The War Against the Humanities
RE: Article by Ross Douthat in NY Times Centroids: First, it would have been nice if Ross Douthat had used some other writer to introduce his thesis; Auden, at least to the extent my knowledge is correct, was a homosexual. To refer to homosexuals in any positive sense is not something I ever lower myself to do. However, Douthat's story makes important points that I cannot find any substitutes for. His essay appears below, after a large blank space that I cannot get rid of. Douthat's argument is summarized in the subtitle of his article: New data on college majors confirms an old trend. Technocracy is crushing the life out of humanism. We are in the midst of what amounts to an all out war against the humanities. Partly, as Douthat himself acknowledges, this is the result of what may be called the "Babylonian captivity of the humanities." The capture of the humanities by the Cultural Marxist Left has led to increasing irrelevance of the entire field as each discipline within it has become fodder for feminist crazies, multi-culturalist loonies, environmentalist extremists, reverse racists of various stripes, transvestites and their bizarre proclivities, homosexuals with their perversions and anti-heterosexual diatribes, Muslims who pretend to be liberals to mask their closet fascism, anti-Christian Atheists who wish to destroy every last church in America, and so forth, a population of misfits up and down the line who contribute precisely nothing to the common good. However, Douthat added, this is far from the whole story and, indeed, is only a minor part of the picture. To put a number on it, which Douthat does not do, an educated guess is that this accounts for maybe 1/4th of the problem. maybe even a third, but that is as far as this explanation can be taken. Two thirds or even 75% has other -structural- sources. Citing the research of Ben Schmidt, Douthat noted that: "the years since the Great Recession have been “brutal for almost every major in the humanities.” They’ve also been bad for “social science fields that most closely resemble humanistic ones — sociology, anthropology, international relations and political science.” Meanwhile the sciences and engineering have gained at the expense of humanism, and with [such specializations as] sports management and exercise studies..." As Douthat continued: Notably this trend is sharper among elite liberal arts colleges, the top thirty in the US News and World Report rankings, where in the early 2000s the humanities still attracted about a third of all students, but lately only get about a fifth. So it’s not just a matter of the post-Great Recession middle class seeking more practical degrees to make sure their student loans get repaid quickly; the slice of the American elite that’s privileged enough and intellectually-minded enough to choose Swarthmore or Haverford or Amherst over a state school or a research university is abandoning Hermes for Apollo at the fastest clip." Why? That problem, said Douthat, is easy enough to understand: " In an Apollonian culture, eager for “Useful Knowledge” and technical mastery and increasingly indifferent to memory and allergic to tradition, the poet and the novelist and the theologian struggle to find an official justification for their arts. And both the turn toward radical politics and the turn toward high theory are attempts by humanists in the academy to supply that justification — to rebrand the humanities as the seat of social justice and a font of political reform, or to assume a pseudoscientific mantle that lets academics claim to be interrogating literature with the rigor and precision of a lab tech doing dissection. At the moment both efforts look like failed attempts." In an effort to find out why, at one time, the humanities were fairly popular in most universities, Douthat noted that the last period this was true, the era that started under Eisenhower and ended with Kent State, was also a time when "mainline" Protestant Christianity was still dominant in American culture. This was a version of faith in which the mainline as well as Evangelicals still shared much of a common morality and shared views about Jesus that were largely compatible with each other. Christian faith was not about 'normalizing 'homosexuality, any such idea would have been regarded as absurd at the time, it was not about patriarchal 'oppression,' it was not about the evils of plastic bags or fossil fuels, it was all about personal responsibility, about the finding a sense of purpose in one's life, it was about asking questions of your faith that mattered to you personally,. and it was about the example of Jesus and his role in an historical drama that is still being played out in the world and in countless private lives. This does not mean that social concerns or environmental awareness are unimportant; that isn't the point. What is the point is that as far as Christian faith as a living faith is concerned, those are all secondary matters. Which is precisely what the so-called "liberal" churches have jettisoned in their lemming-like rush to become ever so "relevant," in the process unwittingly driving out entire populations of communicants who, before all else, want to focus on Jesus and maybe, through reflection on Christ's life and words, find solutions to personal problems that actually mean something to them as individuals. And as members of families and of communities. Which, as an aside, may be what explains why even Evangelical churches have started to decline -even if their rate of collapse is not nearly as bad as among churches of the Religious Left. For Evangelicals the problem is their increasing identification with the Republican Party, something which the young are especially cognizant of and do not like. Back in the era of the 1950s and 1960s, even some years into the 1970s, some issues could be ignored because of the threat of Soviet-led Communism. But that time has come and gone and nothing unites us now, not even the threat of militant Islam -which leaders of both major parties have gone to lengths to minimize, to protect America's interests in the Mid East and at the gas pump. All of which still leaves us with the problem of the serious decline in the humanities in America's colleges and universities. The crux of the problem is high tech and, also important, student debt which has to be repaid as soon as possible so that young adults can become fully functional in modern society and afford such things as family formation. But high tech is anti-humanistic in substance and style and its leaders could care less about Shakespeare or Beethoven or David Hume or anyone else who, at one time, mattered greatly to just about everyone who thought of themselves as educated men or women. If there is one primary villain in this story -there really are many similar villains- it was James Conant, once the president of Harvard and someone, as Douthat said, who was closely associated with "the Apollonian transformation of the modern university, its remaking as a scientific-technical powerhouse with its old religious and humanistic purposes hollowed out." This dates to 1943, viz, the middle of WWII, when it was regarded as essential for the war effort to focus on what works and what can best help the country win the war. But Conant's outlook persisted long past the defeat of the Axis and into the Cold War We still needed to know what works and what it takes to defend ourselves from ruthless Communism. WWII also brought about the beginnings of the computer age and, by the late 1960s the rise of what may be characterized as a computer culture -at that time mostly located in Massachusetts, Illinois, Armonk, and a still emergent Silicon Valley. Now, of course, that culture is pervasive, and has invaded hundreds of millions of personal lives in the USA and billions around the world. We can add some other factors that fed into the rise of computer culture with its disdain for the humanities in general and religion in particular. For example: * The rise of Cultural Marxism in the late 1960s, with its emphasis on raw hedonism viz, anything goes sexuality, anything goes drug experiences, and anything goes values, most notably in the world of entertainment. This movement, which was centered on elite universities for its first decades, was anti-proletarian and contributed to the shift away from the Democratic Party on the part of the working class, first in the South but soon enough all over the map. * The rise of libertarianism with its "anything goes" mentality generally, with its anti-religion ethos because, needless to say, religion always takes the view that some kinds of behaviors are moral and some are immoral. Libertarians do not recognize any differences in values since, so they insist, everything reduces to questions of subjective personal choice, that is, their view that there is no objective right and no objective wrong. * The rise of the homosexual movement with its strong bias against Christian religion and religion of almost any kind since, of course, traditionally, nearly all religions have been highly critical of sodomy. Yet, said Douthat, it all boils down to what Alan Jacobs wrote in a recent book about Conant and his reforms at Harvard: "In the end neither a Christian humanism nor any other has been able to withstand the spirit of Conant, the spirit of technocratic ambition, the spirit of truth-replaced-by-useful-knowledge, that rules today not just in Washington and Silicon Valley but in much of academia as well" And so we get as something akin to revealed truth the view that, to paraphrase the title of non-related book, "everything I need to know about the humanities I learned in grammar school." We now live in a society populated by a majority of cultural illiterates. Which may exaggerate the problem but we all know that the generalization is founded on undeniable truth. What is the way out? Here is Douthat's remedy: "A hopeful road map to humanism’s recovery might include variations on ...older themes. First, a return of serious academic interest in the possible (I would say likely) truth of religious claims. Second, a regained sense of history as a repository of wisdom and example rather than just a litany of crimes and wrongthink. Finally, a cultural recoil from the tyranny of the digital and the virtual and the Very Online," that is, from the implicit totalitarianism of high tech." But is any of this enough to turn the tide? Not hardly. As much as I usually think highly of Ross Douthat, in this case he is peddling bromides. Instead of actual solutions he gives us intellectual cheer leading. That is, exactly how can religion be seen again as important for its truth claims? Hint, it takes far more than wishing it was so. And similarly for regaining a sense of the value of history. And how can we revolt against the tyranny of high tech when no-one in any kind of leadership role in society is offering a reasoned critique of Silicon Valley and other computer businesses and their effects on our culture? The key to the problem is, so it seems to me, a new outlook that makes it clear through hard evidence that, yes, indeed, the truth claims of religion matter a a great deal, which is just about impossible for Evangelicals or traditional Catholics or also Orthodox Jew sto make, since their worldviews are non-empirical. Regardless, we need to dramatically rethink religion of all kinds, for me, the way that Albert Schweitzer started doing in his seminal book The Quest for the Historical Jesus. Archie Bahm once started to do something similar for Buddhism. All of which, in any case, is the diametric opposite of Karen Armstrong's interpretation of the world's religions as petals of one flower, which is naive nonsense, and also the diametric opposite of the kinds of literature produced in abundance by the Religious Right with its unquestioning assumptions and studied disregard of factual historical and other evidence. History is also useful in many different ways, not least in terms of understanding exactly why we have gotten to where we now are, in the midst of a cultural mess of unprecedented proportions where right and wrong have become matters of tribal politics and group identity -with nearly nothing grounded on the real world effects of the values espoused by contending parties or organizations. Then there are the wonders of the Web and of high tech generally, where any opinions on the Right or held by independent-minded political Independents are regarded as morally wrong because, you see, all (ersatz) "truth" is the property of the political Left. And it does not matter that many of the heroes of the Left are pathological liars -viz Al Sharpton, William Clinton, Barack Obama, etc, and, besides, if you want a good example of a liar on the Right, look no further than Donald Trump -who has been characterized by Bob Woodward as "incapable of telling the truth." But the fact is that, at one time or another, high tech giants have deliberately acted to censor or deny service to people who simply do not agree that the the party line of the Democratic Party is not the truth and not something worth believing in. The worse examples of Leftist political bias in high tech are found at Google, Facebook, and Apple, but the phenomenon is just about everywhere. This is to provide nothing more than a starting point, a few suggestions about where we need to go. But Douthat was right in principle. The war against the humanities could get very interesting very soon and be much worse than anyone now thinks is remotely possible. Billy R. ______________________________________ Oh, the Humanities! New data on college majors confirms an old trend. Technocracy is crushing the life out of humanism. [Ross Douthat]<https://www.nytimes.com/by/ross-douthat> By Ross Douthat<https://www.nytimes.com/by/ross-douthat> Opinion Columnist * Aug. 8, 2018 * * <https://www.facebook.com/dialog/feed?app_id=9869919170&link=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2018%2F08%2F08%2Fopinion%2Foh-the-humanities.html&smid=fb-share&name=Oh%2C%20the%20Humanities!&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2F> * <https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnyti.ms%2F2M9JZb2&text=Oh%2C%20the%20Humanities!> * <mailto:?subject=NYTimes.com%3A%20Oh%2C%20the%20Humanities!&body=From%20The%20New%20York%20Times%3A%0A%0AOh%2C%20the%20Humanities!%0A%0ANew%20data%20on%20college%20majors%20confirms%20an%20old%20trend.%20Technocracy%20is%20crushing%20the%20life%20out%20of%20humanism.%0A%0Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2018%2F08%2F08%2Fopinion%2Foh-the-humanities.html> * [https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/08/08/opinion/08douthat/merlin_142108422_d7c0b5a5-b061-42a2-be5e-b41f59ba24b0-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale] In the spring of 1946, W.H. Auden came to Harvard to read a poem<https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/under-which-lyre-3/> to the university’s Phi Beta Kappa chapter. Titled “Under Which Lyre: A Reactionary Tract for the Times,” the poem envisioned a postwar world in which, the war-god Ares having quit the field, public life would be dominated by a renewed contest between “the sons of Hermes” and “Apollo’s children” — the motley humanists against the efficient technocrats, the aesthetes and poets and philosophers and theologians against the managers and scientists and financiers and bureaucrats. These two factions, Auden suggested, could ideally coexist: The Apollonian genius is for government and rule, and “the earth would soon, did Hermes run it,/Be like the Balkans.” But the Apollonian spirit, ever ambitious, cannot bear to leave the humanists to their poems and ideas and arguments, and so it seeks to expand its empire outward: But jealous of our god of dreams, His common-sense in secret schemes To rule the heart; Unable to invent the lyre, Creates with simulated fire Official art. And when he occupies a college, Truth is replaced by Useful Knowledge; He pays particular Attention to Commercial Thought, Public Relations, Hygiene, Sport, In his curricula. During his visit, Auden met James Conant, then the president of Harvard and a man associated with the Apollonian transformation of the modern university, its remaking as a scientific-technical powerhouse with its old religious and humanistic purposes hollowed out. “ ‘This is the real enemy,’ I thought to myself,” Auden wrote of the encounter. “And I’m sure he had the same impression about me.” This anecdote appears near the end of “The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in An Age of Crisis,” a new book<https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-year-of-our-lord-1943-9780190864651> by the Baylor professor Alan Jacobs. Auden is one of his main subjects; the others are T.S. Eliot, Simone Weil, Jacques Maritain and C.S. Lewis, a group of religious thinkers whose wartime writings Jacobs depicts as a sustained attempt, in the shadow of totalitarian ambition and liberal crisis, to offer “a deeply thoughtful, culturally rich Christianity” as the means to a postwar humanistic renewal in the West. Jacobs also depicts their attempt as a failure, because in the end neither a Christian humanism nor any other has been able to withstand the spirit of Conant, the spirit of technocratic ambition, the spirit of truth-replaced-by-useful-knowledge, that rules today not just in Washington and Silicon Valley but in much of academia as well. By coincidence, Jacobs’s interesting, depressing book has come out just after an interesting, depressing analysis<https://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2018/07/mea-culpa-there-is-crisis-in-humanities.html> of the steepening decline in the share of college students majoring in English, philosophy, religion, history and similar pursuits. The analyst is a historian named Ben Schmidt, who just five years ago wrote an essay arguing that the decline of the humanities was overstated, that enrollment in humanistic majors had declined in the 1970s, mostly as women’s employment opportunities began switching to more pre-professional tracks, but that since then there has been a basic stability, at best a soft declension. But now he’s revised his argument, because the years since the Great Recession have been “brutal for almost every major in the humanities.” They’ve also been bad for “social science fields that most closely resemble humanistic ones — sociology, anthropology, international relations and political science.” Meanwhile the sciences and engineering have gained at the expense of humanism, and with them sports management and exercise studies — the “hygiene” and “sport,” if you will, from Auden’s list of Apollonian concerns. Notably this trend is sharper among elite liberal arts colleges, the top thirty in the US News and World Report rankings, where in the early 2000s the humanities still attracted about a third of all students, but lately only get about a fifth. So it’s not just a matter of the post-Great Recession middle class seeking more practical degrees to make sure their student loans get repaid quickly; the slice of the American elite that’s privileged enough and intellectually-minded enough to choose Swarthmore or Haverford or Amherst over a state school or a research university is abandoning Hermes for Apollo at the fastest clip. Even this acceleration is no doubt partially driven by economic concerns: Elite college grads are by no means immune to feelings of precarity. But as with another, more literally humanistic pursuit — childbearing — that had seemed to stabilize after a post-1960s collapse but now is in decline again, the absence of a post-Great Recession bounce-back for the humanities suggests that the economic calamity of 2008 was a precondition but not the only cause, and that other cultural shifts had left the humanities ripe for another era of collapse. In explaining those shifts many conservatives blame the humanists themselves, for being politicized and marching lock step to the left and for pursuing postmodernist obscurantism in their scholarship and prose. But I think it’s more useful to step back a bit and recognize both politicization and postmodern jargon as attempted solutions to a pre-existing problem, not the taproot of the crisis. That problem is the one that Auden identified seventy years ago: In an Apollonian culture, eager for “Useful Knowledge” and technical mastery and increasingly indifferent to memory and allergic to tradition, the poet and the novelist and the theologian struggle to find an official justification for their arts. And both the turn toward radical politics and the turn toward high theory are attempts by humanists in the academy to supply that justification — to rebrand the humanities as the seat of social justice and a font of political reform, or to assume a pseudoscientific mantle that lets academics claim to be interrogating literature with the rigor and precision of a lab tech doing dissection. At the moment both efforts look like failed attempts. But is there an alternative? Here I would dissent a little from the sternness of Jacobs’s pessimism, since I think the Christian humanists that he describes — and their secular and Jewish counterparts — had a little more short-run success than he suggests. There was real growth in humanities majors beginning in the 1950s (stronger among women than men, but present among both), and that indicator corresponded to a genuine mass interest, mediated by journalists and popularizers as well as academia, in pursuits that now seem esoteric and strictly elitist — poetry and public theology, classical music and abstract impressionism, the Great American novel and the high theory of French cinema and more. What sustained this temporary cultural moment, middlebrow and crass in all sorts of ways but still more successfully humanistic than our own? Three forces, in particular, that are no longer with us. First, there was a stronger religious element in midcentury culture, visible both in the general postwar religious revival and in the particular theological-intellectual flowering that Jacobs’s subjects embodied, which rooted midcentury humanism in a metaphysical understanding of human life — an understanding that both ennobled acts of artistic creation and justified a strong interest in the human person’s interiority, his actual person as opposed to just his brain chemistry or social role. Second, there was the example of a rival civilization, totalitarian Communism, in which the Apollonian model had been pushed to its materialist-utopian conclusion and discovered only a ruthless, inhuman dead end. And third, forged in response to the Communist threat, there was a sense of Western identity, Western historical tradition, that could be glib and propagandistic in a from-Plato-to-NATO style, but at its best let people escape the worst of late modern afflictions, the crippling chauvinism of the now. This precise combination is not recoverable: Communism is dead (I think), the religious landscape of the 1950s is even deader, and the humanistic history of midcentury was Eurocentric in a way that a more globalized and multiracial society could neither embrace nor sustain. But a hopeful road map to humanism’s recovery might include variations on those older themes. First, a return of serious academic interest in the possible (I would say likely) truth of religious claims. Second, a regained sense of history as a repository of wisdom and example rather than just a litany of crimes and wrongthink. Finally, a cultural recoil from the tyranny of the digital and the virtual and the Very Online, today’s version of the technocratic, technological, potentially totalitarian Machine that Jacobs’s Christian humanists opposed. Auden’s poem closes with comic (but not really) advice for humanists: Thou shalt not sit/ With statisticians nor commit/A social science … Thou shalt not be on friendly terms/With guys in advertising firms … If thou must choose/Between the chances, choose the odd;/ Read The New Yorker, trust in God … Imagine “social media” where “advertising” sits in the stanza and imagine an intellectual climate where the last piece of advice doesn’t seem like a contradiction in terms, and you’ve imagined the beginnings of humanism’s revival. May we live to see the day. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
