by Joseph Shieber
The humanities are once again in crisis, as they have been so many times before. What distinguishes this latest crisis from many of the crises preceding it, however, is the extent to which the current crisis in the humanities is exacerbated by the current political climate. Attacks on the humanities fit very well with the current right wing attack on higher education more generally; the Right moves seamlessly — one almost wants to say thoughtlessly — from attacks on one to attacks on the other.
Given this climate, it is not surprising that diagnoses of the current crisis in the humanities would focus on the politics of the humanities. Emblematic of such diagnoses is a widely discussed recent piece by Tyler Austin Harper in the Atlantic, “The Humanities Have Sown the Seeds of Their Own Destruction.” There, Harper suggests that the current crisis of the humanities is the result of political capture: the humanities disciplines are now hostage to left-wing political movements and, as a result, have become targets for critics from the center and right.
Underlying this diagnosis is Harper’s suggestion that the political capture of the humanities is the result of an attempt by representatives of those disciplines to respond to a perceived lack of practical benefit of the study of the humanities — a low return on investment (ROI) — by suggesting that the practical benefits of the humanities are not monetary, but social or political. “If the humanities have become more political over the past decade,” Harper argues, “it is largely in response to coercion from administrators and market forces that prompt disciplines to prove that they are ‘useful.’ In this sense, the growing identitarian drift of the humanities is rightly understood as a survival strategy: an attempt to stay afloat in a university landscape where departments compete for scarce resources, student attention, and prestige.” That is, the study of the humanities makes for better people and, in turn, better societies, rather than better workers.
Harper sees this political turn in the humanities as taking two forms, both represented in the following passage:
Instead of trying to prove that the humanities are more economically useful than other majors—a tricky proposition—humanists have taken to justifying their continued existence within the academy by insisting that they are uniquely socially and politically useful. The emergent sales pitch is not that the humanities produce and transmit important knowledge, but rather that studying the humanities promotes nebulous but nice-sounding values, such as empathy and critical thinking, that are allegedly vital to the cause of moral uplift in a multicultural democracy. If the arc of the universe bends toward justice, some would have you believe that it is humanities departments that do the bending.
Though Harper focuses primarily on the idea that the humanities disciplines have been captured by specific political and identitarian agendas, but he also suggests that the notion that the humanities foster empathy is also a reflection of the political turn.
I want to push back on this diagnosis. I will suggest that, unlike the pursuit of specific political agendas, the appeal to the fostering of empathy as a benefit of humanistic study is not political, in the sense that Harper decries. More importantly, perhaps, I want to highlight the way in which Harper’s diagnosis buys into a mistaken framing of the entire discussion of the value of the humanities. I’ll start with this second point first, since it reveals such a common misconception about the purported “uselessness” (to use a term Harper employs) of the humanities. I’ll return at the end of the discussion to the sense in which empathy is political.
According to Harper, the cause of the capture of the humanities by causes dear to the political left lies in the academic administration. It is academic administrators who, convinced that the humanities cannot justify their value from the standpoint of a return on investment, attempt to change the subject, encouraging faculty in humanities disciplines to chase political stances and subtopics that administrators hope will appeal to prospective and current students.
Harper cedes to these putative administrators the point that the humanities cannot justify their value from the point of view of return on investment. He argues that, “if we have any hope of resuscitating fields like English and history, we must rescue the humanities from the utilitarian appraisals that both their champions and their critics subject them to. We need to recognize that the conservatives are right, albeit not in the way they think: The humanities are useless in many senses of the term. But that doesn’t mean they’re without value.” In other words, where Harper attempts to intervene is by rejecting the idea that the humanities ought to play the game of justifying their disciplines according to such frameworks. Harper then goes on to accuse academic administrators of, in effect, brandwashing.
In a recent interview with Yascha Mounk, Harper notes that elite educational institutions might better be thought of as private equity firms with ancillary educational projects:
One of my great frustrations with the sort of DEI, anti-racism (what you’re calling the “identity synthesis”) discourse, particularly when it comes out of the mouth of deans and college presidents, is that these are people sitting on multibillion dollar endowments at universities that have been basically reduced to hedge funds, and yet they expect us to believe that they are some kind of engine of political revolution. It’s transparently a lie, transparently hypocritical. And so I really, really detest it. I would much prefer that institutions and admins went back to defending principles that they could defend without hypocrisy.
That is, in Harper’s view, the “woke” stances administrators promote do little to change the underlying structure of society, but serve to mask the obscene mounds of cash on which the ivy covered lecture halls sit.
I am sympathetic to Harper’s critique of the financial priorities of elite institutions. Furthermore, I think Harper is right to push back on the idea that the humanities can only measure themselves according to a metric of return on investment. However, Harper is too quick to cede the point that, if pressed, defenders of the humanities cannot justify the value of the humanities according to such a metric.
Indeed, it’s somewhat surprising that Harper is so quick to cede the “uselessness” of the humanities, given that Harper approvingly cites John Guillory’s observation that
The distinction between useful and useless knowledge is a bit of ideology that works endless mischief in the market for intellectual goods. It is a scandal that the distinction has been associated with the division between the sciences and the humanities. A good deal of science is in market terms ‘useless’; conversely, literary knowledge, understood as imparting certain cognitive skills, is much more useful than is often acknowledged.
Unfortunately, Harper seems to draw the wrong lesson from Guillory. Rather than using Guillory’s observation to push back on the idea that the humanities are “useless,” Harper instead attempts to deploy Guillory’s reasoning to attack the very idea of assessing fields of study based on their practical outcomes. This, however, would be a mistake.
In fact, recent studies have demonstrated that the return on investment from the study of the humanities is quite respectable. The mistake that many commentators make is in comparing the humanities to the highest-ROI fields, like engineering and computer science. This, however, is a fallacy. Rather, we should compare the outcomes for humanities majors to the outcomes of those who do not complete a college degree at all.
When we do this, as a recent study highlighted in the Chronicle of Higher Education demonstrated https://www-chronicle-com/article/how-do-humanities-majors-fare-in-the-work-force, what we find is that
… in every state, the data show that the median salaries of humanities majors were about the same as or higher than those who earned degrees in the behavioral or social sciences, arts, or education — though their earnings in most states lagged behind those who graduated from engineering, business, and natural-sciences programs.” Furthermore, “Although a degree in the humanities is often bemoaned as leading to joblessness, the academy’s data show that the unemployment rate for humanities majors is similar to other college graduates, at about 3 percent — and, on average, about half the unemployment rate for those with no college degree.
In other words, when keeping in mind the proper comparison class, we can see that humanities majors actually fare quite well, even when the value of the humanities is measured in terms of such a focus solely on return on investment. The humanities: not so useless after all!
Indeed, as Kevin Carey points out in an article for the Atlantic, “The Myth of the Unemployed College Graduate,” “College graduates are more likely to have jobs, become wealthy, be healthy, get married, stay married, and be on the right side of virtually any measure of prosperity and stability one can name.”
Thus, it is true that Harper raises a number of salutary points concerning the ways in which a focus on monetary value distorts considerations of the humanities and the ways in which the priorities of academic administrators, seeking to shield their institutional wealth, actually promote the pursuit of ineffectual, but very public, “woke” stances. However, it is much more damaging for the discussion about the value of the humanities that Harper fails to see that, even measured against the metric of return on investment, it is actually quite possible to mount an argument in defense of the humanities.
If I have convinced you that defenders of the humanities should not be so quick to grant that the study of the humanities is “useless,” even when measured in the stark utilitarian terms of return on investment, then I will be satisfied. I did, however, want briefly to return to Harper’s too-quick move of lumping together the idea that the study of the humanities fosters empathy, on the one hand, with the pursuit of overtly political projects within the humanities, on the other, rejecting both as reflections of the abandonment of serious study in the humanities to “woke” – and ultimately empty – posturing.
Stretched far enough, I do think that empathy is a good way of understanding the project of the humanities.
This is most obvious, perhaps, in the case of the study of literature. As Martha Nussbaum has argued, studying literature helps us to “see and feel the lives of those different from themselves,” as she puts it in her 1997 book Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. In her 2017 book Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, Nussbaum points to novels showing the inner lives of marginalized people like Jews, women, and African Americans and argues these works spur empathy and compassion by showing our shared human aspirations and struggles.
However, Nussbaum’s discussion of empathy also recapitulates both of the failings to which Harper falls prey. This is most obvious in the case of Not for Profit – as its very title demonstrates, Nussbaum uncritically accepts the “either-or” framing according to which the study of the humanities cannot lead to a financially rewarding career as well as providing students with an intellectually rewarding pursuit.
It seems to me that Nussbaum’s discussion in Cultivating Humanity also involves a form of “either-or” thinking that sells the humanities short. There Nussbaum contrasts empathy, which she sees as the province of literature, with critical self-examination, which she sees as the province of philosophy. Most crucially, furthermore, Nussbaum conflates empathy with compassion, suggesting that what empathy produces is compassionate understanding (p. 88), which, in turn, produces an “awareness of our common vulnerability” (p. 91).
Understanding empathy in this way, it is easy to see how it might seem a part of the politicized notion of the humanities that Harper criticizes. I think, however, that to understand empathy in this way would be a mistake.
In another, also widely cited, piece on “The burden of the humanities” for the New Criterion, Wilfrid M. McCay characterizes the fundamental task of the humanities as the attempt “to grasp human things in human terms, without converting or reducing or translating them into something else—as into physical laws, mechanical systems, biological drives, psychological disorders, social structures, and so on. The humanities attempt to understand the human condition from the inside, as it were, treating the human person as subject as well as object, the agent as well as the acted upon.” McCay is a professor of history at Hillsdale College, hardly a bastion of leftist thought. His characterization, however, basically reduces to empathy, the attempt to understand others “from the inside.”
This past semester I taught the Philosophy of Law course at my college. In that course, we spent about a week discussing law and sexual ethics, during which I had the students read John Finnis’s 1997 article, “Law, Morality, and ‘Sexual Orientation,’” which appeared in John Corvino’s collection Same Sex: Debating the Ethics, Science, and Culture of Homosexuality. In that discussion, I try to model for the students what I take to be a form of empathy, putting Finnis’s arguments against the legality of same-sex sexual acts in their best possible light – although I strongly disagree with those arguments. (This is not easy, by any means. In the course of that essay, Finnis not only straight-facedly compares homosexuality to zoophilia, but he also asserts as fact the falsehood that “conception is much less likely to result from rape.” Despite the supposed “wokeness” of today’s college students, the class discussion was exemplary: serious-minded, very critical, but never shying away even from considering Finnis’s points.)
What Nussbaum’s – and Harper’s – notion of empathy fails to account for is that not all understanding need be compassionate. I can understand Finnis’s point of view, I can attempt to see his arguments and train of thought from the inside, as it were, without agreeing with him. Empathy involves understanding someone’s perspective, emotions, and motivations. It is about comprehending their inner world and what drives them, not excusing or validating it. It does not inherently imply a non-judgmental stance, agreement with another’s worldview, or even kindness toward them.
To the extent that the core project of the humanities involves understanding, rather than affirmation or validation, this strikes me as distinctly apolitical. It also strikes me as a fundamental turn – or return – to what has been the core impetus for humanistic pursuits all along. As the playwright Terence wrote almost 2200 years ago, humani nihil a me alienum puto, I consider nothing human foreign to me.