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."
Thanks! I am close to arguing that "literature makes you a better person" can *only* be true if the conditions I outlined are properly met, but I need to give that some more consideration.
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.
I’m not a fan of bourdieu and I think his arguments are badly applied in modern society. Otherwise I think there’s some truth to this but that the decisions about how education should be structured separated the two things somewhat, and they affect people’s marginal decisions when thinking about opportunity cost
There are more possible layerings, where instrumental value layers on instrumental value as well as inherent value, which are crucial for going past the easy reading of Bourdieu. Cultural capital, for Bourdieu as I've read him, is not just about signaling! It's about competition much more generally, and the competitive edge is not simply arbitrary signaling but rather deeply grounded in strategic considerations about prevailing social patterns.
Proust, for instance https://substack.com/home/post/p-157245944, is cultural capital in part because there are real insights about time, memory, gossip, and class-conscious flirting within it. All are instrumentally useful insights that can be applied in social strategies.
In response to what @David44 wrote, these instrumental arguments still hold even if you don't accept the inherent value of literature, but instead accept that it is relatively more valuable than short-form content consumption on TikTok for example. Then the networking benefits bring you in contact with other people with a similar relative value structure, which is probably correlated with deep thinking and creativity and introspection and many other valuable traits that transcend an appreciation for literature (or are necessary prerequisites to it perhaps).
I think it's also important to note that people with English degrees do tend to earn pretty decent salaries! Humanities students tend to have lower starting salaries than STEM students, but when you measure lifetime earnings, the difference shrinks and in some cases former humanities students earn more, on average. (This is largely because liberal arts degrees prepare students for law school well, and because lots of humanities folks tend to go into management positions by midcareer.)
Obviously, nobody knows where the labor market will go from here, but given the data that we have, it is by no means clear that an undergraduate humanities degree is a financial hit. (You could make the case that the more flexible soft skills imparted in a humanities degree are more, not less, well-suited for a job market defined by rapid changes and uncertainty.) The stereotype that humanities majors do poorly is because the entry-level jobs available to them have lower salaries. But it's unwise to judge the viability of an entire career based on the earnings of the first few positions in that career.
(a graduate degree in the humanities, however, is likely another story.)
My understanding is that the marginal return has fallen to zero, or close to zero, hence the declining overall graduate premium. Obviously for some, the return is a net negative. The data you cite would largely be the same, I expect, had all those people studied other subjects.
The question of return is very variable: for someone paying full price to go to NYU, there's almost certainly negative return; for anyone attending college on a full-ride, it's almost certainly positive. Most students (in the US) are somewhere in the middle, so things get muddled. In terms of median income (again in the US--this is the only place I've really looked into the question), though, humanities majors earn around $20,000 annually more than high school graduates and about $10,000 less than average college grads.
On average, then, assuming that the graduate has a 30-40 year career, getting a 4-year humanities degree rather than going to college will earn graduates ~$600k-$800k more over their career--far more than nearly anyone will ever spend on higher education.
True, there are some people who deeply regret getting their degrees, and who make dirt wages! But averaged out across populations, getting a humanities degree is not exactly an economically foolish thing to do, even if it's not the highest-earning degree or the most economically optimized decision.
After forty years of reading, introspection, and contemplation … I have come to understand that I wanted to be a human being among other human beings. I have wanted to bring grace and beauty to a world of veniality, hate, and people doing deadly stupid things.
I hadn't thought about whether arguing that people should read because it's fun was "instrumental" or not until now. In the introductory essay of my Substack, I argued that the read-because-it's-good-for-you arguments have been a total failure, but I'm also not a fan of the arguments from inherent value. Those strike me as having a whiff of elitism that will be offputting to a lot of the people I'm trying to convince.
I think that most Victorian novelists would agree that people should read because it's fun. Their novels were the equivalent of serialized television now. Dickens was a very commercial animal. I think he focused most closely on what would entertain the largest audience, even though he was also creating something that had inherent value.
That may place him among literature's greatest instrumentalists, but he'd be there alongside Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and even George Eliot. And of course, Shakespeare's success was all about filling up the Globe Theatre - he didn't do that by appealing to notions of high art, nor did he argue about why attending a play would improve other aspects of the lives of audience members.
Instrumental typically means it has some exterior purpose beyond the thing itself, whereas the “for its own sake” benefits are more like fun or pleasure. Reading for pleasure is inherent value; reading to improve your skills to get a job is instrumental. Importantly they are not exclusive! But in education the interaction of pleasure and instrumental value is an important question.
That's where a number of my undergrad profs went for their MAs. Our program was partially inspired by their model (close reading of primary texts with peers). Great example of the point you're making in this piece.
Philosophy is the baby-mama of Psychology (you know the saying), and sometimes studying a primeval myth is more therapeutic than anything science can give. And science-fiction often becomes science-fact. Artists express the progression of the world before it happens, so science can prepare us.
Surely the core arguments advanced here for the instrumental value of the humanities are largely universal and can certainly benefit theists as well as humanists (in the secular sense), or am I missing or misinterpreting something?
I think it's important to read for two reasons: 1) If you can read and understand what you read, people can't fool lie to you as easily. They can tell you something and you can go look it up.
2) If you can't and don't read, you easily miss all the little easter eggs that pop up when people talk about something.
We all loved Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels; we learned about Gulliver in school thanks to our literature teacher. This teacher was a necessary instrument to our love of literature, and Voronezh University, Faculty of Philology, was instrumental for her to learn World literature. Do I understand the topic of discussion? Whether you love books or not, you will always need teachers of literature, or humanities, as it is called here. Or are you talking about the value of a book in human life? I don't think that book makes you a better person. Stalin loved Bulgakov's The White Guard as both a novel and a play, which he saw at the theater several times. However, it poisoned his life, as it did for many writers whom he read and liked. Was my love for literature instrumental? Never and nowhere. It was my own property. It seems to me I don't understand the question,
'The barmaid who reads Bulgakov needs no persuading of its value'
Just a quick note on this line.
Why do you consider a barmaid, or anyone on a minimum wage level job, as not having the ability or education to be able to question the value of Bulgakov? After all education is about the ability to ask questions, and the ability to be able to cast a question of value, like the question of as to the value of this whole post, is the most precious intellectual ability any one individual can own. So why would the Barmaid think that the value of Bulgakov is set in stone and unquestionable?
I think you’ve fundamentally misunderstood the point being made in that sentence, which is that if a person who does a job requiring no knowledge of literature is already reading (for example) Bulgakov, it is because they are already convinced of the value of this activity. They don’t need to be talked into it.
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."
Thanks! I am close to arguing that "literature makes you a better person" can *only* be true if the conditions I outlined are properly met, but I need to give that some more consideration.
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.
I’m not a fan of bourdieu and I think his arguments are badly applied in modern society. Otherwise I think there’s some truth to this but that the decisions about how education should be structured separated the two things somewhat, and they affect people’s marginal decisions when thinking about opportunity cost
There are more possible layerings, where instrumental value layers on instrumental value as well as inherent value, which are crucial for going past the easy reading of Bourdieu. Cultural capital, for Bourdieu as I've read him, is not just about signaling! It's about competition much more generally, and the competitive edge is not simply arbitrary signaling but rather deeply grounded in strategic considerations about prevailing social patterns.
Proust, for instance https://substack.com/home/post/p-157245944, is cultural capital in part because there are real insights about time, memory, gossip, and class-conscious flirting within it. All are instrumentally useful insights that can be applied in social strategies.
In response to what @David44 wrote, these instrumental arguments still hold even if you don't accept the inherent value of literature, but instead accept that it is relatively more valuable than short-form content consumption on TikTok for example. Then the networking benefits bring you in contact with other people with a similar relative value structure, which is probably correlated with deep thinking and creativity and introspection and many other valuable traits that transcend an appreciation for literature (or are necessary prerequisites to it perhaps).
Yes that’s excellent thank you
I think it's also important to note that people with English degrees do tend to earn pretty decent salaries! Humanities students tend to have lower starting salaries than STEM students, but when you measure lifetime earnings, the difference shrinks and in some cases former humanities students earn more, on average. (This is largely because liberal arts degrees prepare students for law school well, and because lots of humanities folks tend to go into management positions by midcareer.)
Obviously, nobody knows where the labor market will go from here, but given the data that we have, it is by no means clear that an undergraduate humanities degree is a financial hit. (You could make the case that the more flexible soft skills imparted in a humanities degree are more, not less, well-suited for a job market defined by rapid changes and uncertainty.) The stereotype that humanities majors do poorly is because the entry-level jobs available to them have lower salaries. But it's unwise to judge the viability of an entire career based on the earnings of the first few positions in that career.
(a graduate degree in the humanities, however, is likely another story.)
My understanding is that the marginal return has fallen to zero, or close to zero, hence the declining overall graduate premium. Obviously for some, the return is a net negative. The data you cite would largely be the same, I expect, had all those people studied other subjects.
The question of return is very variable: for someone paying full price to go to NYU, there's almost certainly negative return; for anyone attending college on a full-ride, it's almost certainly positive. Most students (in the US) are somewhere in the middle, so things get muddled. In terms of median income (again in the US--this is the only place I've really looked into the question), though, humanities majors earn around $20,000 annually more than high school graduates and about $10,000 less than average college grads.
On average, then, assuming that the graduate has a 30-40 year career, getting a 4-year humanities degree rather than going to college will earn graduates ~$600k-$800k more over their career--far more than nearly anyone will ever spend on higher education.
True, there are some people who deeply regret getting their degrees, and who make dirt wages! But averaged out across populations, getting a humanities degree is not exactly an economically foolish thing to do, even if it's not the highest-earning degree or the most economically optimized decision.
After forty years of reading, introspection, and contemplation … I have come to understand that I wanted to be a human being among other human beings. I have wanted to bring grace and beauty to a world of veniality, hate, and people doing deadly stupid things.
Loved this for how it focused a few thoughts I’ve been struggling to articulate. Thanks, as always!
“Sheddan said once that having read a few dozen books in common was more binding than blood.”
-The Passenger
Great quote, thanks
It's true, if anyone mentions Jane Austen or Hopkins then I know I want to pursue a conversation...
And if anyone thinks reading is fun, I'll most likely want to know them better 😁
I opened my own Substack on literature a few months ago with an essay about why to read: because it's fun. Is that instrumental? https://clairelaporte.substack.com/p/dickens-dracula-and-djinni-literature
Depends on your view!
I hadn't thought about whether arguing that people should read because it's fun was "instrumental" or not until now. In the introductory essay of my Substack, I argued that the read-because-it's-good-for-you arguments have been a total failure, but I'm also not a fan of the arguments from inherent value. Those strike me as having a whiff of elitism that will be offputting to a lot of the people I'm trying to convince.
I think that most Victorian novelists would agree that people should read because it's fun. Their novels were the equivalent of serialized television now. Dickens was a very commercial animal. I think he focused most closely on what would entertain the largest audience, even though he was also creating something that had inherent value.
That may place him among literature's greatest instrumentalists, but he'd be there alongside Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and even George Eliot. And of course, Shakespeare's success was all about filling up the Globe Theatre - he didn't do that by appealing to notions of high art, nor did he argue about why attending a play would improve other aspects of the lives of audience members.
Instrumental typically means it has some exterior purpose beyond the thing itself, whereas the “for its own sake” benefits are more like fun or pleasure. Reading for pleasure is inherent value; reading to improve your skills to get a job is instrumental. Importantly they are not exclusive! But in education the interaction of pleasure and instrumental value is an important question.
I meet fewer and fewer people with any interest in literature/humanities, so my signals fall mostly on stony ground outside of this platform.
That’s why we need the internet! More group selection!
St. John's College in Anapolis/Santa Fe?
Yes
That's where a number of my undergrad profs went for their MAs. Our program was partially inspired by their model (close reading of primary texts with peers). Great example of the point you're making in this piece.
Nice!
Philosophy is the baby-mama of Psychology (you know the saying), and sometimes studying a primeval myth is more therapeutic than anything science can give. And science-fiction often becomes science-fact. Artists express the progression of the world before it happens, so science can prepare us.
Surely the core arguments advanced here for the instrumental value of the humanities are largely universal and can certainly benefit theists as well as humanists (in the secular sense), or am I missing or misinterpreting something?
I think it's important to read for two reasons: 1) If you can read and understand what you read, people can't fool lie to you as easily. They can tell you something and you can go look it up.
2) If you can't and don't read, you easily miss all the little easter eggs that pop up when people talk about something.
We all loved Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels; we learned about Gulliver in school thanks to our literature teacher. This teacher was a necessary instrument to our love of literature, and Voronezh University, Faculty of Philology, was instrumental for her to learn World literature. Do I understand the topic of discussion? Whether you love books or not, you will always need teachers of literature, or humanities, as it is called here. Or are you talking about the value of a book in human life? I don't think that book makes you a better person. Stalin loved Bulgakov's The White Guard as both a novel and a play, which he saw at the theater several times. However, it poisoned his life, as it did for many writers whom he read and liked. Was my love for literature instrumental? Never and nowhere. It was my own property. It seems to me I don't understand the question,
'The barmaid who reads Bulgakov needs no persuading of its value'
Just a quick note on this line.
Why do you consider a barmaid, or anyone on a minimum wage level job, as not having the ability or education to be able to question the value of Bulgakov? After all education is about the ability to ask questions, and the ability to be able to cast a question of value, like the question of as to the value of this whole post, is the most precious intellectual ability any one individual can own. So why would the Barmaid think that the value of Bulgakov is set in stone and unquestionable?
😎
I think you’ve fundamentally misunderstood the point being made in that sentence, which is that if a person who does a job requiring no knowledge of literature is already reading (for example) Bulgakov, it is because they are already convinced of the value of this activity. They don’t need to be talked into it.
Correct