Dear Friends:
I am currently in the process of being appointed Visiting Professor at the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico City campus, Dept. of Humanities; in fact, my first seminar for the humanities faculty is on February 6. Since colleagues have warned me that I may be asked to do some media interviews regarding the "purpose of a humanities education," I thought I should write something up with a view to talking points on the subject, so that I might have something coherent to say. The essay below (for better or worse) is what I came up with.--mb
"No people can be both ignorant and free"–Thomas Jefferson
"If ignorance were bliss, Americans would be ecstatic"–US bumper sticker
Before we can ask what the purpose of the humanities is, perhaps we should ask what the purpose of a university is, or even what the purpose of a nation is.
If the purpose is money and power, then the obvious model is the United States. At least, in the short run. Because in the long run, this has not worked out very well for the US. As I have argued elsewhere, after 230 years the country seems to be on its last legs. Economically, the US is in deep trouble, with some experts predicting a Depression-style crash within ten to fifteen years. In terms of power, it seems clear enough that the US is rapidly losing influence around the world, with the European Union and China set to replace it in its hegemonic role. A major reason for this decline is that the center of the US value system is money, power, and technology. Not that there is anything wrong with these things, so long as they constitute means and not ends. But in the US, they became ends, purposes in and of themselves; which meant that finally, the country had no purpose at all–it became spiritually bankrupt. While it is by now too late for the United States to reverse course, I would personally like to see Mexico (and the rest of the world) avoid this unhappy fate. Not unrelated to this is the fact that most US universities lost their purpose as well, and I am thus hoping that Mexican universities will rethink their admiration for their US counterparts. Consider the following facts:
1. In 1965, something like 75% of the freshman class in the US said that they were in college "to find a meaningful philosophy of life." Forty years later (even less), 75% said their goal was to become rich.
2. In the 18-24 age group in the US, 87% can’t locate Iraq or Iran on a world map, and 11% can’t locate the US(!).
3. During 2003-4, 20% of US undergraduates majored in business, whereas 1.6% majored in English, and 1.3% in history.
4. 20% of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, and an additional 9% say they don’t know which revolves around which.
5. In 1982, 56.9% of Americans read a work of creative literature during the previous twelve months. This dropped to 46.7% in 2002–i.e. a loss of 10% in twenty years.
6. Newspapers continue to go out of business in the US for lack of readership, and book sales to stagnate. There has even been some discussion in the US as of late as to whether reading will become a kind of "quaint hobby" in the future.
7. Educational researchers in the US have recently identified a phenomenon known as "negative learning". A University of Connecticut survey of 2005 revealed that at sixteen prestigious universities, including Yale, Chicago, Berkeley, and MIT, the seniors knew less about American history, government, foreign relations, and the economy than the freshmen did.
8. The current president of the United States, who holds degrees from Harvard and Yale, is notoriously uncurious about the world and has a difficult time speaking correct English.
What enabled all of this to happen? Three factors come to mind:
1. Increasingly, after World War II, a college education in the US became little more than preparation for a job. "Learning for learning’s sake" came to be regarded a kind of luxury.
2. American universities adopted the model of the corporation, and teaching was in turn modeled on the corporate-client relationship: the professor is there as a "provider" of a "commodity," which the students "purchase" from the institution. Once education became commodified in this way, respect for it basically evaporated. It became purely instrumental, rather than being seen as a way of life, or a way of deepening one’s understanding of the world and of oneself.
3. As the humanities lost respect, many teachers of the humanities lost respect for their own discipline. By the 1970s, a curious phenomenon known as "postmodernism" emerged, in which professors not only abandoned the search for truth, but began to argue that it didn’t even exist. This was a formula for academic irrelevance, if not suicide.
The humanities exist to ask–and answer–the question, What are we living for?, or What is the meaning of human life? If, as in the United States, the Mexican university answer is going to be the US national-corporate one, i.e., To make money, or, To have more technological gadgets, then education and the nation have no real future. For only the humanities can address these questions in a nontrivial way. If Mexico is to have a future, its universities are going to have to make the humanities central to the education of their students. Sound far-fetched? No need to take my word for it; for the counterexample, just–look north.
February 02, 2008
December 14, 2007
Defining Deviancy Down
Dear Friends,
I was recently contacted by a reporter for the New York Times, who asked me to clarify the relationship between culture and politics. Below, my reply.--mb
Dear Kirk,
Thank you for writing. Yours is a great question, both in the sense of being very important, and in the sense of being vast. In fact, to provide you with a decent reply, I think I'd need to go off and do about six years of research, and I'm guessing your deadline is a bit sooner than that. The problem here is that there is no definitive pattern, or even set of patterns, I know of, for the relationship between culture and politics. In some cases, it makes no difference at all that I can see: the British decision of a few years back to outlaw fox hunting, for example. A similar ban in NYC, a few years ago, on smoking in bars and restaurants. There is a lot of stuff in that category.
At the other extreme, we might consider the conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism in the 16th century, or in contemporary Northern Ireland. These are/were cultural conflicts with huge political consequences, quite obviously. Hatred of Jews in Germany during the 1930s, and the cultural campaign against them; e.g. movies (which I've seen) comparing Jews to insects, crawling through sacks of wheat, poisoning the food supply, i.e. the larger "healthy" German culture. As one historian famously remarked, "ideas have consequences."
As for the things you point to, such as capital punishment or homosexual marriage, I could offer some guesses, but that's all they would be.
I do, however, know of one pattern by which culture impacts politics, a pattern identified by the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the phrase, "defining deviancy down." In other words, what is socially unacceptable at one point, becomes perfectly OK--or at least, tolerated--a decade or so later. I used to ride the Metro quite often when I lived in Washington, DC, and watched how increasingly, people put their feet up on the seats, or sprawled out on them. Cell phone users could care less who is listening to them, so one now has to suffer through dinner with a friend in a restaurant while 3 feet away, someone is yakking loudly about their personal life. The Met, in NY, used to ban cell phone use in the galleries; now, one has to look at Rembrandt or Van Gogh while someone stands next to you, describing their recent gall bladder operation. Visitors even talk on their phones in St. Patrick's Cathedral. In schools, rudeness to teachers, and violence toward classmates, has become commonplace. Learning for learning's sake is a thing of the past, something "quaint," for patsies. There is a long list of this sort of behavior, and in fact a long list of books on incivility in American life (Stephen Carter's "Civility" is a good place to start).
There is also a large literature documenting a complete lack of interest in community and the larger society in the US, and how, following Moynihan's prescription, this is now taken for granted. The most famous of these is Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone" (this for the period 1965-95), but you might also check out Alan Ehrenhalt's "The Lost City," among others.
The impact of these things on politics is that politics becomes more or less irrelevant. We don't really have a society any more, so in that context, what is it that politics could possibly accomplish? Most Americans don't vote, and I doubt that very many, in their heart of hearts, really believe things are going to get better over time, regardless of which party is in office. The result of incivility and loss of community, of a world in which (e.g.) violence in our high schools is now regarded as simply a fact of life, and learning and erudition regarded as jokes, is cultural death, cynicism, loss of belief in America at large. "Democracy" becomes little more than a slogan. Bill Clinton or Barack Obama can talk about "hope," but all this is nothing more than empty rhetoric, because there can be no hope in the face of such large-scale solipsism and narcissism. Politics cannot be meaningful when the huge majority of the population has turned away from "the commons," from any participation or even concern about the larger society (which politicians such as Reagan and Thatcher claimed didn't even exist), and into private worlds of shopping, Prozac, TV, the Internet, religious fundamentalism, and the like. And this certainly does constitute an historical pattern, whether we are talking about the end of the Roman Empire, or the disintegration of the American one. Indeed, probably the greatest factor in the collapse of a civilization is spiritual death; and as Moynihan pointed out, we are seeing more and more of it every day.
As for your own question regarding the resolution of all this: take a guess.
Anyway, that's the best I can do on short notice. If there is anything in the above that might be useful to you, feel free to take what you need.
With best wishes,
Morris Berman
I was recently contacted by a reporter for the New York Times, who asked me to clarify the relationship between culture and politics. Below, my reply.--mb
Dear Kirk,
Thank you for writing. Yours is a great question, both in the sense of being very important, and in the sense of being vast. In fact, to provide you with a decent reply, I think I'd need to go off and do about six years of research, and I'm guessing your deadline is a bit sooner than that. The problem here is that there is no definitive pattern, or even set of patterns, I know of, for the relationship between culture and politics. In some cases, it makes no difference at all that I can see: the British decision of a few years back to outlaw fox hunting, for example. A similar ban in NYC, a few years ago, on smoking in bars and restaurants. There is a lot of stuff in that category.
At the other extreme, we might consider the conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism in the 16th century, or in contemporary Northern Ireland. These are/were cultural conflicts with huge political consequences, quite obviously. Hatred of Jews in Germany during the 1930s, and the cultural campaign against them; e.g. movies (which I've seen) comparing Jews to insects, crawling through sacks of wheat, poisoning the food supply, i.e. the larger "healthy" German culture. As one historian famously remarked, "ideas have consequences."
As for the things you point to, such as capital punishment or homosexual marriage, I could offer some guesses, but that's all they would be.
I do, however, know of one pattern by which culture impacts politics, a pattern identified by the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the phrase, "defining deviancy down." In other words, what is socially unacceptable at one point, becomes perfectly OK--or at least, tolerated--a decade or so later. I used to ride the Metro quite often when I lived in Washington, DC, and watched how increasingly, people put their feet up on the seats, or sprawled out on them. Cell phone users could care less who is listening to them, so one now has to suffer through dinner with a friend in a restaurant while 3 feet away, someone is yakking loudly about their personal life. The Met, in NY, used to ban cell phone use in the galleries; now, one has to look at Rembrandt or Van Gogh while someone stands next to you, describing their recent gall bladder operation. Visitors even talk on their phones in St. Patrick's Cathedral. In schools, rudeness to teachers, and violence toward classmates, has become commonplace. Learning for learning's sake is a thing of the past, something "quaint," for patsies. There is a long list of this sort of behavior, and in fact a long list of books on incivility in American life (Stephen Carter's "Civility" is a good place to start).
There is also a large literature documenting a complete lack of interest in community and the larger society in the US, and how, following Moynihan's prescription, this is now taken for granted. The most famous of these is Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone" (this for the period 1965-95), but you might also check out Alan Ehrenhalt's "The Lost City," among others.
The impact of these things on politics is that politics becomes more or less irrelevant. We don't really have a society any more, so in that context, what is it that politics could possibly accomplish? Most Americans don't vote, and I doubt that very many, in their heart of hearts, really believe things are going to get better over time, regardless of which party is in office. The result of incivility and loss of community, of a world in which (e.g.) violence in our high schools is now regarded as simply a fact of life, and learning and erudition regarded as jokes, is cultural death, cynicism, loss of belief in America at large. "Democracy" becomes little more than a slogan. Bill Clinton or Barack Obama can talk about "hope," but all this is nothing more than empty rhetoric, because there can be no hope in the face of such large-scale solipsism and narcissism. Politics cannot be meaningful when the huge majority of the population has turned away from "the commons," from any participation or even concern about the larger society (which politicians such as Reagan and Thatcher claimed didn't even exist), and into private worlds of shopping, Prozac, TV, the Internet, religious fundamentalism, and the like. And this certainly does constitute an historical pattern, whether we are talking about the end of the Roman Empire, or the disintegration of the American one. Indeed, probably the greatest factor in the collapse of a civilization is spiritual death; and as Moynihan pointed out, we are seeing more and more of it every day.
As for your own question regarding the resolution of all this: take a guess.
Anyway, that's the best I can do on short notice. If there is anything in the above that might be useful to you, feel free to take what you need.
With best wishes,
Morris Berman
November 05, 2007
The View from Darien
Dear Friends:
This by way of a change of pace...My German publisher wrote to say that he is going to be editing a book of short contributions by writers, journalists, and actors, on the subject of the first book they ever read, and how it changed their lives. Below, my contribution. Enjoy!
I suppose everybody has a shortlist of books that changed their lives. My own amounts to about 7 or 8 books, I would guess. But there is one that deserves a special place of honor, because it was my first, which I read at age 3: Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe. I was reading it with my mother, and we came across a word I didn’t know: eddy. As it turned out, my mother didn’t know it either (or so she said), so we looked it up in the dictionary. "Whirlpool," was the definition. But the fascinating thing that I took away from Defoe’s tale was that one could explore whole new worlds, worlds that were strange and unknown, and that it was not only safe to do so, but even fascinating. Furthermore, there were guides along the way to help you, such as dictionaries. And finally, I had it imprinted on my tender little brain that reading itself was exciting; that it was the key to a larger world.
That sense of revelation stayed with me, and shaped my life. I particularly remember revelations about revelation itself, such as the story of "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," from The Arabian Nights, which I read at age 13. Ali Baba comes to the covered entrance to a cave, and learns the magic words that open the door: "Open Sesame!" Or, in college now, reading John Keats’ poem, "On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer," which concludes with the lines:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific–and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise–
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
It is now six decades since I first read Robinson Crusoe, and I am still looking out at the world with a wild surmise.
This by way of a change of pace...My German publisher wrote to say that he is going to be editing a book of short contributions by writers, journalists, and actors, on the subject of the first book they ever read, and how it changed their lives. Below, my contribution. Enjoy!
I suppose everybody has a shortlist of books that changed their lives. My own amounts to about 7 or 8 books, I would guess. But there is one that deserves a special place of honor, because it was my first, which I read at age 3: Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe. I was reading it with my mother, and we came across a word I didn’t know: eddy. As it turned out, my mother didn’t know it either (or so she said), so we looked it up in the dictionary. "Whirlpool," was the definition. But the fascinating thing that I took away from Defoe’s tale was that one could explore whole new worlds, worlds that were strange and unknown, and that it was not only safe to do so, but even fascinating. Furthermore, there were guides along the way to help you, such as dictionaries. And finally, I had it imprinted on my tender little brain that reading itself was exciting; that it was the key to a larger world.
That sense of revelation stayed with me, and shaped my life. I particularly remember revelations about revelation itself, such as the story of "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," from The Arabian Nights, which I read at age 13. Ali Baba comes to the covered entrance to a cave, and learns the magic words that open the door: "Open Sesame!" Or, in college now, reading John Keats’ poem, "On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer," which concludes with the lines:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific–and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise–
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
It is now six decades since I first read Robinson Crusoe, and I am still looking out at the world with a wild surmise.
October 23, 2007
"A Public Affair"
Dear Friends,
I just did an hour-long interview with WORT-FM in Madison, WI, that might interest you. I haven't tried it myself, but the host told me after the show that the program could be downloaded by going to www.wortfm.org, clicking on Archives, and then going to the listing for "A Public Affair," 23 October 2007. I personally felt the hour went by in the blink of an eye. Most of the time is devoted to call-ins and my responses. Enjoy!
-mb
I just did an hour-long interview with WORT-FM in Madison, WI, that might interest you. I haven't tried it myself, but the host told me after the show that the program could be downloaded by going to www.wortfm.org, clicking on Archives, and then going to the listing for "A Public Affair," 23 October 2007. I personally felt the hour went by in the blink of an eye. Most of the time is devoted to call-ins and my responses. Enjoy!
-mb
July 27, 2007
Interview on WYNE-FM, 23 July 2007
This is an interview I did with Gary Null, on New York's local NPR station. Link as follows:
http://media.podcastingmanager.com/86473-83093/Media/600100.null072307.mp3
http://media.podcastingmanager.com/86473-83093/Media/600100.null072307.mp3
June 13, 2007
Interview on WYPR-FM, 11 June 2007
Dear Friends:
Here is the link to an hour-long interview I did on the Marc Steiner Show, on Baltimore's NPR station, WYPR-FM. Note that it took me 25 mins. to download this; I sincerely hope your own computer is faster! As follows:
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wypr/local-wypr-597016.mp3
Here is the link to an hour-long interview I did on the Marc Steiner Show, on Baltimore's NPR station, WYPR-FM. Note that it took me 25 mins. to download this; I sincerely hope your own computer is faster! As follows:
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wypr/local-wypr-597016.mp3
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