Culture vision must be shared

Paul Tankard.
Paul Tankard.
Humanities scholars need to communicate their vision, writes  Paul Tankard.

In the 60s, the English satirist Michael Flanders, taking up the suggestion of C. P. Snow that all educated people should know the language of science, proposed greeting a scientist, "H2SO4, professor! And the reciprocal of pi to your dear wife!"

Times have changed.

But when we want to say that something is not incomprehensible, we still say: "It’s not rocket science."

Scientists responded to C.P. Snow’s challenge with commendable directness by setting up – we have one here at Otago – centres for "science communication."

There are chief scientists in government; there are science festivals, science comedians, science prizes, and science film festivals.

Scientists are shamen, and showmen.

The Humanities have not required lobbyists, communication centres, or special programming on TV, because they are thought to be self-communicating.

Humanities "subject", such as literature, history, religion, art and music, are about a people’s place and identity, their ideas and imaginings.

If you don’t know that stuff, well – just what do you think you are?

You need a scientific education to understand the sciences; all you need to understand the humanities is to be human.

But what makes the humanities vital is also what limits their reach.

To be human is to be part of a culture.

The content of the humanities varies across cultures, whereas the discoveries of science apply for every society, in every location.

If there were, elsewhere in the universe, self-aware entities at a sufficiently advanced stage of development, they could understand Euclidean geometry, the periodic table or Newtonian physics.

They would have a lot more trouble deriving anything at all from Hamlet or Beethoven’s 9th Symphony or the Bible or the songs of David Bowie.

If the humanities are no longer appreciated by the bureaucrats and bean-counters, the politicians and powerbrokers, the 24-hour party-people, the digitally-fixated online dilettantes, there are a lot of people to blame: the slaves to ideological fashion who make up school education policy; the lazy relativists whose self-interest it suits to say that nothing important is knowable; the neoliberal "men without chests" who worship material "progress" and economic growth, because they can’t imagine or conceive of anything better.

But also, there’s us.

The humanists.

We have failed to explain ourselves clearly, especially to those who make decisions.

For what it’s worth, here’s my explanation of how this happened.

Since World War Two, humanity’s living arrangements have slowly but surely become unprecedentedly globalised, urbanised, pluralised, digitised.

Also, material wealth increased exponentially.

Many people were cut adrift from traditional sources of identity and certainty.

The sciences, being independent of cultural conditions, coped with this, even thrived, but the humanities were thrown into a tailspin.

As the humane studies were seen to be backward-looking and full of all sorts of inherent undesirable biases – out of step with the new world order – all traditional content was gradually deleted from the humanities curriculum.

In place of the core content of disciplines like English – the core content always being, coincidentally, the part requiring sustained intellectual effort, such as reading and memory – was introduced an arcane jargon and collection of abstract concerns derived from Continental philosophy.

This stuff, which it was hoped was independent of culture, proved impenetrable and repellent to all but a minority of people, and was (and is) suspected by traditionalists of being fraudulent and/or nihilistic.

In other words, the humanities became both politically contentious, and uninteresting.

Schools, to sidestep the issues, stopped teaching content-based humanities – no more grammar in English, dates in history, places in geography, or practical skills in the fine arts – and replaced it with … "projects."

And with social work: dealing with the human costs of the cultural and social dislocation caused by globalisation, urbanisation, pluralisation, and digitisation.

Okay, I’ll admit this is a little too neat. Some folk in my own Department (English) and Division (Humanities) would find it contentious.

But (here’s the thing) it’s in the corridors and classrooms, and the texts read and written, in a humanities faculty that such things are discussed.

You won’t find informed or extended discussion about human nature and society or the meaning of knowledge on the curriculum in faculties of science or of commerce, or the vocational subjects that have been shoe-horned into universities.

Vocational disciplines qualify us to take our places as cogs in a highly complex economic machine.

The humanities not only give an expansiveness of vision, which will enable people to adapt to rapidly and unpredictably changing work environments, but they qualify us for living more fully human lives, and for fuller participation in human society.

That’s why they’re called the Humanities!

If adequate university funding is only to be made available to the so-called STEM subjects (a propagandistic acronym, by the way), our society will increasingly value only the things science and commerce can deal with – the material.

Science and commerce, unlike the humanities, do not concern the past, or ideas, or the lives of others; not the world of the spirit, not beauty, not truth.

Anti-humanities policies accelerate us towards a future in which the only things prized require no education or cultural background to appreciate: SUV’s, designer labels, McMansions in gated communities, with unlimited broadband and wall-sized TV’s, and the ideal life an unending stream of sensual titillation.

The humanities will not furnish the outside of your life, but the inside: make you curious, empathetic, susceptible to beauty, thoughtful, critical, respectful of difference, and with a sense of your place in the order of things.

So, in the context of the present proposed cuts to the Humanities at the University of Otago – about which, please note, I’m saying NOTHING, okay? – I want to plead with teachers and scholars in Humanities disciplines to become more thoughtfully, creatively and frequently outspoken about the larger meanings of their work – in terms that can even be understood by MP’s with degrees in commerce and zoology.

- Paul Tankard is a lecturer in the English department at the University of Otago.

Comments

That's enough! Secondary should have prepared them. It is 'Social Studies', not History, Istanbul not Constantinople. History as a school subject encompassed NZ History, that which people claim was 'never taught, only English Kings and Queens'. History was a choice, taken to UE Level. Once caught by the spirit of Keith Sinclair, Margaret Mead, Rex Fairburn, John Mulgan, and more recently Lesley Proctor, you were humane for life, really.

Excellent article about a cultural tragedy that might be all over bar the shouting. Here in NZ and also in Aus where I’m from. In fact, I think Aus might be further along this path.

Starving people of humanities has awful consequences. Sometimes cultures perish by being taken over by stronger ones, but this is more like a cultural suicide, leaving nothing behind (culturally speaking).

Everybody’s heads will be in their respective vocation-based boxes: how will they relate? Apart from rugby, the traffic and transport systems and money matters (the economy generally and the cost of housing in particular), what will the new New Zealanders talk about?

For those fortunate enough to have a job, New Zealand will just become a workplace. The prospect is dreary and terminally uninteresting.

If it matters, I’m not at all against vocational education or the sciences – all necessary – but the humanities are also necessary, but are just a bit harder to “price”.

An example of more specific problems: we know science sometimes struggles with the difference between “can do” and “should do”; take away humanities (wider critical thinking) and we only have "can do".

Good to read a critique of the fashionable nihilistic and mostly incoherent philosophies of 'post-modern cultural relativism' etc which took a vice grip on academia particularly in humanities and education departments. Not even the 'hard sciences' were safe. The Sokol affair completely caught out purveyors of this pretentious, incoherent, dangerous anti-reason and anti-Enlightenment nonsense. It's still unfortunately taboo for most students and their teachers to question these ideas, such as 'reason' being merely a social construct and that ethical standards are purely dependent on the cultural point of view of the speaker. Cultural suicide, indeed, when universities around the world for the last thirty years or so have passed off nihilism as 'truth'. No wonder young people can easily be seduced by various intolerant fundamentalist views. It's a sobering thought that the values of 'liberty, fraternity and equality' are not 'universal' at all and risk being lost, not just in theory but also in practice, even in law, if the history of the struggle to secure them is not a central part of young people's education.
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair