Are the humanities over? Are they facing an extinction event? There are certainly reasons to think so. It is widely believed that humanities graduates can’t easily find jobs; political support for them seems to be evaporating; enrollments in many subjects are down. As we all know.
Even if the situation turns out to be less than terminal, something remarkable is underway. Bewilderment and demoralization are everywhere. Centuries-old lineages and heritages are being broken. And so we are under pressure to come up with new ways of thinking that can take account of the profundity of what is happening. In this situation, we need to think big.
I want to propose that such big thinking might begin with the idea that, in the West, secularization has happened not once but twice. It happened first in relation to religion, and second, more recently, in relation to culture and the humanities. We all understand what religious secularization has been — the process by which religion, and especially Christianity, has been marginalized, so that today in the West, as Charles Taylor has famously put it, religion has become just one option among a smorgasbord of faith/no-faith choices available to individuals.
A similar process is underway in the humanities. Faith has been lost across two different zones: first, religion; then, high culture. The process that we associate with thinkers like Friedrich Schiller, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Matthew Arnold, in which culture was consecrated in religion’s place, and that in more modest forms survived until quite recently, has finally been undone. We now live in a doubly secularized age, post-religious and postcanonical. The humanities have become merely a (rather eccentric) option for a small fraction of the population.
Despite the humanities’ variety and dispersion, they accrue a power that is hard to extinguish.
Cultural secularization resembles earlier religious secularization. What happened to Christian revelation and the Bible is now happening to the idea of Western civilization and “the best that has been thought and said,” in Arnold’s famous phrase. As a society, the value of a canon that carries our cultural or, as they once said, “civilizational” values can no longer be assumed. These values are being displaced and critiqued by other ostensibly more “enlightened” ways of thinking. The institution — the academic humanities — that officially preserved and disseminated civilizational history is being hollowed out, partly from within. Only remnants are left.
For all that, we should not insist too strongly on analogies between the two secularizations. Doing that risks downplaying the ways in which they differ. The power of the “second secularization” thesis is not just that it helps us recognize the humanities’ plight in their largest context, but that it helps us view them dispassionately.
One difference is that the humanities and religion operate differently in terms of class. Unlike religion, the humanities have always been classed. In their formalized modes especially, they have belonged mainly to a fraction of the elite. Another difference: Cultural secularization is less unified than religious secularization in the sense that it has had two different targets.
On the one side, cultural secularization involves a loss of status and perceived functionality on the part of “high” cultural canons and intellectual lineages. Quite suddenly, having a detailed knowledge of and love for Bach’s music, say, stopped being a marker of a “cultured” or “civilized” person and became just a matter of opinion and personal interest.
On the other side, cultural secularization entails the loss of belief in the ethical and intellectual value of the traditional academic humanities disciplines — what we can call the “high humanities.” The idea, current since Kant, that the disciplined humanities lie at the basis of academic life cuts little ice today.
These two forms of cultural secularization — the erosion of canonicity and the loss of authority — are joined. That is why it has become almost impossible today to affirm the social or ethical value in studying, say, verse forms in John Dryden’s poetry; Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s relation to Moses Mendelssohn; the early modern Dutch ship-building trade; differences between humanist thought in Florence and Milan in the quattrocento; contemporary analytic philosophy’s technical debate over free will. Such topics are of course still researched and even taught, but they have become socially and culturally peripheral precisely because they are not connected to a communal acknowledgment of the high humanities’ value. Thus, at least in Anglophone countries, it has become all but impossible publicly to defend the use of taxpayer money on them.
So why did cultural secularization happen? Globalization, of course, has been one of its causes — globalization intertwined with both feminism and decoloniality. As such, it is a slightly contradictory globalization that affirms a relativism for which all cultures are ascribed equal value at the same time as it downgrades European high culture as a product of colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. (We might call this contradictory formation “emancipatory culturalism.”) In this context, canonical European culture is dismissed as a vehicle for dead white men, of little interest to those who are neither men nor white nor dead.
A second cause of cultural secularization is what is often called “neoliberalism,” the extension of market relations into domains and institutions where they previously played little or no part. The relation between cultural secularization and capitalism is complex. On the one side, an education system primarily directed at increasing economic competitiveness and productivity sidelines the traditional humanities because their economic contribution is minimal or at least indirect. On another side, in an era of radically expanding and niche-marketed consumption, many commodities and commodified experiences (luxury brands, tourism, wines) can provide the cultural distinction that high cultural participation once did.
Cultural secularization’s last and more minor cause is internal to the academy — namely, professionalization. It is obvious that cultural secularization has happened alongside the increasing self-enclosure of the academic disciplines.
Despite the second secularization, in some form or other the humanities retain considerable force and shaping power. The humanities have never had a single project or ethical center. They are not based on a belief or a set of beliefs. They are radically dispersed: They have involved and still do involve all kinds of activities, dispositions, and arguments that go in different directions politically and morally. They are certainly not, as is often said, connected to the encouragement of empathy and social critique. And they are hard to secularize for precisely that reason: They possess no essence, no specific doctrines and ethical principles, to break with.
Despite the humanities’ variety and dispersion, they accrue a power that is hard to extinguish just because they provide fertile ground for historicized reasoning, truthfulness, memory, conservation, imagination, and judgment. Being able to think logically (and dialectically); knowing more than others about the past; being good at checking things for their truth and accuracy; having a strong casuistical sense of what rules count when; being especially familiar with information and archives; being able to dream up possibilities and exciting impossibilities; being intellectually curious; being able to make quick and accurate assessments about whether this (version of an) image or a text is better in a relevant way than that one; having the ability to tell persuasive and accurate stories: All of these are dispositions and skills that secure authority and power for individuals in all kinds of situations. Such skills are not confined to the humanities, but they do thrive and expand there.
This is why a secularized humanities — a postcanonical humanities — still reaches deep into our society through all kinds of networks and institutions, in many forms and media, often at a distance from the academy.
In some form or other the humanities retain considerable shaping power.
Most discussions of the humanities assume that they are essentially academic. This is a simplification. Even if we grant an orthodox understanding of the history of the humanities as developing out of early modern European humanism and reaching an apogee in the West during the Cold War, many of the most significant scholarly and theoretical contributions to that trajectory were written outside the academy.
Indeed, beginning with the emergence of humanism in early modern Italy right up until the later 19th century, the university system was routinely at odds with the currents that have most powerfully shaped the humanities as we know them. Historically, the humanities and the universities have mainly been opponents. Admittedly, the academy became more important to the humanities after 1945, and today it monopolizes at least our image of them, but it remains important to keep both today’s and the past’s extramural humanities in mind when we think about the whole humanities world.
Post-tertiary education’s extension since the war, and especially since the 1980s under neoliberalism, has enlarged the humanities world. So too has the general increase in cultural consumption. Many more people have studied in arts faculties, if only a course or two, than ever before; many more people produce and consume products that refer to knowledges and sensibilities that the humanities foster.
But let’s not forget that a popular humanities has existed since at least the 17th century. We can recall Joseph Addison’s famous desire, expressed in 1711, to bring “Philosophy out of the Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables, and Coffee-Houses.” By the time that Addison was writing, the will to popularize was already well established, and over the centuries it would go on to produce a flood of books and reviews, and, later on, exhibitions, films, television and radio shows, and websites, disseminating analysis, understanding, preservation, and interpretation of society, culture, and nature — a flood that continues, stronger than ever, today. All of this fosters a huge amateur humanities in which many people, some of whom have had only the most attenuated connection to the academy, think and learn. The humanities world has historically drawn much of its energy and legitimation from popular and amateur activities like these.
There also exists an extramural figurative humanities, by which I mean a domain of styles, objects, designs, and tastes that are shaped by the humanities, carry their imprint, and indirectly express and stimulate their findings. An example: the Bauhaus of the 1930s. Bauhaus designs and artworks, famous for their austere industrial elegance, their claim that “form follows function,” their refusal of mere ornamentation, were produced in accordance with sophisticated social and philosophical theories both academic and extramural, theories that loosely resonated with other, not necessarily related, “modernist” knowledges — with, for instance, T.S. Eliot’s rejection of romanticism, that formed the basis of 20th-century Anglophone academic literary criticism.
To recognize that the humanities are expressed in designs, fictions, movies, and so on — that a humanities sensibility is articulated in all these marketable forms — is to modify our sense of the humanities’ current imperilment. Under cultural secularization and its post-disciplinary university, the academic humanities lose authority even as the popular, amateur, and figurative humanities thrive.
What about resistance to cultural secularization? It will help to turn first to the three major genres of resistance to religious secularization. The first is absolutist: Secularization is wrong because God’s revelations and miracles are real. The second is functionalist: Religion provides the framework in which our society, culture, and morality are most securely grounded, and therefore attempts to marginalize it should be thwarted. The third is existential: Human beings are lost in a cosmos they cannot account for and therefore driven toward the transcendentalisms that articulate the wonder, awe, and anxiety they encounter in approaching Being. Religion, the thinking goes, best expresses those affective, existential needs in part because it binds us to earlier generations.
The secularization analogy is illuminating here. Some of those who wish to push back on cultural secularization do so on absolutist grounds, making the claim, for instance, that the cultural canon that holds Western civilization’s glories is where real beauty and truth exist. Some make a functionalist argument: The humanities provide irreplaceable grounds for a good democratic society. They can, for instance, shape empathetic and tolerant moral sensibilities more powerfully than any alternative. Last, some who resist cultural secularization do so on existential grounds. They claim that high cultural traditions and artifacts, along with the practices of interpretation and critique developed in response to them, provide us with the least reductive, most subtle, most profound, impersonal, and thoughtful experiences and lessons available to us, experiences that preserve and sanction the heritage.
The humanities are to be preserved because they are compelled to push back on the capitalist apparatuses that are dismantling them.
None of these defenses seems to me particularly strong. Most of us agree that our canon does not bear any absolute truth and beauty, but rather it belongs to (a fraction of) one particular culture or cluster of cultures. The functionalist argument is weak because, as we have seen, the humanities preach many messages besides empathy and tolerance and the democratic, cosmopolitan virtues. And they don’t seem to make people more empathetic and tolerant anyway. The existential argument is politically impossible because of its implicit elitism: It divides and hierarchizes the world into those shaped by the humanities and those not. Against the grain of contemporary ideology, it also downgrades experiences that happen in, say, nature or in sport rather than in the proximity of high-cultural artifacts. But it is also weak because it is irrelevant. Some, especially among the upper-middle class, will no doubt continue to experience canonical cultural works as incomparably enriching (I do so myself), but that will not hold cultural secularization back. Under secularization, admiration for and commitment to the canon and the old disciplines remains an option (especially for elites), just as religion remains an option (especially for non-elites).
Some causes for cultural secularization are obdurate: It seems clear, for instance, that we cannot effectively prevent constant changes in technology. They seem to have a force beyond our control. Nor can we do much about academic professionalization and specialization: If those processes are going to slow, it won’t be because of exhortations to communicate more with the wider public, or to further quantify impact.
There are, however, two causes of cultural secularization that are open to negotiation because they are more plainly ideological. The first has to do with the processes of intellectual “decolonization” and identity emancipation that underpin cultural secularization. The argument that, to put it very crudely, the received canon is to be downgraded on the grounds that it was created by white, male, heterosexist, Eurocentric, colonizing elites is very powerful today for reasons that most of us understand, and that express a desire for justice and equity that most of us share. But that understanding and that desire court dangerous simplifications. The purposes, qualities, and forms through which literature, art, music, and so on gain their powers and from which they draw their intensities should be understood as “relatively autonomous.” They have no direct relation to the broader social conditions out of which they are produced.
This is true of all aestheticized expressive forms in all societies. All known societies, white or not, colonizing or not, have been by the standards that are dominant in the humanities world today, cruel and unjust to some degree or other. To judge cultures and works not by their own qualities but by our understandings of the equity or not, tolerance or not, fairness or not, of the societies or individuals that produced them, is to end up with an all but empty heritage, and, in particular, to disown and waste the pasts that have formed us and the constructed world in which we live.
The other cause of cultural secularization that should invite pushback is the neoliberal extension of market structures into the education system. High culture and the old humanities disciplines now stand more against than athwart the neoliberal state’s ideological and administrative protocols, which pressure all social formations whatsoever into market-based rationality. The high humanities have to resist that rationality in order to be securely at ease. Potentially at least, for all their precarity and confusion, that resistance confers on the high humanities an internal cohesion, a political value and sense of purpose absent in periods when such formidable external social and political pressure upon them was missing.
The high humanities are to be preserved, then, not just because they intensify practical reasoning and imagination; because they enable us fully to appreciate and enjoy the cultural heritage and connect us to the past; because they offer a space for free contemplation and reflection; because they help us spiritually “endure modernization” (as the German theorists Joachim Ritter and Odo Marquard have argued); or because they encourage particular political subjectivities and movements. They are to be preserved because they are compelled to push back on the capitalist apparatuses that are dismantling them. In that pushback, what remains of them is aligned with green and radically left anti-capitalist movements. That is so even for those in the humanities (and there are many such) who do not personally sign on to political programs that formally contest current capitalist state regimes.
The idea that we are now enduring a second secularization — this time not of religion but of culture and the humanities — helps reconcile us to our losses by helping us to see their larger logic. It is important to remember that religious secularization does not mean the end of religion. The same will be true of cultural secularization. And just as religious secularization involved political resistance, adjustment to cultural secularization will involve critique and resistance.
This essay is adapted from a talk given at Utrecht University’s Centre for the Study of the Humanities.
