The Humanities in the Digital Age

Ross Douthat has been reading doomster essays about the decline of the humanities, and he has some thoughts. (NY Times)

Douthat finds it easier to focus on reading novels to his children than on reading for himself. Because, he says, that situation forces concentration, and forces separation from the phone, the television, and all the other too-readily-available distractions. To read with attention we need to shut out the world, and he can do this much more easily reading out loud to his attentive younglings.

I agree. I found the same to be true about reading to my children, something I enjoyed as much as I have enjoyed anything. I used to do most of my personal reading on the train, where there wasn't much else to do, and the regular rhythm of the conductor calling out the same stations in the same order every day seemed to lull me into a state of calm and order perfect for reading. My house is too full of people, phones and computers for the same state to be achieved so easily.

Douthat extends this into a metaphor for what ails the humanities. 

Humanities education arose almost in opposition to the busy-ness and demands of life. Young men and women were sent to cloister-like colleges where they read Virgil or Milton in defiance of the practical and the mundane. In those circumstances it was much easier to focus on reading difficult texts, and easier to feel that this was a valuable activity. But after World War II the university as a separate, cloistered space broke down and slowly dissolved back into the world.

Douthat thinks humanities faculties made a fatal error by not fighting this trend, by not insisting on a separate space for reading and thinking. Instead they embraced "relevance": politics, personal identity, job skills, and so on. The results is students who have little interest in reading challenging old books and struggle to do so when they try. Some lack the necessary skills, but I suspect more just don't see the point. Why, exactly, would anyone want to read difficult old tomes full of awful political assumptions and situations completely irrelevent to contemporary life?

I think, though, that Douthat's model gives too much power to professors. The world has changed, and universities were forced to change along with it; after all many schools did try to fight the change for decades, but found it to be a losing battle. The whole mission of the university shifted, from creating gentlemen and ladies to preparing people for careers. Now that nobody aspires to be a gentleman or lady, the whole basis of a traditional humanities education has been shredded. I have mentioned here before that when my elder daughter took a real interest in art and history her professors immediately began encouraging to become a professor herself, as if that were the only possible path for someone with such interests to follow.

Not that the notion of a cloistered education is dead. I have met students who still want it, who long to disappear into another world of art and literature and history. Part of the appeal of Donna Tarrt's best-selling "dark academia" novel The Secret History is that it gives us a fantasy of education in the old mode of complete separation, a small group of young people completely devoted to reading ancient Greek. The professor who teaches all their classes introduces one seminar by saying, "I hope you are now ready to leave the phenomenal world behind and enter the sublime."

But even those eager few have smartphones and mothers who text them every day. It is just hard, in our world, to carve out space for real engagement with classic texts. I agree with Douthat that "digital humanities" sorts of projects are self-undermining. They may give people a glimpse of the old world, but without inculcating the habits that make it possible to understand or enjoy novels and epics on their own. Likewise with attempts to make the classics relevant, via anti-racist Roman history or feminist literary criticism. Too much engagement with contempoary politics is equally destructive of the separate space required for immersion and, I would say, to any notion of actually understanding the past.

Maybe there will be a backlash, a new boom of young people breaking their phones and throwing themselves into Homer or Dante. But that won't save most humanities professors, who increasingly find themselves forcing unwilling students to do what the students find absurd and the professors themselves hardly know how to defend.