The Rise of Reassurance Lit

My life as an advertiser began at a firm that specialized in one of the oldest American industries: grift. Staffed almost entirely by interns earning minimum wage, the company sold ad space in phone directories that, once printed, were promptly dumped in desolate corners of campus student centers, next to stacks of greasy pizza boxes. Flailing business owners who bought ads were locked into contracts that forbade cancellation. By the time they sensed a scam, it was too late: We would dispatch a collection agency to press them into line.

My job — keep in mind that I was 17 and entirely unskilled — was to make the ads for which the tanning salons, auto-body shops, and pizza joints paid so dearly. I would drag and drop images with whimsical abandon, superimposing brand logos and stock photographs on top of one another in the manner of a Magritte painting.

That adolescent flirtation with advertising was inevitably short-lived. When I chose to go to graduate school in literature, I did so with the maximum possible moral smugness. I dropped meaningful hints among my consultant-friends about the “coarse imperatives of business” and the “disfiguring strictures of our capitalist order,” all of which, I suggested, I would sidestep by bowing into the university’s hallowed halls.

You know how the story ends, how the academy makes advertisers of us all. Exhortations to promote our work, to lure undergraduates into our courses, to specialize in a sexy brand or niche (“I’m an ecocritic focusing on the aquatic imaginary [translation: I read books about dolphins]”), turn nearly every young scholar into a walking PR firm.

To enter the humanities obliges us to become more than self-advertisers. We are also called on routinely to serve as cheerleaders for our respective disciplines, and for the humanities as an enterprise. Each day, over chocolate milk in the campus dining hall, I spray facts about employment outcomes and writing skills to dismayed undergraduates longing to eat their grilled cheese in silence.

All this humanistic hucksterism may feel unsavory. But my concern here is another species of academic boosterism — one that appears entirely benign. It takes the form of a creeping mandate that we sell the humanities not just to others but also to ourselves. We remind ourselves repeatedly — in keynote lectures, book introductions, tweets, blog posts, conference papers — that the research and teaching we do are difficult, heroic, politically necessary, and criminally undervalued by a disdainful commercial society. In the humanities, reassurance is rife. Does anyone feel better yet?

Hardly a week goes by when I do not encounter a piece of writing or listen to a talk that affirms in moralized tones and to desperate ears the supreme importance of our imperiled academic work. Insisting defensively on our own momentousness has become a tic, especially when we are talking to one another. This stream of self-administered consolation might be called “reassurance lit” — an optimistic complement to its justifiably angry sister genre, quit-lit. Reassurance lit is having a distorting effect on our research and teaching, our morale, and our beliefs about how intellectuals can contribute to the common good.

One recent essay in The Chronicle, for example, justly objects to characterizations of undergraduate humanities education as laudably “useless.” On the contrary, the author insists, the habits of mind inculcated by a rigorous humanities education have great practical bearing in a world dominated by global commerce.

But the view of humanistic study that this well-intentioned piece goes on to advance is equally implausible. In a sharp, one-sentence paragraph, the author slaps down a declaration: “There is no functioning, stable, globalized world of the future without the humanities.”

Pause a moment. The claim is not that the world would be better with well-funded and intellectually serious humanities programs than without them. The claim is that the world’s very survival depends on the activities of a hundred thousand or so harried professors.

Many standard defenses of the humanities assert the value of “critical thinking,” which, rather unfairly, they imagine as the unique product of humanistic study. The essay at hand goes one step further:

Functioning effectively in a globalized society — in business, politics, medicine, education, daily interactions with immigrants in one’s own community, or daily interactions with locals in the community into which one has immigrated — requires the skill of rigorous, critical, empathetic thinking.

Such thinking would seem to be not one skill but several dozen, including capacities for imaginative perspective-taking, the proper evaluation of evidence, discernment of motive, the ability to distinguish an argument from an assertion, and so on. Together those abilities could be said to mark a certain sensibility. But that bundle of traits is not easily acquired or maintained. Thinkers who are at once “rigorous” and “critical” and “empathetic” are rare; they do not stream from humanities programs like Athena springing fully formed from Zeus’s forehead.

This squishing together of hollow adjectives like fake pearls on a necklace reflects not just one essay’s hyperbole but a larger discourse about the humanities that has risen to an ever-more-desperate pitch in response to declining enrollments and a collapsed job market. When we pivot from debates about the worth of undergraduate humanities education to debates about the worth of advanced research in the humanities (the two debates are connected but not identical, though often conflated for rhetorical purposes), the tone is perhaps even more defensive and self-mythologizing.

I should know, because I am as guilty as anyone of giving ponderous talks or writing predictable essays about the importance of humanities scholarship. My worry is that such utterances have come to feel obligatory.

Now, many celebrations of the humanities are valuable. They advance novel arguments that help us and others consider our work in fresh light, or they are meant for audiences that could be newly persuaded (i.e., audiences beyond humanities academics). Defenses of the humanities that fulfill one or both of those conditions help us advance our end of increasing the public’s respect for and knowledge of humanistic research and teaching. Good examples are Helen Small’s dissection of pro-humanities arguments in The Value of the Humanities (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Martha Nussbaum’s potent if strangely divisive case for multicultural education as a means of civic development in Cultivating Humanity (Harvard University Press, 1997).

Less helpful are accounts of the humanities inwardly targeted toward humanities practitioners (whose revealed preferences suggest that they already agree the humanities are worth doing), which advance shopworn generalities, such as claims that the humanities promote “understanding multiple points of view.”

Wheel-spinning defenses of the humanities come from all quarters, but reassurance lit — boosterism for academics, by academics — may have come to dominate the genre. Academic humanists have apparently become amnesiacs who would forget their worth if not perpetually reminded of it.

The reflex to reassure ourselves is understandable. But is it good? What attitudes does embattled boosterism cultivate? Does reassurance advance our common ends?

Excessive reassurance-seeking, argues the psychologist James C. Coyne, is a common feature of depression. The depression-prone person seeks reassurance of approval from others because of his doubts about his self-worth. But he is not convinced by the reassurance offered. So the pattern repeats itself. He strives again and again for confirmation, unable to believe he is lovable and worthy. Eventually this compulsive reassurance-seeking meets with hostility, and the depression-prone person experiences social rejection (which, in turn, exacerbates the symptoms of depression).

To say that the humanities are in the throes of a collective depression would be cheap psychology. But I question whether it is advisable for any profession, even one that feels itself oppositional and endangered, to fortify itself with a torrent of self-love.

The best arguments on behalf of the humanities articulate ideals that allow us to measure our own efforts at teaching and research in relation to a set of standards. Reassurance lit, by contrast, is indiscriminate, assuring each of us of our value, often in grandiose terms.

Several problems follow. The most basic is that a realistic appraisal is always more convincing than an inflated one. We do not, I suspect, truly believe the compensatory overestimations of our own importance that are sometimes offered in defense of the humanities. So we have to ask again whether we, as humanities practitioners, are worthy. The cycle repeats itself.

If reassurance aims to serve a therapeutic function, it is failing to do so. A realistic level of self-confidence in the humanities as an enterprise would be healthier to aim for. We should not abandon large aspirations — far from it — but great intellectual and moral achievements are hard won, not guaranteed by virtue of one’s membership in a professional community. Claims that the humanities alone can stabilize the world or topple capitalism seem to assuage our need for comfort, but that rhetorical inflation actually feeds our insecurities, by making the gap between assertion and reality more conspicuous.

Second, the habit of indiscriminate reassurance makes it more difficult to address weaknesses in the field. Because external opponents of humanistic study are so fond of denying our value outright, any criticism from within is felt as an attack, or an act of complicity with enemies of the humanities. An embattled field that assures itself repeatedly of its own brilliance is likely to double down and harden rather than adapt to new conditions.

Third, the defensive posture of mandatory reassurance has begun to shape research agendas, at least in my field of English (here I ask forgiveness for abetting the unfortunate synecdochic substitution of English for the humanities as a whole). To an alarming degree, literary studies has become solipsistic and self-reflexive, metacritical rather than critical, taking its own methods as central research questions. The matter of “how we read now,” for example, is one of the rare topics that unifies literary scholars across historical periods — the “we” referring typically, and narrowly, to literary academics. By exerting so much energy on justifying the humanistic enterprise to ourselves, we are ceding ground to our opponents (if our work is so important, why don’t we simply do it?) and closing ourselves off from alliances outside our subculture.

What I want is for us in the humanities to free ourselves from a negative cycle of self-boosterism in which we puff ourselves up with empty declarations only to fling ourselves down again. So I am calling for a moratorium on assertions about the value of the humanities that are directed at an internal audience and that fail to offer new, usable arguments. Those refrains about our own importance aren’t winning us any friends. And such remarks are not commonly made by thinkers who sense the force of what lies under their hand. Reassurance has become a corrosive distraction.