Some Recent Links, and thoughts on the Humanities

Blogging used to be about linking, as well as all this personally-generated stuff we seem to do. I think I'm going to revive the effort here, since each week I often discover, read, and link to some wonderful articles and websites through other people, on Twitter and Facebook. Quite a few people who read this blog don't use those social networks (and I say good for you!) so it makes sense to share the links once in a while.

So here we go, with a little something for everyone, I hope!

The top ten words for which there is no English equivalent. I only knew a few of these: how about Wei-wu-wei, a Chinese word that means a deliberate decision not to do something?

Privacy and the Threat to Self. When did the very nature of personhood become a political and legal issue?

... its political importance is certainly part of what makes privacy so important: what is private is what is yours alone to control, without interference from others or the state. But the concept of privacy also matters for another, deeper reason. It is intimately connected to what it is to be an autonomous person.

The Stunning Grandeur of the World's Great Opera Houses. A photographic project by David Leventi. (via Bint Battuta.)

Estates Theatre, Prague, Czech Republic, 2008, by David Leventi.

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The American Academy of Arts and Sciences released a report on the state of the humanities called “The Heart of the Matter.”

Here are two op-ed pieces in response:

The Humanist Vocation, by David Brooks. I'm not a big David Brooks fan, but there is a lot here worth pondering about the change in thinking (and therefore in society) that is resulting from lack of education in th humanities.

But the humanities are not only being bulldozed by an unforgiving job market. They are committing suicide because many humanists have lost faith in their own enterprise...Back when the humanities were thriving, the leading figures had a clear definition of their mission and a fervent passion for it. The job of the humanities was to cultivate the human core, the part of a person we might call the spirit, the soul, or, in D.H. Lawrence’s phrase, “the dark vast forest.”

The Decline and Fall of the English Major A related piece by Verlyn Klinkenborg.

In the past few years, I’ve taught nonfiction writing... Each semester I hope, and fear, that I will have nothing to teach my students because they already know how to write. And each semester I discover, again, that they don’t.

They can assemble strings of jargon and generate clots of ventriloquistic syntax. They can meta-metastasize any thematic or ideological notion they happen upon. And they get good grades for doing just that. But as for writing clearly, simply, with attention and openness to their own thoughts and emotions and the world around them — no.

That kind of writing — clear, direct, humane — and the reading on which it is based are the very root of the humanities, a set of disciplines that is ultimately an attempt to examine and comprehend the cultural, social and historical activity of our species through the medium of language.

Please leave a comment if any of these articles generate thoughts of your own. I'm especially interested in your thoughts about the last two, since many of us have spent our lives in the arts and humanities, in caring about good writing, and thinking about "that vast dark forest" of the human spirit. Do you think this way of being is endangered? What trends do you see in the young people who you know, or perhaps teach?

From my own observation (which is limited, as I don't have kids of my own, and don't teach) I don't think young people today are any less idealistic than we were, or less creative, or less concerned about important things, less spiritual, or less hungry to learn. But as David Brooks suggests, I think we, the educational system, and society in general, may share the blame with a difficult economy for not making the case convincingly about why the humanities matter, and for failing to offer them enough and giving up too easily, perhaps because of our own fatigue and discouragement. What do you think?

Comments

[Sharat B.]

On Klinkenborg and Brooks' pieces, I can verify my generation seeks immediate use value out of their educations. Anecdotal though it may be, I'll provide the example of a conversation I had with a friend 5 years ago as representative of many other conversations and what the statistics in this AAAS study show. As context, we were discussing the purpose of opening a business.

Me: "Businesses are service providers first and their profitability is dependent on their doing that job first. In fact, they have a moral obligation to do their job well."

Friend: "No... Business is for making money. The service they provide comes second."

And that, at least to me, uncovers the literal-mindedness that Klinkenborg talks about. Education, through pressure from test-driven education systems and parents, teaches kids these days that they must extract value from it. That this use value is the only reason to learn. I think this attitude and degree-escalation are responsible for driving higher education into a place where its become about economics rather than scholarship.

[Beth]

Hi Sharat, thanks for this thoughtful comment - I'm glad to hear a direct response from the generation in question. For yourself, personally, how do you view your education? Do you feel you are different from your friends? How much of the pressure to have an education "pay off" comes from parents? And do you and your peers feel you are missing something if you don't take courses in literature, art, music, philosophy, history, etc?

[Sharat B.]

I will try to answer your questions in order (though my mind is far from orderly, and thus I make no promises):

1. I am very grounded in education as a means of self-knowledge, and self-knowledge as a basis for affecting the world (the social mores of my time) in a positive manner. My spirituality plays a huge part in why I seek knowledge. I also just love reading (novels, encyclopedias, dictionaries, scholarly essays, what have you). Having recently begun delving into the vast array of postcolonial studies writings, I also tend to side with the humanities in the debate more as I've found the historical foundations of science (which has been "winning" the knowledge debate in modern European culture for a while) are based on a violence to more traditional forms of knowledge, knowledge that may be covered by religious dogma, but knowledge nonetheless. Science and technology, at the pace they've developed since WWII, have encouraged an atemporal view of the world, ie the world was always as it is. That attitude is dangerously disengaging: when I catch myself in that frame of mind it makes me feel that I have no political agency.

2. My friends are a good deal more grounded in modern ways of thinking: logic, science, athiest, etc. So though I agree with many of the conclusions science has given us, we think about the process of arriving at that knowledge very differently.

3. I think like other societal influences there is no easy point of causation to blame. They too are under pressure from a society which tells them that their children won't have secure futures unless they pursue hard sciences (or in the case of my Indian heritage: doctors or engineers). That's a real worry. And the president of my adopted country takes every State of the Union to push STEM teaching, so they've no reason to question that, do they?

4. I think if they don't think at least a bit historically about whatever it is they're into (chemistry, biology, physics, math, programming) they miss the forest for the trees. My example is of my father and the team of programmers he manages. My father began programming with punch cards and has, over the span of his career, worked at every level of programming language abstraction (from the 0 and 1s of binary to HTML). The new hires have only taken the courses in the latest in-language in computer science education. So when a problem occurs in the coding, my father can figure things out even though he doesn't know the new programming languages: his experience of the history of computing has given him the toolset to solve computer problems regardless of the domain. Similarly, if physicists look back at, say, Newton, they'll see that he was into physics, mathematics (he invented calculus!), and interpretation of the Bible. Not many physicists today can claim that. Specialization in scholarship, a force in education that stems from the Industrial Revolution and is firmly tied to the enslavement of the worker's political and social power to his wages, is damaging to peoples' skepticism. So, while I'd love everyone to love Shakespeare and medieval and Early Modern lit/history as much as I do, I'd rather have them delve into the history of their craft so that they can be aware of the amazing scope of the project of human knowledge they're a part of. (Historical awareness is the beginning of political enfranchisement in my mind)

Thanks for asking, I hope I didn't just ramble!