The liberal arts and humanities lie in education’s ICU surrounded by the triage team: Dr. Slo, Dr. Outcombe, and Chaplain Jobe Reddie. This is not news; the liberal arts have been wasting away, unable to thrive because their rewards are subtle, slow, and cumulative, not easily packaged and marketed, and not obviously related to the workplace. So why should anyone have to study them?
Anthropology studies human origins and the ways humans have devised to live. The humanities, however, study why humans live and what it feels like to be alive. The ways humans live are varied and visible; why humans live and what it feels like to be alive are mysterious and internal. Anthropology can be written about scientifically; life itself can only be presented by stimulating the imagination, creating emotion, or performing life’s continual unfolding. W. B. Yeats’s famous formulation is “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”
Still, the liberal arts and humanities have enormous practical value and importance because they develop knowledgeable, reflective citizens with minds well-furnished with reference points that allow them to envision the consequences of actions. Those exposed to the humanities have, of necessity, thought about humans. Consider this current example: the Obama campaign employs a PowerPoint series of cartoons called “Life of Julia” which follows Julia, a faceless paper doll character, through her frictionless life. Cradle to grave, swaddled in President Obama’s social policies, Julia’s life proceeds free from conflict or failure. Julia is also free from men other than a son who simply appears in one slide, then disappears from the rest of Julia’s life. Without a husband, Julia seems married to the Federal government, enjoying various presidential allowances of tax dollars that ease her way through the coming decades.
The right wing commentariat was in stitches about Julia (who resembles an international symbol for “Ladies Room”), but really, her story is not funny at all; it is chilling to someone who has experienced the liberal arts. The practice of the liberal arts, especially literature, involves comparison, contrast, allusion, resonance, recognition of irony, suggestion, implication—all the artistic architectonics of meaning and sensation that arouse in us what it is to be human. Julia is only a cartoon but what is so unfunny and repellant about her is that she represents what her creators think about human beings. Let me explain by contrast and allusion.
In a much different, thornier world than Julia’s, there is a Paul Brady song called “Nobody Knows.” The chorus runs
Nobody knows why Elvis threw it all away
Nobody knows what [Jack] Ruby had to hide
Nobody knows why some of us get broken hearts
And some of us find a world that’s clear and bright
You could be packed up and ready
Knowing exactly where to go
How come you miss the connection?
No use in asking…the answer is nobody knows
I don’t know what Ruby had to hide, and I never expect to know, but because of literature, drama, and poetry, I do have an idea “why Elvis threw it all away.” I think I know why people who are “packed up and ready” will “miss the connection.” It’s something Julia doesn’t know, something the “progressives” who dreamed her up don’t know.
Elvis threw it all away to be free.
Literature tells this story over and over because it always rings true. William Faulkner’s Isaac McCaslin relinquishes his inheritance and his land so that he can be free of the South’s anguished history. The much envied Richard Cory surprised everyone when he “one calm summer night/Went home and put a bullet through his head.” Edgar Alan Poe called this impulse to act against what is seemingly in our own best interest “the imp of the perverse.” He thought it human and universal. Literature (which can never successfully contradict the world) agrees—the desire to let go, to relinquish, to walk away, is part of the way we are. Humans chafe at any collar or shackle, even success. Having it all (McCaslin, Cory, Elvis) and being able to throw it away could be the only way to be free. Otherwise, to paraphrase Joan Didion, the dream will determine how the dreamer must live. That’s why Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man insists that “there is one case, one only, when man may consciously, purposely, desire what is injurious to himself, what is stupid, very stupid—simply in order to have the right to desire for himself even what is very stupid [my emphasis]." The Underground Man concludes that “suffering is the sole origin of consciousness,” the suffering that follows from making risky, painful, unpopular, even irrational choices because “the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key!”
This is why selling the Julia concept frightens me. She doesn’t yearn to be free, like a human; she yearns to be kept. Julia embraces the piano key life that the president offers, and like W. H. Auden’s Unknown Citizen, she will act and behave predictably, she will choose and think correctly.
But in literature (and life) we recoil from those who trade freedom for safety nets and soft landings. The great anti-utopian novelists warned us over and over what happens when we make that bargain: George Orwell’s Winston Smith, Aldous Huxley’s John Savage, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s D-503 would rather suffer or die than join the Party, take the soma, or blend into the One State.
So what I find most chilling about the Julia ad concept is its creators’ cynical view of Americans, particularly women. And what if her creators are right? As Michael Walsh writes, “It’s tough to accept that perhaps a majority of our fellow Americans would cheerfully trade liberty for a false sense of security.” That is, how many workforce-ready but literature-free voters see The Life of Julia and find her flat, subsidized, feckless life desirable? With the liberal arts in decline, how many “miss the connection?” One must have been exposed to Orwell, Huxley, and Zamyatin in order to see their relationship to Julia and hear the warning.
A perennial question that divides the political left and right is this: what sort of beings are we? Do we have an immutable, perhaps transcendent, nature that will surrender everything utopia for autonomy, agency, and freedom (Elvis)? Or is there no inherent nature, and humans are just socially constructed, plastic, seeking nothing but safety and a reliable sense of well-being (Julia)? Political Science, Psychology, and Anthropology cannot answer that question, and the sciences can only measure what is measurable. The liberal arts and humanities, however, insist that we are like Elvis, and that those who trade liberty for comfort always live to regret it.
Jim Ellison
| July 17, 2012 - 1:28 PM
When I observe the “progressives” prescriptions for life I must assume that they believe “Brave New World” was a utopian vision rather than distopian.
DonM
| July 17, 2012 - 1:50 PM
Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose….
Freedom is worth it. “Price, no object. Use legal means if you must.”
Tony B
| July 17, 2012 - 3:25 PM
Very well thought out and written. Brings to mind a quote I believe is from a Roman philosopher/orator:
“Very few want real liberty; most want kind masters.”
Andy Freeman
| July 17, 2012 - 3:52 PM
> Still, the liberal arts and humanities have enormous practical value and importance because they develop knowledgeable, reflective citizens with minds well-furnished with reference points that allow them to envision the consequences of actions. Those exposed to the humanities have, of necessity, thought about humans.
While that could happen, in practice it doesn’t.
> [Julia’s] story is not funny at all; it is chilling to someone who has experienced the liberal arts.
No. Julia is designed to appeal to folks who have studied the liberal arts. And she does.
I agree that the liberal arts have great potential for good. However, what we’re getting under that name isn’t anywhere near that and the gatekeepers like it that way. Until that changes, and not before, ....
Marty
| July 17, 2012 - 4:12 PM
Do we have any good reason to doubt the political judgment of the Obama campaign team in devising “Julia” and putting it up—and keeping it up?
Wishful thinking doesn’t count.
After about 120 years of progressivism and almost 80 years since the coming of the New Deal, this is what we have become. There’s no point in denial, the question is what do we do about it.
Rosa E.
| July 17, 2012 - 7:47 PM
Agreed, agreed, agreed. This compulsive need to be managed, relying on the federal government for everything . . . it goes beyond a caring society and into outright dependency. Makes my skin crawl.
Walter Sobchak
| July 17, 2012 - 9:27 PM
Nonsense. The humanities lies on its deathbed because it choked on modern French marxist philosophy. The humanities became shallow PC BS that nobody cares about. There aren’t 50 professors in the US who know anything about the humanities conceived as they were a mere 50 years ago. The rest of them are stuffed full of worthless crap about THEORY and minority grievances, and race, and gender (no you ninnies you mean sex), and class, that they are completely lacking in.
Put a bullet in its head and put it out of our misery.
Mr. Alazar
| July 17, 2012 - 11:01 PM
“Still, the liberal arts and humanities have enormous practical value and importance because they develop knowledgeable, reflective citizens with minds well-furnished with reference points that allow them to envision the consequences of actions.”
So that explains why professors of the humanities exhibit those qualities to the degree they do?
HoosierHawk
| July 17, 2012 - 11:17 PM
As as science major (mech. eng.) I disagree.
“One must have been exposed to Orwell, Huxley, and Zamyatin in order to see their relationship to Julia and hear the warning.”
Actually, being a rational reasoning human being is all one really needs, and the BS ME from Purdue pays the bills as well. The idea that you need to go to college to be exposed to literature kinda seems…well unmotivated and dumb. You don’t need professors to lay out what authors have already uhh laid out. They didn’t write the books so that a University could charge an arm and a leg, and take 4 years of your life to require you to read them.. you can do that on your own time for free.
David Clemens
| July 17, 2012 - 11:19 PM
Thank you everyone for your comments.
Andy and Walter, well said, and I couldn’t agree with you more about the way the humanities have been hijacked by multiculturalism and Theory. My position is that what we have now isn’t really the humanities—it’s . . . multiculturalism and Theory. Literature, I contend, has to accord with reality. No one yet has written “The Jolly Slave” or “The Girl Who Found Happiness as an Unconscious Robot Functionary of the State.” Doesn’t work because, like Julia, it isn’t real. B. F. Skinner tried with his utopian Walden Two but the fiction didn’t work because in reality people want to be free. You may be familiar with the horrific “Cypher’s Choice” sequence in The Matrix. No one desires to be Cypher, trading reality for illusion. So the genuine humanities are an obstacle to be removed for those who wish to substitute an illusion for reality. We are on the same page, gentle readers. I just think it may be possible to recover the genuine humanities because they are congruent with the way the world really is making them impervious to whatever mountains of blather others amass trying to smother them.
David Clemens
| July 17, 2012 - 11:50 PM
I think you have a reasonable argument, HoosierHawk. There are two prongs, I think. First, my point is that rational, reasoning human beings act in ways that are not rational. I know a guy who was a Westinghouse honoree, Physics major at Cal, who upon graduation headed off to Hollywood to be a screenwriter because that’s what he wanted to do. Not rational but human.
Second, why should students HAVE to take humanities courses when the texts speak for themselves, a challenging argument. I suppose my response is that I feel that I hugely benefited from having to take Biology, Chemistry, and Physics (as well as voluntarily taking Zoology, Geology, and two Astronomy courses). They gave me a more expansive understanding of the world, one which I would not have otherwise, and that’s the point of a college education, imo. On the other hand, college has become so headlong and expensive that I understand your feelings.
Keef
| July 18, 2012 - 12:51 AM
This is a very odd argument with a false dichotomy at the end. Here are four points that I would dispute strongly.
1. Do we really “we recoil from those who trade freedom for safety nets and soft landings”? From Prufrock? Bartleby? Oliver Twist? I know many people quite passive in real life who are charming and likeable. The argument here seems to castigate all who “would rather not,” but that’s a prejudicial claim that begs the question….
2. ...of freedom itself. The assumption that humans are necessarily free is still very much up for debate. Philosophers haven’t solved that question yet, and it seems to glib to put “freedom” as the essential element of human existence.
3. The Elvis example is quite ironic given that Elvis ceded much of his freedom to the whims of Tom Parker (and others). It’s a misstatement to claim that he “threw it away to be free”; unless you’re counting addiction to drugs—and maybe you are—to personal freedom. I don’t think lots of addicts would think of themselves as free.
4. FInally, the two questions posed in the last paragraph are too constricting. Starting with Heraclitus and continuing at least to existentialism, many (if not most) would feel nothing akin to a “an immutable, perhaps transcendent, nature.” Furthermore the other characterization of humans as “just socially constructed, plastic, seeking nothing but safety and a reliable sense of well-being” is equally unrecognizable to most humans’ experience. The best counter-examples to these are the religious traditions of Buddhism (in which the self doesn’t exist) and Christianity (in which human nature is implacably sinful and therefore needs to conform to God’s rule).
The last statement of the piece is completely unsupportable.
S. J.
| July 18, 2012 - 1:09 AM
As a person who plans on making her career in the humanities (18th Century Lit., to be precise) I find it a relief to FINALLY hear someone defend these subjects. While it is certainly true that much of this segment of the academic world has been hijacked by strident, raging Feminists, Marxists and Multiculturalists, the subjects studied by humanists are still, essentially, valuable. Literature is, in my very humble opinion, a science. It’s a discipline that is deeply involved with pattern-recognition, social experimentation, and a studious, organized comprehension of what it means to be a human being. Yet, literary works require analysis - they must be measured against other works, historical data, linguistic trends, and real-world situations. Dystopian texts are vital to a future populace’s comprehension of WHY such policies are horrific. The horror is certainly exacerbated by a concerted scholarship into WHY such policies are anti-human. That scholarship - on an institutional, as well as personal, level - cannot occur if the humanities are occluded from the larger social discussion.
Preston
| July 18, 2012 - 12:04 PM
As a person familiar with all the works to which you referred, I must confess to an ever increasing awe at the prescience of Orwell. While considering the exponential mushrooming of the web’s capability for providing fulltime surveillance, the endless, faraway wars against unclear enemies for uncertain reasons, wars existing for most only in media reports, yet official justification for domestic suspicions and subjugation, and the purposefully obscure language practiced by the political classes, I can’t help but think he only had it wrong by 30 years. Perhaps too he did not foresee that the technology would be developed by free enterprise, only to be co-opted by governments otherwise incapable of such ingenuity. Then again, Orwell may have divined that the origins of the technology are immaterial, mere fodder for irony, while its inevitably Machiavellian uses are cause for dread. And perhaps he foresaw the timeline accurately as well, but pick “1984” as his title in order that his readers might be inspired to avert this bleak future while there was still time. Finally, I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t still be helpful if Orwell’s heirs and assigns were to reissue the book under the title “2024”, in order to make it more pertinent to a growing number of young people with no experience in the humanities, but an increasing sense of alarm.
Preston
| July 18, 2012 - 1:25 PM
As a person familiar with all the works to which you referred, I must confess to an ever increasing awe at the prescience of Orwell. While considering the exponential mushrooming of the web’s capability for providing fulltime surveillance, the endless, faraway wars against unclear enemies for uncertain reasons, wars existing for most only in media reports, yet official justification for domestic suspicions and subjugation, and the purposefully obscure language practiced by the political classes, I can’t help but think he only had it wrong by 30 years, and perhaps too in not foreseeing that the technology would be developed by free enterprise, only to be co-opted by governments otherwise incapable of such ingenuity. Then again, Orwell may have divined that the origins of the technology are immaterial, mere fodder for irony, while its inevitably Machiavellian uses are cause for real dread. And perhaps he foresaw the timeline accurately as well, but picked “1984” as his title in order that his readers might be inspired to avert this bleak future while there was still time. Finally, I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t still be helpful if Orwell’s heirs and assigns were to reissue the book under the title “2024”, in order to make it more pertinent to a growing number of young people with no experience in the humanities, but an increasing sense of alarm.
richard40
| July 18, 2012 - 4:45 PM
I admit the kind of humanities this author speaks about is indeed worth studying. Unfortunately in most universities today, the humanities dept is so corrupted by leftists that it is no longer worth studying. Too many of todays leftist orientated humanities departments beleive the life of Julia is correct.
The Crafty Trilobite
| July 18, 2012 - 9:42 PM
Um, how on earth do you know Julia “doesn’t yearn to be free, like a human; she yearns to be kept”? It says she gets student aid in college, not whether she trained for the Olympics while there. It says she needed surgery, not whether she was injured skydiving. Says she has a son, not whether she gave up a promotion to spend time with him at home. And why on earth would the slides include anything about Julia’s marriage, Mitt isn’t trying to repeal the joint filing option in the tax code.
Sorry, but your post is one of the least-founded straw man arguments I have ever seen in my life. Julia isn’t shown taking a bath either, does that mean Obama wants us all to stay unwashed?
David Clemens
| July 19, 2012 - 2:07 PM
We had a bit of a malfunction on the comment thread, and this post is a test—sorry for any inconvenience. We hope it’s fixed now. Let me take the oppotunity, though, to thank everyone again for their thoughtful and passionate comments.
Ron Broberg
| July 23, 2012 - 3:23 PM
“Freedom”, as described by David Clemens, lacks any sense of responsibility. Responsibility to family, to community, to God, or Country. It is simply the abrogation of responsibility - the freedom to walk away from any problem that is vexing.
One could argue that Julia suffers from the same problem - an abrogation of responsibility.
That the same issue is found in both the thesis and the antithesis indicates a more fundamental point that was missed by both.