Aug 9, 2018 05:57 PM
(This post was last modified: Aug 9, 2018 06:36 PM by C C.
Edit Reason: added italics blurb
)
Given how the "anti-philosopher kings" shaped the political landscape of coastal, Hollywood, and campus culture... It seems strange to call the radical turn a failure, apart from the current collapse in enrollment. In terms of influence, the legacy of its effects is in the headlines and social media every day of the interactions and grudges between factions of a partisan and group-identity world.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/08/opini...ities.html
Ross Douthat (excerpt): . . . The analyst is a historian named Ben Schmidt, who just five years ago wrote an essay arguing that the decline of the humanities was overstated [...] But now he’s revised his argument, because the years since the Great Recession have been “brutal for almost every major in the humanities.” They’ve also been bad for “social science fields that most closely resemble humanistic ones — sociology, anthropology, international relations and political science.”
Meanwhile the sciences and engineering have gained at the expense of humanism, and with them sports management and exercise studies — the “hygiene” and “sport,” if you will, from Auden’s list of Apollonian concerns.
Notably this trend is sharper among elite liberal arts colleges [...] So it’s not just a matter of the post-Great Recession middle class seeking more practical degrees [...] the slice of the American elite that’s privileged enough and intellectually-minded enough to choose Swarthmore or Haverford or Amherst over a state school or a research university is abandoning Hermes for Apollo at the fastest clip.
[...] In explaining those shifts many conservatives blame the humanists themselves, for being politicized and marching lock step to the left and for pursuing postmodernist obscurantism in their scholarship and prose. But I think it’s more useful to step back a bit and recognize both politicization and postmodern jargon as attempted solutions to a pre-existing problem, not the taproot of the crisis.
That problem is the one that Auden identified seventy years ago: In an Apollonian culture, eager for “Useful Knowledge” and technical mastery and increasingly indifferent to memory and allergic to tradition, the poet and the novelist and the theologian struggle to find an official justification for their arts. And both the turn toward radical politics and the turn toward high theory are attempts by humanists in the academy to supply that justification — to rebrand the humanities as the seat of social justice and a font of political reform, or to assume a pseudoscientific mantle that lets academics claim to be interrogating literature with the rigor and precision of a lab tech doing dissection.
At the moment both efforts look like failed attempts. But is there an alternative? Here I would dissent a little from the sternness of Jacobs’s pessimism, since I think the Christian humanists that he describes — and their secular and Jewish counterparts — had a little more short-run success than he suggests. There was real growth in humanities majors beginning in the 1950s (stronger among women than men, but present among both), and that indicator corresponded to a genuine mass interest [...]
What sustained this temporary cultural moment, middlebrow and crass in all sorts of ways but still more successfully humanistic than our own? Three forces, in particular, that are no longer with us. First, there was a stronger religious element in midcentury culture [...] Second, there was the example of a rival civilization, totalitarian Communism [...] And third, forged in response to the Communist threat, there was a sense of Western identity, Western historical tradition [...]
This precise combination is not recoverable: Communism is dead (I think), the religious landscape of the 1950s is even deader, and the humanistic history of midcentury was Eurocentric in a way that a more globalized and multiracial society could neither embrace nor sustain.
But a hopeful road map to humanism’s recovery might include variations on those older themes. First, a return of serious academic interest in the possible (I would say likely) truth of religious claims. Second, a regained sense of history as a repository of wisdom and example rather than just a litany of crimes and wrongthink. Finally, a cultural recoil from the tyranny of the digital and the virtual and the Very Online, today’s version of the technocratic, technological, potentially totalitarian Machine that Jacobs’s Christian humanists opposed....
MORE: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/08/opini...ities.html
RELATED: A 1970 Humanities and Technology Major Reacts to Russ Douthat’s Column on the Death of Humanities
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/08/opini...ities.html
Ross Douthat (excerpt): . . . The analyst is a historian named Ben Schmidt, who just five years ago wrote an essay arguing that the decline of the humanities was overstated [...] But now he’s revised his argument, because the years since the Great Recession have been “brutal for almost every major in the humanities.” They’ve also been bad for “social science fields that most closely resemble humanistic ones — sociology, anthropology, international relations and political science.”
Meanwhile the sciences and engineering have gained at the expense of humanism, and with them sports management and exercise studies — the “hygiene” and “sport,” if you will, from Auden’s list of Apollonian concerns.
Notably this trend is sharper among elite liberal arts colleges [...] So it’s not just a matter of the post-Great Recession middle class seeking more practical degrees [...] the slice of the American elite that’s privileged enough and intellectually-minded enough to choose Swarthmore or Haverford or Amherst over a state school or a research university is abandoning Hermes for Apollo at the fastest clip.
[...] In explaining those shifts many conservatives blame the humanists themselves, for being politicized and marching lock step to the left and for pursuing postmodernist obscurantism in their scholarship and prose. But I think it’s more useful to step back a bit and recognize both politicization and postmodern jargon as attempted solutions to a pre-existing problem, not the taproot of the crisis.
That problem is the one that Auden identified seventy years ago: In an Apollonian culture, eager for “Useful Knowledge” and technical mastery and increasingly indifferent to memory and allergic to tradition, the poet and the novelist and the theologian struggle to find an official justification for their arts. And both the turn toward radical politics and the turn toward high theory are attempts by humanists in the academy to supply that justification — to rebrand the humanities as the seat of social justice and a font of political reform, or to assume a pseudoscientific mantle that lets academics claim to be interrogating literature with the rigor and precision of a lab tech doing dissection.
At the moment both efforts look like failed attempts. But is there an alternative? Here I would dissent a little from the sternness of Jacobs’s pessimism, since I think the Christian humanists that he describes — and their secular and Jewish counterparts — had a little more short-run success than he suggests. There was real growth in humanities majors beginning in the 1950s (stronger among women than men, but present among both), and that indicator corresponded to a genuine mass interest [...]
What sustained this temporary cultural moment, middlebrow and crass in all sorts of ways but still more successfully humanistic than our own? Three forces, in particular, that are no longer with us. First, there was a stronger religious element in midcentury culture [...] Second, there was the example of a rival civilization, totalitarian Communism [...] And third, forged in response to the Communist threat, there was a sense of Western identity, Western historical tradition [...]
This precise combination is not recoverable: Communism is dead (I think), the religious landscape of the 1950s is even deader, and the humanistic history of midcentury was Eurocentric in a way that a more globalized and multiracial society could neither embrace nor sustain.
But a hopeful road map to humanism’s recovery might include variations on those older themes. First, a return of serious academic interest in the possible (I would say likely) truth of religious claims. Second, a regained sense of history as a repository of wisdom and example rather than just a litany of crimes and wrongthink. Finally, a cultural recoil from the tyranny of the digital and the virtual and the Very Online, today’s version of the technocratic, technological, potentially totalitarian Machine that Jacobs’s Christian humanists opposed....
MORE: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/08/opini...ities.html
RELATED: A 1970 Humanities and Technology Major Reacts to Russ Douthat’s Column on the Death of Humanities