On grasping human things in human terms
Back in the 1980s, an editor at Harvard University Press had the bright idea of asking some of the leading lights of the day to write their own version of a philosophical dictionary, modelled on Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique (1764). The project petered out rather quickly, presumably because there turned out to be so few scholars around who had the breadth and wit to write such a book. But the great sociologist Robert Nisbet rose to the challenge and produced a philosophical dictionary, with the saucy title Prejudices, that was infinitely more charming and enlightening than its French model. It appeared in 1982.
Among the topics appearing in the table of contents for Nisbet’s dictionary is the term “Humanities.” The essay on that subject provides us with an excellent starting place for the present inquiry. It begins as follows: A faculty member was accosted by a colleague with the words, “I understand you spoke against the humanities the other day at faculty meeting.” “No indeed,” was the reply. “I love the humanities. I would die for the humanities. All I asked was, what the hell are the humanities?”
Nisbet continues:
The question is pertinent at this moment in history when the humanities are lying at death’s door. Their condition is known by the fact that they are receiving eulogies throughout the land. University presidents, foundation executives, newspaper editors, corporate spokesmen, Senators, Representatives, movie and television stars, all fill the air with their pious affirmations of civilization’s absolute dependence upon the humanities.
Once it was precisely this way with the classical languages. They died, while testimonials to their indispensability lay thick as cherry blossoms on the ground. The official death of Greek and Latin in this country might be put at 1920, the year of publication of a book filled with eulogies to the study of these languages by the same types who today are at work on the humanities. . . .
Greek and Latin began to die at about the time that the word classics became popular. In the days when the two languages flourished in America, no one was heard saying, “I study classics.” What one studied was Greek or Latin. . . . But [by the time] one says, “I am majoring in classics,” the processes of squish and slush have begun to operate. What happened to Greek and Latin subsequently happened to modern foreign languages in the curriculum, and today the word humanities conceals the same processes of squish and slush.
A rather gloomy Gus, our friend Robert Nisbet. And yet it is hard to contest the essential truth in what he says. Even in his observations about “classics” he proved prophetic. At Princeton, it is now possible to graduate with a degree in classics and not to have studied Greek or Latin at all. Quod erat demonstrandum! Nisbet might proclaim, confident that a Princeton classics major wouldn’t understand what the hell he was talking about.
And it is striking how much of Nisbet’s bill of accusations against the humanities, delivered in 1982, still applies very precisely, over four decades later: the domineering status of political ideology, obsession with questions of race and sexuality and identity, the steady preoccupation with oppression and marginalization and historical grievance, the celebration of the transgressive, the tyranny of overspecialization.All of this was firmly in place in the faculties of our “best” institutions during the Eighties.
I’ll return to Nisbet later in my remarks. But for now, let’s consider his plaintive question: “what the hell are the humanities?”…
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2023/11/the-burden-of-the-humanities
After the truth-shower 