An Embarrassing Defence of the Humanities

The humanities are under threat and need defending!

Like most people whose salary depends on the humanities, I think this. But I don’t believe that I think it only out of self-interest. I worry about the decline in the humanities beyond my own employment situation and that of my friends. But why worry? Why do I want people to keep studying the humanities?

The various defences of the humanities I’ve seen present noble reasons for us to care about our trade. One, by N. Ángel Pinillos, was well-received and makes an eloquent and convincing case. Like other defences recently given, it tells a story that is nowise embarrassing to us humanities academics.1 The humanities provide not just intrinsic value but also indispensable skills. This is very noble indeed: we’re giving society something more precious than gold, and all we ask is a final salary worth three times the median household income.

It’s so dignified a defence, in fact, that it makes me suspicious. I have worked in the humanities for a long time. I can assure you that we are not dignified. As a general rule of thumb, truths about academics tend to be embarassing. If a more embarassing hypothesis can be found, it should be favoured. One such hypothesis can be drawn from David Pinsof’s post on opinions.

Philosophers (including me) have done plenty of complaining about the misleading “fact/opinion” distinction Pinsof draws on there. For now, ignore that. What matters here is that he uses “opinion” to refer to something like a statement of preference, presented in the form of a statement of fact. He gives the example: “Radiohead is the best rock band of all time”. This doesn’t just express a preference. But, to most people, it doesn’t quite seem to state a fact either. People who argue endlessly about such claims aren’t just tiresome; they seem to be deluded—they think there’s a fact of the matter, when really there are just preferences.2

Pinsof sees statements like these—“opinions”—as expressing preferences in the form of factual statements. But they aren’t really facutal. They’re presented in the form of factual statements, he proposes, for a reason: in order to pressure others to adopt the same preference. He explains:

The difference is that the opinion is externalized—it’s a feature of Radiohead, not me—implying that if you don’t agree with me, you’re missing something. You’re not smart or deep or sophisticated enough. If everyone comes to share my opinion, then pretending Radiohead is “one of the greats” will become a social norm, in the same way that pretending Shakespeare is “one of the greats” has become a social norm, even though most people secretly don’t give a shit about Shakespeare. Opinions have covert insults built into them: if you don’t share my preference, there must be something wrong with you.

Why would we want to pressure others to share our preferences? Pinsof’s explanation is that this is all part of a status game. We’re wired up to pursue social status. “That’s what we’re secretly going for—the goal evolution programmed us to pursue—superiority.”

Spinoza saw this long ago, when he defined a person’s striving to bring it about “that everyone should love what he loves and hate what he hates” as ambition. He later defined this simply as “an immoderate desire for glory”. Spinoza’s insight in linking our strange need to have others share our preferences with our striving for “glory”, or social status, was extremely prescient in terms of the evidence cited by Pinsof.

Pinsof also notes that what makes the phenomenon weirder is that we can’t admit that social status is what we’re going for when we try to pressure others to share our preferences. If we admitted it, “we’d reveal what we’re trying to conceal—that we’re competing for superiority”. Nothing costs more social status than visibly trying to get it. Thus we convince others and ourselves that this isn’t what it’s about at all: rather, we’re just trying to get people to have the correct preferences, the right taste in music, to properly appreciate the classics, to access the intrinsic value of Radiohead, etc. We’re trying to help them, not aggrandise ourselves. What, me, grandstand?

We can apply this analysis to our opinion that the humanities are very valuable. Maybe this is an “opinion” in Pinsof’s sense: an expression of preference plus a bit of pressure to share it. What we’re trying to do is support a social norm around our preferences. Although, like everyone, I talk a big game about not giving a damn about status, I am a human being with a tribal primate brain that does all kinds of cringy things without me even knowing it. Consciously I think “different strokes for different folks”, but my little ape brain is going for my strokes über alles—or should I say: ego strokes.

I don’t need people to rush out and buy the new PUF editions of Spinoza in Latin. But I wouldn’t like it if people completely gave up on the idea that maybe they should be into this stuff—if they felt no social pressure to occasionally pretend to know about Spinoza. I’d be disappointed if people were no longer able to recognise the significance of P.G. Wodehouse making Spinoza the favourite reading matter of the sophisticated butler Jeeves. I don’t want to live in a culture in which I’m regarded like one of those men on railway bridges identifying rolling stock. I want people to look at what I’m into and think “ah, if only I had time to learn all that”, not “there’s that weirdo again”. A social norm of respect for the humanities is all that makes the difference between those.

That’s the embarassing side of it. But I also think there’s a less embarassing side. Another reason for wanting people to share your preferences is that you think this will actually make them happier in the end. I really do think that Spinoza, and Zhuangzi, and all the other stuff I’m into is rewarding, and I do want people to enjoy the rewards.

I also think the rewards are pretty crude and visceral, once you get to them. Great philosophy is just heaps of fun. The historian A.J.P. Taylor was highly critical of people who defended history by promising that we can “learn from the past” in order to avoid mistakes in the future. In fact all we learn from our previous mistakes is how to make new ones. He said that the real reason for doing history is that’s fun to write and hopefully fun to read.3 I feel the same about philosophy. I don’t know if it really gives you a deeper understanding of fundamental reality, or makes you a better democratic citizen, or allows you to see through the structures of power, or any of the other things that have been promised on philosophy’s behalf. Probably it does the opposite of all those things at least as often. But it’s really a lot of fun, once you get past the hard and tedious parts. The world would be much more boring without it. I don’t just want you to like it, I think that you will like it, if you give it a proper try. I think it will brighten your life.

This is what Spinoza referred to as humanity (humanitas)—the good version of ambition, where you want people to like what you like, not to boost your social status, but because you genuinely think it will be good for them. There’s a bit of humanity in the humanities, although I fear there’s an awful lot more ambition.

I don’t think humanity will help us to defend the humanities, however. The problem is that the rewards of the humanities aren’t visible from the outside. Great philosophy isn’t like a yumnut. Or, it’s like a yumnut that you only get if you watch Apocalypse Now Redux to the end. The reward is easy to enjoy once you get there, but it really doesn’t feel like that when you’re three hours in and it’s still just fire and sweaty men and trafficked girls and oh, is war bad?, sorry I haven’t quite got the message yet, please add 49 minutes to what was already a long movie.

The problem is that when we humanities academics tell people of the rewards to come, they don’t believe us. We no longer have the credibility. There might be a man outside the cinema enthusiastically waving you in and telling tales of yumnuts to come, but, well… does he seem… ok? Is he, you know, normal? Or does he seem like he likes Apocalypse Now Redux and wishes it was even longer? Does he seem like he might want to (🤮) discuss the movie with you, explaining at length why it’s so much better than the original release? Humanities academics seem more like that, and it terrifies the public.

One way we’ve achieved this reputation is by turning the humanities into a litany of everything bad in the world and nothing good. Everything is horrible late capitalist exploitation and oppression and environmental degradation and indigenous expropriation and sexual abuse and war and genocide and—well, Apocalypse Now Redux. Even the yumnuts come with extensive warning labels about exploited agricultural workers, deforestation to grow palm sugar, and Type 2 diabetes. So much for any attempt to argue that the humanities are fun.

All these terrible things are happening, of course, but our fixation on them just doesn’t seem… normal. Maybe we’re trying to guilt-trip people into improving the world, but that just makes us seem like we have no understanding of human psychology (“drowning them in the Slough of Despond will really inspire them!”). What we’ve ended up doing is making the humanities look like the Ann Summers of cultural self-flagellation. People picture us asking, with which whip shall we flog our horrible selves today?, with something that sounds uncomfortably close to glee. This seems like a pretty niche kink, so you can hardly blame the general public for not wanting to come along on the journey. We don’t come across as people you would go to to learn about enjoyment. Thus, even when we try to tell you of the rewards of reading Homer in the original, we sound like somebody sitting next to you on a public train and advising you to keep all your fingernail clippings in a big jar, because “you just never know”. Thanks, you reply, I’ll pass. I can’t say I blame you.

Luckily, the embarassing side of the story—the ambition side—can be used to mount a defence of the humanities. A society in which social prestige attaches to being learned and cultured is one in which humanities departments have a valuable status symbol to sell. That’s good news for our jobs, of course, but it might also be good news for society in general. After all, if people lose that source of social prestige then they will turn to other sources. Where will they go for status instead? Will they pursue an Instagram or TikTok following? Seek political power? Go for viral posts on “X”? Turn to activism and block up the roads? Peddle conspiracy theories or quack miracle cures? Do you really think we humanists will be more sufferable outside the university?

John Maynard Keynes once wrote: “It is better that a man should tyrannise over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens”. His point was that, although extreme wealth inequality is undesirable, we should remember that if people can’t play the status game of wealth then they might turn to other, nastier games. Recent history suggests that the pursuit of wealth isn’t always the less harmful substitute. The academic humanities status game, however, is a pretty good quarantine for the ambitious. Put a cap and gown onto us, and you know where we are. Deprive us of this bit of status, and we might go down the blog-to-serial-killer pipeline, or the even more fearsome blog-to-YouTube-channel pipeline.

The next time you read Reviewer 2’s pompous, power-mad report, ask yourself where else you’d rather such persons do their status-seeking. This gives us a powerful way to defend the humanities to the general public. We should publish reviewer reports with the message: If you keep closing academic departments, these people will have to become your colleagues. They’ll do their status seeking where you live, instead of up in the ivory tower. Is that what you want?

Just pay the money.