On behalf of humanities professors, Stephen Brockmann apologizes for failing to pass along to students the value of Western Civilization:
What on earth were we thinking? Exactly why was it considered progressive in the 1980s to get rid of courses like Western civilization (courses that frequently included both progressives and conservatives on their reading lists)? And why did supporting a traditional liberal arts education automatically make one a conservative — especially if such an education included philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx?
[. . .]
The battle between self-identified conservatives and progressives in the 1980s seems increasingly like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. While humanists were busy arguing amongst themselves, American college students and their families were turning in ever-increasing numbers away from the humanities and toward seemingly more pragmatic, more vocational concerns.
And who can really blame them? If humanists themselves could not even agree on the basic value, structure, and content of a liberal arts education — if some saw the tradition of Western civilization as one of oppression and tyranny, while others defended and validated it; if some argued that a humanistic education ought to be devoted to the voices of those previously excluded from “civilized” discussion, such as people of color and women, while others argued that such changes constituted a betrayal of the liberal arts — is it any wonder that students and their families began turning away from the humanities?
January 28th, 2011 | 10:23 am
I wonder about, especially the relevance bit. Neither I nor any of my fellow students ever got the chance to tell our professors that angry lesbian and left wing/minority writers like Adrienne Rich and Toni Morrison weren’t relevant to any of us. Students would’ve rather read Jane Austin and Shakespeare.
So I’m assuming relevance is a matter of what the professor cares about more than the students.
January 28th, 2011 | 11:02 am
Once university education became about how to earn a good living instead of how to live a good life, the liberal arts became irrelevant. The problem goes much deeper than the “culture wars.” Sadly few universities today focus on the development of the values and the relationships that mold their students into good citizens who can live good lives in service to the Lord and the community. Once the liberal arts professors began to deconstruct everything so that good and evil became meaningless terms, the liberal arts were dead. C. S. Lewis predicted it all in the Abolition of Man. The liberal arts community deconstructed itself out of a job.
January 28th, 2011 | 12:06 pm
“The Death of the Humanities” is simply one more consequence of “The Death of God.” Liberals like Matthew Arnold and his many heirs have long thought that the study of the Humanities could take the place of the worship of God. They’ve been proved wrong time and time again. “Killing” God means “killing” Humanity. “Killing” Humanity means killing the Humanities in turn. What we are witnessing now is merely secularization at a later stage, coming back to bite its own evangelists. A culture too scientistic and too materialistic and too utilitarian for God is surely going to be a culture too scientistic and too materialistic and too utilitarian for any Great Books, however great. And it certainly won’t be a culture that has much time for the dead-horse-flogging represented by efforts in what’s left of the Humanities to go on (and on and on) disparaging the greatness of those same Great Books for the “benefit” of fewer and fewer students, few of whom have ever once regarded them as great, any more than their professors ever did.
January 28th, 2011 | 4:10 pm
Western culture is essentially Roman culture. From the time of Charlemagne, at least, to the middle of the twentieth century, educated Europeans were saturated in the language, the literature and the culture of ancient Rome. I, myself, am one of the last products of such an education and I received it, ironically enough, at a Benedictine school, as that order was approaching its sesqui-millenium.
Now, the Romans were a people who hated work, despised commerce and lived by plundering and enslaving their neighbours. To be successful at this (and they were very successful) it was necessary to cultivate certain very real virtues: courage, perseverance, self-control, prudence, discipline, constancy in misfortune, devotion to the community. Patriotism meant hatred of foreigners – indeed, the very word “Foreigner” (Peregrinus) is a late one, in Latin, as Cato observes; before the end of the Second Punic War (218 – 201 BCE), they simply made do with Hostis or Servus – Enemy or Slave.
Liberty meant sharing in the government, which is to say, in overseeing the sharing of the spoils and the most honourable as well as the most lucrative professions were those of the soldier, the politician and the jurist. Property, of course, was a matter of pure positive law; to argue that everyone is entitled to the produce of his labour would have challenged the very foundations of a state founded on rapine and slavery.
That such an ethos should be congenial to the so-called “barbarian invaders” is obvious enough; in fact, most of them, like Clovis and Theodoric, were second- and third-generation commanders of Auxiliaries in the Imperial army. Likewise, it is hardly surprising that it should commend itself to their successors and descendents, the military aristocracies that ruled Europe for the next twelve hundred years.
Yet the very boys, who were taught at school to admire Hannibal, Alexander and Caesar as the finest products of the human spirit, were also taught, Sunday by Sunday, the Christian ethic: to renounce the world, and differ in every temper and way of life, from the spirit and the way of the world: to renounce all its goods, to fear none of its evils, to reject its joys, and have no value for its happiness: to be as new-born babes, that are born into a new state of things: to live as pilgrims in spiritual watching, in holy fear, and heavenly aspiring after another life: to take up our daily cross, to deny ourselves, to profess the blessedness of mourning, to seek the blessedness of poverty of spirit: to forsake the pride and vanity of riches, to take no thought for the morrow, to live in the profoundest state of humility, to rejoice in worldly sufferings: to reject the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life: to bear injuries, to forgive and bless our enemies, and to love mankind as God loves them: to give up our whole hearts and affections to God, and strive to enter through the strait gate into a life of eternal glory.
I can think of nothing more dangerous than to teach the one, without the other. The Romans were very like what we are fast becoming. That we lack their virutes will simply make us less successful at it. Perhaps, once again, the study of the classics should be confined to the cloister.
January 28th, 2011 | 6:57 pm
Oh, I remember those days. I was an undergrad at the University of Texas. The English Department — the largest in the known universe — was torn asunder by paladins of the right and left; or as Brockmann reminds us: The “right” and the “left”.
The line between right and left was blurry even at the time. At UT, the chief paladins on the “right” were, as they never tired of reminding us, veterans of the Berkeley Free Speech movement. One of them, Alan Gribben, is recently notorious for the newfangled Huckleberry Finn. Again the line is blurry: is a racially bowdlerized Huck Finn left-wing PC or obnoxious but basically apolitical presumption?
All the fuss truly did discourage me and who knows how many others from pursuing an academic career in the humanities. I had no desire to enter a field where a responsible, scholarly presentation of moderately conservative views so easily became an arena for self dramatizing culture warriors of the right and left.
A few years after the dust settled I ventured back into academia but found grad school and the professoriate not my cup of tea. It wasn’t so much the lock step left wing views as the pseudo professionalization of scholarship in the humanities which made it seem too much like hard work. That’s an unattractive feature of the humanities Brockmann neglects to mention in his article. But still, the 80s culture wars did more than enough harm.
January 28th, 2011 | 7:40 pm
I take it as a very encouraging sign that culture (and young people in particular) are taking their own interest in the subjects that were once taught as “the humanities”.
How we approach and “do” education in this country is due for a renewal. I see that renewal in the making, and feel more encouraged than discouraged.
It is sometimes unfortunate that you don’t value a thing til you’ve lost it, or come close to losing it.
January 29th, 2011 | 12:06 am
Western Civilization was born when Luke united the Graeco-Roman classical world with the Judaeo-Christian world-view based on love of God and love of neighbor.
In the Catholic vision, always a ‘both/and’ vision, faith and reason were united without confusion or fusion
The liberal arts, which originally came from Greece, came into Western Civilization primarily through Augustine and then was further spread within benedictine monasticism and the first universities in Europe
January 29th, 2011 | 5:00 am
Botolph, to speak of Latin writers only, Lactantius lived nearly two centuries before Augustine and Jerome a century after Lactantius. Both were steeped in the classics. Tertullian and Cyprian of Carthage write beautiful Latin and were Roman to the core.
Boethius and Sidonius Appolonaris wrote both verse and prose worthy of the Silver Age. Personally, I think Boethius is over-rated as a philosopner and greatly under-rated as a poet, much better than Persius or Tibillus.
This is not to depreciate Augustine, but to place him in the context of a Christian, Latin culture.
Of course, the liberal arts came from Greece, but Rome set her stamp on them; everyone, nowadays, reads Homer through Vergil’s eyes.
What I was trying to say, obviously rather ineptly, is that there was a profound difference in ethos, between the Christian culture and the prevailing secular, pagan culture of the Roman Empire and that that tension has been transmitted for twelve centuries, by Christians remaining steeped in that secular, classical culture, which has, for long formed the basis of our educational system.
In the present age, the study of the classics, shorn, as it will be, of the Christian counter-balance, will not produce a Francis de Sales or a Newman; it will produce a Mirabeau, a Camille Desmoulins, a Robespierre or a St Just. It is obvious to anyone who reads them.
January 29th, 2011 | 5:02 am
I should have written “and Jerome a century BEFORE Lactantius”
January 29th, 2011 | 6:51 pm
Do we want a world where few know much about the Summa Theologiae, or even who wrote it, or what Socrates espoused? Would the world be a better place if most were ignorant of Christianity’s principal role in the creation of our Universities?
Could we consider ourselves enriched, if most knew virtually nothing about Cicero, or the founding of the Roman Empire?
If the answer is no, to these few questions, then perhaps a radical rethinking of the Humanities, is in order.
February 1st, 2011 | 12:25 am
When Liberals Killed the Liberal Arts
Sigh. Da Libs are ruining everything.
February 1st, 2011 | 3:26 pm
I remember quite clearly thinking about college whilst going through high school in the early 80′s. Inflation triggered a serious recession, and jobs were hard to come by. Even as late as 1984, fast food franchises turned away applicants by the dozens (at least in corner of suburban Philadelphia) to work for minimum wage ($3.15/hr). More importantly, I remember news stories that highlighted the most valuable degrees – business, engineering and nursing, with computer science moving up fast. (remember “Family Ties” with Micheal J. Fox as “Alex P. Keaton”?)
Long story short, I remember thinking that I had to choose a college AND a specialized degree because a Liberal Arts education was a ticket to unemployment.
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