What Are We Doing Here?

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From The New York Review of Books:

I have been reading lately about the rise of humanism in Europe. The old scholars often described themselves as “ravished” by one of the books newly made available to them by the press, perhaps also by translation. Their lives were usually short, never comfortable. I think about what it would have been like to read by the light of an oil lamp, to write with a goose quill. It used to seem to me that an unimaginable self-discipline must account for their meticulous learnedness. I assumed that the rigors and austerities of their early training had made their discomforts too familiar to be noticed. Now increasingly I think they were held to their work by a degree of fascination, of sober delight, that we can no longer imagine.

John Milton said, “As good almost kill a man as kill a good book.” He was arguing, unsuccessfully, against licensing, the suppression or censoring of books before publication. This was usual in the premodern and early modern world, of course. How many good books were killed outright by these means we will never know, even granting the labors of printers who defied the threat of hair-raising punishments to publish unlicensed work, which others risked hair-raising penalties to own or to read.

To put books into English, the vulgar tongue, the language of the masses, was once radical. Teaching literature written in English is a recent innovation, historically speaking, and was long regarded in the more renowned institutions as a lowering of standards. It is still the case in some countries that the work of living writers is excluded from the curriculum, perhaps a sign of lingering prejudice against the vernacular, against what people say and think now, in the always disparaged present. In America this scruple is gone and forgotten. Writers not yet dead, in many cases only emerging, are read and pondered, usually under a rubric of some kind that makes them representative of gender or ethnicity or region, therefore instances of some perspective or trend often of greater interest to the professor than to any of the writers.

. . . .

I have enjoyed the company of young writers, and I have learned from them. I know that one is expected to bemoan the present time, to say something about decline and the loss of values. O tempora, o mores! But I find a great deal to respect.

That said. It is a familiar irony that prohibition and deprivation can make things potent and ravishing, and that plenty very often dulls our taste for them. There is a great deal of questioning now of the value of the humanities, those aptly named disciplines that make us consider what human beings have been, and are, and will be. Sometimes I think they should be renamed Big Data. These catastrophic wars that afflict so much of the world now surely bear more resemblance to the Hundred Years’ War or the Thirty Years’ War or the wars of Napoleon or World War I than they do to any expectations we have had about how history would unfold in the modern period, otherwise known as those few decades we call the postwar.

. . . .

Why teach the humanities? Why study them? American universities are literally shaped around them and have been since their founding, yet the question is put in the bluntest form—what are they good for? If, for purposes of discussion, we date the beginning of the humanist movement to 1500, then, historically speaking, the West has flourished materially as well as culturally in the period of their influence. You may have noticed that the United States is always in an existential struggle with an imagined competitor. It may have been the cold war that instilled this habit in us. It may have been nineteenth-century nationalism, when America was coming of age and competition among the great powers of Europe drove world events. Whatever etiology is proposed for it, whatever excuse is made for it, however rhetorically useful it may be in certain contexts, the habit is deeply harmful, as it has been in Europe as well, when the competition involved the claiming and defending of colonies, as well as militarization that led to appalling wars.

Link to the rest at The New York Review of Books

PG posits that one benefit of studying the humanities is to realize that, while genuinely new discoveries and developments may occur in science and mathematics, most patterns of human behavior have occurred before, often in many different ages.

War is one of the regrettable and repetitive activities of humankind going back to the earliest recorded history. PG is currently reading The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won by Victor Davis Hanson.

In the introduction to his book, Hanson points out the similarities between the locations and dynamics of the ancient Greek and Roman battles and those of World War II. The forests of the Ardennes, lying at the intersection of France, Belgium and Germany provided routes to and sites for major battles by the Roman armies of Julius Caesar, and of Charlemagne as well as for one of the first major battles of World War I.

During the winter of 1944-45, German armies achieved complete surprise by once again attacking along the ancient battle routes of the Ardennes in what would be popularly described as the Battle of the Bulge.

PG hopes another historical event, the Nazi takeover of German universities during the 1930’s, does not have a more modern equivalent in the US and other western universities.

In May, 1933, books from university libraries which were deemed culturally destructive, mainly due to anti-National Socialist or Jewish themes or authors, were burned by the German Students’ Association. Professors who did not adopt National Socialist principles and teachings were hounded from their posts. Professors of disfavored ethnicity were similarly forced from their posts.