Roger Kimball’s musings on the deterioration of the Development of Western Civilization program at Providence College (via Marc Comtois’s Twitter feed) reminded me of something I’d intended to write about last week.

Kimball points to an essay in the college’s magazine by Professor Jennifer Illuzzi that indicates that the program is transforming (or has transformed) from a survey of the great thinking throughout history upon which our society is based into another identity-politics deconstruction.  The following quotation is from a a letter that Kimball’s friend sent to the school president, Father Brian Shanley, who proceeded to forward it on to somebody else for a response:

[I]nstead of educating undergraduate students who arrive in college with little (if any) knowledge of the foundations of Western Civilization, the courses will not waste any time in teaching them but will jump straight into “unearthing” its “problematic foundations.”  Even before students are able to acquire a modicum of familiarity with the works that provided those foundations, they are prompted to criticize them. And it is a very specific kind of criticism that is imposed on those classics and on those unknowing students: the contemporary ideologies of feminism and racism. Instead of enabling students to understand, for instance, how Cathedral schools from the 9th through the 11th century paved the way for the great philosophical achievements of Scholasticism in the 13th century, or the great culture that gave us Gothic Cathedrals, the Summas, medieval polyphony and the great literature of the 13th and 14th centuries, they will be summoned to identify, in those works, what comfortable 21st century academics of a certain inclination have placed on top of their agenda, namely sex and race. Instead of letting the works speak for themselves so that the students can learn from them, those works will be submitted to the ideological cookie-cutter of racism and sexism, stripping them of their essence as classics and leaving only the ugly, imaginary charge with which they were condemned before being read.

Apparently, Professor Illuzzi had written that the department is “doing something rare here.”  That’s a laugh.  You can find this material at any college, even if you’re not looking for it.  That’s despite the fact that the market demand for such material is questionable, at best; this seems to be entirely driven not by consideration of the sort of education that people want, but by the sort of lessons that faculty want to teach.

Last week (via Instapundit), I came across an essay in The Atlantic by Benjamin Winterhalter titled, “The Morbid Fascination With the Death of the Humanities“:

See, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there is a crisis occurring in the humanities. I cannot remember the last time I browsed the op-ed section of The New York Times without encountering someone worrying about “the continuing value of a humanities education in an increasingly technology-driven world” or something similar. For the past several years, stories about declining funding, poor job prospects, and sagging enrollments have dominated the public conversation. These stories are so prevalent, in fact, that it has become rather trite to publicly wring one’s hands over the decline of the humanities. The New Republic even features the macabre article tag “Humanities Deathwatch.” In truth, the existence of the crisis is so solidly established that complaining about the hand-wringing over the crisis has itself become a cliché.

The culprit, writes Winterhalter, is the emphasis on more technical areas of intellectual inquiry, which are more specifically and visibly related to job prospects.  That’s probably part of it, but it seems to me the employment factor exacerbates another, more fundamental, reason that the humanities are in decline as an academic subject.

As a practical matter, there are some things that are best conveyed through the humanities, and some audiences best receive lessons — even technical ones — through the humanities’ methods.  If students of the humanities emerged from their educations able to use those skills in a broad way, employers of all stripes would recognize that and hire them.  The problem is, as Glenn Reynolds suggests at the Instapundit link above, the humanities “have largely squandered the moral and intellectual capital they once possessed by adopting the roles of adversaries to, rather than preservers of, the larger culture.”  The academics decided that their role was to deconstruct the messages being sent because they didn’t accord with their radical politics.

Combing history and literature for examples of cause and effect can train just about anybody to think critically, even if they understand it to be “common sense.”  So, rather than teach students how to understand what has happened in history, or what an author was trying to convey with his work, and thereby train them how to avoid history’s pitfalls and to convey deep messages through their own work, academics taught why the story of history is a lie and why the author was missing his own point.

Unfortunately, being able to discredit somebody’s work is not the same as being able to do it better.

Worse, the message is always the same: straight white men are evil and must be restrained and held to account. Aside from being nakedly racist and offensive, that’s not a very useful, or even interesting, bit of knowledge outside of the political aspirations of hard-core progressives.  Moreover, it’s just not true.  To construct one’s worldview around radical ideology is to insist on living in a world that doesn’t jibe with reality.  (See here for an extreme consequence.)

Perhaps the radical professors can take comfort in the possibility that their mission is accomplished. They’ve infected multiple generations, at this point, with their nonsense, and the presidency of Barack Obama, along with the fates of some canary states, like Rhode Island, suggests that the dishonest lessons have been learned. Reconstructing what the humanities have destroyed, if it is possible, may prove to be the work of several generations.

I’d wager, though, that humanities departments that made it their goal to reinvigorate the discipline — by reinforcing, rather than undermining, the Development of Western Civilization program at Providence College, for example — would find themselves drawing new students.  Interviewing a graduate student in the humanities, Winterhalter offers this intriguing possibility:

Matt’s doctoral thesis is a great example of this: He claims, in essence, that literary modernism’s insights about the relationship between abstract thoughts and tangible objects are now being understood by neurological research. “This thesis of Ezra Pound’s that poetry should yoke ideas to particular objects—so that the thing and the thought are brought together in a single manifold,” he said, “actually anticipates a very recent neuroscientific insight, which is that, in certain aesthetic states, processing and perception happen in the same cortical centers of the brain.” Matt’s big idea, in other words, is that literature sometimes comes to important conclusions about the nature of consciousness and reality before science can catch up. “The point is—and this is a major claim of literary theorists—that literature allows us to feel our way around insights that we don’t yet have a clean, conceptual articulation of.” By his logic, then, the way to drive science forward might be to fund the study of literature.

A related activity to perception is imagination; to some degree, we perceive things that are purely within our minds.  And one way we understand complicated subjects is by metaphor, meaning that if we have the wrong metaphor for a technical concept, it will be more difficult to understand and expand it.  This, I’d say, is a specific challenge for physics, because things for which we use the metaphor of “particles” don’t behave as particles.  Somebody mainly educated in the humanities, therefore, who gains sufficient understanding of a technical subject could revolutionize the field by developing a better metaphor.

A broader point that spins out from Matt’s doctoral thesis, however, is that human beings can understand things without being able to articulate them. I associate such knowledge with the soul and with spirituality, but that isn’t necessary to understand the point: Human beings don’t only (or even primarily) comprehend the universe through abstractions and formulas.  And over time, that more-intuitive knowledge collects within the culture.

The trick that kicked off the successes of the same-sex marriage movement is an excellent example. Activists challenged the traditionalists to articulate why marriage should be defined as between a man and a woman, but the entire function of traditional marriage is to convey a lesson about how to structure families without everybody’s being able to explain it in technical, sociological terms. Of course, the movement proceeded to tar and unjustly ridicule anybody who endeavored such an articulation, foreclosing the possibility that our society could remind itself of the foundations of its beliefs about marriage.

Just so, Winterhalter quotes another humanities academic:

This is noteworthy mostly because Harvard’s government department is slanted heavily toward quantitative research, making a humanities-focused thinker like John something of an outsider. “Politics,” John said as though reciting from a prepared lecture, “is more complex than the science side of the government department would ever even guess. It consists of our arguments to each other about what is right and what is best and what has been and what should be. To only study behavior—to measure the exact amount of the incumbency advantage, for example—is not even close to what politics really is, which is a form of moral discourse. The humanities offer the only means of accessing that moral discourse.”

Unmoored from the common sense embedded in tradition and lessons in critical thinking, our society is less capable of moral comprehension at all, leaving it to the people with the largest platforms and/or the most vociferous voices to fill the gap and tell us what to believe.  Whether you consider it a metaphor or literal truth, Satan has effected a masterful turn if even a Catholic university is incapable of understanding this point, to the extent that the priest charged with guiding the institution hands what is essentially a moral concern off to an academic for response, as if the concern were technical.