"The humanities are like the great old Paris Flea Market where, amidst masses of junk, people with a good eye found cast away treasures," wrote thinker Allan Bloom. “They are like a refugee camp where all the geniuses driven out of their jobs and countries by unfriendly regimes are idling." Bloom thought American education was perverting the old ideals: that pursuing success came before the pursuit of love and liberty. Education was designed to vitalize the soul, said Bloom, not impoverish it. That’s where the crisis of humanities came in.
Sadly, it was a discussion the U.S. hardly recognized. Humanitarian crises are what people like to watch and report about here: the perpetual wars, the natural calamities, the terror of ISIS, their love affair with breaking news, basically. With all the humanity around us, studying the humanities, the realists tell us, would be akin to whistling in the dark and shooting stars in the day, i.e. a futile exercise.
They’re wrong, and they are horribly wrong. It took serious, sustained negligence to get us here; our trademark and cherished value—innovation—may be the only hope to get us out. But creating that kind of intellectual atmosphere — between choosing to work on Wall Street on one end or facing the prospect of lifelong unemployment on the other — grows less and less possible with every passing day. If the fount of fresh thinking lies at society’s door, this is one society bent on draining it dry.
While the humanitarian crises may be directly proportionate to our humanities crisis, the latter isn’t considered much of a crisis at all. A place as corporate savvy as the United States, we are amazingly lectured on the perils of daring to explore humanities, and the rest of our educational sphere, sadly, espouses the mainstream notion. In the words of Florida governor Rick Scott, “We don’t need a lot more anthropologists in the state. It’s a great degree if people want to get it, but we don’t need them here.” To think a society doesn’t need the services of sociologists, psychologists, or even creative writers is to embark on a dangerous moral journey. These subjects are dedicated to studying mankind in its all aspects, and deriding the intellectual warriors majoring in these fields is a shameful endeavor. The percentage of students completing humanities majors is lower today than in the late 1960s. This nation clearly has an abysmal relationship with humanities.
Problems are abundant in quantity, so enough attention should be given to fix them. Let’s initiate the analysis with the procedural ones first: the prevalent dependency on textbooks is a convenient copout for underpaid teachers and unengaged students, and it limits opportunities for students to question the conventional wisdom and partake in constructive dialogues with their peers. Others are economic; for an aspirational middle class, studying Socrates does not a safety net make. Rest are societal; social science teachers aren’t lavished with words of appreciation for their credentials and academic work as often as their colleagues in business schools, nor are they afforded social status. Few cared for pursuits more poetic. Diversity of thought is considered dangerous and, as a direct result, retards research.
Then there’s the Powers-That-Be theory: that asking questions is declared an unforgivable sin for those who hawk religious literalism. When we stopped being informed citizens and began to monitor ourselves or each other only as consumers, we relinquished hundreds of years of human development. How can we possibly sustain our civilization if we don’t understand how it works? How can we interpret the Magna Carta and defend our innate rights if no one comprehends Latin? This is a shame. British scholar Terry Eagleton recently wrote of the vistas at stake, “What we have witnessed in our own time is the death of universities as centres of critique. Since Margaret Thatcher, the role of academia has been to service the status quo, not challenge it in the name of justice, tradition, imagination, human welfare, the free play of the mind or alternative visions of the future.”
The social sciences enrich every aspect of the human condition, but there are other, more selfish reasons for us to embrace them. If the U.S. were to respect the humanities, it would tap mines of intellectual prowess of students, teachers, and activists that seek nothing but progress. And that same talent would ensure that the United States is better understood internationally, better governed domestically and, ultimately, better run in both realms. By endorsing this idea, we may yet produce human talent that values literature over lawn fashion.
If we collectively agree on the assessment that the humanities do not matter, or fail to challenge this school of thought, we are colluding in the very same practices that reduce our humanity, that impinge upon all the other ways in which we can enrich our lives, our abilities to openly express our creative individuality.
Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “We seem to have forgotten that the expression ‘a liberal education’ originally meant among the Romans one worthy of free men; while the learning of trades and professions by which to get your livelihood merely, was considered worthy of slaves only.”
We have something of the reverse here. But if society is to be coerced into embracing human progress over ignorance, the social sciences must be shown to be what they always were: a worthy pursuit.
