Recent posts by Brainstorm bloggers Stan Katz and Mark Bauerlein have laid out how vulnerable the humanities are in times of economic stress. Now that state legislatures and university administrators are not just stressed, but panicked, they’re in slash-and-burn mode. When it comes to funding for education, technology will probably get a free pass, science a few questions, and the humanities? Some very, very hard questions.
It’s a little premature to declare the end of the humanities as we know them, however, since the grim reaper does business on his own terms. But it doesn’t take a college degree to suss out that for the immediate future, degrees in history, literature (unless it’s Arabic or Chinese), literary criticism, philosophy, religion, the creative arts (dance, drama, fine arts), women’s studies, American studies, African-American studies—have I left out anything?—won’t be worth nearly as much, in terms of getting a job, as degrees in science or technology.
Attempts to justify studying the humanities as “useful,” no matter how well-intentioned or nobly expressed, inevitably lead to mushy language about deepening the experience of life or making better citizens — good and truthful ideas, perhaps, but incapable of being proved and offering very little reason for pumping in dollars during difficult times.
In 19th-century America, higher education was unabashedly elitist. A “for gentlemen only” enterprise, it focused almost entirely on educating privileged men in the useless humanities. An ambitious young man who wanted to make himself useful in life might try to use a college education as a stepping stone to becoming an editor or a minister, perhaps, but college was mostly a place to warehouse well-to-do men while they waited for their fathers to die and leave them some money.
Thus the 19th century produced a lot of knowledgeable but essentially useless men — men who could read Latin and Greek, recite Shakespeare, and knew the story of the Battle of Thermopylae, but who didn’t know the first thing about the workings of the steam engine or how to make money by marketing the flush potty. In The Education of Henry Adams, a disturbing and thoughtful repudiation of a humanities-based education, the author discovers that his Harvard education (mostly in classics, literature, and history) failed to prepare him for the rapidly changing modern world where knowledge of science and technology is what matters. He did see, however, that people with social skills who have no ideas at all — people who know nothing at all of the humanities, in particular — succeed very well in life.
On another front, attempts to connect morality and education have always been full of holes. The myriad examples of well-educated human beings who are small-minded, bitter, lustful, greedy, arrogant, cruel, or even vicious or evil, should be enough to lay to rest any attempts (with the possible exception of Plato’s, which I admit I’ve never fully understood) to draw a causal connection between knowledge and morals.
The only way to justify studying the humanities is to abandon modern utilitarian arguments in favor of much older arguments about the end, or purpose of man. Yet Darwin, in firmly swatting down the idea that man has an end, makes returning to Aristotle pretty damn difficult for most modern thinkers.
We could try saying, “Studying the humanities is a beautiful activity, done for its own sake, that used to be unfairly restricted to those who are privileged. Now that we live in a democracy, we want everyone to have the chance to do it.”
Unfortunately, although I like this argument, I can already hear the relativists clamoring, “Who’s to say what’s beautiful?” Worse, I can’t see it persuading any deans or state legislators to pony up the cash necessary to keep the study of the humanities vigorous.
