The Resurrection of the Humanities

I keep hearing about the Death of the Humanities. Nobody is studying them any more. The stats are striking.

But this is probably because nobody is teaching them any more. The truth is, we deliberately killed the humanities about fifty years ago, by government action in Canada, in the US by neglect. Universities are just such conservative institutions that it takes a few generations for the death notice to appear.

This was a fatal blunder. The humanities are meant to be the capstone of any education, and hence of any university. We need the humanities to know what is true, and what is worth studying. We need the humanities to know what an education is. If we do not know what is true or what is real, philosophical or theological questions, there is no cause to study one thing over another.

We cut off the heads of our colleges. They went mad with postmodernism and psychotherapy and scientism and fringe politics, random delusions. That is where we are now—with spiralling costs as things are no longer done out of principle, but purely for money. The humanities may have been first to lose their appeal with students—logically enough, as they were the first to be hollowed out—but many are talking now of an “education bubble” that looks about to burst on all faculties. The conventional university has become unsustainable.

Up to the Sixties, in Canada, each university knew what was real and what an education was because each university, with only a few exceptions, was confessional—it had a definite religious point of view, it had meaningful founding principles, which were supposed to guide all that it did. That was, largely, the reason for having different universities in the first place. We systematically demolished that, in Canada, in a deliberate postware drive to secularize education, and now are reaping the whirlwind.

Just for interest, here's a quick historical primer:

Queen's University—Presbyterian

McMaster University—Baptist

Wilfred Laurier University—Lutheran

University of Windsor—Catholic

University of Western Ontario—Anglican

University of Ottawa—Catholic

University of Toronto—a consortium, with colleges representing each denomination.

University of Manitoba—a consortium of Catholic, Anglican, and Presbyterian colleges. The Methodists originally were also included, but later split off as the University of Winnipeg.

Universite de Moncton—Catholic

Mount Allison University—Methodist

St. Thomas University—Catholic

Acadia University—Baptist

Mount Saint Vincent University—Catholic

Saint Francis Xavier University—Catholic

St. Mary's University—Catholic

Universite Sainte-Anne—Catholic

UPEI—formed as a merger of two preexisting institutions, one Catholic, one Protestant.

Bishop's University—Anglican

Concordia University—a merger of a Catholic and a YMCA college.

Universite de Montreal—Catholic

Universite de Sherbrooke—Catholic

Universite Laval—Catholic

University of Regina—Methodist

Secular universities:

Dalhousie University

University of New Brunswick

University of British Columbia

McGill University

The provincial universities in Western Canada were established more or less on the American model of secular state universities, and were non-denominational. In addition, any university founded postwar was almost automatically secular—until recently.

In the US, the deliberate government elimination of religious influence and of the religious character of universities did not take place; but nominally denominational universities mostly lost their denominational character more or less spontaneously at about the same period. I went to Syracuse University in NY in the late Seventies. It still had odd vestigial traces of its original Baptist character in the Religion Department—most of the professors were still Baptist ministers. But none of them taught, or admitted to believing in, Baptist theology.

The loss of so much heritage and tradition is sad; though not nearly as sad as the loss of so much meaningful education. We have lost, in effect, at least two generations of thinkers, writers, leaders, and artists. We have lost our way as a culture. Individually, we have been swamped by “mental illness.” To paraphrase Leonard Cohen, it ought to be clear to anyone from the raw statistics that some great catastrophe has taken place in the spiritual world since about the Second World War.

Happily, however, there has been a revival of religious colleges in more recent years. The humanities may be dying in these older legacy schools. But these new schools, though small, are booming. And they are centred on the humanities in their true, ancient form, the Great Books and Great Thoughts approach, guided by a coherent visoin of what man is and why he is here.

The problem, in other words, was never with the humanities. It was with the universities.

I predict a general renaissance in the humanities soon. It should have come long ago, had the devil's wrecking ball not been so hard at work. With increased prosperity, our culture has more time and resources for the finer things in life, more time for contemplation, and this is the sphere of the humanities. With the accelerating pace of technology, a practical degree actually makes less and less sense—all the details will be obsolete more or less by time of graduation, even on the vain hope that one's professors actually still know anything relevant based on their education much longer ago. The only workable approach is to focus on the fundamentals, on how to learn, how to evaluate, how to communicate, and how to make decisions. Everything else will more or less necessarily be on the job, or in night school.

We would know this, if we were not running around with our heads cut off.

Mary Daly

Mary Daly has died. Her singular career, as outlined in the following essay (courtesy of a link by Kathy Shaidle), gives you some measure of how depraved the modern university, and indeed the modern _Catholic_ university, has become:

http://www.ratbags.com/rsoles/comment/marydaly.htm

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.