We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and the results aren’t just bad, they’re ghastly.
Robert Pirsig
Among the many woes of American higher education nowadays, one is the precipitous decline of the humanities. Students these days, apparently, are opting for science, business, or engineering degrees, rather than the liberal arts. And as administrators slash budgets in history and literature departments in response to this declining enrollment, some writers and educators have stepped forward to defend this ancient, noble pursuit.
David Brooks attempted a sort of defense recently, in his column “How to Save a Sad, Lonely, Angry and Mean Society.” His argument was essentially that exposure to great works of art develops empathy, as great art trains us to see the world through different perspectives. It is Brooks’s belief and hope that such exposure translates to moral behavior. After all, if we can appreciate the needs, thoughts, and beliefs of others, we will certainly be more kind to them.
I would very much like to agree with this argument. But I have a hard time swallowing it. For example, one of the artists that Brooks mentions is Pablo Picasso, whose great painting Guernica arguably improves its viewers by making the horrors of war viscerally palpable. Picasso himself was, however, a notorious abuser of women, despite being as steeped in art as a person can possibly be. Indeed, history is so replete with cultured criminals—many prominent Nazis were highly educated connoisseurs, to pick just one notorious example—that the notion of betterment through studying the humanities can seem rather silly.
And yet, it is difficult for me to entirely let go of this idea. As a counterpoint, I might mention the American Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara. After watching Errol Morris’s wonderful documentary about McNamara, one is left with the impression of a man dominated by instrumental thinking. That is, McNamara is always concerned with the how of any question—and he is content to let his superiors worry about what he is doing, why he is doing it, and whether he should be doing it in the first place. Put another way, I think McNamara illustrates the limitations of a purely technical mind—even a brilliant one—as he attempts to make a stupid, immoral war machine as efficient as possible.
Perhaps it is fairer to say, then, that the humanities, while not sufficient for moral behavior, are a necessary condition of it. Or perhaps one must make the even weaker argument that, in general, exposure to philosophy, literature, history, and the arts tends to make us more moral. Or perhaps we might even have to take one further step back, and resign ourselves to saying that these subjects give us an opportunity to at least consider how we could become more moral. If that isn’t convincing, then we ought to just admit that the humanities are valuable simply because they make life more pleasant and interesting—which should be enough, anyway.
What does seem quite clear to me is that all the humanities and arts in the world will not be enough to extricate us from the moral morass that the United States—and, to a worrying extent, much of the rest of the world—seems to have fallen into. Individual enlightenment, even if it is achievable, does not stand much of a chance against collective stupidity. As dirty and disheartening as it is, we must participate in politics as partisans if we want to create a better world.
In any case, I think the decline in student enrollment in the humanities should not be ascribed simply to the deterioration of our culture or the coarse values of the new generation. A huge part of the explanation is simply cost. It is one thing to, say, hold history or philosophy in high esteem, but quite another thing to decide to go into thousands of dollars of debt to acquire such knowledge, with no assurance of a decent job on the other end. Expensive universities only make financial sense if they lead to a good career. (Having studied anthropology, I am in no position to be moralizing on this topic.)
In many ways, the university system here in Spain seems more logical to me. Rather than living on a luxurious campus and indulging in the life of the mind, most university students here commute from home, pay a modest fee, and learn exactly what they need to work in a specific job. In other words, it is job training, pure and simple (at least for most people).
And yet, I am old-fashioned enough to think that there is something good and valuable in the old liberal arts model of education, even if it is difficult to justify on economic grounds. Like Pirsig, I shudder to think of a world where people are only familiar with their own specialty, be it science or art. Education should not be reduced to technical training, or we will be left with a society of people unable to think about problems beyond the narrow domain of their fields. But how can the humanities be kept alive amid the ballooning cost of universities and the dwindling job opportunities of the market? This is a question beyond my ken.
Lotz in Translation 