It is a platitude
that we cannot defend the humanities without slipping into platitudes.
Why is that? Part of the answer involves the corrosive impact of
contemporary intellectual fashion. We are besieged by a resurgence of
positivist scientism—the transformation of science from a method to a
metaphysic, promising precise answers to age-old ultimate questions. Yet
while pop-neuroscientists, evolutionary psychologists, and other
defenders of quantifiable certainty have beaten back postmodern
philosophical critiques, the postmodern style of ironic detachment has
flourished. The recoil from modernist high seriousness, epitomized by
the turn from Abstract Expressionist painting to Pop Art, has persisted
long after Andy Warhol displaced Jackson Pollock as the celebrity artist
du jour. As a signifier of the dominant cultural tone, the furrowed
brow has been largely eclipsed by the knowing smirk. The commitment to
searching out deep truths has yielded to the celebration of playing with
surfaces (in the arts) or solving problems (in the sciences). The
merger of postmodern irony and positivist scientism has been
underwritten by neoliberal capitalism—whose only standard of value is
market utility.
This convergence of postmodern style, positivist
epistemology, and neoliberal political economy has turned a whole class
of words into the stuff of platitude. Old words that used to mean
something—ideals, meaning, character, self, soul—have come to seem mere
floating signifiers, counters in a game played by commencement speakers
and college catalogs. Vague and variable as their meanings may have
been, there was a time when the big words of the humanities still
carried weight. They sustained yearnings and aspirations; they
sanctioned the notion that the four-year transition from adolescence to
adulthood might be a time of exploration and experiment.
This idea has not disappeared entirely, but the last
time it flourished en masse was forty years or so ago, in the atmosphere
pervaded by the antiwar counterculture. Indeed one could argue that the
counterculture of the 1960s and early ’70s involved far more than the
contemporary caricature of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. It was in part
a creation of young people who wanted to take college education
seriously, to treat it as more than mere job training. Beneath the
slogans and excess, the counterculture contained a probing critique of
the instrumentalist mentality that managed the Vietnam War—the mad
perversion of pragmatism embodied in the American major’s words: “it
became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.” Writers like
Albert Camus, Martin Buber, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer may have been more
often cited than read by young people in the 1960s and ’70s, but those
writers’ presence in countercultural discourse suggested the urgent
question at its core: How can we live an ethical life amid the demands
of illegitimate power?
One place to explore answers to that question was the
liberal-arts curriculum. During the late 1960s, even at my conservative
Southern university, humanities enrollments soared as students packed
English, philosophy, and history courses—posing fundamental questions,
resisting conventional answers. The old words still had meaning, and
were being called to account. Literature provided a language for
challenging “the insolence of office” that was epitomized in government
lies—and for exposing the technocratic hubris embodied in Ahab’s boast:
“All my means are sane; my motive and my object mad.” This is how we
learned what we were up against: nothing better captured the madness of
the managerial rationality behind the Vietnam War and the nuclear-arms
race. Many students, myself included, acted on the unarticulated
assumption that reading, reflection, and introspection might provide the
foundation of an independent self—skeptical of official pieties,
capable of imagining more capacious ideas of patriotism and courage than
the ones provided by the dominant culture—a self that could speak truth
to power. That phrase was fresh to us then.
How times have changed. Nowadays “speak truth to power”
has to be placed in inverted commas, to distance us from its
earnestness. Among the educated professional classes, no one would be
caught dead confusing intellectual inquiry with a quest for ultimate
meaning, or with the effort to create an independent self. Indeed the
very notion of authentic selfhood—a self determined to heed its own
ethical and aesthetic imperatives, resistant to the claims of fashion,
money, and popularity—has come to seem archaic. In an atmosphere
dominated by postmodern irony, pop-neuroscience, and the technocratic
ethos of neoliberalism, the self is little more than a series of
manipulable appearances, fashioned and re-fashioned to meet the
marketing needs of the moment. We have bid adieu to existential
inwardness. The reduction of the mind to software and the brain to a
computer, which originated among cognitive scientists and philosophers
of mind, has been popularized by journalists into the stuff of
dinner-party conversations. The computer analogy, if taken as seriously
as its proponents wish, undermines the concept of subjectivity—the core
of older versions of the self. So it should come as no surprise that, in
many enlightened circles, the very notion of an inner life has come to
seem passé.
One consequence of this seismic cultural shift is the
train wreck of contemporary higher education. Nothing better exemplifies
the catastrophe than President Barack Obama’s
plan to publish the average incomes earned by graduates
from various colleges, so parents and students can know which diplomas
are worth the most in the marketplace, and choose accordingly. In higher
education as in health care, market utility has become the sole
criterion of worth.
The monetary standard of value has reinforced the
American distrust of intellect unharnessed to practical purposes: the
result is an atmosphere toxic to the humanities. We need a defense of
the humanities that takes these cultural developments into account; that
claims more for the liberal arts than the promotion of “critical
thinking” and “people skills”; that insists, without slipping into
platitude, on the importance of the humanities for their own sake.
WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ, A FORMER member of Yale’s English Department, has written it. In
Excellent Sheep,
he presents a devastating critique of the idea that college education
is simply about learning marketable skills; he also makes a compelling
case for the humanities.
He revives, in effect, the old words—the old
quest for meaning, self, and soul. The problem is that he has attached
his argument to a critique of elite higher education, even as he
recognizes that the critique extends far beyond the Ivy League. He
shrewdly dissects the cult of “meritocracy” on American campuses,
diagnosing its elements of anti-intellectualism—the careerism, the
conventionality, the managerial reduction of education to
“problem-solving,” the embrace of money as the measure of all things. He
acknowledges that these maladies could be found as easily at the
University of Virginia or the University of Mississippi Honors Program
as at Yale or Princeton, but he does not seem to recognize fully that
together they constitute a plague pervading the entire society. Amid the
obsession with marketable skills encouraged by neoliberal capitalism,
all colleges aim to turn out excellent sheep; some are better equipped
than others to do so. Some sheep are more excellent—by all the
conventional criteria—than others.
Whether the students are actually satisfied to be sheep
is another matter. Deresiewicz writes movingly of their anguish. No
reader of his book can doubt that elite colleges are full of fearful,
driven kids whose miseries include “eating disorders, cutting, substance
abuse, addiction, depression...” Here are some voices from the
meritocracy in training: “I only get two hours sleep per night.... I
really really fear failure.... I am just a machine with no life at this
place.... I am a robot just going page by page, doing the work.” It is
like the mental Olympics, one student observes, but the contest never
ends. Sometimes “the drug of praise” can temporarily numb the fear of
failure. And sometimes it takes other drugs: “If I didn’t take Zoloft,”
one former student told him, “I would hate myself.” Parents who
understandably worry about their children’s mental health receive glib
reassurances from administrators, who talk about how many students are
depressed and how easy it is to phone the suicide hotline. The number of
breakdowns is almost a point of pride, part of the price for high
academic standards. A young woman of my acquaintance recalled the Old
Campus at Yale (the freshmen dorms) as a hive of conventional ambition;
the buildings themselves seemed buzzing with ceaseless busyness. One
thing is clear from Deresiewicz’s interviews: the “meritocratic”
atmosphere is death to intellectual seekers, who feel they’ve been sold a
bill of goods and often keep searching after they get out. Somehow the
job at Goldman Sachs just doesn’t satisfy.
The problem, for Deresiewicz, is that when you focus on
problems at Ivy League universities you invite the hostility of
reviewers, many of whom are associated with Ivy League universities
themselves. A few might even be called excellent sheep—products of the
self-styled meritocracy of recent decades. Perhaps the most egregious
example is
Nathan Heller’s review in the New Yorker.
Heller asks “Are Elite Colleges Bad for the Soul?” and begins by
describing the many forms of sleep deprivation endured by him and his
classmates “early in this century” at an unspecified Ivy League
university. All this makes clear that he will avoid the larger issues
raised by the book and focus instead on an anecdotal defense of his own
experience—a strategy followed by other reviewers as well. Deresiewicz
has unintentionally invited this. So to do him justice it’s important to
emphasize that his argument stretches beyond the Ivy League, toward all
of higher education in the contemporary United States—and beyond our
borders to encompass the striving professional classes from Canada and
the United Kingdom to China and India.
Still, there is a logic to focusing on the Ivy League;
it is where the meritocratic myth flourishes in its purest form. The
official atmosphere is pervaded by the unspoken rhetorical question:
Aren’t we great? The relentless striving for badges of achievement is
more flagrantly and broadly present on elite campuses than anywhere
else. The Ivy League is where the American ruling class (or at least a
good chunk of it) learns that they have power and wealth because they
deserve it. They are meritorious. Their credentials confirm it.
The catch is that the students have to keep acquiring
more evidence of their excellence—beginning, after they graduate, with a
job that pays at least $100,000 a year. You remain haunted, they say,
by “the feeling of being a failure if you don’t continue to amass the
blue chip names” and prodded by “the need to keep on doing the most
prestigious possible thing.” Yet some still fear that they have missed
something, some passionate pursuit of a success that can’t be measured
by conventional criteria.
High-achieving children are the products of
“high-achievement parenting,” another development of recent decades,
performed by “parents who fill up their own brittle selves with their
children’s accomplishments,” in the withering judgment of the
psychotherapist Madeline Levine, whom Deresiewicz cites at length. His favorite example of
an abusive parent is Amy Chua, whose
The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
celebrated her own authoritarian insistence on her children’s feverish
striving. Once again he picks the most virulent form of the sickness he
wants to diagnose.
However strict or permissive their upbringing, children
destined for elite schools display a “self that forms in response to
parental expectations,” an “affable, competent, adult-oriented
personality.” Not all parents embrace the meritocratic agenda, but even
if they resist it, their children are swept along by the broad
upper-middle-class culture of achievement. Its darker dimensions include
“junior careerism, directionless ambition, risk-aversion, Hobbesian
competitiveness,” and “monumental cynicism.” There’s no there there.
Education comes to be seen as “not far from game theory, an algorithm to
be cracked in order to get to the next level.”
The preoccupation with process over purpose, means over
ends, has long been a feature of the technocratic mind, which despite
occasional countercultural protests (as in the 1960s) has dominated
American universities since the late nineteenth century and now seems
poised to render other forms of thinking invisible. The focus on
mastering technique rather than grappling with substance means that too
often higher education “does nothing to challenge students’ high school
values, ideals, practices, and beliefs,” as Deresiewicz observes. How
can it, if it has no vision of what an educated human being should be,
as Allen Bloom complained nearly thirty years ago in The Closing of the American Mind.
It is interesting how often Deresiewicz cites Bloom, the bogeyman of
the politically correct left in the 1980s, who was nothing if not a
passionate defender of the humanities. Resistance to technocratic
imperatives cuts across conventional political boundaries.
In recent decades, au courant educational ideologues
have put technocratic imperatives in a determinist idiom—the train has
left the station, etc.—and have added a dose of management jargon. The
most egregious management-speak is the near universal use of a
customer-service model for what universities do. As Deresiewicz
observes, commercial values are the opposite of pedagogical ones. If you
are interested in students’ long-term welfare, don’t give them what
they want—don’t be afraid, he tells professors, to stand on your own
authority, to assume you know something your students don’t, which they
might profit by learning. The very fact that he has to make this obvious
point suggests the parlous state we are in. The easy equation of
students with consumers confirms Deresiewicz’s conclusion that the
schools “finally don’t care about learning at all”—or about teaching.
“Teaching is not an engineering problem. It isn’t a question of
transferring a certain quantity of information from one brain to
another,” he writes, implicitly challenging the current fashion of
online education. On the contrary: “‘Educate’ means ‘lead forth.’ A
teacher’s job is to lead forth the powers that lie asleep within her
students. A teacher awakens; a teacher inspires.” Not every teacher can
measure up to this exalted standard, but its presence at least can make
us try. By comparison, when it comes to motivating teachers, the
commercial model offers nothing.
The emptiness of management jargon, applied to
traditional moral concepts, is nowhere more apparent than in the
ubiquity of the word “leadership.” Once upon a time it was something
that was considered a duty, an accompaniment of privilege. Now,
Deresiewicz writes, it’s little more than “an empty set of rituals known
only to propitiate the gods.” Like so many other ideals of the
meritocracy (“innovation,” “creativity,” “disruption”), indeed like the
meritocrats themselves, “leadership” lacks content. And where content is
absent, power pours in. We are left with Mark Edmundson’s witty
summation, quoted by Deresiewicz: a leader is “someone who, in a very
energetic, upbeat way, shares all the values of the people who are in
charge.”
The people in charge make sure that their charges
inhabit “an atmosphere of constant affirmation” characterized by “the
relentless inculcation of prosocial behavior.” This is how elite
colleges produce “team players”—but so do many other sorts of
institutions, and so they have for many decades. The difference is that
team players from Ivy Schools are more likely to end up team captain.
To the question “What’s the point? What’s this team for,
anyway?” the answers are as vacant as they have always been in
management literature; only now they reflect the diminished expectations
of our neoliberal moment. As Deresiewicz says, the dominant ethos is:
“Forget about ideals and ideologies and big ideas, those scourges of the
twentieth century. Just pick a problem and go to work on it. The notion
is technocratic, and bespeaks the kind of technocratic education
students get today.” Of course its inspiration is not the plodding gray
technocracy of the mid-century corporation, but the hipness of the
high-tech entrepreneur. Deresiewicz is rightly suspicious of the idea
that this new social formation constitutes a “creative class.” As he
writes: “The suspicion arises that the
small-scale/techie/entrepreneurial model represents the expression not
of a social philosophy...but of the desire for a certain kind of
lifestyle”—autonomous, hip, and rich.
Still not everyone, even among the elite, is seduced by
this trendy vision. Deresiewicz has spoken to many young people who
resist it. They are “ardent, curious, independent—looking to college for
meaning, not skills; looking to the world for possibility, not
security. What they told me, invariably, was that they felt abandoned by
their institution.” But it is not just the elite universities that have
abandoned them; it is our entire leadership class, beginning with the
president himself. During the 2008 campaign, Obama gave stirring
speeches in Austin, Texas, and Madison, Wisconsin, where he insisted on
the importance of music and the arts in any educational program. For a
presidential candidate to be saying these things seemed too good to be
true—as in fact it was. Once in office, Obama embraced the neoliberal
education agenda of marketization and privatization, epitomized by his
reliably anti-intellectual secretary of education, Arne Duncan. Where are intellectual seekers supposed to find legitimation for their search?
In Deresiewicz’s book, for starters. He does not mince
words: “An undergraduate experience devoted exclusively to career
preparation is four years largely wasted. The purpose of college is to
enable you to live more alertly, more responsibly, more freely: more
fully.” The key to this process is “developing the habit of skepticism
and the capacity to put it into practice. It means learning not to take
things for granted, so you can reach your own conclusions.” So it comes
down to an effort at self-culture, as Emerson would have said. And
self-culture involves an inward turn: it is “through this act of
introspection, of self-examination, of establishing communication
between the mind and the heart, the mind and experience, that you become
an individual, a unique being—a soul. And that is what it means to
develop a self.” Deresiewicz, the son of Orthodox Jewish parents, is not
himself religious. But he finds religious language—beginning with the
marriage of self and soul—inescapable in describing the intellectual
quest fostered by the liberal arts. “People go to monasteries to find
out why they have come, and college ought to be the same,” he writes. It
takes real courage to make such claims amid the market-driven discourse
of contemporary higher education.
THE CONSEQUENCE OF THIS soul-making odyssey—or at least
an early way station on a lifelong journey—is precisely the kind of self
that resists the siren song of contemporary intellectual fashion, a
self that is fortified against disappointments and failure. “A self is a
separate space, a private space,” Deresiewicz writes, “a space of
strength, security, autonomy, creativity, play.” This is a romantic
modernist vision, thoroughly at odds with postmodern and neoliberal
notions of selfhood. And like the romantic modernists of the 1960s,
Deresiewicz sometimes slips into formulaic oppositions—such as the one
he poses between the young and their parents, whom he falsely assumes to
epitomize the constraints of conventional expectations. He is right,
though, to recognize the difficulties involved in choosing an
independent path—the puzzled looks, the people who wonder why you didn’t
fulfill your promise.
But if you’ve taken the humanities seriously you can
withstand the puzzled looks. As Deresiewicz writes, the liberal arts
curriculum remains “the best training you can give yourself in how to
talk and think”—“to reflect...for the sake of citizenship, for the sake
of living well with others, above all, for the sake of building a self
that is strong and creative and free.” You read literature, philosophy,
and history because “you don’t build a self out of thin air, by gazing
at your navel. You build it, in part, by encountering the ways that
others have done so themselves.” And the wider and more varied the
definition of the canon, the better—the more examples you have of
alternative ways of thinking and being in the world. As Bloom wrote (and
Deresiewicz quotes): “The most successful tyranny...is the one that
removes the awareness of other possibilities.” It was as if the
conservative curmudgeon had foreseen the techno-determinists of our own
time, for whom the train has always left the station and (in Maggie
Thatcher’s words) “there is no alternative” to the neoliberal system.
The prerequisite for independence is the realization that there are
indeed other possibilities than the ones handed down by conventional
wisdom.
A sense of possibility, as Deresiewicz acknowledges, is a
product of class privilege. And indeed the humanities have historically
functioned as the playground of the rich, before they get down to the
real work of running the world. (A friend of mine, a Yale professor,
once said that part of ruling-class socialization was listening to a guy
with a beard talk about Marx.) Yet the humanities need not be reduced
to a mere luxury. Abundant testimony exists from teachers in
night-school classes, even in prisons, that comparatively uneducated
students can respond to great literature with passion and intelligence.
That encounter can be life-changing. A student of mine at Rutgers, a
Navy veteran, found that reading Heart of Darkness forced him
to come to terms with his own dark experiences in the first Gulf War.
Conrad led him to Melville and W. E. B. DuBois, to exploring the
mysteries of the divided self. It was a bumpy ride, but he came out of
it more alert, more aware, and more fully engaged with the world.
So why shouldn’t everyone have a shot at this
experience? Deresiewicz thinks everyone should. And he knows it’s more
than a matter of
affirmative action.
In fact he recognizes what a hollow charade that policy has become—a
legitimation of existing privilege. Quoting Walter Benn Michaels, he
writes, “the (very few) poor people at Harvard...reassure the (very
many) rich people at Harvard that you can’t just buy your way into
Harvard.” Deresiewicz realizes that the only affirmative action worth
the name is a policy that takes class as well as gender and ethnicity
into account. But ultimately affirmative action can never be more than a
Band-Aid on the carcinoma that afflicts higher education—the primacy of
technocratic, monetary standards. We need to create a world, he writes,
“where you don’t have to go to the Ivy League, or any private college,
to get a first-rate education.” Of course it is already possible to do
that at many fine state universities. But they are struggling to stay
afloat amid the systematic impoverishment of the public sector that has
lasted for decades and has only accelerated in the past few years. The
most egregious among many recent examples is the assault on the
University of Wisconsin by the Republican governor, Scott Walker. Since
1989, state spending on higher education in the United States has
dropped by half—a fact few commentators mention as they bewail the
rising cost of college. Of course tuition will rise under these
circumstances: somebody has to pay. As Deresiewicz acknowledges, public
higher education is suffering the same fate as K–12 education, not to
mention public-health initiatives and other essential government
services: they are all “starved of funds, then blamed for failing to
deliver.” So it is clear that the problems of higher education involve
far more than misplaced meritocratic mythology at Ivy League schools;
they are part of a general moral and political crisis.
The question remains: What is to be done? Despite his focus on the
Ivy League, Deresiewicz supplies valuable ammunition for embattled
defenders of the humanities, who too often have been reduced to mumbling
about corporate recruiters’ preference for English majors. It is time
to go on the offensive, and he has done so in fine style. Arguing for
the importance of the humanities is by no means a merely academic
gesture. As the antiwar counterculture of the ’60s learned, the
liberal-arts tradition has a radical edge; it is a prod to the moral
imagination, a seed-bed of political possibilities. The first step
toward challenging illegitimate power is the recognition that you can
indeed take that step—that there are alternatives available to the
future on offer. As a peace-activist colleague of mine in Missouri said,
when students wondered where to begin challenging the enormity of the
nuclear-arms race: “Well, you start where you’re at.”
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