Humanists and the Public Must Meet Each Other Halfway
My computer is an extremely efficient machine. Any task it performs it does vastly better than I or any other human would. It is also, however, limited by this very task-related kind of efficiency.
When it is assigned a task, even if the house were to burn down, it would continue to perform it until the last moment, until the wall came crashing down on it.
Men and women, on the other hand, would have run out of the house (if they could) long before, interrupting whatever they are doing, finding suddenly that what they might have thought was so important, so worthy of concentrated attention, was not important after all.
Men and women have the capacity to shift focus, to see things from different angles, and to change modes of acting accordingly. This capacity does not make them more efficient in the execution of specific tasks; indeed, it makes them less so. Everyone knows how inefficient it is to be distracted constantly by “irrelevant” considerations. But in the long run, the capacity to be distracted, to pay attention to and enjoy different things is our most precious gift. It is because difference matters so much for humans that they have gained the largest scope and made the largest impact of all species on the planet.
There is an area of intellectual and academic endeavor where students and teachers get constant exposure to and practice of this most human of capacities. It is the humanities: an area that works as a true laboratory for the development and mastering of difference.
In the humanities, you learn foreign languages, and that’s much more than learning a new game. A language is a form of life, a way of relating to the world, so when you speak a new language you acquire a new personality, and that is of tremendous help.
From now on, there will be two of you facing each situation and addressing each problem. And if it were not enough to confront the diversity of present cultures, history will make you confront past ones; they will make their points of view available to you. And if that were not enough yet, literature and philosophy will open up the field of the possible, and have you consider what could be the case--which includes: the way someone could see and judge and criticize what you are and do.
But this arena of creative and playful exploration is under attack now. As the National Endowment for the Humanities is at risk of being phased out and all related budgets are painfully shrinking, humanists are challenged by unsympathetic probing. They are asked to prove their relevance, the instrumental value of their disciplines.
Their training has not prepared them for this challenge. For a long time, their profession (my profession) has sustained itself on the basis of tradition and status and has not had to argue for survival.
But that is precisely why the crisis and the lack of sympathy are as much an opportunity as they are a source of pain. They will require humanists and the public to come into contact again, and to educate each other about what they need and what they have to offer.
It will be important for the humanists to convince the public that the humanities are long range, that they are large scope, that they are critical and self-critical; that nothing remotely resembling a human form of life is possible if people are not taught how to develop these qualities.
And it will be important for the public to receive assurance that the freedom and diversity which define the humanities are indeed there, in humanities departments, and that they are indeed taught, shared with generations of students--that they are not either empty labels attached to calcified rituals or the jealous property of an exclusive club.
Within a generation or less, this process of mutual education will play itself out. Or it won’t. Either way, the humanities will no longer be what they are now.
If the process is successful, professional humanists will be in much closer communication with lay people, regularly immersing themselves (of course!) in their specialistic studies but just as regularly coming out to share the visions and tools acquired there.
If the process fails, the humanities will be so drastically scaled down as to no longer have a credible chance to provide anything of value to the community. There is too much at stake for all of us to let the process fail: no invocation of current practical efficiency can ever justify our locking ourselves out of a future and of the new ideas the future will need. But to avoid that outcome, both humanists and the public must be prepared to do their share.
