Centroids:
First, it would have been nice if Ross Douthat had used some other writer
to introduce his thesis; Auden, at least to the extent my knowledge is correct,
was a homosexual. To refer to homosexuals in any positive sense is not
something I ever lower myself to do. However, Douthat's story makes
important points that I cannot find any substitutes for.
His essay appears below, after a large blank space that I cannot get rid of.
Douthat's argument is summarized in the subtitle of his article:
New data on college majors confirms an old trend.
Technocracy is crushing the life out of humanism.
We are in the midst of what amounts to an all out war against the humanities.
Partly, as Douthat himself acknowledges, this is the result of what may be called
the "Babylonian captivity of the humanities." The capture of the humanities by
the Cultural Marxist Left has led to increasing irrelevance of the entire field
as each discipline within it has become fodder for feminist crazies,
multi-culturalist loonies, environmentalist extremists, reverse racists
of various stripes, transvestites and their bizarre proclivities,
homosexuals with their perversions and anti-heterosexual diatribes,
Muslims who pretend to be liberals to mask their closet fascism,
anti-Christian Atheists who wish to destroy every last church in America,
and so forth, a population of misfits up and down the line who contribute
precisely nothing to the common good.
However, Douthat added, this is far from the whole story and, indeed, is only
a minor part of the picture. To put a number on it, which Douthat does not do,
an educated guess is that this accounts for maybe 1/4th of the problem.
maybe even a third, but that is as far as this explanation can be taken.
Two thirds or even 75% has other -structural- sources.
Citing the research of Ben Schmidt, Douthat noted that:
"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 [such specializations as] sports management
and exercise studies..."
As Douthat continued:
Notably this trend is sharper among elite liberal arts colleges, the top thirty
in the US News and World Report rankings, where in the early 2000s the humanities
still attracted about a third of all students, but lately only get about a fifth. So it’s not just
a matter of the post-Great Recession middle class seeking more practical degrees to
make sure their student loans get repaid quickly; 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."
Why?
That problem, said Douthat, is easy enough to understand: " 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.
History is also useful in many different ways, not least in terms of understanding
exactly why we have gotten to where we now are, in the midst of a cultural mess
of unprecedented proportions where right and wrong have become matters
of tribal politics and group identity -with nearly nothing grounded on
the real world effects of the values espoused by contending parties
or organizations.
Then there are the wonders of the Web and of high tech generally, where any opinions
on the Right or held by independent-minded political Independents are regarded
as morally wrong because, you see, all (ersatz) "truth" is the property
of the political Left. And it does not matter that many of the heroes
of the Left are pathological liars -viz Al Sharpton, William Clinton,
Barack Obama, etc, and, besides, if you want a good example of a liar
on the Right, look no further than Donald Trump -who has been characterized
by Bob Woodward as "incapable of telling the truth."
But the fact is that, at one time or another, high tech giants have deliberately
acted to censor or deny service to people who simply do not agree that the
the party line of the Democratic Party is not the truth and not something
worth believing in. The worse examples of Leftist political bias in high tech
are found at Google, Facebook, and Apple, but the phenomenon
is just about everywhere.
This is to provide nothing more than a starting point, a few suggestions
about where we need to go. But Douthat was right in principle.
The war against the humanities could get very interesting
very soon and be much worse than anyone now thinks
is remotely possible.
Billy R.
______________________________________
New data on college majors confirms an old trend. Technocracy is crushing the life out of humanism.
By Ross Douthat
Opinion Columnist
In the spring of 1946, W.H. Auden came to Harvard to read
a poem to the university’s Phi Beta Kappa chapter. Titled “Under Which Lyre: A Reactionary Tract for the Times,” the poem envisioned a postwar world in which, the war-god Ares having quit the field, public life would be dominated by a renewed contest between
“the sons of Hermes” and “Apollo’s children” — the motley humanists against the efficient technocrats, the aesthetes and poets and philosophers and theologians against the managers and scientists and financiers and bureaucrats.
These two factions, Auden suggested, could ideally coexist: The Apollonian genius is for government and rule, and “the earth would soon, did Hermes run it,/Be like the Balkans.” But the Apollonian spirit, ever ambitious, cannot bear to leave the humanists to their poems and ideas and arguments, and so it seeks to expand its empire outward:
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.
During his visit, Auden met James Conant, then the president of Harvard and a man associated with the Apollonian transformation of the modern university, its remaking as a scientific-technical powerhouse with its old religious and humanistic purposes hollowed out. “ ‘This is the real enemy,’ I thought to myself,” Auden wrote of the encounter. “And I’m sure he had the same impression about me.”
This anecdote appears near the end of “The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in An Age of Crisis,” a new book by the Baylor professor Alan Jacobs. Auden is one of his main subjects; the others are T.S. Eliot, Simone Weil, Jacques Maritain and C.S. Lewis, 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.
Jacobs also 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 Conant, 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.
By coincidence, Jacobs’s interesting, depressing book has come out just after an interesting, depressing
analysis of the steepening decline in the share of college students majoring in English, philosophy, religion, history and similar pursuits.
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.
Notably this trend is sharper among elite liberal arts colleges, the top thirty in the US News and World Report rankings, where in the early 2000s the humanities still attracted about a third of all students, but lately only get about a fifth. So it’s not just a matter of the post-Great Recession middle class seeking more practical degrees to make sure their student loans get repaid quickly; 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.
Even this acceleration is no doubt partially driven by economic concerns: Elite college grads are by no means immune to feelings of precarity. But as with another, more literally humanistic pursuit — childbearing — that had seemed to stabilize after a post-1960s collapse but now is in decline again, the absence of a post-Great Recession bounce-back for the humanities suggests that the economic calamity of 2008 was a precondition but not the only cause, and that other cultural shifts had left the humanities ripe for another era of collapse.
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, 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.
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, 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.
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.
Auden’s poem closes with comic (but not really) advice for humanists: Thou shalt not sit/ With statisticians nor commit/A social science … 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 …
Imagine “social media” where “advertising” sits in the stanza and imagine an intellectual climate where the last piece of advice doesn’t seem like a contradiction in terms, and you’ve imagined the beginnings of humanism’s revival. May we live to see the day.
Ernie:
I like the idea of a Truth Bowl; can you send some information?
OTOH, one thrust of Douthat's article is that the mindset of many or most academics
is utterly ideologically conditioned. Even if these academics are given maximum freedom,
so what? They would still gush forth with their ideologies and fixed positions and
all the rest. How do you -anyone- break the mindset, not for the sake of breaking it,
but for the purpose of developing a new and better philosophy of life?
So far, the best solution to that problem that I am aware of is to mix people
with different ideologies together in some practical way such that this mixing
is an everyday matter that can't be walked away from and co-operation
is a necessity. Then there can be shifts in opinions and changes in views.
There was a study of 3 judge courts in which you could get all 3 Reps
or all 3 Dems, or some version of 2:1. In all cases of 2:1 there was
gradual shift towards the center by all concerned. In all cases
of 3-0 the ideologies became more rigid and closed minded.
Anyway, maybe there are some good ideas in the Truth Bowl.
Billy