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January 9, 2008
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The new cynicism
The other day, renowned literary scholar Stanley Fish devoted a lengthy New York Times blog post to being unable to articulate a reason why the humanities matters. "If it were true [that the study of great works enlarges the soul], then most generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people on earth would be the members of literature and philosophy departments, who spend every waking hour with great books and great thoughts, and as someone who's been there (for 45 years) I can tell you it just isn't so." Fish smugly presents his inability to defend humanistic study as a good thing, even as proof of its value.
Margaret Soltan saw through the pose, though, and cut pointedly to the chase at University Diaries:
Note what's missing in this account: Not merely the idea that humane study civilizes and perhaps morally and even spiritually ennobles; but also the idea that the path of humanistic education and cultivation is in some sense a path directed toward greater and greater disclosure of the truth--however 'situated' we want our sense of the truth to be. Fish's justification for the study of literature and philosophy rests entirely on his observation that the technical activity of decoding meaning and comparing knowledge systems yields--in himself and others--pleasure.This is a supremely aristocratic account of humane learning, in which the glory of novels and ontologies lies in the peculiar, indefinable delight (Fish does not characterize humanistic pleasure) they afford us. Stewards of humanistic institutions shouldn't be expected to be any more "good-hearted and honest" than their faculty; they should be expected to run their institutions in whatever way maximizes the possibility of exposing the largest number of people to humanistic pleasure.
Rejecting Fish's echo-chamber ideal of the humanities, Soltan suggests that such a vacuous position is the sad result of too much relativistic postmodernism, imbibed for far too long. Even though Fish has shed a lot of the "there is no truth, there is only text" posturing that made him famous, his thinking is still tainted by it ... and his vision of the humanities is correlatively elitist and decadent. Considering how much energy Fish and others have exerted in recent years trying to tearing down elitist, decadent models of artistic apprehension, this is ironic, to say the least.
Today, Russell Jacoby reveals an undeniable animus toward the academic humanities. Writing at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jacoby appears at first to be offering an update of his 1987 book, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe. In that book, Jacoby stirringly argued that, in the wake of the 60s, new academics were neither interested in nor capable of reaching a wide audience--and that they had thus succeeded in creating a professional culture that rendered their work mediocre and irrelevant:
They grew up in a much-expanded campus universe and never left its safety. Younger intellectuals became professors who geared their work toward their colleagues and specialized journals. If this generation--my generation!--advanced into postmodernism, post-Marxism, and postcolonialism, where the Daniel Bells and Lewis Mumfords never trod, it did so by surrendering a public profile. It neither wanted to nor, after a while, could write accessible prose. The new thinkers became academic--not public--intellectuals, with little purchase outside professional circles.
So far so good--and so far still a good approximation of the self-imposed pointlessness of much academic work. Jacoby then goes on to seem to consider whether the Internet, with its capacity for making intellectual discussion public, accessible, and democratic, has affected this pattern much. But he pretty well dismisses that possibility out of hand--which makes for a thin discussion in which Michael Berube's retirement from blogging is somehow supposed to indicate the failure of electronic media to recreate an intellectual commons. And soon the reason for the thinness of this discussion is apparent--Jacoby is less interested in assessing whether blogs and other electronic media have exerted a useful, democratizing pressure on academic discussion than he is in using it to shoehorn in potshots at conservative critics of academe.
If this sounds random and bizarre, that's because it is. But it's worth tracing the thought process anyhow. Watch the progression in his last few paragraphs:
On the Internet, articles, blog posts, and comments on blog posts pour forth, but who can keep up with them? And while everything is preserved (or "archived"), has anyone ever looked at last year's blogs? Rapidly produced, they are just as rapidly forgotten.The fate of public intellectuals today allows no neat and certain answers. Even the effort of the indefatigable Richard A. Posner, judge, professor, and conservative, falls short. In his 2001 book Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, Posner sought to finally give precision to this topic. He wanted to nail down the species and measure its worth, which he found inadequate. Enamored of, if not blinded by, a market approach, Posner found an absence of quality control in public intellectuals. He tabulated Web "hits" and scholarly citations, not only to identify leading intellectuals, but also to indicate their defective quality. Public intellectuals, he concluded, gain attention as they lose scholarly credibility. The more they address public issues, the less their professional colleagues refer to them--for good reason, according to Posner.
As public intellectuals step outside their specialties, they offer substandard information, Posner argues. For example, Stephen Jay Gould attacked (in The Mismeasure of Man) the notion of IQ, but Posner declares that the late Harvard professor lacked expertise on the subject. Gould was a paleontologist, not an authority on intelligence. The scientists who objected to a national antimissile defense system, the lawyers who protested the Clinton impeachment, and the professors who questioned the invasion of Iraq did not know what they were talking about. None possessed the requisite professional knowledge. Posner uses the stick of specialization to dismiss those with whom he disagrees. The decline of public intellectuals correlates with the rise of Richard Posner.
Other conservative commentators may be more on target, although they draw the wrong conclusions. Some years after the publication of The Last Intellectuals, a few critics began, and have not ceased, to bemoan an overrepresentation of liberals and leftists in academe — the so-called tenured radicals. The argument and its evidence seem defective. For starters, how are such political animals identified? And how much does it matter if a Republican, Democrat, or Naderite teaches "The History of Ancient Greece"? Moreover, what does "overrepresentation" in the university mean? Compared to what? The post office? The State Department? Wall Street? Who says all of society must be statistically homogeneous? Finally these aggrieved conservatives seemed supremely uninterested in the political cast of the more-substantial faculties in fields such as the sciences, medicine, and engineering. It is their poor cousins in the humanities who drive them to distraction.
Yet let us accept, for the moment, the argument that humanities departments house more leftists than Home Depot or the police department. Shouldn't this be something that conservatives celebrate, not decry? Doesn't this mean that the system works elegantly, not poorly? Are these professors the successors to the last generation of intellectuals? If so, society has successfully insulated them. They inhabit a protected environment where they can neither harm each other nor reach outsiders. As academic intellectuals subvert paradigms and deconstruct narratives in campus symposia, conservatives take over the nation. Brilliant!
Talking dismissively about blogs becomes a way of introducing a dismissive discussion of Richard Posner, whose own work on the decline of public intellectuals offends Jacoby's sensibilities. Talk of Posner, in turn, licenses the shift to a discussion of "other conservative commentators"--and thence to an oddly shrill concluding digression on the evils of the conservative critique of academe. That digression not only caricatures the critique it claims to summarize, but then degenerates into a nasty cynicism in which the insularity and irrelevance of a left-leaning academic humanities is held up as a marvelous triumph for the conservative caricatures evoked by Jacoby's final paragraphs.
The point: Neither Jacoby nor Fish can think of a single positive, sincere reason why the academic humanities should continue. Fish's best effort devolves into a snobbishly amoral account of art as a source of pleasure (one is reminded of Lord Henry in Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray). Jacoby doesn't even get that far--as far as he is concerned, the wilfull obscurity of scholars who share his politics is tantamount to complicity with those who don't. And, in an academy where one's political affiliations are often an unyielding bottom line, that's a terrific condemnation.
It's interesting to watch Jacoby's argument go off the rails when he broaches the subject of conservatives. It's a variant of the Conservative Derangement Syndrome that seems to affect so many otherwise reasonable critics of higher ed. And it's interesting, too, to consider how the empty-handedness of the Stanley Fishes--who say we should value the humanities but can't say why--licenses the kind of manhandling Jacoby gives them here.
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Comments:
Two thoughts:
First, as an analytical person, I can come up with a reason for almost anything. For instance, I like the color red because contemplating it makes me feel happy. If I were a literary scholar, I believe I could come up with some coherent reason why I need to be one.
Second, though, this: "Teachers and students of literature and philosophy don’t learn how to be good and wise; they learn how to analyze literary effects and to distinguish between different accounts of the foundations of knowledge." may be the key. I majored in chemistry and math, and I've worked in labs all my life. I enjoy literature for insight into human nature, stories that pull me along, thoughts I am inspired to think. I have written on my blog about my farm-woman grandmother who quoted Alexander Pope to my mom, a little barefoot girl on a farm in Mississippi. And about "To an Athlete Dying Young" being forever linked, for my daughter, with a high school friend, a nationally-ranked tennis player who died from a heart defect.
So I don't think you have to have all those credentials for humanities to be important to you and to know why they are. In fact, maybe they get in the way. Maybe it's like not having to be a degreed theologist to be a person of profound faith.
For starter's, Fish's assertion that: "If it were true [that the study of great works enlarges the soul], then most generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people on earth would be the members of literature and philosophy departments, who spend every waking hour with great books and great thoughts"...this is bad reasoning. The implied assumption is that people choose to become lit or phil professors exclusively because they like the books/thoughts. In reality, career choices are affected by many factors other than the substance of the profession. If Fish is correct that humanities professors are not particularly "generous, patient, good-hearted and honest" then perhaps there are things about the academic career path and working environment that tend to turn such people off.
Analogy: If one found that the mechanical engineers in Soviet-era automobile plants were generally unpleasant people, this doesn't prove that the study of this field predisposes to obnoxiousness. More likely, it proves that the organization of work in these plants did not dispose to good human values.
David and Laura, I think you're missing Fish's argument. He is discussing arts and humanities as fields of study. His argument is simple -- simplistic, even: if contact with art and history and literature made us better people, then those who have constant contact with the arts should be better people. Fish tells us his colleagues aren't such good people, QED.
Now, for me, the argument breaks down not because, as David wrote, there's something about the profession that stunts the moral growth resultant from contact with the arts and humanities. No, Fish is talking about two different kinds of good: good professional colleagues and the ethical subjects of literature. And of course, those are different things. You don't become a good co-worker by reading Homer. The question facing Achilles: how to fulfill his two prophesied missions -- destroy Ajax and be killed at Troy? How to fight knowing you've been promised no safe return? Why fight?
See, there's a real incommensurability between the professional behavior and complex ethical agency.
As I've written a few times at The Valve's website, the problems with Fish are legion:
1. art and culture does teach us stuff
2. art and culture teaches us very different, often conflicting, stuff. *The Iliad* teaches something very different than O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" -- just to mention to texts I'm teaching right now.
3. so if you want to teach "good stuff," you'll need to limit syllabi to texts with good lessons. That's indoctrination.
My own defense of the humanities begins with the weird fact that humans use langauge to do things like tell stories, describe scenes, record past deeds, explain the world, etc. We use words to domesticate and to make strange again the worlds around us. We must study this, just as we study the odd behavior of monkeys or starfish. The humanities are the non-biological study of what humans do. And humans naturally reflect on what it means to be human. Our first stories are about the stuff that isn't human: earth, sea, sky, tree, animal, and gods. And then we carve out a space of relations between humans and the inhuman. You know, Pygmalion and Galataea. Man and woman replaced by man and stone. The gods' imperfect creation of woman meets the human's perfect creation of a sculpture of a woman. Pygmalion approaches the level of God as creator, and his novel loving leads to Venus turning G into a woman . Stone, man, woman, and god find their places.
If stories are where humans express their inevitable interest in their selves and their worlds, then anyone who things the Human is a good object of study must defend the Humanities.
Erin O'Connor is right to identify Stanley Fish's lordly invocation of the pleasure-principle (perhaps this recently "born-again" public intellectual has not yet jettisoned his long-borne Freudian baggage?) as the sole reason for spending an idle hour (or life) over literary works as so much pseudo-aesthetic posturing (though perhaps Fish's aim is epater les professeurs who perversely waste educational opportunities by foghorning for leftist social and political causes?). That Fish's assertion that this is so simply because, first, one's proficiency in, e.g., the explication de texte method of literary interpretation cannot of itself ensure one's corresponding practice of virtue, and second, that many proficient literary technicians do live and act badly, is, as Luther Blisset pointed out, simplistic.
For as Laura more aptly suggests, in the vicarious participation in others' creations (whether authors, characters, voices, and/or situations) that perceptive readers gain in their engagement with profound and enduring literature can yield significant insights into human nature, and thus into ourselves, others, past and present societies, nature, even God. And David Foster is right to suggest that there may be environmental or tribal factors contributing to the current malaise afflicting many humanities educators, who in turn inflict their cranky screeds upon their students (Erin O'Connor's deft anatomy of Russell Jacoby's tendentious and reductive remarks on Richard Posner's worthy book on public intellectuals demonstrates one such example).
Properly invoked in reference to academic humanities' curricula, "culture" as an end refers to the refinement or cultivation of the moral, intellectual, and aesthetic senses through education (in contrast to its more technical usages in biology or anthropology and to its vulgar journalistic usages such as "pop culture," "youth culture," "drug culture,"--i.e., whatever some group likes and does.). In sum, Fish ignores (or even spites) the more acute moral and intellectual senses (inextricably combined with aesthetic forms and features) that readers and students may gain from engagement with a wide variety of views presented in literary works. I hardly think great authors from Sophocles to Dante to Shakespeare to Tolstoy meant to serve merely as panderers to arouse the all-too-easily jaded sensibilities of literary voluptuaries.
Luther, I agree with everything you say, with two very minor possible exceptions.
First, I don't think one should compare a person steeped in the humanities with a person not so steeped, to see if the humanities make him a better person. I think one should compare that person to the kind of person he would be if he had not been steeped. We can't do that, of course. But you don't know whether a specific humanities-steeped person who is only half wretched would be half or wholly wretched without them, and that would be the real test of whether or not they make a difference.
Secondly, there are a lot of complex ethical issues in the workplace, for those with eyes to see them. One of my previous workplaces was being shut down and we were all having to do our jobs knowing that they were coming to an end. Some of us took that as a challenge and actually took pride in giving our very best effort up until the last second. This was a complete enigma to others, who could not begin to fathom why we cared at all. I told one of the people in my group that she needed to look inside herself and get some standards. I might as well have been speaking Greek to her. Then there are complex relationships between people who work together every day - almost parent/child or bickering sib relationships, for instance; and there's pride that will make a person deny he's made a trifling mistake that any fool can see he made, and dig himself into a career-injuring hole when all he has to do is say "I screwed up, sorry". I try to be a good coworker, a good employee, a good manager, and that means calling on my knowledge of human nature and a certain amount of personal insight, a lot of which I get from reading literature and contemplating what I've read.
Laura...you might be interested in these thoughts by Michael Hammer.
Those are some interesting thoughts.
My daughter had 4 years of Latin in high school, with the result that she has an outstanding English vocabulary. Since middle school years I've thrown uncommon words into conversation with her, and it's been some time now that I can't stump her at all. (She's 20.) I taught her some basic project management during science fair season in elementary school, with the result that her school papers and projects are never late and usually completed ahead of deadline. So I fully agree that schooling yields benefits beyond the actual subject material.
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