Are the humanities "relevant"? Should they have to "justify their worth"? I am disturbed by last week's NYT article in which these questions are posed, not because it's reporting an unfortunate, if not entirely newsworthy, phenomenon—the decline of interest in the formal study of humanities given their seemingly inherent impracticality and the excessive costs of education—but because these questions are simply wrongheaded.
The majority of the pro-humanities experts cited in the article perpetuate the error. Columbia's Andrew Delbanco worries about the perceived relevance of studying the humanities. I think he may have chosen the wrong word. Relevance to what? Put another way, how can the humanities not be relevant to the seemingly infinite varieties of topics, themes, problems, and occasions they address? Take the article headline, for example. How are the humanities not relevant to "tough times"?
By viewing the humanities as relevant, I don't mean to endorse the comments of Yale Law School's Anthony Kronman, who seems at once willfully oblivious to history and dangerously naïve, implying that greed, irresponsibility, and fraud are somehow peculiar to today's world, and suggesting that humanistic reflection will manage to fix that circumstance. To my mind, the engaging aspect of so much work in the humanities is precisely their not being "well-equipped" to do much of anything. Perhaps they facilitate accomplishment only incidentally. One learns from poetry, for instance, how to read for a kaleidoscopic range of meanings, a skill that could bolster one's work as an attorney. But that's not the only, let alone the primary, reason for reading poetry.
How are "producing enough trained engineers and scientists" and the study of the humanities mutually exclusive enterprises in the struggle to assure "America’s economic vitality"? Why only our "economic" vitality? I'm with Derek Bok: "There’s a lot more to a liberal education than improving the economy." One might even demand engineers and scientists to justify their worth in humanistic terms.
I cribbed this post's title from an old book review in Slate that discusses the growing popularity of the study of Latin. This is one of those instances of remarkable, perhaps not merely fortuitous timing, when the report of the imminent collapse of the humanities, a "prerequisite for personal growth and participation in a free democracy," is proclaimed pretty much just as the study of its emblematic, dead language becomes fodder for best sellers.
I guess this somewhat panicky (and silly) debate makes its rounds along with the fluctuations in the financial / job market. There is little doubt that the demand for the humanities slumps when the economy is suffering. Students want to go out and get a "marketable" degree. The same trend and tendency are noticeable in developing nations where production of consumer goods and strides in health care, more than fine thoughts, make "life worth living." Science and engineering are therefore valued over philosophy and literature - at least until the basic standards of subsistence are met. However, that doesn't necessarily lead us to the question of whether the humanities are "relevant." It is merely a matter of practical priorities of the moment, like asking whether between being hungry and unhappy, which condition do I wish to correct first? For survival reasons I will wish my hunger to be satiated before I look for happiness. That doesn't mean that I don't want to be happy or that happiness is "irrelevant."
As for Anthony Kronman, I will let Anna (or my daughter, if she reads this) weigh in with greater authority.
Posted by: Ruchira | March 02, 2009 at 12:58 PM
Your take makes good sense, Ruchira, and I see a fair depiction of the big picture in it. But at a slightly lower level--the one pitting history against computer science, say, or poetry against medicine--I continue to wonder. Surely not all engineering enterprises aim only to maintain the basic standards of subsistence. Our lives are crowded with the wires, beams, dishes, remotes, toggles, switches, buttons, LEDs, and crappy PC speakers that count as innovation. Granted, the market then supposedly "values" those "advances," generating wealth that accrues in some peculiar fashion to all of us. The same could be said, of course, of sonnets, were they sold by the gross.
Silly, yes. See this commentary courtesy of Network World. Lindsey Lohan is no more representative of theater than Legos are of engineering. What a cheap swipe! Evidently the sciences need theater if "we need to figure out more creative ways to showcase" them. And witness the genius who recently graduated with a computer science degree: his conclusion that the job market doesn't "suck" is based rigorously, irrefutably on his personally having received numerous job offers. QED.
That'd be the abbreviation of a Latin phrase, quod erat demonstrandum.
Posted by: Dean C. Rowan | March 02, 2009 at 07:33 PM