Creative Humanities
A Philosophy of Education for the Post-University Era
1.
In two recent essays on two consecutive Sundays (here, and here; I recommend you read these before continuing), I bemoaned the collapse of the academic humanities. I characterized Trump 2’s most recent assault on American universities not as the beginning of a period of crisis for institution-based pursuit of humanistic inquiry, but as its end. Things had already been very bad for quite some time, and what we are seeing now is really just the coup de grâce finishing off a set of institutional practices that had in any case become entirely detached from their earlier mission. I also had a few things to say about some prominent alternatives to what the academic humanities had become. I stated clearly, much to the displeasure of many readers, that I am no great fan of canon-mongering, of Great Book fetishism, of anachronistic reenactment of Plato’s Academy, like Civil War buffs but for sitting in circles in groves, with phones left behind in designated cubby-holes.
I have good friends who favor these approaches, and I am not as hostile to them as I no doubt appear. It is simply that I do not think they are sufficient alone to solve the crisis, and that they do not quite face up to its immensity. For one thing, they are not —to use a word beloved in the tech world— scalable.
I regularly receive e-mails from young people all over the world —Egypt, Nigeria, India—, telling me that they have enjoyed discovering my writing online (and the language barrier, where it exists, is weakening all the time, as they and their machines learn to auto-translate my work, and then to auto-translate their own messages to me in turn). Time and again, I hear the same story: that they come from small, traditional communities of narrow-minded people who only value, as Karl Marx put it, Kinder, Kirche, and Küche. So they take solace in whatever life of ideas they are able to find on the internet. Time and again, too, they tell me that their point of first entry was Jordan Peterson. They tell me how thankful they are that they did not stop there, but pressed onward to cultivate what I am indeed bold enough to describe as more refined tastes. There are a few billion young people out there in similar conditions, and they are not going to learn to love Plato, if they learn to love him, as a result of their small-group discussions at St. John’s or their exceptionally and admirably unzeitgemäße undergraduate education at the University of Chicago. They are going to learn to love him online.
The Hinternet has launched its First Essay Prize Contest. The question is: “How might new and emerging technologies best be mobilized to secure perpetual peace?” The prize winner will receive $10,000. Please click the button for more information. And PLEASE help us to get the word out! —The Editors
In the present essay I will, finally, give a positive account of some of the new practices I would like to see developed, for the stewardship of humanistic inquiry and humane curiosity into an uncertain future. It’s not entirely uncertain, of course. We can be certain, at least, that the near future will be characterized by weakened institutions, machine domination, and governments indifferent to human flourishing.
What, now, might the humanities look like under such conditions?
