Matthew Yglesias makes a familiar complaint that the humanities can’t expect to survive if they understand their mission as undermining “faith in the main underpinnings of society”. Like Brad DeLong, I found that this claim set off my bullshit alarms.
It’s a familiar complaint, that is, if you read a lot of social media and opinion published at major newspapers. Not for the first time, I would love for Matthew Yglesias to do something besides read the Internet. There are days where he feels to me like some kind of emergent AI consciousness, a sort of frothy bubble foaming up from the turbulent seas of online culture. He doesn’t seem ever to know something that comes from somewhere else, whether that’s an in-depth conversation with experts on a subject, some investigative reporting, or reading a few books on a subject that interests him.
Let me tell you one of the first places I ran into the thought that a humanities professor was undermining society by refusing to confirm the greatness of something that a critical observer thought should be great. I was reading about the creation of the Honors Program at Swarthmore College exactly a century ago by then-President Frank Aydelotte and I took an interest in the (at first) small number of faculty who strongly supported Aydelotte’s new initiative. Faculty across American academia at that point weren’t as specialized in disciplinary terms as they are now, particularly in the humanities—there was a complicated, slow transition ongoing away from the humanities primarily consisting substantially of religious study and what we today think of as classics. Many faculty that we would see as humanists would have some background in theology, classics and philosophy, as well as perhaps in formal literary study. One of the faculty who joined up with the Honors Program was popular with students but had received some complaints from parents and community members because he had the temerity to teach about Christianity that was highly skeptical about the religion.
The complaining language was almost the same—that this was undermining what society valued, that this was dangerous and subversive and would threaten the integrity and value of a Swarthmore education. This has been a common sentiment about the humanities in higher education for most of the last century. From certain perspectives, it’s a common view of the humanities in the entire history of Western higher education. Humanists in the Renaissance (both in the university and outside of it) were not anti-Christian but they were in many cases envisioning humanism as a critique of the Catholic Church’s stewardship of Christianity, as a way of mobilizing the thought of antiquity to clarify and purify Christian thought and practice. If you really want to go old-school, you might even note that Socrates ended up drinking hemlock because? Because he was convicted of undermining Athenian society through his philosophical engagements with the youth of Athens.
The thing about that Swarthmore professor of a century ago, and all his brothers and sisters in other colleges and universities at that time, is that it wouldn’t be wrong to say that they played a role in undermining Christianity as it had been. It wasn’t necessarily their intent—many of them saw themselves as Christians or deists—but they supported a skepticism about the way that congregations and the wider society understood the content of scripture or the meaning of faith. It’s the other part of Yglesias’ proposition that I think is wrong: that faculty being underminers would inevitably lead to the decline or marginalization of higher education itself, because society wanted higher education to glorify existing values rather than critically challenge them. That hasn’t happened, despite a lot of whining and moaning across the decades by institutions and forces feeling threatened at any given time by what humanists are thinking and teaching.
There is at the very least the paradox that Yglesias seems vaguely aware of that: the values he imagines should be glorified by 21st Century humanists in the academy include a belief that the Western tradition enables skepticism, critical thought, and free thinking. It’s pretty odd to ask that we glorify a tradition in a way that patently refuses to practice that tradition. It’s a bit like Brian in “Life of Brian” trying to explain to a crowd that they all have to think for themselves only to have them adoringly repeat that as conformist dogma.
There’s also something antiquated about the sensibility that Yglesias attributes to bourgeois American society—that they’re just tired of all that rubbishing of Thomas Jefferson and Aristotle and want a little bit of love for the classics. Or at least something generational—spend time with some folks between 22 and 42 and you may find that there’s a lot of culture and history that they’d like to celebrate or glorify and it isn’t what Yglesias is thinking about. Which is yet another problem: Yglesias here sounds like the kind of right-wing bullshit artist who has habitually done a drive-by on college curricula or the MLA conference program for the last forty years and said “woe is me, the Western tradition is gone! Shakespeare isn’t taught any more!” who is just factually wrong about the content of the classes or majors they’re surveilling (poorly), who is just assuming that the loudest six or seven academic humanist voices on social media are representative.
There’s a version of this point that has some legitimacy, of course. I’m occasionally shocked that humanist scholars and intellectuals who believe that what they’re saying is a radical critique of existing society nevertheless seem to be surprised when the powers that be react as if that is in fact true. Steven Salaita frequently acknowledged on social media that what he was saying went against the establishment logic of higher education and the wider power structures of American society but then seemed genuinely shocked when that provoked a repressive response that cost him his job. Sometimes you do hit a nerve and do more than just genially undermine ideas and practices that need to change. Sometimes the powers that be want a particular professor to drink hemlock, or go even further and just burn down the entire higher education edifice. That’s always been the risk of being an underminer, and sometimes that calls for some tactical caution. But otherwise, what could glorify the Western tradition more than to speak truth to power, practice skepticism and critical thought, and let the undermining chips fall where they may?