> Our ancestors would make the most daring bets in pursuit of a better for their children.
There are numerous counterexamples to this and plenty of them worked out fine. The speed and enthusiasm we adopt new technology is unmatched by any culture with a surviving literary tradition that I'm aware of.
Word meanings evolve. Virtue literally means "manliness" in Classical Latin but only a pedantic dick would insist we use it in that sense. Polis and it's related words meant something different to the Greeks than they do to us.
Right, "Politics" evolved from "affairs of the cities" to "the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of status or resources.".
That pressure is largely coming from other men. I don't know many women who want to date a guy who's unable to be vulnerable. I think if men made more space for each other to be something other than angry y'all would find life a lot more pleasant.
What we call science is short for natural science. Science just comes from the Latin word for knowledge. Different disciplines have different ways of building knowledge. That doesn't necessarily make one better or worse.
> No libertarian would try to control others based on his/her religious beliefs, and no libertarian would be remotely comfortable with any of the heavy handed stuff in Trump's platform.
Have you been on libertarian Internet recently? I don't see a lot of hand-wringing about people's civil liberties being under attack.
in my experience only the comments section which is full of the same whackos as it has been for the past decade. I'm a regular reader at reason, lots of the articles are good and present traditional libertarian points of view.
Those guys are just embarrassed republicans trying to pass themselves off as more intellectual, when they're just as close minded as ever and want to end civil rights and political speech. I've watched the Mises branches and they are not traditional libertarians at all. they welcome in the bigots and other white supremacists for the numbers it adds to their roll calls.
I know for Classical literature it's largely the theoretical approach to interpreting texts. Lit theory is always evolving and tenured faculty don't always keep up with the changes. There are also new interdisciplinary departments that pop up. I imagine it's more varied in fields that study things created in the last 2000 years though.
By what metrics are literary theories judged against each other? What makes the new "cutting edge" ones better than the old? It seems like there is no actual advancement going on, but rather just ever changing fads, which is why I question the value of the entire enterprise.
I don't want to defend humanities academia too much, but you could ask the same about pure math too. Of course the correctness of proofs is a checksum, but that doesn't answer which direction one should develop it or whether the thing you developed is found to be useful and interesting and elegant to other pure math people (often like a dozen worldwide).
There's not further justification needed than the fact that other high prestige people find it cool and mind-blowing.
Now my own opinion is that humanities academia is not a good concept. Literature, poetry, art are all great. But merely thinking and chatting about it is not a field. By all means go write great novels that express the human condition. But better go live a real life with adventure and real non-academics around you and write about that. Like Hemingway. Or write poems or paint impactful paintings. But simply writing about that is the equivalent of a reaction YouTuber.
Now the steelman is that they make a complex literary work better understood by unfolding its layers, relating it to the context, analyzing its impact and influence etc. so the work becomes better and deeper understood.
Well yes but its not what you think. Philosophy as a field in the US has become too narrow. I remember taking a class in the German department on German Romanticism, which was actually very important for understanding later developments in German philosophy and some of the authors involved are even referenced directly by Hegel in his Lectures on Aesthetics. But when I was doing my Philosophy MA one of the faculty members was complaining once, in a class on Aesthetics, that they couldn’t teach German Romanticism as a class because the school had deemed it “too literary” and we just had one seminar on it.
Its also the case that you wouldn’t have a great understanding of, say, Plato or maybe even Aristotle if you studied them in philosophy vs Classics, since in the latter you actually read and analyze the text at the level of the grammar and open up the complexity of the potential intepretations, whereas in Philosophy there is often a somewhat rote or dumbed down version of Plato and Aristotle taught to undergrads because the teachers don’t actually know any Greek. But that depends on the faculty and the course obviously, I just wouldn’t trust most philosophy departments to teach Plato well these days.
Yes, this is the curse of specialization due to ever more intellectual works in existence but the same amount of time per person.
I think it's much better to learn in an integrated way, so history, art, science, politics, philosophy, technology, math, economics in a sort of horizontal, cross-cutting way.
For example to understand the political relevance of some art movement, you need to know the history of the period, understand the art, the political climate, the philosophical underpinnings. To understand the impact of Darwin on his time, you need to know the historical context, and I'd argue you should actually understand evolution too (not in a comic book fashion, but quantitatively including our modern understanding and what he couldn't know then), also his religious background, you should understand what is Unitarianism and what is Anglicanism, how the Catholic Church reacted, and how their general situation was at that time, etc. etc.
But in my experience academics really dislike interacting with their neighboring fields, they look down upon each other in a mutual way, or they simply don't see any benefit in an exchange because their publications are aimed at extremely narrow specialized journals, and a "hybrid" work will not fit either journal. Of course sometimes it works, but in my experience "interdisciplinary" is mostly a buzzword that admins like to use a lot and academics also pay lip service to but in reality they highly prefer just sticking to their well known bubble and be left alone.
> I don't want to defend humanities academia too much, but you could ask the same about pure math too.
That's true to some extent. I think math has built up enough credibility though because such a huge amount of mathematical investigation has turned out to have relevance in science which eventually trickles down to applied science. Even if the specific content of esoteric math isn't of practical use, the "machinery" developed for navigating the concepts often becomes an essential tool for other things that are more practical. It's interesting to think, though, if the prestige of math could decline as the stuff left to discover becomes more and more remote from practicality.
> Now the steelman is that they make a complex literary work better understood by unfolding its layers, relating it to the context, analyzing its impact and influence etc. so the work becomes better and deeper understood.
Yes, and I think that steelman is true. The important thing, though (like I said in another comment) is that it means what is important is not the specific content of the opinion but that process of unfolding, relating, analyzing and so on. So it can be useful to write about that, and to read what others wrote about it, even though in the end no one is really going to "find the right answer".
> But simply writing about that is the equivalent of a reaction YouTuber.
I'd say at the low end it can be like that. At the high end it can be more like one of those videos that breaks down "how movie X creates its suspense", or reading a good travelogue. Reading a book about someone's travels in Tibet isn't going to be the same as going to Tibet, and it would be foolish to read it hoping to replace such an experience. But if the book is good, you can still gain something from it, and it can potentially include things you wouldn't have gained by going there yourself, because the author can articulate insights you might not have been able to formulate yourself.
What I think is mostly missing the mark is treating this as an expertise that you learn in college, i.e. straight out of high school you go to college and then do a PhD and you interact in a bubble of people who are the same way. And you try to comment on the greats of literature, without any real world experience.
I value it much higher to read critiques by different authors and artists, in a kind of Viennese coffeehouse gossip culture way.
It's the equivalent of wanting to become an expert on the philosophy of ethics without ever having to resolve a real ethical conundrum in real life, like pulling the plug on someone's medical support or advising about authorizing an artillery strike or whatever other thing may arise with difficult tradeoffs outside neat thought experiments. It's being clever from the sidelines.
So, I don't think it's a field of expertise, I think it's a teaching job. And teaching about art and literature and helping the new generation process the message therein is good. But it doesn't make it a research field. Indeed, the idea that a humanities teacher at university should have regular novel thoughts and innovations is a very new idea, from the 19th century, originating in the Humboldtian reform of German universities. Before that, teachers would read the classics to students and comment on them, but they mainly passed down the same type of commentary that they received in their education, of course with some of their own flavor, but it wasn't really seen as producing new knowledge, just making it easier to digest the existing high-prestige work of literature.
I more or less agree with that, with the proviso that I think academia in general (not just the humanities) would benefit from easing up a bit on the insistence on "producing new knowledge". It's good to produce new knowledge, sure, but I think the way that's been pushed has led to a situation where people just publish a lot of papers without necessarily creating a lot of new knowledge. In part this is due to Goodhart's law and people optimizing for publications. In part though it's due to the two-tiered (tenure/non-tenure) academic job system.
Even in fields quite remote from humanities, we have, for instance, a bunch of people who need to be taught calculus and so on. And it would be fine for them to be taught calculus by someone who isn't "creating new knowledge" in mathematics. But you can get paid a lot more to create new knowledge while begrudgingly teaching calculus now and then than you can to just teach calculus with gusto.
Likewise in the humanities, I think your argument leaves open the possibility that there could be new knowledge produced there, but that we just shouldn't expect everyone who's teaching Intro to American Literature or whatever to be producing such knowledge.
In my view a good step would just be to significantly reduce the pay gap (and gaps in benefits, job security, etc.) between teaching jobs and research jobs. There are many people who love Moby Dick or basic calculus and could ably and happily teach it for years without feeling any need to write a novel or prove a novel theorem themselves. We'd all benefit if such people could get a steady job doing that.
Yes, simple lecturing jobs are fine, and they do exist, but as you said they are paid less. Because in truth this is the reality already, we just don't admit it.
The intention behind it is understandable though. Someone who has produced new knowledge tends to have a more flexible mind, they have felt that the walls of knowledge are soft and malleable and not some concrete slab. They work with the math even outside class, and have a real grasp on why things are defined in certain ways, having also defined new concepts and written new theorems and proofs and having faced dilemmas of how to construct it to be most elegant and compact and logical etc.
Now, of course today the research and the teaching are often on quite distant topics. Like teaching some basic computer science stuff like basic data structures and algorithms while you actually research computer graphics or speech recognition.
I'm not so sure that having produced new knowledge is so vital to teaching old knowledge, at least not at the scale that's required for a tenure-track job. It's good for a teacher to not be locked into a static view of old knowledge, but I don't think that requires anything like the breakneck amount of publishing that's expected in many fields today.
idk man, I'm a humanities major whose spent all of my career, which spans about a decade and a half now, around people who have had very little to no exposure to humanities courses and my take is that more people need to take them.
The quality of analysis and opinion outside of academia is just, I'll be blunt, incredibly poor. I think claiming that literary analysis courses are just a bunch of people spouting opinions is an unfair reduction. You learn analytical techniques, you learn how to identify theme and structure, how to perform a historical analysis versus a contemporary reading, close reading, logical analysis etc etc. There's not just depth at the level of an individual work, there's tons of technical and analytical and procedural depth to uncover in the practice of interpretation.
Inadequacies in this practice lead directly to bad societal outcomes imo. People who are unable to critically dissect narratives are also easy to manipulate. Worse, a lot of people who lack exposure to these ideas do not even ask important questions in the first place, even basic ones like, "how might this tech actually impact society" because they simply have never had the training to learn that asking these kinds of questions is important.
Also I do think it is an actual research field, which, just like any other field, changes as available tech changes. For example digital humanities is a relatively new approach that was mostly enabled by the advent of statistics and computers. This unlocked a whole new suite of literary analysis techniques and perspectives, and these new techniques have actually furnished novel interpretations and second looks at previous works (a really concrete example, these techniques have been used to resolve questions of disputed or unclear authorship) just like technological innovations do the same in other sciences and research fields.
This is a symptom of a much deeper issue. The education system is completely broken because quite often if the student memorizes answers, that's already huge success. There is very little attention towards teaching students new ways of thinking. Not to mention that even in prestigious schools, teachers are often dropouts who failed to secure a more lucrative career in private sector, which means they themselves aren't competent. And even besides this, many people have too much shit going on in their lives to dedicate attention to education.
I don't disagree with all that you said about analytical techniques and so on, but those are learning "how" not learning "what". It's not about learning the result of someone else's analysis, it's about learning to do the analysis. No doubt you'll need to study other people's analyses to see how they did them, but the point is not to learn their result but their process. This is reversed from something like learning physics where you are primarily learning the results of other people's discoveries (e.g., Newton) and understanding their process is secondary.
> For example digital humanities is a relatively new approach that was mostly enabled by the advent of statistics and computers. This unlocked a whole new suite of literary analysis techniques and perspectives, and these new techniques have actually furnished novel interpretations and second looks at previous works (a really concrete example, these techniques have been used to resolve questions of disputed or unclear authorship) just like technological innovations do the same in other sciences and research fields.
I'd say that concrete stuff like resolving authorship questions is not really the lion's share of digital humanities. And the key thing there is that there was an answer that was found. The mere fact that the field changes because of new techniques and "novel interpretations" doesn't get us very far. The question is whether such changes are an advance over previous research or simply a change. In scientific fields if a new theory is accepted it means the old theory is either enlarged or discarded; we either decide "we knew X was true, and now we know Y is also true" or we decide "we knew X was true but now we know it is false and actually Y is true". But "new interpretations" can just mean something like "some people think X and now some other people think Y", but without reference to any ground truth this doesn't represent forward progress.
I'll add that I agree that humanities courses are valuable and that society would benefit from more people taking them. I just don't think that focusing on the aspects of humanities that are slightly more scientific is a good way to justify that. Insofar as something like resolving authorships questions is concrete and measurable, it's because it's using scientific methodology. The humanities cannot beat science at its own game. I see the humanities as more valuable in how they provide a broader context and motivation for scientific and technical work. I don't think this is incompatible with what you said, it's just a matter of what gets the emphasis.
I see the humanities (I mean literature here and not so much history etc) as a continuation of cautionary tales and parables and fables and legends and fairy tales around the campfire. Its "output" is that you're better able to feel on a visceral level how others might feel or what the social outcome can be, or what the deep values of your society are etc. Literary analysis is twice removed from this. Ground level is how you act in a new situation. Once removed is the concrete stories you hear at the campfire. Twice removed is the dissecting analysis of the story and more meta levels.
In physics the ground level is solving a new engineering problem in industry. You use the recipes and methods you learned in physics class to formulate your problem in the language of physics and solve it. Once removed is teaching the equations and methods themselves. Twice removed is discussing how the physics knowledge was produced historically and how research is done today.
I do belive though that learning about the history of science is immensely enlightening. In school it seems like these things just fell from the sky fully formed like Athene from Zeus' forehead. Kuhn's book on the Copernican revolution is super interesting. I found it better than the more famous Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The latter is more abstract and tries to build a big theory, while the former mostly just narrates how it happened in the concrete case of Copernicus, Kepler et al.
I agree that this is a problem with how humanities is often (or at least sometimes) done in colleges, and I suspect it's a significant contributor to the animus directed at the humanities. There has been a blurring of the line between fact and opinion such that some professors think it is worthwhile to teach students about their or other people's opinions, as if those opinions had value in themselves in the way that facts do.
This isn't to say that opinions don't or can't have value, but just having someone say "I think X" or "Professor Blah thinks X" isn't in itself important by virtue of the content of X. This is especially true if the subject of the opinion (what it is about) is something that is rather far removed from the realm of fact. There is not really any meaningful sense in which a given text, for instance, "really does" instantiate a Jungian archetype or a Freudian urge or whatever. But I get the impression some humanities scholars think there is, that when they debate among themselves about such things, there is a "fact of the matter".
Not all humanities scholarship is like this, but I think the proportion has increased over time. To my mind what it misses is that the important thing about such humanistic opinions is not their content in and of itself but the ways such opinions are formed and what kinds of "evidence" can be found to support them. An alternative goal would be for students to read things, engage with them from their own perspective, and learn how to solidify and articulate their response, as well as (importantly) to elucidate its sources both in themselves and in the text (i.e., "my reaction to this story is X, and I think that because the story says Y but also I have had experiences A, B and C that led me to think about things in such-and-such way"). This is likely more valuable than simply being taught someone else's opinion.
I think this approach is sometimes shunned because it is perceived as navel-gazing or having students "just learn about themselves". But this perception may partly be due to a fear of acknowledging that what I said above is true, namely that opinions on such matters have little intrinsic value, and therefore the students' opinions are almost as valuable as those of more senior scholars.
All this is basically to say that I think the humanities could be perceived as much more "valuable" and positive if they shifted more towards the idea of "these are some ways to have a rich life, gain an awareness of other people's opinions and how to infer their sources, and learn how to extract a meaningful experience by careful attention to what you're confronted with in life".
Its not really helpful though, since to understand a thinker like Marx, for instance, requires careful study and an attention to empirical social trends, which can be demonstrated historically through texts like, say, Pride and Prejudice or Baudelaire’s poetry. The entire content of literary study is not “general rules for life” but careful attention to aspects of the empirical world through things that appear in its history and conditions, which are ever changing and thus require constant re-evaluation. We can hold certain principles above these empirical judgements, but we cannot lay claim to any absolute laws besides, perhaps, that human society is prone to violent convulsions.
There are numerous counterexamples to this and plenty of them worked out fine. The speed and enthusiasm we adopt new technology is unmatched by any culture with a surviving literary tradition that I'm aware of.
reply