Abstract: An interpretation of the contemporary situation in both culture and higher education, from the perspective of America’s magnificent commitment to democratic pluralism – as radically distinct from the autocracies that prevail today. This essay is also presentation of a vision of human development from which emerges a mature form of humanity capable of living a democratic life, including what it takes to sustain it. These dynamics are articulated through consideration of the fate of the humanities in our time, and the great benefits for both person and society that could flow from their revival and practice.
Key Words: humanities as valve, genius of diversity, life affirmation, healthy soul, risking belief, nihilism, democratization of culture, robots/AI versus humans, equality of difference, pluralistic democracy, culture wars, hope and possibility, autocracy, culture become self-aware, humanities as practice, ineffable energies, dialogue as relationship, humanities as useful, human maturity.
No sensible man [sic] would insist that these things are as I have described them, but I think it is fitting for a man to risk the belief – for the risk is a noble one – that this, or something like this, is true about our souls and their dwelling places, since the soul is evidently immortal, and a man should repeat this to himself as if it were an incantation…
Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo, 114d.
I.
My classrooms have always started out with that quality William James attributed to the consciousness of a baby, one of “blooming, buzzing confusion.” We have usually found some success in the creation of learning community, transforming blooming confusion and the discourse of unqualified critique into learning community and the (more or less) disciplined conversation or dialogue of mature adult life and democratic relationship.
But in recent years the classroom, already diminished from earlier days of vitality and efficacy, has suffered repeated and overlapping waves of trauma: Trump, Covid, climate change, nuclear threats, displaced populations – the list goes on. In the process higher education has also suffered from lack of effective leadership, capitulation to market analysis, career training, and the moral disease of identity politics and culture wars. Worse than being powerless, colleges and universities have been complicitous in the collapse of culture and civility.
Saul Bellow, one of the great humanists of the last century, remarked in his novel, Herzog, that “what this country needs is a good nickel synthesis.” We need fresh interpretation, and that is what I seek to offer with this essay, drawing on a half century of practicing the art of liberal education on the front lines of American (and sometimes Chinese) public education. I want to address these matters, beyond the fads and cliches, the latest techniques, and projects corrupted with opportunism. And I want to pursue insight, especially in relation to the fate of the humanities, as the most sensitive “canary” through which we might access and revive the coal mine of American culture, this pluralistic and sometimes raucous way of being together which sustains us all.
II.
Seems like humanity has become a mostly unhealthy infection on the planet, and that Earth may now be in the process of throwing us off. There is no need to repeat the list of potentially lethal and intersecting problems, many of which we create and have to face each day. Contributing to and fueling those problems is the fairly recent and virulent disparagement of the humanities, and the corresponding loss of the notion that the humanities are an important aid in the process of understanding and living, as Socrates said, “a life worth living.”
Why are the humanities under attack? There are several reasons, which I will touch on below. Before discussing these it is important to point out that often in attempts to defend the humanities we – we who continue to worry about such things — follow our reflexes and get lost in arguments about what constitutes the “stuff” of the humanities (i.e. is it the “ten foot shelf,” Harvard or Chicago versions, or a revised canon not comprised entirely of “dead white men”?).
Moving in a different direction, I want to say that the humanities first and most essentially could be understood as a practice, an activity, and a way of living, and these in service of the developmental process that leads to mature humanity, a state of being which is paradoxically both different and the same across space and time and peoples, reflecting the genius of human diversity.
This utterly basic paradox of commonality and difference in human life arose from cultures of the traditional period (from around 600 BCE, the Axial Age, to sometime in the Twentieth Century, often August 6, 1945 with the bombing of Hiroshima) were organized around concern about humans (at least some humans) maturing beyond purely social behavior into a larger wisdom that sets them apart as a more highly developed (not necessarily to say “better”) form of humanity. They also share remarkable consensus in envisioning transformation as passage from ego orientation to a centering in something more like reality.
Continuing boldly, we can identify world-wide reports about the role of diversity in the maturation process, as mediating an ever-expanding harmony between difference and commonality when they stand in synergetic relation. This, of course, is a highly discussable claim (what is this “synergy”!?), especially so since it is grounded in a certain very delicate experience of vitality in life, far more than in established doctrine and the communal structures of society – in the direct experience of democracy as distinct from the experience of autocracy/monarchy/patriarchy. This claim about diversity and maturity suffers most, in the raucous conversation of the present, not so much by blows to vital parts as by chilly non-responsiveness followed by smug turning away (as if to say the democratic relationship is too much to hope for; as if to acknowledge it in a peculiar way of our peculiar present).
In light of the horrendous issues of our time and their manifestation in all realms of life, we must ask again: What are “the humanities?” In today’s avaricious and weaponized climate, can we once again come to understand and evaluate them – not as means to job opportunity, but as resources for living with meaning, compassion, and sustainable values? Are the humanities a necessary component of a well-educated and vibrant populace? And with Artificial Intelligence bearing down on us from all sides, do we need them at all, or perhaps only need them as decoration, and a another medium through which the wealthy can project their privilege and superiority?
The following pages are my attempt to address the relationship between the humanities and the status of human life under contemporary circumstances. In this attempt, I want to describe three outcomes of approaching the humanities as practice, including their integration with culture, their study and their enjoyment. This includes awareness of their implications for a very necessary and across the board resuscitation of education, a reconstruction – through the devastating and ever ongoing storms of Covid and Trump, climate change, and the grinding repulsiveness of worldwide authoritarianism.
III.
Before going ahead with this daunting assignment, I want to say something about a new and vastly more promising life-orientation which is emerging in our time, right alongside the more ominous developments. It is one which is neither the passivity, negativity, or giving up that are so prevalent, nor the “toxic positivity” or “aggressive apathy” which also abound – pathways to nihilism either way. Rather, it contains the mindset sometimes referred to in the discourse of today as “hopeful pessimism,” or Jane Goodall’s “hope in dark times,” or the profound experience William James was pointing to when he spoke of “new ranges of life succeeding upon our most despairing moments.”
Could it be that those today who present these qualities of being neither Zombies nor Angels but humans in the glory of our self-transcending life affirmation, are showing us what we must become? They show us that it is possible to live well, do what we can to save the world, and remain attuned to the gift quality of life, even in “impossible” circumstances. Like that species of bird which is prohibited from flying by the laws of physics and yet somehow flies nevertheless, the people I am talking about live with dignity, awareness, and compassion – right in the midst of disaster. How do they do that?!
Recalling the Hebrew warning that “Where there is no vision the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18), we can say that the life-orientation to which I am pointing requires that we sustain belief in the existence of what used to be called “soul,” a quality of the person deeper than “self-actualization” and closer to the essence of who they are. We are speaking of a connection within the person with a reality beyond the scope of ordinary human experience, something universal and sacred, a point of contact and even identity with an agency which is the source of right action and healthy living, one which is paradoxically both beyond what any person could do or be on their own and at the same time the most authentic identity of that person. In Hinduism, and with variations in the other great traditions, the ultimate realization is contained in the simple (though by no means easy) phrase Atman is Brahman (self is God). Phrases like this, of course, are very frustrating to the data-driven mindset of today, with its impatience and even animosity toward matters qualitative, relationally complex, and irreducible.
Socrates indicates in the epigraph above that life on Earth is so ordered that realities like “soul” – and the other ineffables of human life, including love, justice, truth, goodness, beauty – are actually dependent on human belief in them, as a prerequisite for their being present and active in the world and in our lives. Humans are challenged to be co-creators by the very structure of life, the very divinity of life on Earth. So it is catastrophic when humans are no longer willing or able to “risk the belief” – or “keep the faith,” as we used to say. Everything just falls apart, or together, but not into that unity in diversity we know as democracy.
It is hard for us to adopt and sustain such a belief because it is in the essence of our postmodern circumstance that matters of meaning and value as they have been expressed in traditional cultures, often bundled as “the axiological dimension,” have been critiqued, deconstructed, “cancelled,” and dismissed. On this the “anti-woke” people are right: babies have gone out with the bath). This has happened, in large part, following the hugely unsettling awareness of the contamination of culture by values which are racist, sexist, classist, etc., especially through association of traditional cultures with atrocities of the past which taint all of them – in America with annihilation of native peoples, slavery, and the oppression of women and others. Plus, especially in the West, there is the problematic heritage of heavily negative and escapist – even Earth and life-denying — understandings of freedom. So alongside and mixed ambiguously with intuitions and gestures toward a new life-orientation, all peoples share the negative solidarity of a problematic past – inevitably with both cultural and personal aspects.
This discouraging realization is not at odds with Socrates’ statement, since “risk[ing] the belief” is contained within the simple affirmation which we share with all other life, the joie de vivre that makes the world go round. The risking, then, is as deep as it is large, that life is good, with broader horizons than we (or the robots) can know, and that it is moving ever so slowly and mysteriously toward a world of peace, justice, and art — and that our efforts actually do matter.
Believing in the existence of soul and the significance of our action — and avoiding arrogant declarations of disbelief — means moving beyond brittle intellectualist and doctrinal ways of knowing that were prevalent in our past, and also beyond the shallow and materialist empiricisms and scientisms of modernity, with their insistence that all must be known from the bottom up, from the simple to the complex. It also means that we must outgrow the ancient need to always occupy a position of certainty and righteousness (even more highly than we value being truthful or loving, whether by idealist, empiricist, or fascist epistemologies), knowing Plato demonstrates to be about as reliable as flickering shadows on the wall of a cave.
Outgrowing old ways occurs as we become able to receive assurance from deep down in that inner territory of soul (sometimes “conscience,” or the root of “self-respect,” or through attunement with the natural world), making contact with that deepest source of our vitality, as both similar to and different from that of other life forms. This can sound frightening at first, but growth and reintegration in a new lifeway turns out to be surprising liberation. For now it becomes possible to have some perspective on our ego, some distance on that raging drama which refuses to be “fixed” by the popular psychologies and pharmaceuticals so widely prescribed for the malaise of our time.
With new awareness – so fragile, so vulnerable, so improbable — we are able to exercise a much broader range of choice as to emotional state and the general direction of our lives, rather than always chasing from one impulse to another, with no moral compass, repose, or cultural companionship. We are liberated from the tyranny of our own ego, from our “whim and caprice,” as John Dewey puts it in his monumental Democracy and Education.
In the atmosphere of ego it is impossible to live well (hedonism notwithstanding as a viable option). And it is extremely difficult to engage sincerely in the hard and necessary cultural work of sorting that which is important to save from that which we must let go in our mixed inheritance. This is a big problem, a “wicked problem,” because in the absence of this work we are stuck in the quagmire of moral disease, arising like a noxious gas from the dead lake that had once been culture. Now, problematic as traditional culture was, we now must cope with absence and what follows: ever more disturbing incivility, non-regard for others, and reduction of persons to their financial, use-for-me potential, and/or their demographic characteristics.
Indeed, conscious engagement with passage from an old way in collapse to new life-orientation emerging may be the most ambitious ever undertaken by the human race. As in previous times of rapid growth, that which had been unconscious and involuntary becomes both conscious and voluntary, and hence a matter of choice and responsibility. With the surge of growth our time requires — and exhibits to some degree, culture becomes self-aware, no longer dependent on unconscious processes of socialization and acculturation for its perpetuation; now culture can (and must) be chosen and created. So much of the drama of culture wars, “angertainment,” etc, can be seen as a process of finding out whether humans are able to live with the responsibility that is a necessary component of the ambiguous democratization of culture.
This is not as mysterious as it may sound. There are many people and resources out there available to support and guide us. Certainly there are those among them who wish to exploit and manipulate, preying on the extreme vulnerability of humans in this historical moment. We learn to be more effectively aware, not cynically rejecting of everything, but not gullible either, not hiding from news of the world , but not detached.
Yet the new orientation which is so crucial yet fragile is fairly well understood in the broader culture of educated people – at least intellectually, which is to say, more “conscious” than “voluntary” (per above). It begins and gathers strength with basic emotional intelligence, the “know thyself” capacity to sustain a more or less friendly relationship between “me” and “myself,” which is like other healthy relationships in being both critical and caring – and willing to reside together in creative tension. Development also entails refinement of critical thinking, beyond reductive “critical theory” and “deconstruction,” into appreciative mindfulness, as the ability to discern value and focus attention. Development in these capacities progresses with coming to be more fully able to live in the zone of simultaneity between acknowledging limitations (without self-loathing) and accessing wisdom (without absurd claims of entitlement).
So on many days it looks like our problem may be plain old human sluggishness, more a failure of willing than knowing – like the proverbial frog who does not notice ever-increasing water temperature in the pot on the stove in which it sits as it is poached! Perhaps the frog is frozen in sudden but too late awareness of her circumstance. What could she do? What can we do?
IV.
With that brief and ambitious attempt to describe the context of the humanities and our commonly shared life in the present, as well as an alternative vision of both personhood and culture which is struggling to emerge from the ruins of traditional (including modern) cultures, here are the three outcomes I want to advocate in terms of the role the humanities could play going forward.
I think these considerations of outcome can say a lot more to questions about how to engage, study, and practice – and evaluate — the humanities than most of the more abstracted and mechanistic ideas of education which have been out there since invention of the assembly line. These outcomes, and the conditions under which they are likely to be manifest, with their deeply empirical and experiential footings, can be more fruitful than more theoretically-framed discussions of “innovative pedagogy,” often beginning with a creative notion but then veering off into disconnected methodology or strange localism.
The first must be Healthy Soul:
The presence of a well-cultivated and conscious soul has been unusual in the human past, though it certainly has been envisioned. It might be even more improbable in late modern societies like ours, despite unimaginable physical advantages, where vision is lost in chaos. These societies are characterized by their failure to sustain even belief in the existence of soul, let alone its immortality, sacredness, etc. Let alone also the understanding implicit in “soul” that each person is unique and valuable, a potential source of creativity, wisdom, and the insight needed to solve problems of the immediate moment, the most general of which is how to live well.
In the pathological condition of our transitioning into either a new way or oblivion, persons are treated — and treat themselves — in ways exclusively physical and psychological. We do this by objectification (as in thing-making), and on the modern, laisse faire, push-pull model of transaction (you’ve got apples, I’ve got oranges…). This worldview, having failed and collapsed, leaves us in a world of human construction on a barren plain (physical, psychological, cultural, even spiritual…). Here, interests and power and their common denominator in money are bottom line, and we are “known” in those terms, along with our demographic characteristics – nothing deeper. We relate as animals or machines, but not often as humans. Is there no greater (and more reliable!) agency in which we can participate?
It might be sufficient to say that having a healthy soul is fundamental to moving from our current condition of grimness to vital living, that its maintenance is a necessary and ever ongoing project, a kind of hygiene, one that has obviously become extremely challenging in our world.
The humanities, at the very least, remind us in these things – that being human is very different from being a machine (a person rather than a thing, a subject rather than object, a thou rather than an it – that most basic distinction at the root of traditional Western and other ethics). They make it clear that the astonishing permutations possible with AI are nevertheless wholly different from real creativity; that a “soul” is different from mechanism, no matter how well lubricated the machine may be.
The second outcome is Sense of Possibility:
There is something about human beings which causes us to become so apprehensive that we shut down and retreat from life into cramped and closed quarters. We are skittish in the ontological sense, attracted-lured by the illusion of protection which various ideologies and conspiracy theories present, from the vast uncertainty of life and the inevitability of death. Yet – in what seems a cruel joke – those containers we rush to actually are quite unreliable; they starve and suffocate, and render us dangerous.
So a developed sense of possibility, a willingness to maintain hope when all is lost, is the first prerequisite and the first practice in nurturing the healthy soul. It involves the adult form of return to childhood wonder, and a reclaiming of that point of departure indicated by “philosophy begins in wonder” (could a robot wonder?).
A developed sense of possibility (and the accompanying ability to tolerate complexity and not knowing, aporia) also involves emergence of that specific capacity to distinguish authentic creativity from the sensationalism echoing off of every wall and from increasingly desperate people trying to prove to themselves that they are alive. Along with this key sense of discernment comes ability to recognize truth as it emerges fresh from the dialogue of similarity and difference, whether between you and me, me and myself, or between us and the most singular other.
Sometimes engagement with or identification of the capacity I want to illuminate is spoken of as the ability to identify and appreciate a fully developed human being, not only those who are old, but also “old souls.” Other times it is evident in attempts to describe “practical wisdom,” judgment and graceful movement in the midst of the full particularity of life, rather than insisting on the dream of detached abstraction and pronouncement from a place of superiority and mere application of preset rules. This same recognition and sense of possibility has also been associated with renewed appreciation of the significance of art, including awareness of its broader meaning in what Alfred North Whitehead called “the most austere of all mental qualities,” “style:” the ability to act decisively, cleanly, with as little extraneous movement or exertion as possible, as with Chuang Tzu butchering an ox with one, continuous, apparently effortless movement (“Carving Up An Ox”). Note the similarity here with Confucius’ “at age seventy I could follow my heart’s desire without ever transgressing the way” (Analects 2.4), or with Islam on surrender, Judaism’s acute sensitivity to idolatry, or curious Christian talk about “he who would save his life will lose it” (Mark 8:35). Traditional cultures/religions contain unfathomable riches in relation to the conundrums of our time, though we have made them extremely difficult to access.
Third is Humanities as Valve:
A third outcome is more political and cultural. It is the developed capacity to be persuasive in the world (including with oneself) on behalf of a lifeway compatible with the pluralistic and democratic sentiments necessary to a future other than that of tyranny and autocracy. It takes some real discipline and focus of human agency.
Though it is nearly impossible to even speak of these things in our present environment of suspicion, relativism, and degraded relationship, the humanities are distinct in their ability to evoke and motivate our common humanity, providing signs of life beyond ever-changing consumer preference, private wishes, conspiracy theories, and the quirks of society and culture – indeed, a life beyond the corrosive loneliness of partially liberated individuals and our weird accommodations.
Development of these crucial motivating sentiments involves activation of a love of the world, Amor Mundi, an active love of mortal, ever ambiguous, always particular, embodied life on Earth. It involves a finely honed appreciation of that most magnificent American affirmation of an equality of difference, grounded in the understanding that all persons are unique possible sources of revelation and inflowing of ultimate reality – modeling what it means to live well and be created “in God’s image,” as a creator.
Like the great religions, the humanities can lead us beyond the life we have received through the enormous contingency of our origins in traditional cultures and their still-somewhat alive remnants, as well as through the always-flawed families and local tribes from which we merge, somehow into centering awareness of how to live and die well. Communication of this awareness is beyond any one articulation, only to be heard in and through and under the vast symphony of individual and cultural stories of life affirmation. The humanities return us to the world and the most basic insight about care for others as the locus of true enlightenment.
V.
So maybe the most important distinction is that between open and closed. Machines are subject to entropy, eventually running down into non-functioning. They are closed systems. Now AI introduces the claim that machines will be able to program themselves to function indefinitely (talk about feeling hot breath on the back of our necks!). But AI, as distinct from full human presence, is still not “open” in the cosmological sense of being a space or an activity through which new energy comes into the world, fresh vitality from as deep – or as far beyond –as the wellspring of life itself, what humans and other life-forms most basically need in order to thrive.
Humanities can be understood as the great ventilator, the very lungs of human life. One might even say that all other good things for both person and community flow from them – as do bad things flow from their absence or corruption, demonstrating again and again how entropy is manifest in human life.
An old song comes to mind: “Anything you can do I can do better.” Yes, certainly this is true about robots. Operating by objectification in all functions, Robots can command huge swaths of all kinds of data and do better than humans with it. But if they do develop that capacity to program themselves, what then? What is the purpose or end to which they point? –if this is still a relevant question. Or are we already completely engulfed in technological determinism?
As we still love and aspire, there remains the dimension of meaning and value, always overlapping the most Earthly dimension of objectification, the freezing of dynamic processes and entities into the “knowing” which then dominated and constrained life – for better and for worse). Sometimes the meaning/value dimension is called “the spiritual.” It is very hard to know how to characterize or describe reality in this sense from our current position in the outer space of social media and high tech. This turns out to be no better vantage point by way of identifying the vitality of life than the attempts of our all too local ancestors, in abstracting and generalizing from what was under their noses, into peculiar, often charming, sometimes dangerous descriptions of what is real and how we should live. Indeed, identification of and responsiveness to sources of vitality – through descriptions and interpretations, yes, but also through enactments and reminders in ritual and art, are essential to the ongoing, creative adventure of life.
We know by now that, in the absence or incoherence of the axiological and spiritual dimensions, humans are lost and become indeterminant, protean, and dangerous. We must become more sophisticated in matters hermeneutical than our ancestors, to see that what we are looking for often lies in living in good faith with the questions, more like an abiding than a possessing, a keeping faith.
VI.
Meanwhile in higher education, long known as a critical bellwether of American society and what Fareed Zakaria once called “America’s best industry,” students are choosing not to attend college. They do this in part because of the cost, in part because they are recruited for well-paying jobs that do not require a college education, in part because they do not see the long-term rewards in areas other than medicine, law, and technology. Others around them do not see either, so the advice young people may hear most emphatically is to get an associate’s degree and skip the humanities because they will never “use them.”
(Here I must interject, appealing to no credential other than my age: it can take many decades in “the school of hard knocks” for human beings to learn that the only “use of use” is creation of a world of love, justice, and beauty.)
I am suggesting the opposite of the prevailing understanding: that the humanities can be of very high use value, in both public and private life, both short-run and long. How ironic and profoundly sad that they (some more than others – we could use some empirical research here) are rejected today, if not in gestures of indifference or reduction, then in acts of cultural self-hatred and perverse attempts at atonement.
I do not have easy solutions about how to pull out of death spiral and revive this deep valuing, but suggest we begin a new conversation with the hypothesis that the humanities are not primarily an established subject matter or body of work, or a universalizable canon. Rather, they first and fundamentally indicate a movement of the human spirit, a transformative practice which honors what is effective in specific times and places in bringing humans to fullness of life, to the kind of ripeness that is the glory of our species.
In the modern democratization, with its limitations and ambiguities, humans move from a secondary to a primary relationship to culture. Clearly this is a development that comes with both opportunity and danger, including that of persons who are too overwhelmed to be able to respond with the dignity of their own agency, broadcasting instead fascist assertions which have been pumped through their colonized ego.
It is possible, though, that democratization might not be as dangerous as it has come to seem in the very wild early Twenty First Century, with liberation of the masses from those well-disciplined but underdeveloped patriarchal elites that dominated and then left (with the money) the wasteland of cutthroat competition in their wake. Possibly what is passing now is more vivid and more frightening than that which will later emerge from the wreck, in fact, that which is already emerging – when we look closely — despite feebleness of its infancy.
Supporting this possibility, especially in the crucial realm of education, where we at present have NO coherent vision apart from its lowest form in training to make money, I propose that we adopt the developmental approach to the humanities as movement toward maturity and practices which elicit mature humanity.
This, of course, is dependent on the existence and vitality of open, lively, and free dialogue about the meaning of such always challenging matters. For “dialogue,” as the term for that relationship through which wisdom emerges, the relationship in which we can affirm sources of wisdom other than our own. Here we are way beyond the simplicity of mere transaction (which, obviously, remains necessary for other kinds of human relationships and developments – as in child-rearing and education where we are so anemic today.
Through all of this we come to see that understanding and practicing dialogue is the most general and basic definition of education, the most effective way of coming to solid understanding of the crucial processes and dynamics of maturation, including its typical failures and distortions. It also leads to the fresh conversation we need, about reinvention of culture and education and what is – or could be – so great about the humanities.
This is what we get to as we press the case for pluralism, as vastly different not only from autocracy, but also from relativism and the transaction of “free market economy.” And in a world of as yet limited interpretive (hermeneutical) sophistication, it soon becomes clear that pluralism requires that we let go of older forms of universalizing, and now adopt a deeper form, one which celebrates the fact that the particulars of practice can vary greatly from place to place and time to time, while the personal and relational consequences of healthy human practice and encounter remain remarkably the same in the civilized human being. “Depth” rather than “transcendence” begins to seem the better metaphor for that which is beyond metaphor.
This most demanding set of qualifications and commitments implies that the grand aspiration of free and full humanity is still present and active in the world, that there is still some “objectivity” to the old aspirational talk. It takes us back around, to the inherently democratic nature of the humanities: not only as pluralistic, but also as dependent on that dialogue/conversation mentioned above, one whichturns on a very particular kind of relationship with each other and the ineffables, those mysterious and elusive energies on which our lives depend. We should explore this relationship more fully.
References:
James, W. (1971), “A pluralistic universe,” in Essays in radical empiricism and a pluralistic universe, ed. Richard J. Bernstein. New York: Dutton, 264.
Whitehead, A.N. (1957), “The aims of education,” in The aims of education and other essays. New York: Free Press, 12.
Zakaria, Fareed (2008), The post-American world. New York: Norton, 190.
Dr. Stephen Rowe 