The humanities help us find the people we want to know.
Looking for instrumental arguments
One account of what has happened to the humanities is that there was a boom in subjects like English Literature, and the boom became a bubble; standards fell at the margin, as did returns; now the boom is sliding to a messy ending, seen by some as apocalyptic.
For individuals, the slide makes sense. Why do a degree with zero financial return but plenty of debt? The social problems of fewer literature graduates aren’t very obvious. Democracy, liberalism, empathy, and critical thinking have all flourished among people without literature degrees. (And many literature grads make a terribly poor showing in these areas.)
So, why do we need the humanities?
First, let’s put aside the question of inherent value. For one thing, that is axiomatic on this blog. For another, it doesn’t answer the money question. (We need literature scholars to maintain that but maybe not a very big rise in literature graduates.)
What instrumental value can we claim?
There are three main benefits to humanism. Sorting, selection, and signalling.
Sorting means matching: it’s a process of networking. We all have to find people who match our temperament. The weirder we are, the more important this is. But all lives are made more enjoyable and productive by the discovery of the right friends and associates. One of the best ways for students to find their people is to discuss books. Discussing literature and ideas is not just how I make friends: it’s how I do my work. The same is true of students. Great books offer a depth of good quality material to enable those discussions. Why sort yourself using anything less than the best work? This matters for inherent value too: if you believe literature is worthwhile for its own sake, you will want to find people who agree. For those more interested in ideas, humanities provide breadth of thinking. What discussion of politics and monetary policy isn’t enhanced by a shared knowledge of Jonathan Swift?
Selection is essential to universities. Letting in the right people is perhaps the most important decision they make. St. John’s College isn’t having a crisis of screens or a widespread lack of reading. Zena Hitz told me this is because they have a strong core curriculum. You have to read Pliny and discuss it in a group. There’s no other option.
Signalling is how graduates alert others that they are the reading sort of person. This might be done pretentiously, but mostly it’s a way of continuing the sorting and selecting process after university. It happens on Substack everyday and to all of our benefit. Being able to turn up and discuss the ideas of humanism is increasingly important in a world looking to distinguish between AI and human outputs.
It’s hard to prove the inherent value of literature. The barmaid who reads Bulgakov needs no persuading of its value. Those who don’t read aren’t responsive to these arguments.
But the practical case for the humanities might be stronger than it first appears. Rather than weak claims for moral improvement, we should think more about the benefit of sorting, selecting, and signalling ourselves with the great works of our civilization. This is just as much an argument for teaching Shakespeare to plumbers, as
has argued, as it is for elite college. Intellectual life is enhanced by Jonathan Swift wherever it occurs; enabling people to have those conversations is to the practical benefit of educational institutions.One thing humanistic education can do is to help us understand how messy people are. With all the developments in the world right now, that is only going to rise in value. Universities want to enable that understanding.
It may be that not that many people need a whole degree in literature to find the people they want to know. But the broad benefits of sorting, selecting, and signalling mean that it’s time to require everyone to read Jonathan Swift. Life is a journey that is made more enjoyable and beneficial when we travel with the right companions.
Gulliver was an outsider everywhere he went. If more of us read Swift and talk about it, we need not be as isolated as he was. We can flourish in the company of our fellow humanists.
My many thanks to all those whose conversations have inspired these ideas.
I liked this a lot and I think you won't be surprised that I agree! After all, book clubs exist for a reason. Literature provides you with the materials for sophisticated forms of group formation, cohesion over time, and interpersonal bonding seems a lot more plausible and no less appealing than "literature makes you a better person."
I suppose the problem I have with this argument is that, while these are indeed instrumental arguments, they are instrumental arguments that seem only to work for people who have already accepted the argument for literature's intrinsic value. Because if someone doesn't think literature has an intrinsic value, why would they care if they can network with other readers, or want to signal to other people that they read literature, or indeed whether they are selected to study literature at university? So for people who do not accept the intrinsic value of literature, this provides no reason to read, even an instrumental one; whereas people who do accept it won't need instrumental arguments, because they will be reading anyway.
There would be a stronger instrumental reason if you were to tweak the "signaling" point, so that you are signaling not your interest in having discussions about literature, but your membership of a certain social class. That is effectively Bourdieu's point about "cultural capital", but it was prefigured by the people Matthew Arnold argues against in the first essay of Culture and Anarchy, who see the study of Greek and Latin literature as not valuable in itself, but as something to mark themselves as "educated gentlemen". But the problem with THOSE kinds of instrumental arguments, while moderately effective in persuading people to read, is that they all too often are a fuel to literary relativism: they provide a reason for dismissing the idea that literature has any intrinsic value beyond its use as a class signal. It is certainly easy to read Bourdieu that way.