Western Civ and the Collapse of the Humanities - Are the Pearl-Clutchers Right?

Rebecca Schuman doesn't get it.

A case can be made against conservative hand-wringing over the fate of the traditional humanities, particularly at the fact that some conservatives can rail against the eclipse of Homer out of one side of their mouth, and out of the other support policies specifically engineered to ensure the death of whatever remains of the liberal arts. But that's not because they're wrong, so much as because they're duplicitous.

The literary canon – however flexibly you might define it, however open it has historically been to debate and reinvention – was once the heart of a whole political, artistic, cultural body, keeping it alive and self-identical over the course of time. Modernity itself is a mere senesence.

But let's get to the substance:

Mac Donald (and before her a he-swears-not-stoned David Brooks) chides the literary disciplines for losing “timelessness” in favor of contemporary critique. Timelessness? Anyone who has taught Dante’s Inferno (as I just did to my freshmen) knows that every canto contains some now-opaque reference to Dante’s personal enemies, or Pope Boniface VIII, or that timeless political party the Guelphs.In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (which I also just taught to my freshmen), much of theWife of Bath’s Prologue is devoted to rousing debate about Jovinian, whose views on marriage got him excommunicated from the Church in that timeless year that everyone remembers: 393. And do you know what play was written largely to placate his audience’s new fascination with all things Scottish? Shakespeare’s Macbeth—which, again, I just taught to my freshmen, alongside such “politically correct” work (or “masterpieces of world literature;” tomato, to-mah-to) as The Epic of Gilgamesh,The Bhagavad-Gita, and the Tao Te Ching.  

Does Schuman really think that the Commedia is part of the canon because of its discussion of thirteenth century Italian politics? Historical understanding can ground our reading of texts, enrich them even – that's why five hundred generations of good souls have deigned to write in the most humble of genres: the commentary. But commentaries help us appreciate even more texts that have been chosen for entirely different reasons. Not even the greatest commentary ever written will ever make Manilius required reading in Intro to Western Civ. And by the way, believe it or not, having a basic understanding of the ecclesiastical history of the fourth century was once considered a very important attainment and a really necessary part of a well-rounded education.

So why do we read Shakespeare?

Because listen. No literature, if it’s any good, is timeless. Ever. It is of its time—and, in order for students to be at all interested in reading it, it is of ours as well. That does not make it “timeless.” That makes it nuanced. For example, when my students recently read nonexplicit excerpts of the Kama Sutra, they were aghast that the text condoned “forcibly carrying” a girl away as a legitimate form of marriage. They, not I, brought up their objections in class, and a terrific discussion resulted on sexual consent in the fifth century BCE.

Um...no. British contract law is extremely nuanced – but I have yet to see anyone propose it for inclusion in the general curriculum. Nuance alone is just that . . . nuance, complexity. Fifty Shades of Grey, or so I've heard, is nuanced, and particularly so when it is read as a product of Anglo-American middle class sexual/cultural mores. Set that in a context of the decline of the print book, the rise of Amazon, and the post-Hunger Games, post-Game of Thrones, post-Girl With the Dragon Tattoo homogenization of mass literary culture, the picture because extraordinarily complex and interesting. None of that changes the fact that it is (reputedly) a terrible piece of literature.

Schuman's point is a common enough one, however – and I think it arises from this curious fact that modernists often are required to teach intro courses. Hence the only premodern literature they have ever been exposed to is the best, the timeless, the canonical. I think personally that the stories in Gervase of Tilbury's Otia imperialia are great – but Gervase is no Chaucer (be he ever so nuanced) and will never, ever be considered for a place on the Five Foot Shelf of Books. Read some Elizabethan revenge tragedy next to Macbeth – it will give you some really fascinating insight into understanding genre, and audience, and the historical context of the sixteenth century. But if you can't see how immeasurably superior Macbeth to the Spanish Tragedy, then you suffer from a complete and utter lack of taste and judgment. As a result, these modernists – always the champions of the undiscovered, the underappreciated, the marginal – assume that all premodern literature must be of the same quality. Somehow, I think their delight in the non-canonical would evaporate if they ever had to teach Valerius Flaccus, or Apollonius of Rhodes, or Marius Victor, or Orosius, or Corippus (a venerable Vandal Renaissance man), or Hrabanus Maurus, or Diego García, or Nicolas Trevet, or Thomas Kyd, or Joseph Addison.

But there is a deeper point here. The canon remains and will remain at the heart of elite education. Schools for the rich will continue to teach the traditional subjects, the traditional texts – even if their sponsors and clients are more than willing to foist 'ínnovative' and 'experimental' methods of education on the poor, the middle class, the generally non-elite. The promise of the expansion of higher education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was that this liberal training would be made available more widely, because everyone could benefit from the best that has been written and thought. Ever so predictably, our elites – more capitalist than aristocratic – are snatching away those opportunities, doing their best to ensure that higher education, except for their own children, prepares lower and middle-class children only for participation in the work-force, which in less generous moods one might call 'wage slavery'. Do you want 'a rising tide of literate poors who dare question the politics of privilege'? Then let's make them literati by giving them the education that they have been denied for reasons of money, power, and privilege. Let's actually believe that they are worth an education which treats them as something more than a potential labor unit. That I believe is the real reason we ought to defend the canon. People who peddle trendy silliness in place of the real, timeless (really timeless) solidity of the classics are collaborators with the elites who want to deny the poor and middle class a chance to have the kind of education their class has maintained as its birthright.