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| "Please, Sir. I want some more." |
The humanities are in retreat. For years science and technology have been running roughshod over the arts in the nation's colleges and universities, a thrashing turning now into rout.
This is hardly news. For years a consistent string of news
articles and commentaries have documented the humanities' decline. An especially
robust burst of coverage greeted the release last summer of "The Heart of the Matter,"
an earnest series of recommendations and equally earnest short film produced
under the auspices of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Backed by a prestige-dripping commission
of actors, journalists, musicians, directors, academics, jurists, executives
and politicians, "The Heart of the Matter" sounded what the New
York Times called a "rallying cry against the entrenched idea that the
humanities and social sciences are luxuries that employment-minded students can
ill afford." In our race for results, the commission urged, the quest for
meaning must never be abandoned.
Alas, the sad truth is that earnestness at this point
doesn't begin to cut it. Celebrity endorsements won't reverse the trend,
either. We may as well come clean and accept that the humanities
have been losing this fight for centuries, and a reversal of their fortunes isn’t
likely anytime soon.
The reason, I think, is fairly simple. Relative to the tangible
solidities produced by science, technology and capital, the gifts of the humanities are ephemeral, and thus easily dismissed. "The basis of
all authority," said Alfred North Whitehead, "is the supremacy of
fact over thought."
This is not to say the humanities won’t retain a place at
the table. They will, insofar as they can make themselves useful. But like
Oliver Twist, the paucity of their portion will always leave them begging for
more. All the more reason, then, to celebrate those
who have managed to land a blow or two against the empire.
One of the early aggressors against whom the seekers
of Higher Truth had to defend themselves was Francis Bacon. His introduction of
the scientific method was accompanied by an unending string of attacks on the
philosophers of ancient Greece for their worthless navel-gazing. Like
children, he said, "they are prone to talking, and incapable of
generation, their wisdom being loquacious and unproductive of effects."
The "real and legitimate goal of the sciences," Bacon added,
"is the endowment of human life with new inventions and riches."
Legions of scientific wannabes followed Bacon's lead to
become dedicated experimental tinkerers in whatever the Enlightenment's version
of garages might have been. Meanwhile Jonathan Swift stood to one side and
argued, with droll, often scatological amusement, that the emperor had no
clothes.
|
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| Jonathan Swift |
Those who read Gulliver's Travels in the days before
literature classes were eliminated may recall Gulliver's visits to the
Academies of Balnibarbi (parodies of Salomon's House, the utopian research
center envisioned in Bacon's New Atlantis), where scientists labored to produce
sunshine from cucumbers and to reverse the process of digestion by turning
human excrement into food. Embraced in greeting by the filth-encrusted
investigator conducting the latter experiment, Gulliver remarked
parenthetically that this had been "a Compliment I could well have
excused."
A more recent battle in what might be called the Arena of
Empiricism unfolded in 1959, when C.P. Snow presented his famous lecture,
"The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution."
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| C.P. Snow |
The cultures to
which the title referred were those of literary intellectuals on the one hand
and of scientists on the other. While it's true Snow criticized the scientists
for knowing little more of literature than Dickens, by far the bulk of his
disdain was reserved for the intellectuals. Sounding a lot like Bacon, Snow
said the scientists had "the future in their bones," while the ranks
of literature were filled with "natural Luddites" who "wished
the future did not exist."
Again, a partisan of the humanities launched a spirited
counterattack, this one fueled not by satire but by undiluted rage.
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| F.R. Leavis |
Manning the
barricades was F. R. Leavis, a longtime professor of literature at Downing
College, Cambridge. Leavis was well known in English intellectual circles as a
staunch defender of the unsurpassed sublimity of the great authors, whom he saw
as holding up an increasingly vital standard of excellence in the face of an
onrushing tide of modern mediocrity. Snow's lecture represented to Leavis the
perfect embodiment of that mediocrity, and thus a clarion call to repel the
barbarians at the gate.
From his opening paragraph Leavis's attack was relentless.
Snow's lecture demonstrated "an utter lack of intellectual distinction and
an embarrassing vulgarity of style," its logic proceeding "with so
extreme a naïveté of unconsciousness and irresponsibility that to call it a movement
of thought is to flatter it."
Snow, Leavis said, made the classic mistake of those who saw
salvation in industrial progress: he equated wealth with well being. The
results of such a belief were on display for all to see in modern America:
"the energy, the triumphant technology, the productivity, the high
standard of living and the life impoverishment—the human emptiness; emptiness
and boredom craving alcohol—of one kind or another."
The uncompromising spleen of Leavis's tirade certainly
outdid the conciliatory platitudes of the "The Heart of the Matter,"
but to no greater effect. Neither fire and brimstone nor earnest entreaty will
rescue the humanities from their fate. Meaning will remain the underdog in a
world that increasingly demands the goods to which it has increasingly grown
accustomed.
Defeatist? To the contrary, all the more reason to carry on
the fight, boldly and without apology. I keep a quote from Jonathan Swift taped
over my desk:
“When you think of the world give it one lash the more at my
request. The chief end I propose in all my labors is to vex the world rather
than divert it.”
(More thoughts on
this subject can be found in my earlier essay, “The
Battle Between Art and Science (Continued).”)
©Doug Hill, 2014
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