The practicality of the humanities
From Leon Wieseltier, “The Tolstoy Bailout,” New Republic, 18 March 2009, pg. 48:
The complaint against the humanities is that they are impractical. This is true. They will not change the world. They will change only the experience, and the understanding, and the evaluation, of the world. Since interpretation is the distinctively human activity, instruction in the traditions of interpretation should hardly be controversial – except in a society that mistakes practice for a philosophy. It is worth remembering, then, that the crisis in which we find ourselves was the work of practical men. The securitization of mortgages was not conceived by a head in the clouds. No poet cost anybody their house. No historian cost anybody their job. Not even the most pampered of professors ever squandered $87,000 of someone else’s money on a little rug.
The creativity of bankers is a luxury that we can no longer afford. But now I read about “defending the virtues of the liberal arts in a money-driven world,” as the New York Times puts says. I would have thought that in these times the perspective of money would be ashamed to show itself. What authority, really, should the standpoint of finance any longer have for American society? Who gives a damn what Kenneth D. Lewis thinks about anything? The president is right: we must work with plutocrats whom we despise; but surely not with their values. The study of religion, defending itself to capitalists? The study of literature, afraid for its prestige? Let the SEC grovel before the MLA! I am being somewhat precious, I know. But adversity is always a clarification: it refines the sense of what matters.
In tough times, of all times, the worth of the humanities needs no justifying. The reason is that it will take many kinds of sustenance to help people through these troubles. Many people will now have to fall back more on inner resources than on outer ones. They are in need of loans, but they are also in need of meanings. The external world is no longer a source of strength. The temper of one’s existence will therefore be significantly determines by one’s attitude toward circumstance, its cruelties and its caprices. Poor people and hounded people have always known this, but now the middle class is getting its schooling in stoicism. After all, bourgeois life was devised as an insulation against physical and social vulnerabilities, as a system of protections and privileges secured honestly by work; but the insulation is ripping and the protections are vanishing. We are in need of fiscal policy and spiritual policy. And spiritually speaking, literature is a bailout, and so is art, and philosophy, and history, and the rest. These are assets in which we all may hold majority ownership; assets of which we cannot be stripped, except by ourselves.
...[W]hat ails the humanities is not as egregious as the assault on them. Regression analysis will not get us through the long night. We need to know more about the human heart than the study of consumer behavior can teach. These are the hours when the old Penguin paperbacks must stand us in good stead. It was for now that we read them then.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009