Stom, “Young Man Reading by Candle Light”
Thursday
I love it when conservatives write defenses of the liberal arts. It gives a liberal like me a vision of us all agreeing about life’s elemental issues, even when we disagree about other things. Therefore, I enjoyed a recent New York Times article by conservative Ross Douthat that laments declining humanities majors and looks for explanations and solutions.
Douthat begins with a passage from W. H. Auden’s “Under Which Lyre: A Reactionary Tract for the Times,” written immediately after World War II, where the poet describes a war between “the sons of Hermes” and “Apollo’s children.” Douthat explains the conflict as one involving “the motley humanists against the efficient technocrats, the aesthetes and poets and philosophers and theologians against the managers and scientists and financiers and bureaucrats.”
You don’t really want Hermes’s children running the world, Auden says, since that would turn us into the Balkans. (Perhaps he has in mind contentious poets, who can battle over what the rest of the world sees as very minor matters. Cartoonist Matt Groening once wrote that the best way to irritate a poet is to be another poet.) If the pragmatic and common sensical Apollonians entirely take over the world, however, we will be hollowed out:
The sons of Hermes love to play
And only do their best when they
Are told they oughtn’t;
Apollo’s children never shrink
From boring jobs but have to think
Their work important.
Related by antithesis,
A compromise between us is
Impossible;
Respect perhaps but friendship never:
Falstaff the fool confronts forever
The prig Prince Hal.
As Douthat notes, there’s a place for both Apollo and Hermes. But Apollo greedily wants to rule the private realm (through “official art”) as well as the public:
If he would leave the self alone,
Apollo’s welcome to the throne,
Fasces and falcons;
He loves to rule, has always done it;
The earth would soon, did Hermes run it,
Be like the Balkans.
But jealous of our god of dreams,
His common-sense in secret schemes
To rule the heart;
Unable to invent the lyre,
Creates with simulated fire
Official art.
And when he occupies a college,
Truth is replaced by Useful Knowledge;
He pays particular
Attention to Commercial Thought,
Public Relations, Hygiene, Sport,
In his curricula.
I’m not clear what Auden means by “official art.” Perhaps he’s attacking mass culture since he describes the radio as our Homer and describes advertising jingles (say, for doughnuts for the masses) as “over-Whitmanated song”:
His radio Homers all day long
In over-Whitmanated song
That does not scan,
With adjectives laid end to end,
Extol the doughnut and commend
The Common Man.
In any event, Douthat uses the poem to introduce a new book by Baylor professor Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in An Age of Crisis. The book describes Auden, T.S. Eliot, Simone Weil, Jacques Maritain and C.S. Lewis as
a group of religious thinkers whose wartime writings Jacobs depicts as a sustained attempt, in the shadow of totalitarian ambition and liberal crisis, to offer “a deeply thoughtful, culturally rich Christianity” as the means to a postwar humanistic renewal in the West.
Douthat says that Jacobs
depicts their attempt as a failure, because in the end neither a Christian humanism nor any other has been able to withstand the spirit … of technocratic ambition, the spirit of truth-replaced-by-useful-knowledge, that rules today not just in Washington and Silicon Valley but in much of academia as well.
Douthat agrees with the book in part and cites recent statistics about declining numbers of English, philosophy, religion, and history majors:
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, that enrollment in humanistic majors had declined in the 1970s, mostly as women’s employment opportunities began switching to more pre-professional tracks, but that since then there has been a basic stability, at best a soft declension.
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.
Douthat points out that the decline is particularly steep at liberal arts colleges, a sure sign that the humanities are in trouble since the humanities have traditionally flourished there.
I appreciate what Douthat chooses not to blame. Although a conservative, he does not go after politicization or “postmodernist obscurantism,” seeing them as a response to the crisis rather than the cause:
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.
I agree that certain New Critics in the 1950s and 1960s experienced science envy when they treated the “text” as an object and subjected it to a version of the scientific method. The structuralists and deconstructionists went even further. So yes, some assumed “a pseudoscientific mantle.”
I recognize myself in Douthat’s other characterization but see the issue differently. To his accusation that I defensively rebrand the works I love to serve social justice and political reform, I respond (with Percy Shelley) that great literature has always pushed for human freedom. But while I disagree with Douthat, this is the kind of debate I love having. I will acknowledge that this blog originated from a defensive posture: because so many people believe that literature is non-essential, I spend time every day arguing otherwise. If at times I overemphasize literature’s utility, it’s because others underestimate it.
I admire the way that Douthat, rather than simply lament the decline of the arts and humanities, looks for ways to restore them. In order to do so, he first disagrees with Jacobs that Auden, Lewis, et. al. failed in their project:
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, mediated by journalists and popularizers as well as academia, in pursuits that now seem esoteric and strictly elitist — poetry and public theology, classical music and abstract impressionism, the Great American novel and the high theory of French cinema and more.
Douthat attributes this growth to three things:
First, there was a stronger religious element in midcentury culture, visible both in the general postwar religious revival and in the particular theological-intellectual flowering that Jacobs’s subjects embodied, which rooted midcentury humanism in a metaphysical understanding of human life — an understanding that both ennobled acts of artistic creation and justified a strong interest in the human person’s interiority, his actual person as opposed to just his brain chemistry or social role.
Second, there was the example of a rival civilization, totalitarian Communism, in which the Apollonian model had been pushed to its materialist-utopian conclusion and discovered only a ruthless, inhuman dead end. And third, forged in response to the Communist threat, there was a sense of Western identity, Western historical tradition, that could be glib and propagandistic in a from-Plato-to-NATO style, but at its best let people escape the worst of late modern afflictions, the crippling chauvinism of the now.
The bad news, Douthat believes, is that these three conditions cannot return:
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.
The good news is that we need the humanities so much that they may make a comeback anyway:
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.
I’m not entirely sure what Douthat means by the first but it sounds a bit like what I and a number of my colleagues have been doing in our courses. We’re no longer trying to be scientist wannabes but are teaching our disciplines with an eye to life’s greater meanings.
For instance, philosophy is no longer taught in the bloodless way it was when I went to college as my colleagues explore forgiveness (Kate Norlock) and apology (Barrett Emerick). A colleague in religious studies (Katharina van Kallenbach) has been examining German Christianity’s fraught relationships with the Nazis and has shown how the story of Cain has helped Germany face up to and deal with the Holocaust. My colleagues in English don’t teach disembodied texts but explore how literature provides a rare chance to grapple with life’s fundamental questions. My history colleagues do not just teach history as a litany of crimes and wrongthink—they never have—and do indeed see history as a repository of wisdom.
Douthat endorses Auden’s concluding advice only suggests we substitute “social media” for “advertising”:
Thou shalt not be on friendly terms
With guys in advertising firms…
If thou must choose
Between the chances, choose the odd;
Read The New Yorker, trust in God…
After national tragedies such as 9-11, people flood into churches looking for solid grounding. I like Douthat’s notion that the humanities offer such a sanctuary in troubled times. As Salman Rushdie said in a recent article (I blog about it here), truth-telling classics offer us a true compass when politicians try to manufacture reality.
Douthat and I have faith that we’ll never stop coming back to literature.
