HUM 21 > The Humanities in a New Era: Surviving or Setting the Agenda? > The Humanities in America
Geoffrey Galt Harpham - National Humanities Center - 7 Alexander Drive - Research Triangle Park, NC 27709 gharpham@nationalhumanitiescenter.org (919) 549-0661
Keynote for conference at the University of Copenhagen on "The Humanities Into the 21st Century".
The Humanities in America
I am very pleased to be here on this occasion, which I see as an opportunity for a conversation on the nature and the future of the humanities in a cross-cultural and transnational context. The conversation takes place in a rapidly globalizing world, in which communications are enhanced and borders crossed or ignored, and differences suspended. At the same time, however, we are seeing a dramatic and disturbing increase, rather than a decrease, in ethnic, religious, political, and nationalistic violence. Not long ago, some were proclaiming the "end of history" brought on by a new consensus on the advantages of liberal democracy. From the perspective of 2008, that dream appears to have been sadly premature, disconfirmed by events all over the world that suggest not a grand unification of humanity but rather a fracturing dissensus fueled by massive migrations of refugees and increasing, rather than decreasing, inequalities. This situation is too well known to require elaboration. The question we-that is, scholars-face is, what is the position of humanistic scholarship in the world today? What role does it play, and what is the real nature of the contribution it makes and can make?
With respect to the role played by the humanities, I would have to say that it is deeply equivocal. So much scholarship in the humanities consists of highly particularized inquiries into events and texts that were understood, in the first instance, as particles of local rather than transnational or cosmopolitan traditions that scholarship implicitly confirms the priority and urgency of local identity and traditions. And the curricular organization of virtually the humanities in all universities is predicated on locality; it is as if the map of the world is always presented with the home country in the center.
And yet, the humanities are simultaneously invested in an implicitly universalizing discourse that seeks, and speaks to a deeper essence, beneath or beyond local determinants. The foundational concept of the humanities is not French or Japanese or Brazilian humanity, but humanity as such. The disciplines of the humanities are inconceivable without some concept of the human. But what is that concept? And does that concept change from place to place, time to time? To raise such questions cuts across the grain, because for the most part, humanists proceed as if these questions had already been answered. There is, in fact, a deep-laid resistance to considering the question of the human because this question resists disciplinary inquiry, and seems to require not scholarship but some arbitrary act of positing. Nevertheless, I think that we would all gain from a collective consideration of the fundamental question that underlies our diverse activities.
The country in the middle of my map is the United States, so I will begin by considering the discourse of the humanities in that country. Before I do so, however, I would like very briefly and inadequately to rehearse a history that may be very familiar to you here. In the United States, it is not widely known at all. The humanities began to assume their modern form in the German research university as conceptualized by Wilhelm von Humboldt. For von Humboldt, the most fundamental of all disciplines was philology, which provided objective evidence about the history of a people, evidence that was superior to that produced by science and philosophy because it had a moral and utilitarian value, yielding a deep knowledge of culture that would eventually lead to Bildung, the ennoblement of character. The goal of philology, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was not merely to produce accurate texts of classical documents, but to disclose through an historical study of language the history of mankind, all the way back to the origin of civilization itself. In time, this inquiry became an inquiry into the privileged origin of "Aryan" culture, with such consequences as are well known even in America.
Von Humboldt's thinking on education were taken up in England by Matthew Arnold, who conceived of education as a means of supporting culture, as opposed to anarchy. A key component of his thinking on culture and education was a veneration for the state as the means by which culture was secured and anarchy subdued. Arnold's version of culture played a major role in the formation of the elite universities that emerged in the United States around the beginning of the twentieth century, institutions that traced their genealogy directly back to von Humboldt. At these institutions, education was promoted for its moral as well as its academic benefits, and the humanities were identified as the disciplines in which the links between culture, education, and the state were forged. At elite American universities where research was prized, the role of the humanities in what came to be called "liberal" education was conceived in romantic, politically conservative, anti-rationalist, and aesthetic terms, with an emphasis on cultural traditions and the enrichment of character. By a quirk of history, research universities offering liberal education, which had been informed by German concepts of research and British notions of culture, flourished in the United States to a far greater degree than they did in Europe, at least at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the modern concept of the humanities was first being articulated as the "moral" complement to the scientific approach.
By the mid-twentieth century in the United States, the humanities found themselves on the defensive, under challenge from the emergent disciplines of the social sciences. After the Second World War, social science, including psychology, economics, anthropology, law, linguistics, political science, and sociology, emerged very rapidly as a set of mutually sustaining disciplines that seemed, to some Americans, distinctively American. The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences was founded at Stanford in 1951 in the belief that social science, especially as practiced by American scholars, could promulgate a set of principles about human behavior that would have the effect of spreading democracy, especially American-style democracy. Humanists were outraged because up to this point, they had been the ones promoting an American version of humanity, one based on rich subjective experience and moral seriousness rather than on general laws or principles. To the humanists, social science was nothing more than an academic form of mass society, technology, and bureaucracy. As one offended humanist put it in 1964, the social sciences presumed "the meaninglessness of the single event and the single human being in themselves," and therefore represented "the intrusion of the mode of the natural sciences into the world of human affairs and into man himself," a grievous offense and a serious threat. The humanities, by contrast, espoused the primacy of the individual, especially the reflective, autonomous, freely creative individual. While the social sciences represented the triumph of quantification, and the connection between research and policy, the humanities, it was claimed, represented an artisanal form of knowledge whose value was at once more deeply personalized and more abstract.
The discourse of the humanities around this time sounded the chords of universalism and the symphonic unity of humankind. In the 1964 document that launched the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Report of the Commission on the Humanities, the humanities are described as "the study of that which is most human . . . Throughout man's consciousness, the humanities have played an essential role in forming, preserving and transforming the social, moral and aesthetic values of every man in every age . . . . Their subject is every man." But the influence of Matthew Arnold, in the form of the link between education, culture, and the state, was still strong, which meant that the nationalist agenda was never far from the surface. And so the argument that carried the day then, as now, was that while the humanities addressed and concerned every man, they spoke with particular force to citizens in a free society in which individual autonomy was prized.
It was often said during this time-the time of the civil rights struggle, the space race, the Bay of Pigs, the missile gap, the Kennedy assassination, and the Cold War-that the humanities could "unify society," often with the strong implication that they were especially good at unifying American society. As one writer put it, the humanities could "play the role of liberator to the American spirit" and fill "the desperate need of the American people to find some constructive use for their increasing hours of leisure." If such claims had been made about the role of the humanities in liberating the German, French, Somali, Italian, British, Bolivian, Navajo, Egyptian, Laotian, or Hungarian souls, they would be considered-by Americans at least-as frightening, ridiculous, deluded, arrogant, or narcissistic. But in a public culture in which the free individual was so insistently identified with the national identity and the national identity with universal values-a culture in which the freedom to realize a human essence was considered the nation's gift to the species-such claims were none of these; they were simply and immediately persuasive. They were effective most of all in clinching an argument that might seem implausible but which was essential to sustaining a taxpayer-funded endowment-that the humanities, which are often described even by their advocates as useless on principle, or useless in the best sense, were a matter of national importance.
Indeed, this argument continues to be compelling, when carefully deployed. After being under attack from the right during the 1980s and 1990s for their decadence, intellectual corruption, and left-leaning tendencies of scholars in the humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities has made a very modest comeback in competing for funding (although the total budget for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts represents an expenditure of less than $1 per citizen.) And for a sample of the arguments that have prevailed, we can look to an event that happened just a couple of years ago, when the chairman of the endowment, Bruce Cole, appeared at the inauguration of the new governor of the State of Mississippi, one of the most deeply conservative states in the union, to state that the humanities speak to "what makes us human: the legacy of our past, the ideas and principles that motivate us, and the eternal questions that we still ponder." When you think about it, he said, this was what the 9-11 bombers were really attacking, and what the brave firemen and policemen who came to the aid of the survivors were defending. As Cole put it,
the values implicit in the study of the humanities are part of why we were attacked on September 11. The free and fearless exchange of ideas, respect for individual conscience, belief in the power of education . . . all these things are anathema to our country's enemies. Understanding and affirming these principles is part of the battle.
Today, it is especially urgent that we study American institutions, culture and history. Defending our democracy demands more than successful military campaigns.
It also requires an understanding of the ideals, ideas and institutions that have shaped our country. . . .
Such knowledge is part of our homeland defense.
The connection between the humanities, culture, and the state has never been stated with greater conviction.
For a comparison that will bring out the distinctively American combination of universalism and statism-that is, the simultaneous assertion of the loftiest pan-human spiritual or moral aims and the assertion of American geopolitical primacy-that I'm trying to demonstrate, we might look at the mission statement for the Arts and Humanities Research Board in the United Kingdom. It reads as follows: "The Board supports research that seeks to improve or enhance or develop creativity, insights, knowledge and understanding in the artistic and creative activities, history, languages, literatures, and systems of thought and belief of human beings, both past and present." To American eyes, this is strikingly deficient with respect to uplifting rhetoric. The equivalent statement on the NEH website, by contrast, does not disappoint. It reads: "Because democracy demands wisdom, the National Endowment for the Humanities serves and strengthens our Republic by promoting excellence in the humanities and conveying the lessons of history to all Americans." Actually, the contrasting messages of these organizations are fully conveyed by their places in the larger bureaucratic structure. The NEH is independent, and while it is dwarfed by the agencies that support science and health, it is structurally comparable to them; the Arts and Humanities Research Board is positioned, as the official description says, "in the Office of Science and Technology (within the Department for Trade and Industry)." No fine discourse about values, sensibility, the imagination, humanity, or the need to counter tyranny and terror-nothing, just a list of the kinds of work supported by this office.
Since its founding over forty years ago, the National Endowment for the Humanities has steadily lost ground as the leading funder of humanities research. Its budget has been frozen, its survival has been threatened, and more and more of the slender resources it has are going to projects with an explicitly patriotic and anti-Marxist cast. The indifference or even hostility of the federal and state government to the humanities has, however, enabled another, far more powerful sponsor to step in. The universities themselves, with their immense multi-billion dollar endowments, have taken to supporting humanities research on their own campuses through the creation of on-campus "humanities centers," of which there are now well over one hundred. These centers, and much else, are primarily funded by contributions from individuals. This represents a quite significant shift in the source of support for humanities research, but to my knowledge the effects of this shift have never been assessed. I would like to raise this issue now and invite you to compare the situation in the United States with the one that you confront here.
In the United States, scholarship in the humanities is funded at every level by private philanthropy. A scholar works at a university, in a department, in a building, and all these-university, department, building-are supported by private contributions, and the last is undoubtedly named for someone. If the scholar is doing research, s/he may receive sabbaticals, travel expenses, conference registration fees, a research budget, and a publication subvention; and these, too, may be funded directly or indirectly by gifts from individuals. If scholars want support for a research leave, they may apply to many foundations, including the National Humanities Center. When they complete their projects, they will try to get the results published in a scholarly journal or university press, neither of which would be supported by the state.
Imagine the primal scene of American philanthropy: a man who, having reached a certain stage in life, turns his thoughts outward, pondering how he might benefit society. In contemplating this question, this person asks himself what has meant most to him in life, what forces have truly shaped him, and what is most needed. These questions may lead back to those undergraduate years, when, perhaps, he had some experience with the humanities that touched him deeply. Maybe it was a particular instructor whose enthusiasm lit up the room and illuminated the world; maybe it was a course that introduced him to Dante, Picasso, the revolutions of 1848, Mozart, female mystics of the fourteenth century, Cuban cinema, Nietzsche, Chekhov, or Emily Dickinson. Maybe it was simply the peculiar challenge of contemplating other minds, other cultures, other languages-things that had no direct relevance to his career, but which somehow conveyed a more intense connection to reality than anything encountered elsewhere in the curriculum. Our thoughtful person might even draw some connection between the success he enjoyed in his chosen careers and those golden moments of youth, which had, almost as a byproduct, stimulated his imagination, exercised his sense of judgment, deepened his understanding of the traditions that enfold us, awakened his sense of possibility, and invited him to experience intellectual joy. How, he might ask himself in wonderment, could these things ever be considered optional or marginal? This is no dream: I know a number of such people, they are uniformly interesting and often deeply impressive individuals, and their support is critical to the humanities in America.
The philanthropic perspective can be highly selective and idealistic, proudly cultivating its own form of unreality in the service of a distant ideal. Such a perspective might take a liberal turn towards individual freedom and a kind of "left-aestheticism," or it might take a conservative turn towards timeless values and the virtues of tradition. It might be too vague to take any turn at all. And it might be intrusive in other ways. Once, a retired physician wished to endow a professorship at the university where I worked. It was understood that I would be the first recipient. I had known this person very casually for several years, during which time I shaved, then re-grew my beard. When the endowment gift was completed, it came with two surprising stipulations: that the holder of the professorship would be a male of Western European descent-at least it didn't specify "Aryan" lineage-and "clean-shaven at least half the year," which I suppose he felt I would not consider too burdensome. The university and I both rejected the conditions, and some other purpose was found for the gift (which the university refused to return). But not all attempts at promoting particular agendas-or promoting oneself-by funding can be easily deflected. Shortly after this incident, the same university accepted an endowment for a professorship given by the founder of an online search engine. There was nothing "wrong" with this endowment, except the inelegant name: The Yahoo! Professor of Political Science.
It can be difficult for hungry universities-and the rule is, the wealthier you are, the hungrier you act-to decline offers of support from individuals who wish to promote particular policies or politics, and difficult to know where to draw the line. Because they have no direct connection to public policy, the humanities might seem to be less exposed to this danger than the social sciences, but cultural issues can also be political, and no discipline can claim to be altogether free from the interests of its funders. Indeed, all scholarship and especially the humanities, where philanthropists often seek personal contact with the beneficiaries of their gifts, are brushed, as it were, by the beliefs, attitudes, and expectations of those individuals. These beliefs and attitudes are complex, multiple, and changeable, but among them is an almost defiantly unworldly, even utopian belief in the possibility of individual liberation, fulfillment, and ennoblement by acquaintance with the cultural and historical past extending across time and space. A high value placed on non-quantifiable subjective experiences of judgment, interpretation, appreciation, and responsiveness to beauty is built into the American conception of the humanities, especially at privately endowed colleges and universities, which generally set the tone and the agenda for others.
I do not want to draw too bright a line between the American system and others, since even in the United States, there are significant differences between the elite institutions where philanthropy plays a leading role and state institutions funded by state governments. In fact, all the elite institutions receive government support, and all state institutions benefit from private philanthropy, so the situation is thoroughly mixed. But it is definitely the case that when it comes to government funding, the humanities find themselves competing directly with national defense, entitlement programs, disease control, highway repair, technological infrastructure, and other essential needs. The humanities are at a great disadvantage in this context because the kind of value they generate cannot be adequately expressed in economic terms.
So poorly do the humanities compare with those other needs when measured in strictly quantitative terms that most defenders of the humanities declare at the outset that the value of the humanities cannot be determined by quantitative measures at all. Another response, which is more common outside the United States, is to represent the humanities in terms more appropriate to science, as a set of research projects whose determined outcomes have a specific value. For an example closer to your home than to mine, I would like to report a recent experience in which I was asked to review a proposal for a grant from a Research Council in one of the western European countries. As it happens, the project was on the concept of the state in the educational writings of Matthew Arnold. It was an exhaustive proposal, 7,000 words in length, including a bibliography of over 100 items. It provided a general background and an assessment of the current state of knowledge, a statement of purpose, a list of research questions, and a 1000-word section on "design and approach." This last section described the process by which a comprehensive data-base of all Arnold's references to collectivity and community would be compiled, and outlined the methods by which a rhetorical analysis of these references would be conducted. The goal of the analysis would, the proposal says, be to elucidate the way Arnold represents, through a pattern of rhetorical distortions, "the undecidabilities of aesthetic ideology as a discourse of sentimental education which simultaneously aspires to concrete realization in the form of the State and resists the disinterested impersonalisation involved in this realization in the name of self-interested sentiment." This sounds to me more like a result than a plan, but it is a highly useful indicator of the paradigm for humanities research in this environment.
That paradigm is social-scientific, with specific results following from a determined methodology. While the students in Matthew Arnold's ideal schools may have been invited to exercise their imaginations in the contemplation of the treasures of the past, no such invitation would be extended to the graduate student who would sign a contract to do this project as his or her PhD. That contract would leave no room for the lonely experience of formulating a problem, finding one's way amid a mass of possibilities, trying to fashion an argument; it would attach no value to individual interpretation, and would communicate no sense that scholarship represented both a discipline and a kind of free self-fashioning. It would leave no opportunity (or time) for deliberative reflection. In short, it would leave-from an American perspective-no room for the humanities. I hope that the project is funded, but I could not, in judging it, altogether suppress an "American" feeling that the entire thing was shallow, and, in its confidence about the value of its predetermined results, optimistic in an unacceptable way. Indeed, reading it, I realized that one of the functions of the humanities in America is to provide a counter to the epistemic confidence of the sciences by introducing into the monolith of predetermined outcomes factors of doubt, uncertainty, and hesitation.
So among the questions I would like to introduce today are the following: what ideology informs the humanities in Europe today? Have the humanities been able to maintain their independence from the social sciences? Do they wish to do so? Does the American model, with its unashamed invocations of the possibilities of the human spirit, represent from your perspective a perversion of scholarly work or its most essential aspiration? Should the humanities see themselves as guardians of the highest potentialities of humankind, or should they be understood as a mere set of disciplines, a sector of knowledge like others, and equally worthy of support, but with no special enlightening mission, no special depth?
There is, surely, no single answer to these questions, no one best way to organize the humanities. But a conversation about the understandings that form the foundation of the humanities-what sort of thing a human is, what sort of methods should be used to study the human, what sort of goals scholarship should set for itself, and how these goals should be integrated into political, cultural, or ideological agendas-would surely be illuminating.