The Day I Almost Saved the Humanities
By Tom McBride
“Julie is a humanist,” said the college dean to his new lady friend.
The lady friend represented a granting agency, and Julie was a faculty member’s spouse. The dean was trying to help his new friend with the faculty by identifying who was who and who did what. I could never figure out why he would say that Julie, who had never taught anything at the college, was a humanist, and I wondered about the grammar of such a statement. Is “Julie is a humanist” more like “Julie is a Texan” (as she was) or “Julie is a plumber” (as she was not)? If a humanist does not teach humanities, then what does she do? A plumber plumbs.
That spring, in Hilton Head with my mother-in-law’s friends, who described their work mysteriously in such terms as “being in debentures” and “merger commodities,” I told them I was a humanist, and they immediately knew that I was a nonentity. Meaning is use after all.
Back in those days, there was little talk in my limited corner of the world about saving the humanities. The setting for such a scene would have been unhelpful. If a man is drowning, then it would be apparent to all that he needed saving. In 1933 many (if not all) observers thought that capitalists needed saving—however much capitalists disliked the methods of the lifeguard.
The humanities, though, lacked a sense among the great unread majority that they needed salvation. Things were going quite well without much popular attention to the humanities. Today, the number of Americans gratified by the fight picking of irascible Larry David is greatly in excess of those pleased by the supreme understatement with which Dante depicts two Florentine lovers who, adulterous in life, are now stuck forever in the inferno with each other.
The humanities are difficult, but they don’t pay much. Computer science is difficult; it pays handsomely. If we are living in a sort of dark age, then one day it may be written that the academy at least kept the humanities alive through arcane scholarship. But it may also be written that such scholarship also prevented the humanities from becoming enjoyable. This may seem unfair, for, have not attention spans been so diminished by the Internet that reading even about a suicidal Native American in Michigan, as Ernest Hemingway depicts in a five-page story, is a chore? Maybe the charge is unjust, but either humanists like Julie and me have lost our ability to present the humanities pleasingly or the audience for such pleasure has vanished.
If it is the former, then we might blame modernism, postmodernism, deconstructionism, and all the other theoretical and presentational baggage that have insisted that the humanities are like a cult to which only elites may apply. Edmund Wilson used to argue that literature was lost when it was turned over to academicians, who made it their special fetish, and was taken away from journalists, who knew how to reach a much bigger daily audience.
It may be, however, that any large audience for the humanities—for Geoffrey Chaucer or John Coetzee or David Hume or Richard Rorty—has disappeared (or has never been). Here we might blame the Internet (once again) or curse cable television or decry the transformation of just about everything deemed worthy—from health care to ecology to Bluetooth to market regulation—into something scientific. What merely depicts human experience—in its terror, ambiguity, delight, and possibility—would seem ever so beside the point. As Saul Bellow and Allan Bloom moved into their cranky and dispensable old age, they would complain that every other story on the evening news, or so it seemed, was about how to live longer or banish aches and pains.
The humanities have no such answers. One may labor to discover whether Milton is on Satan’s side in the war with God, only to conclude that Milton is mainly, as one critic has said, on the side of sides: We want to be bad and we want to be good, and that’s the perpetual contest for human beings. Where’s the new treatment for that? Until Dr. Jekyll gets on Brian Wilson or Katie Couric one afternoon, no one will care.
It may be that the humanities will become more important when their audience decides that matters are in a permanent muddle, as did the young South African freedom fighter who knew that there was little comfort to look forward to and so turned to Shakespeare as an expression of what human beings might be capable of before being shipwrecked. When life or society or conditions have made it clear that, to paraphrase King Lear, need is always going to be reasoned no matter where we go or what we try to do, then the humanities might become popular. The audience will discover that amid the lilting trivialities of Virginia Woolf’s characters there was inner dread and desperation, and the audience will wonder how Woolf had been so prescient about their own situation.
By then people may be too feverish and hungry to read, or too poor to buy books. Folks may turn to God, who, though a fine fellow, is no humanist. I have always told my humanities students that much of what they are reading with me will make fuller sense only when life gets much harder and that I am divided between wanting them to get off easy and wanting them to become greater readers. Let us not forget that the best reader of Paradise Lost was Frankenstein’s creature, but only because he was driven to identify with Satan as hyperfriendlessness.
Given current conditions, though—the belief that scientific or social scientific knowledge will deliver us from harm, the unreadable terminology of academic discourse (take that, bourgeoisie!), and the diversions of alternative and guiltless pleasures—it is unlikely that the humanities will be saved or that any majority will deem that such an emergency even exists. Meanwhile, at Vanderbilt and Wisconsin–La Crosse, the patient is being kept alive, sort of, against the day when Wordsworth and Mrs. Gaskell will attain a more general popularity and pertinence, a miracle that would be rivaled only by the sudden springing up of new Woolworth stores on every American corner.
When I was younger, though, I didn’t always feel this way. In fact, there was a day when I almost saved the humanities. At my college, we were working on a new general education program, toward which the scientists and social scientists were either indifferent or hostile. Our dean, himself from the humanities, gently lectured a physicist—who had declared in the school newspaper that the Garden of Eden story was merely a myth—that in the new general education program such remarks would not be good enough: “Yes, Joe, it is a myth, but it is an eminently human myth, and you cannot dismiss what is human just because it enables scientific attention.” Joe giggled sheepishly and must have thought: “This dean is such a character; what will he say next?” Of course, Joe the Physicist had no intention of being part of such a program.
The natural scientists and economists and sociologists sniffed a plot. The new general education program would translate their work into humanistic terms, and instead of talking about cost-benefit analyses, they might be induced to speak of Hamlet’s eloquently irrational view that the human condition was beyond calculating the costs and well beyond contemplating the benefits. Still, we got a lot further with this program than we ever thought we would. I was on the committee pushing for it, and when it came to the academic senate, it almost passed.
I had friends among the scientists and social scientists, you see, and had convinced them to give our agenda a trial basis. I knew the vote would be close, and it was. It came within just one of passing. Had it done so, we humanists could have offered pilot courses the following year. In time we would have convinced our nonhumanist friends that, in the end, their knowledge, too, comes back to human decisions, motives, and observations. In time we would have also sold them seaside property in Colorado. Isn’t rhetoric, after all, part of the humanities, too?
Yet we failed. The program was never heard of again. The conspiracy was foiled. Now, many years later, given these hard economic times, I turn for acceptance not to Albert Camus’ happy Sisyphus, joyfully rolling his ball up and down, down and up, reveling in the absurdity of it all, but for reassurance I call my friends in the economics department, who tell me, in language anything but humanistic and in discourse almost completely bloodless, that the recession will someday end.
Thank goodness. I shouldn’t want to get to the point where I’m starting to understand Keats’s words that to think is to sorrow and then have to go in for a doubling of my Lexapro. •
