The Review

In a 2019 essay in our pages, the literary and cultural critic Simon During discussed what he calls the “second secularization,” a process whereby “the value of a canon that carries our cultural or, as they once said, ‘civilizational’ values can no longer be assumed.” Just as, in an earlier era, religion had lost the authority to offer an overarching horizon of meaning for all but had become merely one lifestyle option among many, today the “culture which was consecrated in religion’s place” — Matthew Arnold’s “best which has been thought and said” — has become “merely a (rather eccentric) option for a small fraction of the population.”

Those are compelling but necessarily abstract claims, with major stakes for the fortunes of the academic humanities. Recently, also in our pages, the historian and former University of California at Berkeley chancellor Nicholas Dirks revisited During’s essay in the course of an autobiographical reminiscence about his father. An Iowa farm-boy turned aspiring minister turned academic humanist, J. Edward Dirks’s career might be taken to encapsulate one peculiarly American version of the transformation of religious into humanistic energy characteristic of the secularization processes of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th (late phases of the “first” secularization). “He became preoccupied,” Dirks fils writes, “with how theologians turned to philosophy to modernize the tenets of their Christian convictions, in the process seeking to balance the gravitational pull of faith with the centrifugal force of new and ever-changing knowledge.” One fruit of that preoccupation: the journal The Christian Scholar, which J. Edward founded in 1953.

The Christian Scholar might be thought of as a local, somewhat late, and still specifically Christian instance of a larger movement whereby “the humanities” emerged in response to two perceived threats: first, “the demise of core Christian (Protestant) values as the base for moral education"; second, “the rise of the research university itself,” where “research” entails a kind of scientism at odds with Arnoldian ideals of culture. “The humanities,” Dirks writes, “became the cluster of departments and courses that was fashioned as a modern substitute for religious values.” The ecumenical and humanistic turn among progressive theologians is homologous to the larger-scale process whereby culture supplants religion.

Dirks’s essay is concerned in part with tracking the second secularization’s causes, some of which are internal to scholarship (the relativism arising from Boasian anthropology and its descendants; the recognition, under multiculturalist pressure, that canons are particularistic and even chauvinistic) and some of which are external (declining funding). “Have the humanities,” he asks, “finally come to the end of the road?”

He hopes not, and he offers his father’s experience with The Christian Century as, in a sense, a model for a healed humanities, one in which an ecumenical pluralism restores, with a difference, whatever was sacrificed with what During calls “the erosion of canonicity” and “authority.” Dirks leaves vague the specifics by which “a more ecumenical approach to cultural artifacts, intellectual traditions, political positions, and ideological debates” might mitigate the current grim situation — a vagueness that is perhaps for the moment unavoidable. But he is surely right that something will replace what’s been — what’s being — lost. In During’s words, “It is important to remember that religious secularization does not mean the end of religion. The same will be true of cultural secularization.”

Read Nicholas Dirks’s “The End of Disenchantment and the Future of the Humanities” and Simon During’s “Losing Faith in the Humanities.”

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Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,

Len Gutkin