Some Thoughts on a Humanities Revival (from a Pseudo-Humanist)

THE LIFE OF THE MIND can feel a bit dismal these days, what with the disinvestment in education and the rise of generative AI. Especially for a humanist. Of the many humanists I know, and love, I find most split between hope and despair. Those who despair see before us, in the future, the intensification of older trends which foretell of even bleaker prospects for the humanities. Those who hope feed on statements, like the claim from Anthropic co-founder Daniela Amodei, that the humanities are poised to become more relevant than ever.

I would like to believe that those who are hopeful are right. The survival of the humanities feels, strangely, like my own survival in some way. But that might be a little disingenuous. Because, if the truth be told, I’m a bit of an imposter or an interloper in the humanities.

Sure, I’m a professor of theology whose department is housed in the humanities division of a small liberal arts college. So, institutionally, I’m a humanist. But the field I work in (religious studies & theology) is an interdisciplinary field, full of humanists as well as social scientists. It was an interdisciplinary field before interdisciplinarity was cool (and long before it stopped being cool). And the humanities (for good reasons, which I promise to discuss) tends to host a lot of tension with religion. So, I’ve been treated as an alien outsider by many academics, especially the native humanists in literary studies who often disdain (or are made anxious by) the taint of religion on my PhD.

But I also happen to think that whether or not you are an identifiable humanist is also the least important thing about the humanities. Sounds like something a pseudo-humanist would say, doesn’t it?

I WAS A DOUBLE MAJOR in comparative literature and Spanish, as an undergrad. I liked to think of myself as a humanist, though I didn’t quite know what that meant. It felt like a certain kind of style, or aesthetic. I was the kind of person who took lots of classes in literature. I liked books. I liked people who liked books. I liked to write. Sometimes I liked the other people who also liked to write. I knew that much.

During my final year at university, I planned to apply to PhD programs in literature. But I had a crisis of confidence when I was forced to pick a specific period to specialize in. I toyed with 19th-century American, but ultimately it all seemed too narrow to me and committing felt like an arbitrary form of self-betrayal. So I dropped the idea, worked in a bar for a while, and eventually became a daily newspaper reporter for a few years instead. A professor once told me that it would be like boot camp for writing, and it essentially was.

That time away from academic life also gave me some clarity about what I was actually interested in. I learned that I wasn’t necessarily interested in being a humanist. Nor was I interested in literature so much as I was interested in that strange ethereal matter that so much poetry, and also some fiction, was both erasing and yet also preserving. I didn’t understand it, and it fascinated me. I discovered that talking about religion, and especially theology, gave me a different point of access to it. So I went to graduate school, to study theology.

It was in a class on Reformation history, during my master’s, that I finally learned what the humanities actually are. Despite the fact that I’d always gravitated towards the humanities, I’d never quite understood them. I knew they had something to with books, and reading, and writing. And history, and philosophy. And art, at least to some extent. But was the humanities merely a collection of academic disciplines? Was the humanities the community of people who identified as humanists, rather than scientists? It had always seemed as if, when I tried to understand the humanities, there was nothing behind the curtain but a bunch of people who called themselves humanists.

But, studying the history of theology, I finally understood that the humanities are a method. Or a set of methods. I learned about, for instance, Desiderius Erasmus and his contemporaries, who—despite their religious commitments—did intellectual work that was incredibly destabilizing for religious institutions. In their move ad fontes (to the sources), they studied scripture in its original languages and discovered how much had been altered in translation. They didn’t keep this to themselves. They pointed it out. They offered critiques, and new translations in new languages.

To understand the incredible impact this had on religious life, we need only to look to Martin Luther who inherited, and utilized, these methods. I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to claim that the Protestant Reformation, to which Luther and so many others contributed, was a radical and dramatic reorientation in religious life. It was a reformation sparked by many things (including the usual suspects: politics and economics). But it was also driven by the humanities, and its incessant move to go ad fontes.

This move toward the sources—ad fontes—is a practice. It’s a way of doing something, not a way of identifying yourself. It’s a way to develop a kind of relationship with sources. You listen to them carefully, you speak to them, ask them questions, trace their lineages, peel back the layers and look at what comprises them. In many cases, you end up engaging with the voices of the dead. It’s important to have a good method, or set of methods, to do something wild like that.

It’s a practice that’s inherently destabilizing, because it’s interrupting the very things that, in so many cases, have been used to establish forms of power and authority: sacred texts, letters of the law, etc... This is why the humanities are often in tension with religion. And it’s because there have been so many theologians (like Luther) who use these methods that theology itself has often been in tension with religion (despite the fact that it’s also, more often, associated with it.)

I THINK THE DRAW towards the humanities, and books, that many people seem to feel right now is for a certain style, aesthetic, or feeling. It’s the longing for a less digital way of being. And I think this can serve to draw attention to the humanities. It can help to create a scene. And a scene can do things. It can point you towards the people you want to be like, and away from the people you don’t want to be like. But if what we want is to protect an intellectual heritage against corporate exploitation, a scene is not enough. We need the boring and difficult thing: the means and the methods.

Despite my own inner conviction that the humanities are methods and practices (not types of people) I know that this isn’t how many people tend to think about them today. In academic institutions the humanities tend to be a collection of underfunded departments staffed by people who identify as humanists, who often understand themselves to be in a battle with the scientists (or technologists) for administrative sympathy and resources.

This understanding of the humanities (let’s call it, for the sake of expediency, the identitarian approach) makes it resonate in strange ways with the rightward-leaning push for a revival of the classics. Many of the sources that are included in the right-wing return to “western” roots in Ancient Greece and Rome are sources that plenty of humanists also read. If there were to be a humanist revival that unfolds as an identity movement, what would distinguish the humanist’s relationship with Cicero from that of the rightward leaning classicist? To be the type of person who reads Cicero, and who refuses to sever that nourishing connection to the past, is a nostalgic sort of hunger for roots that could potentially bridge a humanist revival with a right-wing return to the classics. Here, the sources authorize your present identity. You go ad fontes to determine, or authorize, what sort of person you are.

I think that the humanities, as a method, offers something else. It’s the embrace of a certain kind of tension. It’s the willingness to unsettle, and be unsettled. Or the hunger to peel back layers, and to take the risks (including the dissolution of who you thought you were) implied in doing so. You go ad fontes to remake the present, including yourself, in a strange conversation with the past.

This isn’t to suggest that the use of a method doesn’t change who you are, and how you function in the world. Of course it does. But, I think, if you take this particular method seriously enough you will be inclined to resist an understanding of your identity as genuinely contained by that method.

One of the reasons why so many people are interested in the humanities right now is because the proliferation of generative AI has forced us to ask (as we have always, in various ways, been asking) what makes us human. It’s the reason why everyone seems to be talking about consciousness right now. Interest in the humanities is a different variation on the same theme.

Given that this is the case, I think it’s the humanities as a method or a practice, rather than an identity, that offers us the best chance at maintaining any sense of intellectual sovereignty in the midst of AI proliferation. Generative AI is essentially anti-humanist in method. These LLMs may have absorbed millions of sources (more than any scholar could ever dream of reading). But they don’t develop relationships with them. They don’t begin to revise their sense of self, or their frame of mind, in relation to them. LLMs make a hamburger out of the sources, and feed it to us so that it’s processed for easy digestion. The humanist method for thinking, and encountering text, knows that there are real pigs (or maybe cows) in that hamburger, and is willing to take the absurd next step to try and find out where that pig (or cow) actually came from.

Books aren’t sacred objects (even though I sometimes feel tempted to believe that they are). But they are very special technologies, for humanist methods, because they claim to be the creation of a specific person, or set of people. If that was a lie then there is, at least, an interesting story to discover. And if it wasn’t, the sparse technology of black ink on white paper offers you a strange and potentially electrifying point of access to another mind, moving through time and space. That might be sacred.

But maybe you shouldn’t take my word for it. I might only be a pseudo-humanist.