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On the end of the canon wars (the humanities: its demise, justification, rescuing)

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https://thepointmag.com/letter/on-the-en...anon-wars/

EXCERPT:  They always start with a dirge. The humanities, as everyone knows, are in crisis—whether you measure it in plummeting enrollments; the virtual disappearance of tenure-track jobs in philosophy, history and literary studies; or the shuttering of once-venerated programs like Howard’s classics department [...] My pessimism was nevertheless tested by an especially charming recent entry into the defense-of-the-humanities genre: Rescuing Socrates by Roosevelt Montás.

[...] What is the point of writing a schematic apology for humanistic thinking [...] This is what Montás makes clear: to feel any need to justify the liberal arts with arguments is already to have lost. The value of the humanities is, upon exposure to real humanistic practice, self-evident.

I would go further: a society that acts as if this were not true, that threatens artists and philosophers and poets with oblivion or obscurity if they cannot justify their existence, is a profoundly sick culture. I suppose these must seem like outlandish claims to many Americans, but if I had to justify myself, I’d begin with a slogan: art is just what people do when they’re free. That, in fact, is what art is—nothing more. But also nothing less.

[...] what came out of this postmodern wave in the end was not a resolution but a self-undermining stalemate. On the supposed left you had people whose misguided attempts at sympathy for the oppressed led them to conclude that any universal curriculum in the humanities was itself a form of oppression, a broad liberal education nothing more than a status symbol. On the right you had reactionaries whose idolatry toward dead authors was all too often a pretense for defending Western chauvinism in the past and the misrule of elites in the present.

One side uses the old canon as a punching bag and a scapegoat for all the evil-isms that afflict us; the other, as a monument to national glories and an erstwhile set of commandments issued from on high.

In the university, the result was the self-segregation of each faction into their own departments, leaving each more exposed to the axe of the budget-trimming administrator. In society at large, it has led to culture wars where the books themselves are more often revered or reviled than actually read. Most crucially, it has facilitated a broad decline in the public’s faith that a humanistic education has any necessary connection to a life that is happy, just or free.

Montás occupies an unusual position in this debate. He’s a steadfast believer in expanding access to liberal education, which he treats, refreshingly, as a universal public good. At the same time, he largely agrees with those who blame the current stalemate on the “crisis of consensus” inaugurated by postmodern critiques of the old curriculum, calling the resulting relativism “probably the main intellectual impediment to the kind of liberal arts education” he prefers.

On one level, you can see where he’s coming from, even if it does make him sound at times like the Blooms (Allan and Harold) or Camille Paglia. Regardless of how one judges their politics—my own verdict should be fairly obvious—at least they’ll stick up for the kind of canon-oriented teaching that so deeply transformed both Montás’s life and my own. Who else does? With each passing year, fewer schools require or even offer such courses at all.

Too often we’re told this means the postmodernists won: extremists have butchered our common heritage, the standards of civilization have been exploded, chaos reigns. But from where I’m standing, the critical theorists’ attacks on a canon narrowly focused on a white, male, European tradition were hardly misguided.

The problem isn’t that they went too far. It would be better to say they stopped too soon. Having punched a canon-shaped hole into the heart of the humanities, the postmodern professors too often proceeded to retreat into their area specialties or their identitarianism, there to think small thoughts and ask petty questions—and this, at precisely the moment when what was called for was an enormous act of creation.

What had to be done, but wasn’t, was to develop a truly global canon—one that could transcend the provincialism of the so-called Western mind and yet remain faithful to that aspiration, integral to the greatest of the old Great Books programs, of rooting a democratic culture in what Matthew Arnold called “the best which has been thought and said.”

In the absence of this global canon, we’re left only with a false choice between two impossible options: to resume treating as the world’s sole inheritance traditions whose claim to universalism we know is false, or to live—if it can be called living—without any deep connection to the past that created us.

The unfulfilled task of building a third, better option is one of my generation’s greatest intellectual challenges. After all, a global canon can’t just be a list of books hastily thrown together.

For starters, it would take synthesizing decades of specialist work in various area studies just to figure out what’s most important. New teaching methods would have to be developed to cultivate interdisciplinary understanding and critical thinking among students, beyond the regurgitation of political dogmas. The goal would be to produce intellectuals who are at once more aristocratic (in the breadth of their reading) and more democratic (in their origins, commitments and teaching practices) than we ever dared to be.

Meanwhile, to ensure support for such ideas in the broader culture would require action outside the university: translating global literatures to and from dozens of languages, financing cheap editions with good prefaces, organizing local reading clubs, assembling free libraries online and off, maybe even shortening the workday to make more time for proper self-cultivation.

And that’s the real challenge, isn’t it? Today’s humanists are intimidated by what it would take to really overcome what they have called, inadequately, the crisis of their disciplines. To accomplish practically any one of these feats would require an ambition, a ruthlessness, and a will that our university training has hardly cultivated in us. To accomplish them all would mean to have begun a cultural renaissance... (MORE - missing details)
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