What are we good for?

Absolutely something-or-other

If there’s a particular genre of opinion piece that almost guarantees a click from me, it’s the one that offers up (or contends with) the so-called “value” of the humanities. And that’s a little weird, because if I’m completely honest, I tend to think of rhetoric and writing as a field of study that doesn’t quite fit comfortably into the humanities.

This attitude of mine comes in part from a book that I mentioned last month in a different context, Herbert Simon’s The Sciences of the Artificial. Simon’s argument (based on my hazy recollection) is that, alongside the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, we might add a fourth general category, with which he titles his book. He’s not talking about artificial as “fake,” but rather in terms of artifice, or making. The book has been described as “one of the most influential texts in the 50-year history of the development of design theory,” but I only really know of one book in my own field that took it up seriously. The artificial sciences would encompass “all fields that create designs to perform tasks or fulfill goals and functions,” and would include architecture, design, engineering et al., and to my mind, rhetoric has a great deal in common with those fields, perhaps as much as it does with more traditional humanities disciplines. (Given that most rhetoric/writing programs remain embedded in Departments of English, this would probably qualify as a hot take disciplinarily.)

[For those of you who’ve read my book, it might interest you to know that my own take on interfaces, which is a strong one, comes in part from Simon, who defined the artifact (the output of artificial sciences) as “an ‘interface’ in today's terms between an ‘inner’ environment, the substance and organization of the artifact itself, and an '‘outer’ environment, the surroundings in which it operates.” If you read that and think that it’s a remarkably broad definition for interface, one that’s much broader than we typically use, you’re right.]

One of the ideas that we might take from Simon is the notion that artifacts, or artificial systems, can be studied empirically, revised, improved, and adapted. We have ways to measure and assess the sturdiness of a bridge, the effectiveness of an advertising campaign, or the uses to which a building is put. In all sorts of ways, that is how we arrive at conclusions about the relative value of those artifacts.

The Humanities Center at SU

Part of the challenge for the humanities, and for the folks who profess them, is that value is not nearly as clear cut. I don’t mean to say that their value is not clear, but that the idea of a generalized sense of value, one that might be abstracted from individual instances, measured by empirical means, and asserted beyond the scope of an isolated encounter, is fundamentally inappropriate as a way of understanding the humanities. That’s not to say that we can’t place a book or a film into a particular context, and measure the value that it yields in that moment—we have bestseller lists, and Academy Awards, and auction houses, all of which purport to assess culture and assign its works a value. But those institutions can only tell us about individual texts, and only in a specific context. They don’t articulate anything about the humanities in general.

But when we accustom ourselves to thinking in terms of value, it makes it more difficult to think about that more nebulous question. And we get articles like the one from a few days ago in the New York Times, from Agnes Callard, “I Teach the Humanities, and I Still Don’t Know What Their Value Is.” Value is one of those terms that we treat as though it were perfectly denotative—as though it were somehow self-evident—when in fact, it’s the furthest thing from it. Part of the (presumably intentional) irony of this opinion piece is that Callard makes all sorts of statements about the humanities’ value to herself, while at the same purporting to be utterly ignorant of that value:

As a humanist — someone who reads, teaches and researches primarily philosophy but also, on the side, novels and poems and plays and movies — I am prepared to come out and admit that I do not know what the value of the humanities is. I do not know whether the study of the humanities promotes democracy or improves your moral character or enriches your leisure time or improves your critical thinking skills or increases your empathy.

The answer is, of course, that the humanities do all of those things and none of them as well. “The humanities” isn’t a thing in itself—it’s a category that stretches to include philosophy as well as those novels, poems, and plays. Each of the disciplines therein, and each of the works studied by and generated from “the humanities” contains all sorts of possibilities, some of which will be enacted depending on an infinite array of factors (and some which won’t in the moment or may never). A book that changes the way I think may seem like a snooze to you. I might bow out after 15 minutes of watching your all-time favorite movie. I might be able to articulate my tastes to you perfectly, with no guarantee that you will find as much value as I do in the album we’re listening to or the art we’re looking at.

While the humanities can, in some cases, “perform tasks or fulfill goals and functions,” it’s a pretty grim world we live in if that’s their only purpose, and asserting or defending or pretending to articulate their “value” is a step further down that rabbit hole than we should wish to take. It creates the sort of gnarled thinking that result in passages like these:

We humanists keep on trying to teach people what the value of the humanities is, and people keep failing to learn our lessons. This suggests to me that humanists do not know the value of the thing they are trying to defend.

Setting aside the strangely flawed reasoning in this passage (which earlier likened humanists to math teachers whose students had failed an exam), I find myself flat-out disagreeing with its initial premise. As Callard herself later demonstrates as she discusses her own teaching, no humanities course “tr[ies] to teach people what the value of the humanities is.” My own PhD is actually in Humanities, so I’ve taken as many such courses as just about anyone, and that’s simply not the case. It also puts the lie to right-wing screeds (which have been circulating in ALL CAPS since I first attended graduate school in the 1990s) about higher ed being a site of indoctrination.

But the worst part of this argument is how absolutely tired it is. In this, I’ll side with Adam Kotsko, who wrote a few years ago that

The idea that college faculty and their allies have somehow failed to “make the case” for the value of their work is one of the hoariest clichés of higher ed commentary—our equivalent to the legendary “since the dawn of time”-style opening for undergraduate papers.

Kotsko sorts through a number of equally exhaust(ed/ing) anti-humanities propaganda points, including the myth that STEM degrees are more “valuable” than humanities or liberal arts, which typically make up in career earnings their disadvantage in initial salary. But these points continue to circulate, and to dominate discussions of higher ed in general and the humanities in particular, in no small part because of the way that “institutions of higher education have been actively dismantled,” as Kotsko puts it, by conservative politicians, a corporate culture that has off-loaded vocational training onto universities, and honestly, a managerial class that fails up with the mantra of “running it like a business.”

As for Callard, her disingenuous argument affects a friendliness towards the humanities and the values it represents, just long enough to arrive at the point that she truly wishes to make. When folks who work in the humanities feel (rightly) that they’re under attack, they respond with a defensiveness and politicization that is inimical to those values, she explains. To be fair, this sounds almost reasonable. But I guess I can’t help but hear echoes here of the constant refrain of NRA-funded Congressfolk feigning outrage over the Left’s “politicization” of the victims of gun violence. It’s as though this dismantling weren’t itself already political and designed to put us in survival mode.

Interestingly enough, a couple of years ago, I read Eric Hayot’s excellent book Humanist Reason, which travels some of this same ground—Hayot writes that “Too much of humanist metadiscourse is defensive,” for instance. But rather than urging a retreat the way that Callard does (or Ross Douthat did several months ago), he traces back the distinction between the sciences and the humanities, and tries to offer a different path, a new model for how we might understand humanist reason. I can’t really articulate it here without doubling or tripling the length of this post, but he explains that “I don’t think the humanities matter because they’re beautiful or because they do left politics. I think the humanities matter because they’re a good way of knowing things, and because their way of knowing things has often produced substantial changes in the way all of us think, live our lives, organize our social spheres, and plan for the future.” What excites Hayot most about humanistic reason is that “it sees connections across the entire fabric of human experience.”

I could go on, but I think I’ll close with one more line from Hayot: “The reality is that humanist social value at its most valuable belongs to everyone, including scientists and social scientists (who then do research on things like democracy or the environment), which is why it seems not to exist at all.” There’s a case to be made, I think, that it’s precisely this kind of social value that doesn’t lend itself to the actors, systems, and mindsets whose judgments about “value” we’ve become so accustomed to accepting. The social value of the humanities is important enough that I still feel compelled to defend it, even if I don’t always feel like the work that I do is squarely located there.