The Bonfire of the Humanities

In my last essay I argued that the recently announced provincial cuts to university grants were justified, and indeed, did not go far enough, on the grounds that the universities have betrayed the founding principles of academia by becoming factories for the production of the very sort of "experts" whose claims to superior knowledge Socrates demolished in the fifth century BC so that the foundation of the Western academic tradition might be laid over the rubble. The "experts" in question, the kind who have done so much harm to everything during this pandemic, have at best mastered the extent information within one specific branch of one of the fields of human learning rather than the generalized acquaintance with human learning as a whole that was the aim of the older academic tradition, and at worst have mastered merely the technical jargon of their field rather than the accumulated facts of the field itself.

A follow up essay seems to be in order to answer two potential objections to my thesis.

The first potential objection is that universities do not typically allow students to pick a narrow field of study from the very start of their academic pursuits but rather require them to begin with more general studies. This is true, but it is merely a token gesture towards the older ideal. The general education the student receives before being required to specialize is hardly adequate for the realization of that ideal. In my last essay I included a quotation from Stephen Leacock in which he described the older view of education that still prevailed in the Oxford and Cambridge of his own day. In the essay from which I took the quotation he immediately went on to describe the alternative system in (North) America:

Now our American system pursues a different path. It breaks up the field of knowledge into many departments, subdivides these into special branches and sections, and calls upon the scholar to devote himself to microscopic activity in some part of a section of a branch of a department of the general field of learning. This specialized system of education that we pursue does not of course begin at once. Any system of training must naturally first devote itself to the acquiring of a rudimentary knowledge of such elementary things as reading, spelling, and the humbler aspects of mathematics. But the further the American student proceeds the more this tendency to specialisation asserts itself. ("Literature and Education in America", 1909).

The second and more serious potential objection is that universities continue to allow students to study the humanities or liberal arts, the curriculum through which the older academic tradition sought the realization of its ideal, right up to the doctoral level.

This objection obviously cannot be as easily dismissed as the first. One approach to answering it might be to repeat what has been said in various books that have appeared in the last quarter century sounding the alarm about the impending demise of the humanities, or at least classical studies, due to declining enrolment and other factors. One example is the nineteen year old collection of essays published by ISI, the title of which I have borrowed as shamelessly as its editors, Victor Davis Hanson, Bruce Thornton and John Heath, adapted it from that of Tom Wolfe's most successful novel. (1) Hanson and Heath's earlier Who Killed Homer? (1998) is another. As important as the case for the enduring importance of classical studies undoubtedly is, however, I think a different approach is in order to answer the objection in question. The problem in contemporary academia is not merely that STEM research, and the abominable pseudo-disciplines known collectively and misleadingly as the "social sciences" have surpassed the humanities, but that a completely different view of knowledge and learning has supplanted the traditional one and this has altered how the humanities themselves are studied.

This was evident as far back as the Stephen Leacock essay quoted above. Here is his very next sentence:

When he enters upon what are called post-graduate studies, he is expected to become altogether a specialist, devoting his whole mind to the study of the left foot of the garden frog, or to the use of the ablative in Tacitus, or to the history of the first half hour of the Reformation.

While the first of these absurd examples would fall under the natural sciences, to which this hyper-specialization was first applied, paving the way for the benefits and the curses of technological advancement, the second and third are of the same hyper-specialization applied to the classics and history, which fall under the humanities. A couple of paragraphs later Leacock gave the example, apparently from real life, (2) of a man who "was engaged in composing a doctor's thesis on the genitive of value in Plautus," describing how the man had spent a year and a half reading nothing but the Roman playwright, picking out all of the verbs of estimating, reckoning, etc. followed by the genitive, and compiling them into tables of frequency with a result "about as interesting, about as useful, and about as easy to compile as the list of wholesale prices of sugar at New Orleans."

While there is a place for some specialization in the humanities, Leacock went on to argue, the kind of hyper-specialization that is characteristic of what he calls the American system of education is worse in the humanities than in the natural sciences where it is to a degree necessary for work in these fields to be accomplished. He qualified this observation of its necessity to the natural sciences by saying that specialized research belongs properly to work done in these fields after the completion of education and not to education itself but added that attempts to imitate it in other fields "is a mere parody."

To put the point in ethical terms, hyper-specialization when applied to the physical sciences is what enables us to develop both life-saving techniques such as heart surgery and life-destroying instruments such as the nuclear bomb but with the drawback that the education geared towards such an outcome is far less capable of instilling the discernment necessary to recognize when such development is better left undone. Hyper-specialization in the humanities is no more capable of instilling this discernment than hyper-specialization in the physical sciences, but it also lacks the compensation of having any utilitarian value.

The deleterious effects of the newer paradigm of knowledge and learning on the humanities was the subject of a short but important essay by George Grant entitled "Research in the Humanities." It might be of interest to note that Grant was the grandson and namesake of Sir George Parkin, who had been headmaster of Upper Canada College when Leacock taught there before pursuing his doctorate in political science and economics and becoming professor of such at McGill University. Grant's essay was originally published in 1979 as part of Humanities in the Present Day, edited by John Woods and Harold G. Coward and published by Wilfred Laurier University, but was also added to Technology and Justice, the 1986 collection of essays which would be Grant's last published book. The paradigm shift in knowledge and learning which the age of technology has ushered in, and its consequences, especially for Christian faith and ethics and the older understanding of the eternal, goodness, and justice, is the overarching theme of this book.

Grant's primary complaint about the new paradigm has less to do with its fragmentation of the whole of knowledge - although it is to this that his suggestion that the radically transformed university be renamed the "multiversity" points - than of its objectification. "Suffice it simply to say", Grant wrote in "Faith and the Multiversity", the longest essay in the book, "that what is given in the modern paradigm is the project of reason to gain objective knowledge." A few sentences later he gave this clarifying explanation:

Reason as project, (that is, reason as thrown forth) is the summonsing of something before us and the putting of questions to it, so that it is forced to give its reasons for being the way it is as an object. Our paradigm is that we have knowledge when we represent anything to ourselves as object, and question it, so that it will give us its reasons.

Grant contrasted this with the older paradigm by noting how it inverted the relationship between man and the world in which he lives. In the older paradigm, man was accountable to something greater than himself, in this newer paradigm everything else is accountable to man.

While most of the book consists of Grant grappling with the philosophical and ethical implications of this, in "Research in the Humanities" he briefly spelled out what it meant for the liberal arts. These disciplines used to be the means through which ancient culture was passed on to us in a way that kept it alive. Transformed by the modern paradigm, however, they can only transmit a "museum culture", that is, a culture that was once alive, but is no more:

Previous scholarship was a waiting upon the past so that we might find in it truths which might help us to think and live in the present. Research scholarship in humanities cannot thus wait upon the past, because it represents the past to itself from a position of its own command. From that position of command you can learn about the past; you cannot learn from the past. The stance of command necessary to research kills the past as teacher.

One effect of this is to divorce high culture from popular culture. That this ought to be viewed negatively is the obvious implication of the argument found in the series of articles by poet and critic T. S. Eliot that first appeared in 1943 in New England Weekly and were compiled and published as Notes Towards the Definition of Culture in 1948. Eliot argued that civilization requires a high or art culture with a living, organic relationship to the popular culture. To separate the two, assuming Eliot to be right, and I am inclined to agree with him, would be to strike against civilization.

Grant wrote:

What then happens to bright young humanities professors in the 'museum culture' they are asked to reproduce? The best of their students think they are going to get something living from the humanities, and when they find they are not, opt for the real culture which is all around them. Outside the official university, there is the real culture of the movies, popular music, and polymorphous sexuality. But there is no relation between the culture of the humanities and the popular culture. The first sterilizes the great art and thought of the past; the second is democratic but at least not barren.

This, Grant went on to argue, was the explanation of the exodus from the humanities, that classics professors like Hanson, Thornton and Heath would later bemoan.

The internal changes to the humanities wrought by the neoteric paradigm of knowing and learning have rendered them particularly vulnerable to being used to betray the principles of the academic tradition. Remember that the foremost of Socrates' opponents were the sophists, the masters of the art of rhetoric. Reality, that is "things as they are", was less important to the sophists than words and the ends which can be achieved through their manipulation. Protagoras in particular, remembered for his statement that "man is the measure of all things," was depicted in Plato as the ultimate relativist. The Socratic school, especially Plato, opposed all of this by asserting a stable, fixed, reality, and our own ethical accountability for our words and actions within it.

In Plato's Cratylus, Socrates was asked to mediate a dispute about language, or more specifically names, between his friend Hermogenes and the title character who was an extreme disciple of Heraclitus of Ephesus. According to Diogenes Laertes and Aristotle respectively, Plato himself had studied under these men before becoming Socrates' pupil, making the Cratylus a dialogue between Plato's own teachers. The subject of the dispute pertained to the relationship between names and the things to which they refer. Hermogenes took the position that the relationship was not essential but conventional. We call a shape with four equal sides joined by right angles a square because we have agreed that this is what it is to be called in our language. We could have as easily called it a circle. We create the relationship between the name and the shape by agreeing to call it a square. Cratylus, on the other hand, took the position that the relationship between things and their names is essential or natural. Socrates addresses each of these positions in turn, disagreeing with both of them. The bulk of the dialogue consists of his answer to Hermogenes, whose position was the more difficult of the two to refute being supported by such evidence as the obvious fact that different languages have different names for the same thing. Socrates' answer was to say that the coining of words was an art in which the artist joined sounds to create a phonetic depiction of something and that therefore names are not arbitrarily chosen but are appropriate to that which they signify. He illustrates the point at great length with an etymological analysis of various sorts of names. Cratylus takes all of this as confirming his own absurd position, but in doing so falls into a trap which Socrates had been carefully laying for him. Names are crafted to depict in sound that to which they refer, but like any other art the depiction admits of degrees of accuracy and perfection, and is not absolute as it is in Cratylus' view. Socrates brings his interchange with Cratylus to a close by redirecting the discussion to the larger philosophical problems beneath the latter's position. Cratylus believes names to be absolute natural depictions of their referrants because he subscribes to a theory in which the study of words is the avenue to obtaining knowledge of reality, and the fact that names often change over time, does not appear problematic to him because he is the arch advocate of Heraclitus' theory that flux or change is the essence of reality. All of this, however, was Socrates real target all along, a hint of which can perhaps be detected in his own earlier allusion to Heraclitus' famous river metaphor in his discussion of the naming of the Titans. Contra Heraclitus, or at least Cratylus' interpretation of Heraclitus, Socrates defends stability and order as being more essential to reality than the changes which occur within the framework, and it is the study of that reality directly (3) rather than the study of words that leads to knowledge.

The humanities have, over the course of the last century, come increasingly to be permeated and dominated by a substitute for thinking that began in their own language studies departments. In its first stage it resembled a Hegelian synthesis between the very elements of Hermogenes' and Cratylus' theories that Socrates and Plato rejected. Words have no natural connection to what they signify (Hermogenes) and are themselves the object of study in the pursuit of knowledge (Cratylus). From this seed, planted by Ferdinand de Saussure, and watered with views taken from the writings of Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl and Jean-Paul Sartre, "intellectuals" such as Jacques Derrida, Jean François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Paul de Man, Richard Rorty, Jean Baudrillard, et. al., grew the noxious weed that has ensnared and entangled the liberal arts ever since. From words have no necessary connection to what they signify, to language being its own self-contained universe which has no relationship whatsoever to the reality of things as they are, to the politicized assertion that language is constructed to oppress and even the nihilistic denial of a reality of things as they are, it has descended further and further into a darkness and madness that is ameliorated only by the tendency of those who propound such nonsense to consistently apply their own ideas, reject the laws of language, and so write in gobbledy-gook that communicates nothing and obscures everything.. It has infested every branch of the humanities. A century ago, humanities students read and studied the great literature of the past to learn from it. In the absence of the past as teacher that objective research methodology has brought for reasons explained by Grant, the humanities students of the day approach the literature of the Great Tradition only to sit in judgement on it.

Far from being an exception to the rule that the universities have betrayed the founding principles of academia, today's humanities exemplify this betrayal.




(1) Wolfe himself, took the title of his novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, from the 1497 event in which Savonarola ordered the city of Florence to bring all of its mirrors and makeup and other such "vanities" and burn them in a public bonfire on Shrove Tuesday. Its application to Wolfe's novel about a New York bond salesman at the height of the '80's bond bubble whose indiscretions land him the defendant in a high profile, racially-and-politically-charged hit-and-run case, has been a subject of discussion ever since. The Reverend Bacon is presumably supposed to be the Savonarola of the story. Perhaps generating discussion was itself Wolfe's primary intent.
(2) Leacock depicts the man as having passed away immediately after graduating and names no names. It is interesting to note, however, that Dr. Gordon Jennings Laing's book on The Genitive of Value in Latin and Other Constructions with Verbs of Rating was published in Chicago twelve years after Leacock's essay came out. The book, however, had originally been Laing's Ph.D dissertation for John Hopkins University and as such had been submitted in 1896. Laing, who was originally from London, Ontario was born the same year as Leacock and survived him by one year. Laing graduated from the University of Toronto the same year as Leacock. The two men were close friends all their lives. It seems likely that with some of the details altered - the thesis of the dissertation made comically more narrow, and the author's premature death made up - Leacock was alluding to his friend.
(3) One of the discussions of the Platonic Forms occurs here.