http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/printArticle.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=401629&version=1&template_id=46&parent_id=26
Humanities need to get off the back foot
Publish Date: Tuesday,30 November, 2010, at 12:30 PM Doha Time
By Joanna Bourke/London
What does it mean to be human? We inhabit a world that is sometimes lazily
dubbed "post-human".
Indeed, in recent decades, an anti-humanist rhetoric has emerged largely as a
response to the palpable failure of humanism, which is seen as hypocritical
(humans are being tortured and killed in order to save humanity), or mistaken
(based on an unrealistic celebration of human consciousness and freedom), or
obsolete (scientific shifts have blurred any clear notion of a human-animal
border, and have substantively broadened the physical possibilities of human
action).
The destabilising of notions of "the human" has profoundly disorientated many
of us who mass under the flag of the humanities. It has rendered us vulnerable
to the swaggering philistinism of management scientism as well as the bruising
confidence of the sciences. Yet, in many ways, we share similar intellectual
enthusiasms.
In the 21st century, proponents of nearly every form of institutionalised
knowledge (from biology and chemistry to history and literature) have become
obsessed with defining, categorising, and identifying what constitutes life
itself. But many practitioners within the humanities have been tempted to raise
the white flag, deferring to the knowledges created by the social and natural
sciences.
While many sciences also lack immediate social impact (astrophysics,
mathematics, cosmology, evolutionary science, to name a few), they are
significantly less defensive when it comes to standing up for their disciplines
to assorted accountants, trustees, and governments.
In contrast, many in the humanities have accepted demands to provide a
particular kind of serviceability to business and the economy. Some can even be
heard spouting the ideology of efficiency, productivity and utility, which are
profoundly not conducive to our intellectual discipline.
A negative politics that claims that researchers in the humanities produce cold
facts out of a hat with as much cunning and cleverness as any white-cloaked
scientist, or that we write as "disembodied observers" of objective truths,
leaves us with no room for anything save the paradox of purchasing our
intellectual freedom through self-immolation. Part of the problem lies in how
we define the "humanities". There are three major ways of doing this. I like to
think of them as the "Three-Ws", of Whip, Worship, and Worry.
The "whip approach" defines the humanities according to the clustering of
academic disciplines, such as classics, philosophy, history, literature,
languages, ethics, comparative religion, and criticism. Sometimes, this
definition simply means: "not science".
Ironically, when these individual disciplines do group themselves together
under the flag "humanities", they do so largely for pragmatic or managerial
reasons. Thus, my own department of history is not in the humanities faculty,
but that of the social sciences, even though the research of most of my
colleagues clearly follows a humanities model. In other instances, the creation
of humanities departments or institutes is driven by the very managerial
culture they purport to disdain.
The second "worship approach" is more like a brashly adorned altarpiece
celebrating Narcissus. It heralds a rather vain humanism that embraces
"whatever influences conduce to freedom", as one scholar put it, or, even more
grandiosely, the study of "the sum total of human activities".
The celebratory approach to the humanities is much too starry-eyed. Philosopher
Martha Nussbaum claimed that the humanities are "one key to dispelling barriers
of hatred and ignorance that divide people the world over by class, caste,
race, sex, and religion", but it is entirely unclear how she thinks this will
happen.
What about the conception of the humanities as fulfilling the job of "worrying"
society? The humanities help develop a critical, questioning attitude towards
the world. It is engaged in debunking the commonsense of its time. It is
fundamentally about critique of the given, and resistance to what makes life
unjust and ugly.
Indeed, in the 21st century, the humanities are actually more important than
ever and those who wield power, whether in politics or business, might be
thought to have a particular obligation to verse themselves in the history of
human thought, including a duty to understand other peoples, languages and
concepts. If we are to understand the modern world, with its transformative
sciences, its terrorists, and its geopolitical upheavals, an education in the
humanities is necessary.
Human cloning, genetic engineering, xenotransplantation, species melding: all
these scientific innovations call for an understanding of the ways they change
the way we live. In a period that has seen remarkable interventions in the
very basis of what it means to be human, we need (more than ever) ways to
address problems of meaning, value, and consequence. The sciences are simply
not equipped to answer questions about the purpose of human life and desires;
ends and actions. The "crisis of the humanities" may turn out to be a result
of our hyper-relevance to 21st century transformations. - Guardian News and
Media
- This is an edited version of a lecture given at the Why Humanities?
conference, organised by the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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