A Third Way for the Humanities

A Declaration

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The Current State of Things

It is perhaps in the nature of academics to fret about declining standards, especially as these academics age and become ever less attuned to the always-evolving expressions of the innate ingenium of youth. But even an eternal complaint can be truer in some eras than in others. With each passing year since the economic crisis of 2008, the familiar response to complaints of decline —that we must not let our spirits flag, that we must not retreat into cynicism and defeatism— has come to sound, to those who have not lost their hearing, ever more “late-Soviet”.

No one wants to be the first shock-worker on the assembly line to acknowledge that the factory is not meeting production quotas. But at some point enforced identification with what is obviously a collapsing system grows so strained as to become unbearable, and the change that had been coming slowly for a long time now comes all at once.

The arrival of generative AI was, for many university-based humanists, the event that finally pushed us over the edge, and suddenly compelled us to begin naming the problem in lucid and uncompromising language. But AI was not so much a new threat to humanistic inquiry as it was the final, decisive blow dealt by a many-fisted menace that had been stalking us for years. A combination of technological, economic, political, and cultural forces, at work both within and without the university, had by the early 2020s effectively pummeled the tradition of universitarian humanism into unconsciousness. Humanities professors could still “report for duty” in a narrow sense; like apparatchiks in the early days of post-Soviet confusion, they could still show up for work and collect their (greatly devalued) paychecks. What they could not do is fulfill their duty — they could no longer, that is, have any real hope of guiding their students from beacon to beacon of a millennia-long tradition of reflection and discovery that, once internalized, likely represents the greatest hope a person has in this hard world for achieving a condition of true freedom.

The collapse is amply confirmed in both data and anecdote. But it is already a symptom of the total domination of a non-humanistic spirit in our contemporary world to suppose that data have some great power of persuasion that narrative description lacks. You can find the data elsewhere; let us instead consider here, unashamedly, some anecdotes.

These are stories that most humanities professors will already have heard in other variants, even if their full significance may not yet have sunk in. We have learned of an American student on a semester-abroad program in Florence —Florence— who, when told just a thing or two in passing about Michelangelo or Dante in the context of an introductory Italian class, complained to the program director that precious class time was being wasted simply to indulge the professor’s eccentric interests. From the student’s perspective, the entire purpose of learning Italian is exhausted by such things as ordering panini.

But why bother to go to Italy at all? This student’s “major”, of course, was one that did not exist prior to the present century, involving some ad-hoc concatenation of terms like “leadership”, “innovation”, and “sustainability”. On such a course of study students can easily end up in Florence rather than Barcelona, say —where they will in any case spend the weekend, thanks to EasyJet—, as the result of a choice as hasty and unreflected as the one between “Innovation Mindset” on Mondays and Wednesdays or “Team Building for Social Impact” on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The simple truth is that the students have no idea why they’re in Italy; they barely know that they’re in Italy. There is some dim awareness that they should be there, eventually to put “Italian” among their “languages” on LinkedIn. But this “Italian” is an Italian entirely separated from history, literature, and culture; and this should is an imperative entirely imposed from outside, entirely unconnected to a student’s exercise of his or her own freedom. The student has no freedom. Freedom has to be cultivated.

One feels for the student, whom the system has so tragically betrayed; and one feels for the professor, who simply cannot, under the circumstances, come good on their true life-calling.

But what about the humanities majors? If you go check the data you will see that there aren’t that many of them left. Have the humanities departments responded to their falling enrollment numbers by renewing their commitment to the great tradition, to helping their students wake up to the wonder of the human mind as manifest in its most enduring monuments? They have not. Instead, like the hoverflies that have found their little niche inside beehives through Batesian mimicry of the outer bodily morphology of their hymenopteran cohabitants, the humanities are undergoing a rapid process of what Tyler Austen Harper has called “business-schoolification”.

The blame for all this is not to be heaped entirely on the professors — though we’ll give them their share of it soon enough. The real explanation of why it is happening has everything to do with top-down economics, with the decisions made by that class of administrators whose primary function is to raise money, an enormous portion of which now comes from corporate partnerships. We have heard from a California-based specialist in medieval cosmology whose courses, which he spent decades gaining the expertise necessary to teach, have been replaced by other courses on “video-game ethics”. He has been told he’s welcome to stay on, for now, and teach these if he wishes. You can roughly guess, given the proximity of Silicon Valley, what sort of deal must have been made that would explain this change in curricular priorities. We have spoken with countless young Ph.D.s, who squeezed through with what can now only be seen as dissertation topics from an ancien régime —beautiful topics, universe-in-a-grain-of-sand topics, on Vedic ritual and Hildegard of Bingen and Ptolemy’s Almagest and Navajo verb tenses and Mexica calendars and and and—, who are now desperately bouncing from place to place, adjunct-teaching fake courses for paltry sums of money on topics fundamentally unworthy of their attention, on “Critical Thinking for Executive Leaders” and “Philosophy for Public Impact” and all those other confabulated subjects that fall within the genus of what is ultimately and irremediably an oxymoron: “Business Ethics”.

One feels for all of these precaritized intellectuals, whom the system has so tragically betrayed. But the time has come to do more than feel for them. The time has come to see whether something might be done for them, not just to string them along in a system that is plainly no longer their natural home. The time has come to think seriously about how we might salvage their beautiful spirits intact, and enable them to carry forward, to the next generation, the things that really matter. It is plain, by now, that if this is going to happen, it will not be the result of an intra-university change of priorities. Universities are not going to reform themselves, not without significant external pressure from independent para-academic initiatives capable of modeling how the humanities are actually done.

The present moment in fact, is ripe for the flourishing of such initiatives. We see them burgeoning all around us, and this fills us with hope. We will have more to say about these initiatives soon enough, but let us first, as promised, give the professors their share of the blame for driving the university-based humanities into the ground.

The Myth-Busters

Most academics who are not yet retired or dead are young enough to have spent their entire careers in a milieu dominated by some strain of “myth-busting” or other. The principal purpose of what has passed for humanities education has been to convince students that the humanistic tradition is not what they think it is. This is a peculiar pedagogical goal, to say the least, since typically at the outset students do not have any idea of what the humanistic tradition is, or even that it exists at all. They are being rushed straight from ignorance to contempt, without any serious effort to familiarize them with their contempt’s object. And in contrast with our loose use of the term in the previous section, this is a tragedy in the literal Greek sense: it is a blindness as to the nature and consequences of the professoriat’s own choices that ultimately contributes to their own downfall. For in fact nothing has been more useful to the administrators seeking to transform the entire university into a business school than to hear from the humanists themselves that their tradition is in any case really only the propaganda wing of white supremacy, patriarchy, and imperialism. Imagining themselves as occupying a site of resistance to capitalism, they end up among its most obedient running-dogs.

We acknowledge that in the 1980s and ‘90s many powerhouse intellectuals had a hand in promoting what Paul Ricoeur called the “hermeneutics of suspicion”. Even today you’re hardly much of an intellectual yourself if you feel no frisson in your encounter with what the cultural reactionaries —whose influence we will deplore next— classify generically and imprecisely as “postmodernism”, or even more imprecisely as “postmodern Marxism”. Much of the work these reactionaries ignorantly dismiss is indeed exciting stuff, and it has uncovered real truths about our reigning ideological order, in large part because all the leading figures of its first generation were extremely well-educated and knew the objects of their critique inside and out. But revolutionary movements almost always degenerate into mediocrity once they pass into the institutions, where the succeeding generation, charged with upholding them, preserves little memory of what the revolution had defined itself against. The particular flavor of our current mediocrity, in fact, results precisely from the collision between this now-institutionalized, half-educated spirit of contempt, on the one hand, and the vastly more powerful forces of financialization and hyper-quantification on the other. (We used to include “STEMification” in this litany too, until our friends in the natural sciences and mathematics convinced us that they are being bulldozed by these forces too. Indeed ideally we would not conceive the sciences as distinct from the humanities at all, and the fact that we do is itself a symptom of the same problem we are diagnosing. But the full treatment of this symptom, and its significance and possible cures, will have to wait for another day.)

It is as products of this collision that we must understand the delirious proliferation of ostensibly peer-reviewed articles —if their reviewers read them, they will almost certainly be alone in having done so— on what are plainly topics that would best be investigated in the form of a personal or literary essay. Their authors fail to understand, or pretend not to understand, that what interests them is best pursued through cultivation of an individual expressive style rather than through a weak semblance of argument and a flimsy citational apparatus. And thus we find young humanities professors maintaining a cargo-cult-like system for the publication of reflections on their personal motivations for adopting non-binary avatars when playing video games (for example), shoehorning a question that really ought to be explored through the cultivation of a personal authorial voice into the ill-fitted, incongruous frame of abstracts, keywords, works cited, and so on. The results cannot fail to be laughable. If those who participate in this cargo cult are unable to see this, it is because they preserve no real memory of the existence of a humanistic tradition that, rather than allowing its practitioners to burrow further into themselves, instead brought its practitioners out of themselves and onto a horizon that was much, much larger than their gaming screens.

Unlike the cultural reactionaries, it is not at all our purpose to ridicule anyone in particular. We sooner feel for them, whom the system has so tragically betrayed. But that this current way of doing things is ridiculous, that this strange skeuomorphic vestige of the formerly flourishing Geisteswissenchaften needs to be abandoned by any serious person — of these conclusions there can be no question.

Those who have some stake in upholding this absurd system —the junior academics excited to add an editorial-board membership to their CVs, the grad students eager to glean some likes on social media by sharing their first “accepted” e-mail as a screenshot— can often be found criticizing their critics for having criticized them in ignorance of what is called “the literature”. But by this they invariably mean only the narrow productions of the particular academic community in which they’ve found a home. Upon investigation, these productions never turn out to exhaust the range of what might legitimately be said on a given topic.

Such wagon-circling is particularly common in theoretical reflection on gender — a field in regard to which, note, we are here taking no substantive position whatsoever (though many of us involved in writing this Declaration do find particular satisfaction in the myth of the primordial androgyne). What does it mean to tell someone they have not adequately consulted “the literature” on gender? That they have not read the Rig Veda? The Talmud? That they have not sufficiently familiarized themselves with the role of the Tungusic shamaness in mediating between the Upper World and the Middle World? That they don’t know enough about twin symbolism among the Congolese Lele?

There is not a single human society that has not had significant, fascinating, important ideas about what gender is and about how it structures our reality. It would be surprising indeed if the infinitesimally small sliver of these ideas that is influential in Anglophone gender-studies departments in the early 21st century were to happen to be the final definitive account of how gender works. These people do not cite, or understand, the key works of social and cultural anthropology or of kinship studies that in fact paved the way for their own half-educated personalistic stabs at sense-making. And the result is a presumptuousness exactly as arrogant, exactly as myopic, as the presumptuousness of those on the right they claim to deplore, who believe without ground, without any real knowledge or any desire to get real knowledge, that scientific modernity and rationality are not only the unique accomplishment of “Western civilization”, but proof positive of this “civilization’s” superiority. (The scare quotes here are not a repetition of the rhetorical move made by Mahatma Gandhi, who said, when asked what he thinks of Western civilization, that it’s “a nice idea”; they rather mark our rejection of the idea that “civilization” is a meaningful historiographical category. This too is a commitment we will have to flesh out on another occasion.)

Let us turn to the Western supremacists next.

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The Myth-Makers

Representing the most prominent “Second Way” alternative, the Western supremacists have been stirred to life in the past few years as one of the many ripples of the new global surge, especially in the United States, of populist identitarian nationalism. They hope to move into the void created in large part by the obvious failures of the myth-busters currently dominating the academic humanities. In certain parts of the United States, perhaps most notably in Florida, they have succeeded in this ambition. This does nothing to change the fact that they are themselves failures, utterly ignorant of what humanistic tradition is and of what it is good for.

It is only natural, given the essential binarism of social media, that when no other space for public debate is left, the principal opposition to myth-busting should take the form of an equally crude myth-making. The people with Greek statues as their profile pics, like those they mock, know nothing of the concrete attainments of the “humanities as Wissenschaft” model that took shape in the Enlightenment and survived until around the end of the 20th century. They have never read Winckelmann; they don’t have a clue as to what in fact makes a Greek statue beautiful; and they are certainly in no position to spell out any real criteria in virtue of which the Greek statue might be judged “superior” to a Kwakiutl totem or a Benin bronze.

Even if we concede for the sake of argument that the Greek statue is superior, these people still have no account of how or why that superiority should be supposed to traduce down to them in particular. In most cases they descend from ancestors who in antiquity had been forest-dwelling barbarians. There is of course nothing wrong with that. A properly capacious humanism is one that studies the life-world of the barbarians with no less generosity of spirit than we should expect of our specialists in Hellenistic aesthetics. But they’re hoist on their own petard. For if you do wish to reduce tradition to blood-ties, and the history of human ingenium to what has been produced only within complex hierarchical urban societies, well then sorry, but you hicks probably aren’t going to make the cut.

It is of course natural for members of traditional societies, lacking a humanistic education, to conceive the history of humanity as having a teleological arc that leads to the emergence of their own kind of people. We have spoken with villagers in Anatolia who will proudly tell you that the pre-Socratic philosophers of Miletus were “Turks”. This is normal, endearing, and indeed a widespread cultural phenomenon worthy of study in its own right. But it is what you should expect to find in the absence of humanistic education. It cannot, therefore, obviously, be the purpose of a humanistic education to bring the student who undertakes it into exactly the condition that that education was supposed to lift him out of.

We ourselves are defenders of “the canon”, for much the same reason we defend periodization (“antiquity”, “the Middle Ages”, etc.). It is not that our system of ordering is the final definitive one, but rather that you can make no sense at all of the monuments of human attainment if you don’t organize it around a set of commonly recognized beacons and transitions. Most of the works in the canon, most of the “Great Books”, are truly great. But the criteria that make them great are at least in great part taphonomical, so to speak: their greatness accrues gradually over the course of their long reception-histories, often as a result of contingencies that could not have been predicted by any non-omniscient intellect at the time of their creation. Gilgamesh is great. It is a beacon of humanity’s common heritage and should be studied and loved by everyone. It is also a statistical composite of a common Mesopotamian narrative whose tablets happened to survive. Are the stories on the tablets that were stored in conditions less amenable to preservation less great? We will never know for sure, of course, but that seems unlikely. The Odyssey is great. We also know with certainty today that it was an oral tradition for centuries before anyone bothered to write it down. Is it “greater”, then, than the oral traditions of the highland Bosniak guslars, which feature many of the same epithets and alliterations and other mnemonic techniques, telling much the same sort of heroic tale, to the same aesthetic effect, serving the same purpose of social cohesion?

We are so far, today, from the sort of capacious, generous, liberal disposition that enables any true humanism able to see essentially the same genius at work wherever human beings are doing their human thing. We are so far today from any real receptivity to human creativity as such, to culture as such; to craft traditions; to oral traditions; to folk tales, lullabies, ditties, byliny; to an awareness, such as G. W. Leibniz was already perspicacious enough to see in 1704, that once we have studied every word of every “Great Book” of every “civilization” in the world, the real task of humanistic inquiry will have only just begun, since at that point “languages would take the place of books, and they are the most ancient monuments of mankind.”

This conception of what humanistic inquiry is supposed to be doing had a long and productive history, extending as a slightly subaltern but still very influential thread throughout modern history, from Leibniz through J. G. Herder and other figures of the so-called “counter-Enlightenment” and “Romantic” movements, issuing in the scholarly study of folklore and fables by the Brothers Grimm and G. E. Lessing, informing the anthropology of Franz Boas and the ethnomusicology of Alan Lomax (to run through just a few of the great beacons of the tradition we take ourselves to be upholding), only to be definitively squelched by the end of the 20th century with the conjoint triumph of hyper-financialization at the level of institutional organization, and the hermeneutics of suspicion at the level of ideology.

And today, with practically no one around in our institutions to defend such a generous approach to the human past, the past itself is left undefended from the invading barbarians who imagine themselves, likewise in classic cargo-cult fashion, as the brave upholders of civilization. There is no one around to articulate, to the likes of Christopher Rufo, the real reasons why the humanities cannot be subordinated to the purposes of national myth-making or patriotic indoctrination. And so the campuses fall to these ignorant marauders, like paper tigers, while true humanistic inquiry remains just as homeless as it had been under the reign of the administrators with their vision of the university as one giant business school; of the donors, with their demand for ever more programs in AI ethics and other oxymoronic whitewashing schemes; and of the post-humanist faculty, with their self-indulgent me-search and their strained and anxious appeals to “the literature”.

It is only natural, in the midst of this omnishambles, that the true humanists should start to think about building new homes for themselves.

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What Comes Next

As recently as five years ago, the job-placement operations within humanities graduate programs still treated the so-called “alt-ac” path as a regrettable second-best, a consolation for runners-up, something to be avoided if at all possible. Today, the entering Ph.D. students we encounter, in various humanities programs at variously ranked schools in several different countries, tell us openly that they have no expectation at all of ever having a traditional academic career. Ph.D. studies are pursued, now, out of a combination of at least some genuine intellectual curiosity with a strategy, when they are honest about it, of stalling for time, of pushing the eventual obligation to find a job 3-5 years further down the road.

At the same time, something remarkable has been happening: independent initiatives are springing up right and left, spearheaded by former academics, or academics working double-time (or triple-time), or otherwise academia-adjacent people for whom the traditional career pathway did not work out, or indeed who are waking up to the reality that that pathway will never deliver them the intellectual satisfaction for which they might earlier have hoped. Many of these initiatives are spearheaded by “dissenters” of various stripes, by cautiously critical insider-outsiders, or indeed, in some cases, by downright gadflies. They have all, in very different ways, woken up to the fact that they have a significant amount of power, delivered to them in part by our new technological infrastructure, to decide for themselves what the humanities are going to look like, rather than waiting for a dean or a provost or a board of trustees to decide. They are finding that the old objection, that their initiatives cannot deliver “course-credits” to those who sign up for them, falls increasingly flat. There does not seem to be, at this point, much in the way of a link between such credits and any eventual material pay-off, the new thinking goes, so we may as well just do what interests us. And who knows, really, what sort of pay-off might come, down the road, from the accumulation of such uncreditable experiences?

Among these initiatives we might include, notably but not exhaustively, the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, the Catherine Project, the School of Radical Attention, the Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life, and indeed the Hinternet Foundation; magazines such as The Point are organizing summer workshops; Substack is increasingly spilling out of its initial function as a site for writing and spinning out new experiments in continuing education. Some of these initiatives are inspired by the particular vision of education at the more traditional academic institutions they are born from, such as the University of Chicago or St. John’s College, themselves already somewhat “alternative” within the American university landscape. Some of these initiatives are grounded in a “back to basics” philosophy that eschews technological aides, others are eager to experiment. Many of them draw inspiration from historical antecedents, experimental initiatives that sprang up in the early-to-mid 20th century, such as Black Mountain College or the many working-class reading groups that flourished in close associations with trade unions in Britain, Europe, and North America, but that began to fade with the expansion of higher education after Word War II.

Higher education is no longer expanding; it is contracting, or transforming to the point of total discontinuity with what it had once been. It is only natural that this transformation should bring with it a rediscovery of the historical fact that there is nothing intrinsically “elite” about reading Homer or Shakespeare. Yorkshire coalminers used to do it, together, with great joy and satisfaction. It was a lie and a betrayal on the part of the heremeneuticists of suspicion to have told their students —and their deans— that humanistic inquiry is, in its essence, anything but democratic. The humanities are democratic precisely because they do not come down to us through blood-ties, but must be cultivated anew over the course of an individual life. As Seneca said: “If there is any good in philosophy, it is this — that it never looks into pedigrees. All men, if traced back to their original source, spring from the gods.” (Of course, since the early 20th century the dominant strain of Anglophone philosophy has sought to distance itself from the humanities and to find its niche somewhere closer to the positive sciences — yet another case of hoverflies sneaking into the beehive. But this has been a futile effort — one which, again, we’ll have to address on another occasion.)

The humanities are not a system for the production of positive “research results”. They are a practice of self-cultivation, or they are nothing. They proceed through the interiorization and mastery of great bodies of work that attest to the fundamental genius of human endeavor as expressed in culture. They understand culture as inescapably wrapped up with myth. But they see it as their purpose not to bust myth, nor to buttress it, but simply to wonder at it — to take it in and admire it in all its variety and depth.

Most of the work humanists study will necessarily be foreign to the life-world into which any individual humanist-in-training was born. This work will not, initially, be “relatable”. This is among the most compelling arguments for the humanities, not against them. Their purpose is nothing less than liberation, from the narrow horizons of our all-surrounding mass-culture, from the eternal vapidity of the present, from externally imposed and ill-comprehended imperatives, from a life of being told to go now here, now there, simply because that is what one does.

It will surely seem paradoxical to some to be told that the path to freedom lies in tradition. Today tradition is generally thought to limit self-realization, not to enhance it. Honestly, though, could anyone be less free than the young American who goes to “study” in Florence, but resents having to hear any mention of Dante once there? The institutions that have allowed this to happen have failed her, plainly and simply.

It is time for committed humanists to get over the idea that these same institutions offer the only setting in which humanistic inquiry might be collectively pursued. This does not mean we want to replace them, or that we must, individually, abandon them. Many of us will remain insider-outsiders, perhaps for the rest of our careers. But it is time now, at least, to begin building parallel institutions that can exert some real pressure, that can let the universities know just how deeply they’ve failed, by modeling a truer and more beautiful alternative.

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