[Serious] The Humanities

[Belacqua]

There's an idea that's revived every now and then. It says that as religion loses its influence in society, the arts and humanities are necessary to pick up the slack. I've seen this attributed to Matthew Arnold, though others seem to come up with it too. 

Like it or not, in European history it was largely through the framework of religion that people considered questions of value, sympathy, and the good life. Any standard other than monetary was usually given a Christian setting, and any push-back against the selfishness of the rich was usually framed in Christian terms. This doesn't mean it was consistent at all -- Christianity has been used to justify the rich as well as the poor. But Christianity supplied the vocabulary and the tools to consider these issues. 

I think there is reason to worry that in the absence of religious values, nearly the only other option we are given is the value of the marketplace. 

So Arnold and others said that if we're going to toss out the church, and we don't want to just accept the rule of capital, the humanities are going to have to step in. 

The trouble seems to be that the humanities may not have done the job. People haven't turned from the Bible to Proust and Bach. They have accepted instead the values of the market and the status quo, which are often propagandized in corporate "cultural" products like hit movies and best selling books. 

Atheist discussions tend to set up religion and science as a dichotomy, yet science can't do what great literature does. 

Here is an article about the subject. The author uses the term "cultural secularization" to talk about how the humanities have been pushed to the sidelines, just as in some circles religion has:

https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/2...OEFmX0hiRQ

and a passage from the article:

...cultural secularization involves a loss of status and perceived functionality on the part of “high” cultural canons and intellectual lineages. Quite suddenly, having a detailed knowledge of and love for Bach’s music, say, stopped being a marker of a “cultured” or “civilized” person and became just a matter of opinion and personal interest.

On the other side, cultural secularization entails the loss of belief in the ethical and intellectual value of the traditional academic humanities disciplines — what we can call the “high humanities.” The idea, current since Kant, that the disciplined humanities lie at the basis of academic life cuts little ice today. 

These two forms of cultural secularization — the erosion of canonicity and the loss of authority — are joined. That is why it has become almost impossible today to affirm the social or ethical value in studying, say, verse forms in John Dryden’s poetry; Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s relation to Moses Mendelssohn; the early modern Dutch ship-building trade; differences between humanist thought in Florence and Milan in the quattrocento; contemporary analytic philosophy’s technical debate over free will. Such topics are of course still researched and even taught, but they have become socially and culturally peripheral precisely because they are not connected to a communal acknowledgment of the high humanities’ value. Thus, at least in Anglophone countries, it has become all but impossible publicly to defend the use of taxpayer money on them.