The True Crisis of the Humanities

The humanities are in crisis, as readers of Quadrant will be only too aware. What was once the jewel in the crown of scholarship in Western civilisation has become a pedagogical sheltered workshop in our universities, totally dedicated to promulgating anti-Western, anti-liberal, anti-democratic and (literally) anti-human ideologies. This situation has recently attracted the attention of the media and the federal government, which has proposed changes to course fee structures that are intended to dissuade students from enrolling in what have become useless if not in fact pernicious degrees in the humanities, arts and social sciences.

Unfortunately, the intensity of the reaction to this appalling situation has obscured the true nature of the humanities and their once illustrious history as the scholarly arm of humanism, stretching back seven centuries as a field of study, and over 2000 years as a project to lay claim “to the glory that was Greece / And the grandeur that was Rome” (to quote Edgar Allan Poe’s famous words from “To Helen”).

This heritage has been forgotten in the increasingly furious reaction to the ideological coup that has taken place over the past fifty years. The humanities have been hollowed out, leaving only a shell; the traditional disciplines have either been driven out or completely debauched intellectually, and a whole range of new ideology-infested subjects have set up home in their place. Perversely, while living comfortably in this “humanities” shell the tenured practitioners of these subjects have adopted as their mission the complete denunciation and destruction of the humanities and humanism, along with Western civilisation in general. This is the true crisis of the humanities.

Even some defenders of the humanities misunderstand the tradition and where its strengths lie. For example, in an attempted defence of the field (Weekend Australian, June 27), Luke Slattery tries to bolster his case by declaring, “I don’t believe humanism is an exclusive product of Western civilisation. And I think, on balance, that there is a strong case for an under­graduate program in multicultural humanism anchored in the African, Asian and Middle Eastern traditions.”

This is wrong on a number of counts, but it particularly betrays the fundamental failure of nerve that has undermined the humanities and their once impregnable position in the universities. It seems to have been conceded that humanism is a possession of many civilisations and that the humanities can’t stand on their own as a product of Western civilisation, but must be reinforced and have their existence justified by importing elements from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. This claim falls apart once the intellectual traditions of these regions are actually explored. Moreover, it is condescending, as if these other cultures should be gratified by our appropriation of what they might regard as their intellectual treasures.

However, it is also a defence mechanism, prompted by the outrageous “cancel culture” attack on proposed courses in Western civilisation. “It’s all right,” our apologists are saying, “we’re terribly inclusive; it’s not just the West, there’s room in the humanist tradition and the humanities for everyone.” It’s also prompted by the Left’s relentless campaign of denigration of Western civilisation, humanism and the humanities. For example, it is claimed that humanism maintains an “ancient continuity” between Classical Greek civilisation and Nazism (see Tony Davies, Humanism, 2008). From a radical perspective, attacks on humanism are commonplace, typically denouncing it as an ideological construct lying at the heart of Western culture, disguising various forms of monstrous oppression. Consequently, its more reticent defenders embrace a sort of inclusive academic multiculturalism, looking for allies and hoping for safety in numbers.

This is not the right path to take. What is required is an unapologetic reassertion of the humanist tradition and its central place in Western civilisation. Let us now look at what we have lost in the humanities, and then at what has come to take its place, hollowing out the once great tradition and living comfortably in its shell. For reasons of conciseness, we will focus on the diametrically opposed visions of humanity, the self, and the individual that lie at the centre of both humanism and its deadly anti-humanist ideologies.

Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304–74) is generally regarded as the father of humanism, although the seeds of that revolutionary program had been sown earlier, as classical texts began to filter into Europe in the eleventh century. Petrarch began reflecting on human potentiality and the “this-worldly” meaning of life, and saw how scholars could draw upon the cultural treasures of classical civilisation to augment and develop the Christian tradition. This quest was taken up in the fifteenth century by scholars of the Italian Renaissance, and humanism’s subsequent influence is one of the main reasons the Renaissance is viewed as a distinct historical period, a time of rebirth of classical learning after the so-called “Dark Ages” lamented by Petrarch.

It is important to note, as Oscar Kristeller pointed out in 1961, that “Renaissance humanism was not … a philosophical tendency or system, but rather a cultural and educational program which emphasised and developed” the study of the humanities. Taken together, these disciplines constituted a package that empowered scholarship and personal transformation. Its guiding concerns included the dignity of the human quest in this life, the privileged place humanity occupies in the universe, the importance of the various classical systems of thought and other forms of ancient wisdom, an interest in the natural world, and a profound new emphasis on the individual.

This revolutionary program was identified by Jacob Burckhardt in his literally epoch-defining work, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). This book focuses particularly on “the development of the individual” and “the revival of antiquity”, their interaction, along with the rise, flourishing and destiny of humanism in the period.

The term itself was introduced (as humanismus) by nineteenth-century German scholars to reflect the Renaissance emphasis upon classical studies in education taught by the umanisti, scholars of classical literature. Umanisti is derived from the studia humanitatis, which consisted of such disciplines as grammar, poetry, rhetoric, history and moral philosophy, and was derived in turn from the Greek paideia. This etymology emphasises how the humanities pursue a scholarly and educational ideal that stretches back millennia to the very origins of Western civilisation. (This is why it is bizarre to cede “joint ownership” of the tradition to “Africa, Asia, and the Middle East”, as our apologists are prepared to do.)

This educational ideal was realised in the form of the “liberal arts” (artes liberales). These are those seven intellectual disciplines that it was considered essential for free citizens to master if they were to participate fully in civic life. These disciplines were divided into two groups. Initially, in antiquity there were three disciplines—grammar, rhetoric and logic—which constituted the Trivium. In the Middle Ages four were added—arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy—which constituted the Quadrivium.

These two groupings have important characteristics that have largely been forgotten, to our great detriment. The Trivium focuses on those disciplines that are concerned with the realm of mind, while the Quadrivium is concerned with the realm of matter and space. Moreover, these disciplines involve intransitive activity—“the action begins in the agent and ends in the agent, who is perfected by the action”. This may be contrasted with utilitarian disciplines like the fine or manual arts, which involve transitive action—“the action goes out from the agent and ends in the object produced”, usually producing something of cultural or commercial value. Such a distinction between inwardly and outwardly directed actions reflects the emphasis on the perfection of the individual that defined the traditional humanities, and that we are emphasising here.

Indeed, the discovery and transformation of the self was central to Renaissance Humanism. As Kristeller observes, it was driven by a fundamental “tendency to express, and to consider worth expressing, the concrete uniqueness of one’s feelings, opinions, experiences, and surroundings”. It hearkened back to the spiritual exercises of ancient philosophy, analysed by Pierre Hadot (Philosophy as a Way of Life, 1995):

All spiritual exercises are, fundamentally, a return to the self, in which the self is liberated from the state of alienation into which it has been plunged by worries, passions and desires. The “self” liberated in this way is no longer merely our egoistic, passionate individuality: it is our moral person, open to universality and objectivity, and participating in universal nature or thought.

In this fashion, humanism explored subjective experience, promoted individual self-knowledge, and sought to identify and communicate the foundational values and practices of a life well lived. Letters, memoirs, confessions and biographies became popular genres (taking inspiration from the remarkable twelfth-century Letters of Abelard & Heloise). The pedagogy of humanism therefore aimed not just at the transmission of knowledge but above all at the development and eventual self-realisation of the individual, with the expectation that a vibrant and virtuous society would flow from this.

From this fundamental orientation, the humanist curriculum evolved and ramified over the centuries through the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, and the Age of Imperialism. Other disciplines were added, including history, Greek and poetry, and it became the foundation for elite education in Europe, particularly for the governing classes, the clergy and the professions, gradually spreading to the middle classes and other social strata. The humanistic ideal of a liberal arts education persisted until the middle of the twentieth century.

What happened then? At that time, the humanities and liberal arts were widely represented in Britain, Europe and in America, including the “Great Books” courses and civilisation survey subjects. In Australia similar survey courses existed, for example at the fledgling La Trobe University before it was engulfed by student radicalism.

Meanwhile, secondary schools had comprehensive humanities curricula, culminating with demanding year-long senior subjects in English Literature, British History, Modern European History, Eighteenth-Century History, Classical Civilisation, Ancient History, Australian History, and Renaissance and Reformation History. Even in state high schools it was common for the senior masters to wear academic gowns, oversee specialist subject libraries, and seek to mentor promising students into humanistic academic studies.  

Out in suburbia, fifty-four-volume editions of the Great Books of the Western World were being sold door-to-door, along with the Encyclopedia Britannica, which lasted in print from 1768 to 2010, offering about 40 million words on half a million topics. These monuments to the humanist faith in the value of knowledge were so expensive that they were offered on “hire purchase” terms, and their purchase by hard-pressed working families was a testimony to the preparedness of ordinary folk to invest in that knowledge.

But it was the height of the Cold War, the West was entering the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and innumerable new universities were opening up for the Baby Boomers. Abruptly, this entire realm of humanist pedagogy and humanities scholarship came under concerted attack. Avowed communists of various allegiances, radical New Leftists, anti-Western ideologues, exponents of identity politics, feminists, self-styled victims’ groups, radical environmentalists, multiculturalists and advocates of political correctness came to form a formidable “Progressive” coalition that depicted the traditional courses as instruments of Western imperialism, technocratic oppression, elitism, sexism, racism and ecological destruction. Academic gowns were hastily put away as a new generation of teachers took over.

Consequently, the Great Books courses largely vanished from curricula and Western civilisation courses were demonised, as we have seen in Australia with the Ramsay Centre’s Western Civilisation initiative. Traditional history and literature subjects atrophied in the universities and virtually disappeared in Australian schools as sophisticated stand-alone subjects possessing a canon of work that was systematically taught and studied. In their place were substituted ideologically-loaded courses “taught” via project work that pillages the internet, and addressing social issues, favoured victim groups, popular culture and “inclusive” and non-offensive courses.

This ideological assault found acute expression in the changing attitudes in literature and history, where the “high culture” concerns of the Renaissance and the humanist tradition were dismissed as elitist “minority interests”. The impact was well described by Veronica Brady in 1988:

Literary texts [now] mattered not because they were concerned with questions of value or even because they were manifestations of individual consciousness … It was not consciousness but the ways in which consciousness was produced and structured that mattered. The notion of an autonomous world of the individual imagination was nonsense, as were the ideas that people shape their own lives and think their own thoughts.

This approach was formalised as “theory”, and its dominance was exemplified by such gargantuan anthologies as the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, which runs to some 2850 pages of frequently impenetrable prose extracts. It declares explicitly that the study of literature is inherently political, must take its lead from new social movements, must provoke scepticism about society’s institutions and values, and must be prepared to engage in political “resistance”—the revolution begins in the tutorial.

This shift reflected the tremendous influence of neo-Marxist theory, social history, feminism, postmodernism and post-colonialist studies, described so presciently by Keith Windschuttle in The Killing of History (1994). And so, as another leading historian, Norman Davies, observed:

Humanist thought, Reformation theology, scientific discovery, and overseas exploration have had to give way … The professionals now like to spotlight magic, vagrancy, disease, or the decimation of colonial populations.

The Renaissance itself quickly fell victim to this shift from the sublime to the mundane. Once, entire volumes were routinely devoted to it but soon a prominent history of the past millennium offered no specific discussion of the Renaissance in a work of over 800 pages, while another massive history of Europe gave it only a two-page subsection. In Australia, where there was once an entire Year 12 subject on Renaissance and Reformation History, a new history curriculum offered the era only as an elective at Year 8 level, competing with Medieval Europe, the Vikings, and the Ottoman Empire. Meanwhile, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment were barely mentioned. This represented the suppression of the most important periods in modern history. Is it any wonder that the humanities sank into crisis?

This was especially so as this iconoclastic intelligentsia refined its anti-humanist counter-ideology. This coalition of intellectuals, academics, teachers, ideologues, writers, artists and film-makers formed an “adversary culture”, as Lionel Trilling put it. It defined itself in terms of its opposition to what it first dismissed as “bourgeois” middle-class culture, then as imperialism, then as a “patriarchy”, then as a racist dystopia, before finally turning against Western civilisation in general. Posing always as outsiders, this intelligentsia came quickly to actually dominate the very culture they pretended to be opposing. As Daniel Bell observed in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1974), they soon controlled “the publishing houses, museums, and galleries; the major news, picture, and cultural weeklies and monthlies, the theatre, the cinema, and the universities”. In the decades since, this stranglehold became ever tighter, culminating in the cultural auto-da-fés and bonfires of the vanities that we are presently enduring.

At the level of political critique, conventional Marxism-Leninism has had a tremendous impact, as with the multi-million-selling A People’s History of the United States (1980) by Howard Zinn. This spawned a copycat Australian version, A People’s History of Australia since 1788, deliberately published in 1988 to spoil the Bicentennial. 

This lumpen-Marxism was augmented by the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School and the influential Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), copies of which were handed around in the 1960s like contraband samizdat. Its authors, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, claimed that Reason has not realised its Enlightenment promise of liberation but had instead become a totalitarian force that links liberal democracy with Stalinism and Nazism as a form of totalitarianism. For them, this is epitomised by the heroine of the Marquis de Sade’s pornographic novel Juliette (1798), who, in David Macey’s words, “exploits the power of rational thought as an instrument of sadistic domination and pleasure. Juliette enjoys the exquisite pleasures of destroying the civilization of the Enlightenment with the very weapons it has created.” It is a measure of the irresponsibility and superficiality of this type of radicalism that it makes “Reason” the enemy and takes evidence for its argument from pornography.

It is at the level of the human person that the intelligentsia made its anti-humanism explicit and it is here that the contrast with the historical humanist tradition is so striking. According to this version of neo-Marxism, “‘men’ do not make history, nor find their ‘truth’ or ‘purpose’ in it; history is a process without a subject”. Similarly, the communist theoretician (and wife-murderer) Louis Althusser, argued that humanism is merely the ideology of the bourgeois revolution and capitalist society. According to him, history has no subject but simply charts the trajectory through time of economic forces and the relations of production, carrying the masses along with them.

Behind such anti-humanism was Claude Levi-Strauss, the inventor of structuralism, which reduces human beings to place-markers in an infinite system of signs. He especially denounced the “lawless humanism” that was allegedly destroying non-Western cultures and the ecological balance of the earth. The magnitude of his anti-humanism can be measured by his assertion that “the survival of [a single] species should be as precious to us as that of the entire corpus of a Michelangelo, a Rembrandt, a Rousseau, or a Kant”.

Meanwhile, the structuralist psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan insisted that the Western self is radically split, and that the Cartesian notion of a stable and integrated subject is the core, crippling illusion of humanism. Subsequently, the post-structuralist philosopher Michel Foucault famously announced “the death of man”: “Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end,” he declared, “and as the structures that shape human knowledge shift”, so man will disappear, “erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea”. Under the impact of such attacks, humanism became “a code word for the impotent and reactionary values of the bourgeois literary canon builders of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries”, as one radical feminist put it.

According to this anti-humanist ideology, the humanist pursuit of knowledge is illusory, because there is no fixed structure to the world and therefore there can be no final correspondence between that world and our knowledge of it. Similarly, there are no “essences”, no essential nature of anything; there is no “human nature”, and there is no “woman” or “man” (as J.K. Rowling recently discovered to her cost). Reality is constructed and knowledge is reducible to the language via which this is accomplished. Moreover, language is merely conventional and subject to the wilful exercise of power. Power and knowledge are therefore conflated and interchangeable according to the formula made famous by Foucault, “Power/Knowledge”. Similarly, the world is only text and outside the text there is nothing, as Jacques Derrida insisted.

From this it follows that those who control language control reality, which is why the Left is so focused on words, signs, symbols, images and language generally. In particular, it insists there are no settled “selves” but only constructed identities, drawing on sexual fantasies and the flotsam and jetsam of contemporary popular culture. In academia, this mandates all sorts of subjects in feminist and queer theory, transgender studies and the rest. It also underpins the concept of “intersectionality”, according to which a person is the “intersection” of the sum total of a wide range of “identities” (such as gender, race, class and body image), all of which are caught up in the play of “Power/Knowledge” in an oppressive society.

So flimsy and fragile are these fashioned facades that they demand to be protected from real and imagined slights by the draconian use of state power, as with the Australian Human Rights Commission and similar state agencies. Such defensiveness is understandable, as these “snowflakes” with their constructed personas hover over an existential void, utterly vulnerable to reason, which is why reason is demonised. Awaiting them is “the abyss of annihilation” brought by the inevitable collision with reality. This is what makes those possessed by these illusions so paranoid and dangerous, as various people dragged before the AHRC star chamber have discovered.

So this is what has happened to the humanities—its true crisis. A tradition some 750 years in the making has been invaded, pirated, debauched and eventually hollowed out, leaving a shell within which a whole range of alien ideas have set up shop. Ensconced in tenured positions in our universities, their advocates play out their intellectual fantasies, imagining that they and their acolytes are infinitely plastic beings, floating about in a sea of desire, while they seek determinedly to destroy not only the humanist tradition but the entire civilisation built around it. These people and their ideologies now represent the humanities.

What is the result? From a conservative perspective, as John Carroll wrote in Humanism (1993):

We live amidst the ruins of the great, 500-year epoch of Humanism. Around us is that colossal wreck. Our culture is a flat expanse of rubble. It hardly offers shelter from a mild cosmic breeze, never mind one of those icy gales that regularly return to rip people out of the cosy intimacy of their daily lives and confront them with oblivion.

But what is now a wreck was for half a millennium “a huge and brilliantly lit metropolis of a culture” that hosted “the most sustained bout of philosophical, literary, artistic and musical wrestling known to man”. At stake in this Promethean struggle was “the future of the Western soul”, and the battle was lost.

But perhaps it hasn’t been finally lost; perhaps there is an opportunity for a counter-attack, as the products of the debauched teachings infecting our universities demonstrate their wilful, nihilistic ignorance in the streets and on social media. Dressing up their iconoclasm as a moral posture, they are campaigning to destroy a civilisation so they don’t have to learn about it. Probably the universities will have to be cut free and their academic ideologues left to wither on the vine. And meanwhile, in circles where the Western tradition and scholarship are still valued, the process of reclamation of humanism and the humanities can begin.

Mervyn Bendle is contributing a series of articles on Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation on Quadrant Online.