The humanities—or the academic disciplines concerned with languages, literature, history, philosophy, and the arts—are in steep decline and have been for a long time. For decades now, the percentage of students enrolling in humanities classes has steadily decreased while the STEM fields have swelled to ever greater numbers. Recently, however, the rate of decline has accelerated dramatically, with plummeting enrollment numbers now forcing universities to close whole departments and severely limit humanities course offerings. The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker all have published a number of articles noting the sudden collapse—some even proclaiming The End of the English Major, speculating about “what it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before.” The trend has obvious implications for those interested in preserving culture. After all, the practices of the modern university influence education at every level and permeate into every domain of culture, and yet the cause of the crisis has largely gone unnamed. Some blame the economy, dwindling job prospects, or the increasing technological nature of our society.
And doubtless these factors have made studying the humanities less attractive, but the true cause of the crisis—the unmentioned elephant in the room—has come from within the humanities, not from without. Many know that over the past twenty years the philosophy of postmodernism has come to dominate nearly all humanities departments in higher education. The result has been nothing short of a revolution. Postmodernism, which originated as a form of literary critique, is a philosophy completely antithetical to the worldview that initially gave rise to the humanities and allowed them to flourish for hundreds of years. Consequently, the humanities now exist in a state of contradiction, cut off from their roots, divided against themselves. The casualties of the conflict have been severe: books, which previously served as foundational texts for their disciplines, have been eliminated from reading lists; classroom practices like the Socratic method have been abandoned; and even the academic essay has increasingly been swapped out in favor of personal reflections and journal-entry-style writing assignments.
The truth is that our contemporary humanities classes bear little resemblance to those of the past. Students today are not signing up for literature or philosophy classes because these disciplines no longer offer what they did to previous generations. The first step toward restoring the humanities is to recover their original purpose.
The humanities grew out of the liberal arts tradition of the great universities of Europe. These universities themselves were the product of the famous marriage between faith and reason—a union which was not only possible but fruitful because both Christian faith and Greek rationality, at their core, subscribe to what the philosopher Charles Taylor would call a mimetic view of reality. Mimesis sees the world as an intrinsically ordered and meaningful place—human flourishing, therefore, lies in our ability to discover and conform ourselves to the ultimate truth of reality.
Postmodernism, by way of contrast, is the latest incarnation of what Taylor calls the poietic worldview, in which the world is seen as formless and chaotic, lacking any intrinsic meaning. It is then up to the individual to generate purpose from the raw material of the world. The practical implications of these two worldviews—especially for humanities education—are radically divergent.
From a traditional or mimetic perspective the humanities are ultimately about formation. Aristotle, echoing Plato, expresses this view when he says the end of education is for a student to love what is good and dislike what is bad (Nicomachean Ethics 1104b11-13). Aristotle here presupposes two basic principles of the mimetic worldview: (1) that universal truth and absolute good exist and (2) that these are intelligible, i.e., accessible or knowable via human reason. Rooted in this understanding of the true and the good, education becomes not merely about the accumulation of knowledge or the development of skills but a transformation of the whole person. It is a journey of ascent from ignorance to knowledge of the good to what Aristotle describes as eudaimonia—the state of fulfillment or blessedness which results from a life lived in harmony with the ultimate truth of reality. To experience eudaimonia is to love what is good and hate what is bad.
The humanities in the mimetic view are disciplines whose end is the proper orientation of the affections toward the good. The various rigors, methods, and practices of the humanities can be seen as a set of tools—developed by practitioners over centuries, if not millennia—which can be used to reliably distinguish the true from the false, the good from the bad. The role of the teacher is to initiate the student into these disciplines.
However, the concepts of universal truth and absolute good which sit at the foundation of the humanities disciplines are denied outright in the poietic worldview currently championed by postmodernism. The highest truth is the truth of the individual—a view best expressed by Protagoras the sophist’s famous saying, “man (i.e., the individual) is the measure of all things” (Plato, Theaetetus 152a). Consequently, the tools of the humanities disciplines—e.g., logic, rhetoric, poetics—have no privileged position or claim towards higher truth. In fact, they must be viewed with the utmost suspicion since, as social constructs, they are merely tools of oppression used to subdue individuality. The truth of the individual, therefore, is not the product of rational reflection but instead found in the immediate data of subjective experience. Emotions and feelings, pleasure and pain—these are the only reliable vehicles of truth.
Students are therefore not in need of formation since they are already in possession of the only real truth. The classroom then becomes a place of performance where they can express and act out the truth of their subjective experience. Teachers function in a way similar to contemporary therapists: they aim to draw out the thoughts and feelings of their students so that these can in turn be affirmed and validated. The text or work of art presented in the classroom has no value in itself but serves merely as a springboard or catalyst for students to investigate their own feelings and articulate their experience.
However, postmodern education is not as good as its principles. Not all voices can be validated since the truth of one individual so often conflicts with the truth of another. Also, if all opinions are equal, then the belief that all opinions are not all equal must be recognized and given equal weight—in practice, it would turn out that the rules of logic which postmodernism seeks to dismiss prove to be remarkably binding—and so in the postmodern situation, where rationality has been stripped of its intrinsic authority, the only thing that counts is the strength of a particular individual’s or group’s will to power. The subordination of reason to will is the event of nihilism, as defined by Nietzsche, in which the highest values are devalued and reduced to the status of ideology.
The humanities of today now perform the opposite function of their historical incarnations. No longer providing students with the means for finding higher-order truth and meaning, they convince them of the impossibility of any such discovery. The psychological impact of the postmodern worldview has far-reaching implications.
We know the valorization of subjective experience has habituated a generation of students to interpret everything through the lens of self. Instead of seeking to transcend the limits of their own experience, they look inwards, believing reality lies within the shifting topography of their own emotional landscape. The practical consequence is neuroticism—a perpetual, self-referential loop indistinguishable from the kind of solipsism traditionally associated with mental illness. I would argue that the skyrocketing rates of anxiety and depression among young people cannot be viewed apart from the rise of postmodernism and the disordered worldview it promotes.
Increasingly, many today are aware of the crisis in the humanities and the disastrous effect it is having on students. So it’s only natural that many students, especially those with traditional values, are flocking to the STEM fields in droves. But are they any better off? Yes and no. Yes, a student studying engineering or chemistry avoids the cheap cynicism and ideological manipulation that he or she might experience in, say, a contemporary art history course. After all, the sciences posit the existence of an intelligible, objective reality. However, the sciences do not and cannot provide insights into the reality of consciousness, intentionality, meaning, purpose, thought, and value—in short, the world of the mind and human subjectivity. To be clear, it is not simply the case that the sciences have not made significant progress in these areas but that they fundamentally exceed their scope. The elimination of subjectivity—e.g., sensations, opinions, personal thoughts—is a methodological necessity for the functioning of the sciences. A science of meaning or value would fail to be scientific, if by scientific we take to mean knowledge derived from and subject to the scientific method. Consequently, the sciences provide no broad vision of human destiny or experience in the world.
Judged by Aristotle’s definition of the end of education—to love what is good, to dislike what is bad—a student merely trained in the sciences cannot be said to be educated in any meaningful sense since terms such as “good” and “bad” cannot be understood on a scientific basis. Where, then, does this leave our students? At most mainstream universities they must choose between humanities departments which, overcome by postmodernism, deny objective reality, and the STEM fields which dismiss subjectivity and so present a wholly materialist worldview. In other words, the choice is between solipsism or scientism.
And yet there are many colleges and universities where postmodernism has never taken root. Unsurprisingly, these schools boast thriving humanities departments, growing in numbers year after year, offering students the full beauty, complexity, and depth of our cultural and intellectual heritage. What do these schools have in common? What makes them immune to the current crisis? The common element is, invariably, an explicit profession of Christian faith. After all, Christ is The Logos, the Incarnation of the Divine Word, the first and ultimate reason of all things created in Him. Christ is not a reason but Reason itself in its fullest meaning. Faith in Christ is faith in the ultimate intelligibility and rationality at the heart of the created order––it is this faith which has preserved humanities across the ages, and it is from faithful institutions, secure in their knowledge of Christ, that the humanities will eventually rise again.