Opinions

The Humanities' Decline Makes Us Morally Obtuse


The great works of literature, history and philosophy that used to be at the center of a college education have been shunted to the sidelines or discarded entirely over the past two decades or more. This is a loss on many fronts, but one example is the debate around Asia Argento. One of the first whistle-blowers against Harvey Weinstein, Ms. Argento has since been accused of sexually assaulting a 17-year old boy.

For some, Ms. Argento’s action cancels out her earlier complaint. Others feel the need to dismiss the accusation against her as either fraudulent or trivial. Both approaches strike me as ignorant. This woman could certainly have been the victim of abuse and still be herself a perpetrator. One doesn’t negate the other. It simply shows that people can be blind where they should be most acutely conscious. We see this all the time when our friends complain about traits in others that are prominent in themselves.

Few people seem to be able to reconcile two overlapping truths—that someone can have a valid grievance in one context and be guilty of some version of the same thing in another. I see this as a failure of education. By “education,” I do not mean the workshops that teach us what not to say or do to avoid offending others. That is training, not education (and I’m not sure how well it actually sticks).

The Humanities’ Decline Makes Us Morally Obtuse



Photo:

iStock/Getty Images

The assumption these days is that people are monolithic—either completely good or completely bad. The best way to repudiate that assumption it to study the humanities, which illuminate human life in all its complexity. How can you think about crime or misconduct in such an unimaginative way if you’ve read great literature: adultery after “Anna Karenina,” bad parenting after “Death of a Salesman,” political extremism and even murder after “Julius Caesar”?

The greatness of these works is that they don’t excuse the conduct in question, but they do help explain it as a function of human frailty and misguided motives, sometimes of the most high-minded sort. They expose the back story that otherwise would be hidden from us so that we can, if not sympathize, at least go some way toward understanding what happened. They humanize what would otherwise look like simple stupidity or evil.

When we read the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights as first written, the disjunction between their call for freedom and equality and their maintenance of a slave-holding society is appalling. These documents imply an ideal of which the founders fell abysmally short. But this need not negate the greatness of their vision or incite us to denounce these men as entirely benighted. Both the ideal and the reality are part of the story that needs to be taught.

Education is the immersion in “the best which has been thought and said in the world,” as the 19th-century critic and poet Matthew Arnold put it. That “best” can be difficult, unclear, even contradictory. Part of being “the best” is that a work doesn’t reduce to a formula. It can also be written by people who are far from exemplary.

The emphasis on STEM fields in higher education reflects the need for expertise in a high-tech world. But this has tended to make the “soft” fields of the humanities seem weak and easy. Science, engineering and finance may be hard, but literature, history and philosophy are complex—impossible to resolve with a yes-or-no, right-or-wrong answer. This is precisely what constitutes their importance as a tool for living. Metaphysics takes its name from the idea that it goes beyond “hard” science into the realm of moral and intellectual speculation, where no empirical proof is possible.

The humanities teach understanding, but they also teach humility: that we may be wrong and our enemies may be right, that the past can be criticized without our necessarily feeling superior to it, that people’s professed motives are not the whole story, and that the division of the world into oppressors and victims is a simplistic fairy tale.

We speak about the decline of the humanities without fully recognizing how it has hurt our society. If we want our nation to heal and thrive, we must put the study of literature, history and philosophy back at the center of our curricula and require that students study complex works—not just difficult ones.

Ms. Cohen is a dean and English professor at Drexel University.



READ SOURCE

Leave a Reply

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.