Crisis in the Humanities

The Humanities in American Life: Report of the Commission on the Humanities.
University of California Press. 192 pp. $12.50.

The appointment of a commission of inquiry is never a sign of health in the subject being studied. The more prestigious the inquirers, the sicker the patient is assumed to be. So it is with the humanities in our time, and the appearance of this new report, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and signed by the pillars of the American educational establishment, augurs no better for the future of civilized learning than did its predecessor, the 1964 study sponsored by (among others) the American Council of Learned Societies.

The earlier report was strongly influential in the creation the following year of the National Endowment for the Humanities, an institution whose fortunes have until recently waxed as the humanities themselves have waned. The current report quite properly begins with a consideration of just what the humanities are that should have a place in American life. Not surprisingly, to this slippery question the Rockefeller Commission advances an all-inclusive, not to say slippery, answer.

For the notables who signed this report—among them such stars as Richard Lyman (President of the Rockefeller Foundation), Robert Coles (Professor of Psychiatry and Medical. Humanities at Harvard), Richard Lamm (Governor of Colorado), Martin Marty (Professor of the History of Modern Christianity at the University of Chicago), and Harry Woolf (Director of the Institute for Advanced Study)—the humanities are based on “languages and literature, history and philosophy,” but they are vastly more than even the sum of these and related fields. Rather, they “mirror our own image and our image of the world”; in essence, they are “a spirit or an attitude toward humanity.” Along with this unbounded definition is assumed a natural corollary: those who engage professionally in the humanities are humanists. Like the subjects they treat, humanists are to be found in all areas and cultures, in all styles and qualities, in possession of all degrees of relevance and appeal. The circle is thus complete: humanists are defined by their practice and the humanities are defined by their practitioners.

For the Rockefeller team (in contrast, it must be said, to the 1964 report) the essence of the humanities clearly does not lie in any traditional body of great works. As Hilton Kramer has pointed out in a devastating review of this new report in the New York Times, the great figures of classical and modern humanism are strikingly absent from these pages. Even such a central figure in the debate over the value of the humanities as Matthew Arnold—as well, one might add, as his cherished adversary Cardinal Newman—is here an unperson. The very idea of choosing mentors so strict and demanding could only be anathema to the writers of words like these:

Because each generation views the factual basis of the humanities from a new vantage point, education should focus on major themes common to human experience rather than adhere to a rigid canon of “great works.” Yet some works have been so important in shaping our cultural heritage that it is foolish to ignore them in the classroom or omit them from the shelves of school libraries. All young people should be introduced to classics from the Western cultural tradition, foreign cultures, and American racial and ethnic groups. In selecting appropriate works and teaching them, teachers must be sensitive to the age, background, and capacities of individual students.

As with great works, so with great values. The report does not regard the humanities as inculcators of such traditional values as honor, courage, family, or country. These hitherto sacrosanct goals are now, one must assume, capable only of existential definition. In their place, the report appears to advocate a kind of rootless skepticism:

By developing conceptual skills and imparting knowledge of traditions, the humanities encourage a critical examination of human values . . . in matters of human action, choice, and belief . . . the evidence is often ambiguous. The humanities do not impose any single set of normative values, whether moral, social, or aesthetic; rather, . . . they give historical perspective . . . [they] bring to life the ideal of cultural pluralism by expanding the number of perspectives from which questions of value may be viewed, by enlarging young people’s social and historical consciousness, and by activating an imaginative critical spirit.

Where content is so hollow, all that can be left is process, doing one knows not what for reasons one knows not why. In our time such a deracinating process is called education. And education is, in a broad sense, what the Rockefeller report is about. But precisely because what is to be taught is so vague, amorphous, and general, the discussion of education here is metamorphosed into nothing more elevated than an ingenious advocacy of jobs for those among the unemployed and underemployed who happen to call themselves humanists.

This collapsing of the humanities into the fate of those teaching them is amply conveyed more than once in the report, along with an implicit devaluation of learning for its own sake:

Graduate programs in the humanities that cannot offer students reasonable prospects of employment, whether academic or non-academic, should be abolished.

Two pages later, the point is made again:

The continued vitality of the humanities depends on the successful adjustment of graduate institutions to the job crisis.

But cutting programs—even those of no value to students who will be looking for employment—will itself further reduce the number of positions available. The report sees clearly that what is therefore needed is rather an expansion in humanities programs sufficient to keep the educational machine running at full speed. How is such an expansion to be managed? Here, indeed, is the meat of the commission’s thirty-one recommendations; here the positions taken are both simple and audacious.

The introduction of humanities-oriented and humanist-directed programs is to be mandated at every level of schooling, covering every level of student. Attempts to teach basic literacy to children and adults alike are to be enriched with the humanities. At the opposite end of the educational spectrum, doctors, lawyers, businessmen (and, no doubt, Indian chiefs as well) are to be indoctrinated with humanistic skills. Museums and libraries are to be urged to present, with the proper amount of humanist consultation, programs oriented to the humanities. The mass media are to be used to convey the needful gospel. It all suggests a sweeping rule: no American institution, public or private, indeed no aspect of American life whatsoever, should henceforth be without its humanist-administered component.

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All this, of course, takes money. The Rockefeller report advocates increased support for every kind of program from training to employment, from fellowships to sabbaticals, from exhibitions to archives, from audience-development to planning for the future. This support is to be extended both in the form of challenge grants and operating subsidies. The funds themselves are to come from every sort of private, foundation, and corporate giver, with particular emphasis to be placed on developing the relatively untapped area of business support for the humanities. And in a perhaps last yearning glance at the federal government as an endless cornucopia of the good, contributions are exhorted from a variety of Washington sources, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Department of the Interior, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the new Department of Education.

There are, to be sure, aspects even of this report which may give some limited comfort to those whose interest in the humanities and civilized culture as a whole is in the highest sense amateur rather than professional. The report recognizes the present drop in the standard of reading and writing skills; it acknowledges the damage done in the recent past by the system-wide search for novelty in programs and approaches; it admits that the long-term health of the humanities is not always well served by the concentration on marketing required by any thoroughgoing attempt at making the humanities truly popular. But having made these cogent points, the report does nothing to come to grips with the basic problems surrounding the place of the humanities in American life. These problems are principally two: what is the intellectual content of the humanities, and what are the proper substantive values which this content enshrines?

A traditional answer to the problem of the intellectual content of the humanities might be that they consist, in a way which changes so slowly as to seem almost unchanging, of the monuments of the Western tradition in both its secular and religious forms, along with a much more limited investigation of the highest achievements of other, non-Western civilizations. This view of the humanities finds them based in high culture, the enduring product of elites transmitted in most cases by writing but also by consciously created works of plastic, visual, and musical art. It need hardly be added that to this domain of culture are properly admitted those supporting scientific and archival disciplines necessary to assemble coherent areas of understanding.

These various areas of the life of the mind have, however, usually been studied for reasons which go far beyond their great inherent intellectual and aesthetic fascination. Though the humanities charm and move us because they are concerned with universal passions, their study has been advocated for centuries not because of this but because of the desirability of the values they embody. These values are elite, authoritative, and sure of themselves; they speak in the accents and out of the thoughts of the leading classes of the societies which together have produced the West. They link ideals of rank and order, war and courage, sacrifice and suffering, discipline and obedience, individuality and community, rationality and revelation, and, not least, God and man, to the evolving context of Western history.

This conception of the humanities was seen to be both correct and even necessary so long as the West was ascendant. The domestic and foreign sway of the West from the Renaissance to World War I provided a worldwide umbrella for this conception, and even after political power had passed from aristocracies to formerly subordinate classes, habits of leadership and deference assured the continuance of traditional values in education and society.

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This situation clearly no longer obtains. Neither the values nor the political structures of the West—in our case of the United States—command unanimous assent at home. Abroad, the populous Third World defines itself in part by its opposition to our ideals and politics. Our educators and our educated, no less than our public officials, professionals, and businessmen, trim their sails to the winds of social and ideological change; the ideal of the melting pot has been replaced by something very close to ethnic fission. That subgroup of the educated commonly called the intellectuals both assuages its guilt and sometimes makes its fortune by acting as midwife to what it sees as liberating destiny.

But a severe problem poses itself for such self-doubting facilitators of change. This problem is nothing-else than the dilemma of the humanities expressed in personal terms: just what do such intellectuals, educated as they are in the traditions and habits of the West, have to say to those, not only diverse but anarchic, who lack not only our past but even an awareness of their own?

Here is the reason the Rockefeller report is so scant on the question of content when it comes to the humanities in American life. Those responsible for this document are on the one hand unable to support fully the great tradition or to speak for the values of an elite culture; on the other hand they are unable to participate authentically in cultural worlds foreign to their own background. They take refuge, therefore, in the comfortable liberal exhortation of a larger pie with more and bigger slices for all. Yet regardless of how many debts this report discharges, and regardless of how many conflicting interests it satisfies, the commission’s basic refusal to take either an intellectual or a social stand can only guarantee a simple outcome for its recommendations: at first irrelevance, finally oblivion.