Reposting this (at a time when I can’t seem to write anything) in response to an egregiously insensitive article published in The Economist this week lambasting the humanities as a spent force and praising those who would ‘vote with their feet’ by opting for university courses in computer science over English or history; thereby capitulating to the currents of ‘creative destruction’. Simply put, if we loose the humanities we not only forgo a sense of personal orientation in the social and creative worlds, we also loose a sense of political and critical awareness. Both of which, for reasons I need hardly identify, could not be more vital in this strange conjuncture we find ourselves inhabiting. Today, I would likely write this piece in an entirely different manner (were I able to do so right now), but it nevertheless captures the basic point at issue and does so effectively. But I will let you be the final judge.
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Sometime in the summer of 2020 I downloaded Tik Tok to see what the fuss was about. After sitting through a dull succession of disparate clips, the algorithm – scratching its head, surely, as to which way my interests incline –presents me with the visage of a young white American man sitting in what seemed to be a classroom, holding up a deck of flashcards, staring fixedly at the camera, as if trying to penetrate the soul of the idly scrolling Tik Toker. From the moral injunction he had to convey, this would seem an apt pre-assessment. In bold red lettering, the video’s superimposed caption read: ‘You should only go to college if you intend to study the following subjects.’ To the tune of something – something unnoticeable: otherwise I would have noticed and remembered it – the young American set about sequentially dropping the flash cards, each bearing the title of a subject or degree deemed by this person to be auspicious and propitious: business studies; accounting; law; economics; medicine; chemistry; physics; psychiatry; and so forth. It was a thick deck of cards. I didn’t stick around to the end; I knew where it was going. In fact, I deleted Tik Tok within a few moments of this, never to be re-downloaded. At various points over the succeeding year, mired in the grips of boredom, stultifying depression, or something more exotic, I thought of reneging on this commitment: I thought of re-downloading Tik Tok. I was already addicted to Twitter and Instagram, to the point of sapping my mind of any vivid colour. Would a third do any harm? What was standing in the way of submerging myself completely? Then I thought of that video clip, the set of repugnant social and cultural values it embodied, and the fact that it was permitted on Tik Tok under the guise of it being innocuous – as plainly evincing a truth already acknowledged by most people, anyway; rather than something tantamount to conservative indoctrination. I’m sure this video was tame by what else can be discovered on Tik Tok, or indeed Twitter or Instagram (I have recently stopped using the former, and deactivated the latter – about which I shall write something soon), but it stuck with me because I thought it to be especially revealing, without perhaps meaning to be so: it says something about how we conceptualises the status, role, and obligation of the individual in neo-liberal societies in 2022; about how, in this context, we understand the purpose of education; and, finally, how we view the liberal humanities in what are increasingly conservative societies more concerned with inaugurating and perpetuating free markets, protecting the reciprocal power structures underlaying them, and inculcating notions of market deference clothed in a thick veil of ‘civic responsibility’. There is no room for critical philosophy in this nexus. Whatever room it already occupies is to be culled. Whoever aspires to speculation or criticism – questioning their circumstances; devising possible modes of radical change; building social solidarity in order to exact said change – are to be redirected to business studies, secondary school teaching, or the police, useful and beneficiary occupations befitting their station in life, lest they unite, ‘theorise’ amongst themselves, and grow to challenge the social structure on which the imposing edifice of capital rests. ‘What are you going to do with a philosophy degree, anyway?’ There is good reason for why this cliched abasement – spouted by an estranged uncle, say, at a family gathering – reflects a grim reality expressed in a desultory inertia, from which the National Lottery appears as though the only practical form of escape.
I started college when I was seventeen, verging on eighteen. I chose history and philosophy because I had always loved the former and suspected I would enjoy the latter. I was going to study what I so wished to study: in the end, I thought (rightly, as it proved), that I would do better in my studies if I enjoyed what I was studying, and then proceed from there. I knew law wouldn’t suit me; nor would business, or anything of this nature – at this stage. I was of an imaginary and literary inclination. I was good at writing, and creative writing especially. I wanted to study something that would entice me to thought, firstly, and then aid in my efforts towards self-cultivation and social understanding: I recognised the act of living as analogous to the act of painting – I was a literary ‘romantic’ without yet realising myself to be a literary ‘romantic’. Studying history and philosophy would provide me with some idea of how to direct my brush, which paints to apply, and how to mix them properly. Studying accountancy was no use to me in this; it wasn’t going to provide the tools necessary for me set myself standing in this social world, but rather fill my head with formula, pre-set equations to formal questions and procedures I would encounter time and time again over the forthcoming fifty years, turning me into a personal ‘calculator’ incapable of extrapolating outwards, looking upon things from the outside inwards. I wanted to be able to criticise; to look upon my decidedly unprivileged standing in society and see where I stood in relation to power and privilege; to be able to assess the merits of a literary text or piece of legislation; to engage in arguments concerning the nature of love, morality, good governance, and social performance, and, ultimately, how to live and engage with people. I knew these to be philosophical questions for which one cannot find an answer, but which one can also learn a great deal in pursuit of, through engaging with those who had devoted their lives to trying to answer these questions, laying the ground for future writers, critics, and thinkers to pick up the baton and carry the torch. I simultaneously recognised these questions to be historically-embedded questions, and how history and philosophy supported each other quite nicely: history, as David Hume and Quentin Skinner would both agree, provides the substance to abstract philosophical speculation. I mean this in the following sense: It is often assumed, for example, (implicitly, for the most part) that the triumph of liberal democracy was inevitable and that it constitutes if not the best, than the least-worst set of ideas by which to organise a society. History, though, is not inevitable; but governed, rather, by the principle of contingency. On looking back from a secure standing in the present it is easy to link-up a few congenial points and compose a coherent narrative, while usually (mostly) ignoring those facets which would cast a blemish over said narrative. If one were to attempt a philosophical critique of neo-liberalism (to distinguish, in this case, from classical liberalism), with a focus on ‘individualism’, say, one would benefit from a historical perspective: for it is in history that one finds abundant illustration of ‘what has been lost’ (to use Peter Laslett’s provocative phrase) and sign of ‘what might have been’ (to use Quentin Skinner’s). To the sense of alienated fragmentation that characterises (post)modern social life, one can find any number of counter-examples in history of people living together harmoniously in a state of social solidarity underlaid by a feeling of commonality: rural Ireland on the verge of famine in 1845, for example. This is not to elevate such a form of communalism above our own, as something akin to a utopia, as something objectively ‘better’. Look upon any example of such a community in history and you will likely find it to be governed by principles of misogyny, for example, or be otherwise morally compromised. But is ours not structurally misogynistic, also, as well as being plagued by several other structural problems? The important point is that it provides an alternative model: the spirit of this form of communalism is worth preserving more so than the particular features of it. It provides an alternative: something we have lost, and which might have prevailed had things been slightly different. This is what matters.
Ideas do not arise ex nihlo, from nothing. There are never any ‘new’ ideas, as in arising from the ether in a fit of ‘genius’: they are the occasional offshoot of a steady accumulation and digestion of extant knowledge – of one author engaging with a collection of others, however compiled. As Edmund Burke wrote in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1791), ‘The science of constructing a commonwealth [i.e. government], or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori.’ – that is, by first principles: by rational, or logical, deduction. Proper principles of government are historically embedded, as are ideas: they arise out of concrete experience; they derive from practice. They are not found floating in the air, awaiting to be seized and deployed. The idea of the ‘humanities’ arose during the Renaissance, as the studio humanitatis. The human being as a social being was the object of their study, basically construed, all to the end of inculcating notions of civic virtue to the burgeoning numbers of notaries and administrators in early-modern Italian city states. They – early Italian humanists such as Petrarch, Leonardo Bruni, and Poggio Bracciolini – looked backwards towards antiquity as a way of circumventing, and refuting, the moribund body of knowledge known as scholastic philosophy and its adjacent worldview, which they looked upon with derision as inimical to human development and flourishing. In this, they employed ‘history’ as a form of political rhetoric. Seeing themselves at the forefront of the ‘modern’, they looked back towards the springs of antiquity through the supposedly (but not really) ‘barbarous’ and languid ‘middle ages’: where all study of the self, and of the self in society, had (apparently) dissipated, facilitating the rise in Europe of a social and cultural structure that subordinated personal fulfilment, and fulfilment in art, literature, governance, and society, to the adoration of the divine and anticipation of the hereafter. A conception of the ‘historical’ allowed the early humanists to imagine something different; to regain and adopt part of what had been lost by embracing the literature of antiquity, and so give practical expression to an alternative model, in spite of whatever opposition they faced from the more reactionary elements pre-Reformation Christendom. But not in the total sense. Renaissance humanism is commonly conflated to secular humanism, a tradition that arises from eighteenth-century Enlightenment deism and attains its fullest expression in nineteenth-century German thought (in the writings of Feuerbach, Hegel, Strauss, in particular): where the primary of the individual is elevated above God and the divine – on the view that the latter is an imaginative projection of the former. This is of course anachronistic. But it nevertheless highlights something important: Renaissance humanists were concerned with individual flourishing in the physical world more so than in the afterlife, as a marked departure from the medieval conception of humanity and the purpose of life. This benevolent conception of human life arose from the rediscovery and reading of various texts in ancient Greek and Roman moral philosophy – and especially those written by the Roman Stoics. It is vital to highlight that in fifteenth-century Italy these ancient authors were seen as atheists, as existing before the time of Christ, thus determining how their writings were read and received: their general world-view was not adopted by Renaissance humanists, because it would have been impractical (and heretical) for them to do so. Certain components of their thought were adopted and adapted to meet prevailing intellectual currents and socio-cultural circumstances; others were ignored as irrelevant or because they could not be reconciled to their Christian world view. History provides a rich selection of options, when properly considered. We take what we deem useful to our present circumstances. Nevertheless, the fact of these disparate options naturally tempts the imagination.
In providing sight of an alternative, history provides incentive to action, for in history one also finds individual figures or groups engaged in variations of the same debates we now face. This is not to call these debates perennial: they appear with variety and difference, as according to the particular context out of which they arise: the questions we now face concerning global ecology were quite different to those faced by the thinkers of the Enlightenment, or by Marx. It is rather to say that the reflections and assessments of these writers still stand to illuminate: Marx still had something to say about the ecology-debate, as he knew it, and he thus has something to contribute to debate. Such writers do not stand to answer our questions, but they do stand to provide new angles for addressing them. The nineteenth-century theory of ‘Marxism’ (whatever this may be – Marx probably wouldn’t recognise it) cannot be taken as providing direct answers to our discontents, but they do provide an invaluable light by which to approach these pressing issues, such as the dynamic between power, capital, and gender. This provides the philosophical perspective, the critical theory; while history provides a wealth of counter-examples, or alternative perspectives, to substantiate this perspective, precipitating the formulation of a critique. History provides the alternative, while philosophy allows us to recognise and utilise this alternative. Walter Benjamin is commonly described the greatest Marxian cultural and social critic never to have read Marx, illuminating my point nicely.
Studying the humanities is necessary in at least two respects: if we wish to gain a proper understanding of ourselves, our place in society, and of our proper obligations to one another as sympathetic social beings rather than atomised consumers; and if we wish to create a fairer society which is more hospitable to difference and protective of those without, rather than subordinating their demands and requirements to the undemocratic and largely unregulated whim of the tumultuous free market. In particular, the proper study of the figures and writers of history will lead to the inculcation of certain values and perspectives necessary for one to deftly navigate the vicissitudes of human experience, the vagaries of social and political life, and the capriciousness of love, constituting a moral and ethical education in and of itself. Moreover, in the same way that the novels of Jane Austen can provide a guide to social conduct, a study of the great thinkers of philosophy can provide a guide to thought, and therefore a guide to life. If we want to learn how to ‘live’, as opposed to merely existing, we need to study the humanities, and to do so critically, always against ‘better judgment’.
If any thinker can be seen as conscientiously joining these three strands – the literary, the historical, and the philosophical – in their work, it is David Hume. His main goal as a philosophical ‘man of letters’ was to democratise obtrusive philosophical argument by conveying his ideas in a lucidly accessible literary style which appealed directly to a growing reading public amidst the burgeoning commercial classes of Georgian Britain. He was engaged in an aesthetic exercise, and a radical one at that. Whereas all notable political commentators in Britain before Hume were outwardly and uncompromisingly partisan in their opinions and assessments, Hume was adamantly impartial in his pioneering analysis of Hanoverian high politics – to the point of compromising the partly, the Whigs, to which he was at least nominally partial, giving ammunition to their parliamentary opponents, the Tories. This was hardly Hume’s initial purpose. Indeed, he reached no conclusion in his deliberations: he found no side to be especially venerable and worth championing, as the better party, that party worthy of your attention and allegiance. In setting out and dissecting the ‘principles’ of each party, as gleaned from an examination of their histories, he found ample failings as well merits on both sides. It was the purpose of the reader to consider Hume’s exposition, take him up his claims, read into them, innumerate their merits and demerits, and decide for themselves which party they preferred. If none would do, then none would do. What matters is that through the aesthetic sensibility of Hume’s critical writings, he had managed to spur the reader to independent thought: rather than relying on communal affiliation to dictate their choice on such issues as to whom they pledged their political allegiance, and such questions as whether the reality or unreality of God directly impinged upon the quality of one’s life on earth, or whether something good because it was morally ‘good’ or because it was ‘useful’. The utility of masturbation is clear to us now as it was to many in the eighteenth century; but as now, it was then more commonly castigated as immoral, as something which was ‘bad’ – in the Christian-moralist sense of the term – rather than something un-useful. Similarly, when Hume treated the still-contentious issue of suicide in an eponymously titled essay from 1755, he suggested that suicide could be seen in two ways: one could either look upon it as something useful – as when someone is struck down by a debilitating disease and faces a life of excruciating pain and discomfort, robbing their life of any substance, finding solace in the prospect of suicide, or euthanasia (Greek for a good or dignified death) – or as something morally detestable – on the view that in killing oneself goes against the will and benevolence of God, therefore incurring his infinite wrath. Hume sets out these two views and allows the reader to decide. It is clear, though, which side he falls on. The second view is based on a principle of terror: in the prospect of the terror which would await one in the afterlife after committing suicide, the ‘true believer’ would not give it a second thought. They would withstand their pain like a good Christian ascetic. This is the basic view against which Hume’s philosophy – as embodying the core principles of the European Enlightenment – can be seen as a hostile reaction. The prospect of infinite suffering in the afterlife as a consequence of committing some moral sin casts a thick veil of trepidation over action in the real world, closing off options which may be directly beneficial, and lead to a better life in the here and now, because they are morally questionable according to some dogmatic religious authority. In this general sense, Hume can be taken as a synecdoche for the varied critical philosophies which arose in Europe during his time and over the succeeding centuries.
Constituting a core tenant of modern liberalism, for good or for worse, Hume implores us to think for ourselves in the face of inert consensus. He wants us to criticise; to take our casual assumptions and subject them to scrutiny. How we act upon what they reveal is for us to decide. Of primary importance is assuming such a position from which to direct criticism. In this, we ward off temptations to complacency; we overcome the tendency to fall back on timely certainties, reinforced by apparent authorities, when mired in doubt. There are no certainties, nor any golden rules by which to structure a life. We are stranded in the dark, regardless of what is preached from some quarters. The humanities offer a guiding light, a light that is never strong but always flickering, and a light that is threatening to go out.