The Harvard Salient -- 12 March 2007

The Harvard Salient
20 April 2007

The Inhumanity of the Humanities

Progressives’ focus on the irrelevant does violence to humane studies

By Roger G. Waite, Staff Writer

Existence was fragile in colonial New England, visiting professor Martha Craven Nussbaum explained in a public lecture she gave recently. Luckily, though, there was at least one man willing to stand up for what really mattered in the world. A man who could firmly believe that his unbelieving neighbors were on the road to hell yet fight with his every human power that they could peaceably prepare their way thither while on earth. A thinker that raised his mind to the loftiest realms of wisdom, on par even with the great John Rawls.

Roger Williams’s genius, Nussbaum argued in essence (though she would never have admitted it), was that he was a teacher of baseness and cultivator of imperfection. Conscience was noblest thing since it directs man toward the highest end, to God, and any coercion of it was “soule rape,” each worse than “forc[ing] and ravish[ing] the Bodies of all the Women in the World.” To avoid this evil, the state must have not only religious toleration but accommodation; whatever of conscience that does not impend the state’s lower aims, the protection of the body and public order, it must permit. Because the dangers to the body are lighter, the state may aid the body more freely, but the conscience is too precious even to help.

Williams so interpreted naturally attracts the sympathies and attention of liberal humanists like Nussbaum. He turns his political ideas away from the truth about man to a convenience, toleration of error, and disguises convenience in dress of necessity and truth. This very problem seems to haunt the modern humanities which has no search for the truth but a digging up of bits and pieces to support various, narrow opinions. We can see this orientation clearly in an earlier written comment by Nussbaum, “What I am calling for, in effect, is. . . a society that acknowledges its own humanity, and neither hides us from it nor it from us. . . it constructs a public myth of equal humanity, to substitute for other pernicious myths that have so long guided us.” The aim is nothing more than ransacking the humanities for the means to expedient myth making.

The assessment may sound rather exaggerated, but look at Nussbaum’s record as a case study. Called as an expert witness in a gay rights case in 1993, she so abused the norms of scholarship that several detractors virtually accused her of perjury and even a favorably inclined classicist claimed Nussbaum was “really pooping all over herself” by her lapses. Trained as a classicist and a professor at University of Chicago’s law school, she lightly dismissed points of scholarly consensus as groundless and deceptively cited references under oath. Rather than moderating her views after the trial, she later leaned on K.J. Dover, author of one of the major works on classical Greek homosexuality, to revise some of his conclusions to conform to her more controversial claims.

A very consistent political agenda never seems far from her mind. “Perhaps we should drop the label of family altogether” she once mused to her law students at Chicago, quickly thereafter wondering what implications would be for issues like gay adoption. Even her well known attack on the postmodern founder of queer theory, Judith Butler, in the New Republic was a largely political affair. While Nussbaum noted Butler’s obscure style and criticized some of her scholarship, her central claim was that Butler’s work inspired a “quietism” that distracted from political feminism and was amenable to non-feminist appropriation. While scholars like Nussbaum may seem to have little in common with the underworld of unabashedly politicized “subaltern studies,” their quarrel is mainly one of method and not aims.

Of course, many scholars do not see the humanities as a rarefied branch of political advocacy; many of this remainder seem to suffer from the same root problem. A few hundred years ago when ideas like final cause were not dismissed as though superstition, the purpose of the humanities was clear. When Digory Whear, for example, took the first professorial chair in history at Oxford in 1623, he could state the ultimate aim of his field comprehensively and elegantly. “Among the historians,” he wrote, “there are some things that conduce more to learning, some to prudence, others that shape one’s diction and perfect speaking ability, and yet others to the shaping of one’s life and the formation of morals.” As simple as the statement may appear, there is meaning even in its arrangement. First the humanities appeal to speculative knowledge and thereby aid the intellectual virtues. In this they influence the outward practical knowledge and finally develop the moral virtues. They are neither useless nor merely instrumental; the intellectual and practical unite in such a relation that a humanistic history stands between idle antiquarianism and propaganda.

Moving over to Cambridge and over a few hundred years, we can easily see the difference these fields have undergone. Dismissing the simplicity of historians who believed the great texts of the past had a bearing on “timeless questions,” the historian Quentin Skinner argued in the 1960’s that “any attempt to justify the subject in terms of the ‘perennial problems’ and ‘universal truths’ . . . must amount to the purchase of justification at the expense of making the subject itself foolishly and needlessly naive.” Unfortunately, Skinner’s style of sophistication makes the humanities rather foolishly pointless.

This crisis of legitimacy is not just a theoretical question but a practical one. Since a holistic cultivation of mankind has become hopelessly old fashioned, scholars have been divided on how to prove they are not part of a racket. On one side the humanities are overrun by the social sciences, by the spirit that takes a passage of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and probes it for references to the contemporary Roman cityscape or that uses Darwinism to interpret the Aeneid. On the other lies the humanities conceived as a political instrument, the persuasion that looks to Herodotus as father of narratives of Western domination over the East and sleuths through medieval hagiographies for a whiff of gender role subversion.

Each, however, loses sight of the human aspect of the humanities. Women’s studies has the feminine, queer studies the deviant, fat studies the tubby, with each so committed to its parochial end that it dare not question it in the light of the whole, the human as such.

Even when the narrowest polemical focus is avoided, our humanists are so often afraid to look candidly at humanity. Harvard’s president-elect Drew Faust, for example, had the devil’s own time trying to explain the peculiar, culturally contingent practices mid-19th century Americans had about death in her article “The Civil War Soldier and the Art of Dying.” Apparently, the Counter-Reformation popularized Ars moriendi guides, which spread a discourse about the “Good Death” across the western world. Faust clearly explains the discourse in all its arcane detail. “At the heart of this common understanding,” she writes, “lay the assumption of death’s transcendent important.... The hors mori, [sic] the hour of death, had, therefore to be witnessed, scrutinized, interpreted, narrated.” The desire to be at your loved one’s deathbed was a cultural artifact of the Church’s fight against Protestantism. Where there was once something familiar, perhaps even natural, one finds only a strange, cultivated distance.

The modern humanities understandably have an apprehension of the concept of humanity, of tying themselves integrally to any particular human good. They would sacrifice some of their radicalism, directed as much to revival as revolution. The sage counsels of the human past may be admitted an occasional show, but, as one historian suggested, “sometimes the present needs to be haunted only by its own novelty.”