An increasingly dominant strain of thought at American universities and colleges embraces a certain materialism. Materialism here refers not to a consumerist urge or to a Marxist ethic, although neither is wholly unrelated, but rather to a worldview that treats reality as no more than what can be observed through science. The Academy is filled with very smart students who flock to physical and social sciences. These students will learn important things. They will learn to apply statistical models to human behavior and natural phenomena, and they will learn how to use genetic modeling to study character. But they will not do—at least not very much—what students at liberal arts schools used to do. They will probably not read Plato or Shakespeare. And they will not learn about the dominant modes of religious and secular thought which define Western Civilization.
The so-called decline of the humanities is hardly a new phenomenon. It began in the 1980s with the advent of postmodernism, which replaced thought with ideology and thus obscured or outright denied the deeper meanings of literature. The irony that postmodernist interpretations were supposed to make literature more popular is rich. By reducing the human experience to a series of simplistic identity markers – race, gender, class, etc. – the movement limited the true power of literature: its ability to transcend identity politics and give a more complex account of the world.
Yet what the humanities face now is not merely confused attempts to limit the value of books, but an outright denial of their ability to teach us the most important things. This latest challenge does not claim, as postmodernist theorists did, that truth is a fiction. Rather, it claims that the way to finding truth is through science, both natural and social. Neuroscience and economics can teach us more about how we make decisions than can “Hamlet”. Biology teaches us more about happiness than do Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics” or contemporary American fiction like David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” or Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom”.
In the face of such delegitimization, several notable commentators have stood up to defend the humanities. Responding to an article by Steven Pinker in The New Republic, literary critic Leon Wieseltier writes, “The question of the place of science in knowledge, and in society, and in life, is not a scientific question.”
The philosopher Thomas Nagel, formally a leading materialist, has been lambasted by several high-profile academics for going to the dark side. “It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection,” Nagel writes in “Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.” There is more to the world than what science can observe and study, Nagel argues. Religious readers will likely consider Nagel’s claims obvious. Nagel is not religious, but he is finding that there are certain things, like love and death, that science and materialism cannot explain. Scientists will claim that these things are not real, but are in fact what has been termed a “manifest image.” Nagel is unsatisfied with this answer.
The question before us, as an academic community, is whether we too are unsatisfied. The danger is that we will accept the materialist account without actually considering it. Judging by the popularity of biology, economics and political science, it may be too late. Political science is an excellent example because it traditionally has been taught as both philosophy and a glorified sort of applied statistics. The trend in political science is away from the philosophy – away from debating what governments should look like – and towards statistics. To be sure, the methods of natural science are being applied to social sciences with great success. But is there no room for normative thinking? Is political science or economics merely a study of what is? Or should it also consider what should be? Furthermore, can statistical analyses alone tell us how to organize the best governments or markets? Does an exploration of justice require what used to be called pure reason?
In the next few months, I intend on making a case for books. My columns will not always directly relate to this defense of the humanities but they will proceed from the contention that literature can teach us about things over which science has no jurisdiction. This is not to say that scientific methods have no value. They surely do. Indeed, science is quite helpful when addressing certain problems introduced by postmodernism. For instance, the popular claim that gender distinctions bear no relation to sex is demonstrably, scientifically false. But science has limits, and we ignore them at our peril. A brain scan can show a father’s brain light up when he gets excited, but it tells us nothing of the deep joy he feels when he sees his newborn daughter.
In a world where meaning and truth are elusive, to the extent students even believe in such notions at all, it is imperative that we read more literature. Ours is a generation without faith in everything from God to capitalism and democracy. Literature reminds us of our traditions and natures so as to restrain and thus enable progress. It is an exploration of who we are that allows for irony and humility. To subordinate it to science or ideology is to subordinate ourselves.
A Defense of Books
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