern university or college; the only part safe from left-wing indoctrination,which also permeates the social sciences, and, with eco-everything, the real sciences too.

Why, however, have our universities deliberately killed the humanities?

Precisely because it is the fastest way for a culture to commiut suicide. Our culture has been so inclined for some time; the baby bust is another example. The culture that does not study its great books, after all, and does not allow its best and brightest that study, is doing just that: deliberately wiping itself out, within a generation or two or three. Our elites quite openly want to do that: all known evils are blamed on European “colonialism,” dead white males, and so forth.

And that's what an education in the Humanities is supposed to be: a study of the culture's Great Books, or better, of the world's Great Books. This means, at the same time, a study of the culture's, and the world's best thoughts. What could be more important? Indeed, it is usually an early sign of totalitarianism when, as in Soviet Russia, Hitler's Germany, or Maoism China, this is suddenly no longer possible. Free thought, and deep thought, is politically dangerous.

Chace, in his article, makes the point that the traditional “Western canon” of great books leaves out many more recent immigrants—not to mention the many students now coming from abroad.

This is a point I have often made myself; when we limit our thought to that of the West, necessarily, we limit our thought. That is not a healthy thing, regardless of how recent immigrants might feel. But the proper solution is not to burn the best books we have. It is to add the great classics of Asian and North African literatures. Not, mind, recent books—the true classics, that have stood the test of time.

Granted, not all parts of the earth have a great literature, just as not all of us have written a great book. That is their problem; we need not make it ours.

Chace is right, however, to point out that in order to be meaningful, the Humanities must, like any other study, involve an established corpus. It must have some agreed outer boundary: chatting on the street, or the latest popular tune, cannot qualify as great literature. One useful rule of thumb might be to exclude anything written within, say, the last 50 years, in order to ensure some lasting significance.

Chace is also right in pointing out that the Humanities have lost their guiding principles, that “to teach English today is to do, intellectually, what one pleases.” This contrasts tellingly with the supposed rigour of, for example, the hard sciences.

But this was not always so; there used to be just such a rigour to the study of the Humanities. It is called religion.

This is why almost all institutions of higher learning in the world, until quite recently, have been founded as explicitly religious institutions.

Without that unifying vision of what the world is, what life is for, and why we are studying, any given aproach to the world's Great Thoughts becomes, essentially, random and arbitrary. Where there is no goal, there is no path. The sciences, held together by the scientific method, do not face this problem. Furthermore, without this shared, considered goal, the resulting vacuum of meaning positively atttracts popular delisions and the madness of crowds: any passing superstition that seems to go explain two facts together is grasped at with a quasi-religions fervour. Hence our current plague of scientism, feminism, Marxism, Freudianism, postmodernism, queerism, behaviourism, constructivism, connectivism, and on and on. Any ism in a tempest.

Western civilization itself has always had such a unifying vision. That is what defined it as Western civilization. That unifying vision is called Christianity. Try to study or understand Western civilization while avoiding any mention of, and remaining deliberately ignorant of, monotheism and Christianity, and you have created for yourself an impossible task; like trying to understand colour while never opening your eyes.

Yet that is precisely what modern Humanities departments, especially in the “public universities” are most systematically bound and determined to do. It is the one closest thing that they have to a unifying vision: that they are not Christian, but secular, and will not under any circumstances discuss Christianity.

We might want to, and easily could, expand that to "monotheism," to the three great monotheistic religions, which are kindred in any event. But to "expand" it by excluding religion is not expansion; it is contraction down to nothing.

The next problem, which Chace does touch on, is linked to this. It is that we have stripped the Humanities of their proper practical application, making it a significant economic hardship to study them. Historically and logically, a degree in the Humanities, a passing familiarity with the best thought of the culture, is the precisely apt qualification to become a teacher in the schools. Currently, teaching as a profession has been usurped by the social sciences, with disastrous results.

Chace laments that research in the Humanities does not bring in research funding. Traditionally, it brought in the most funding of all: it was the churches who sponsored the entire academic enterprise, and the lower schools as well. But this is a vicious circle: strangle the Humanities, and you strangle the churches. Strangle the churches, and you strangle the Humanities.

I like, and strongly endorse, as well, Chace's idea that Humanities departments have a very practical mission in teaching clear expression and writing competence. Rhetoric is an extremely valuable skill not just in teaching, or preaching, but in business (aka salesmanship) in politics and the military (aka leadership) and in the law. It used to be the core of the curriculum. Bizarrely, now, nobody teaches it. The Humanities used to, could and should. They do not now: it is currently even considered fair practice for those writing theses in the Humanities to hire an editor to fix their prose before submitting it—as if clear writing, and clear thought, were not part of what was being assessed.

You'd think a grown-up culture would know better.