Don’t dim the light of learning: the case for humanities

Where ideology narrows our eyes and our minds, knowledge frees us from the strictures of the present. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake is a worthy pursuit.

Knowledge frees us from the strictures of the present, stimulates an awareness of the past, and makes it available for the future. Picture: iStock

At a graduation ceremony in 1991, Monash University history professor John Legge publicly defended the traditional ideals of the liberal arts when he reminded graduates, attired in their hired academic robes and caps, that knowledge was an end in itself.

“Sociology might appear useful,” Legge told the assembled graduates. “And languages learned for particular ends. Perhaps geography. But for the humanities in general — enjoyment, the satisfaction of particular curiosities, the contribution that such studies can make to a civilised ­society — do these add up to a sufficient justification for the funds we devote to them? You and I would say yes. But can we persuade the outside world?”

The Morrison government’s brutal decision last week to double tuition fees for some humanities courses suggests the delayed answer to Legge’s question is a dispiriting no, and that academics in the humanities have been unable to persuade the “outside world” of their discipline’s virtues.

I started reporting on higher education when the Dawkins revolution was first cemented during the Hawke government’s third term. Since that time, the higher education debate has been focused almost exclusively on funding and structures. It still is.

Educational ideals — what are we teaching, why, and for whom — are rarely addressed.

The tragedy of the humanities is caught up in this larger failure to address the abiding questions at the intersection of culture and education. After the announcement last week of the government’s proposed fee hike, I spoke to two humanities academics, a generation apart, and it was clear that both shared Legge’s values.

Steven Schwartz, the former vice-chancellor of Macquarie University in Sydney, Brunel University in London and Murdoch University in Perth, says: “There is nothing wrong with vocational training; a fulfilling career is an important part of a good life. But universities also have a duty to help students think about what kind of people they want to be.

Being able to quote Shelley will not help politicians get elected (certainly not in Australia) but studying Ozymandias might make them more humble, empathetic and thoughtful about their accomplishments.”

Francesco Borghesi, an associate professor at the University of Sydney who holds degrees from the University of Bologna and Brown University, Rhode Island, says he has always been surprised by the lack of discussion of the value of liberal arts in Australia. “Discussions around academia and its value seem too often to revolve around the ‘vocational’ only and not on the inherent value of knowledge for human beings in general and citizens more in particular,” he says.

A thread of shared values unites Legge’s 1991 invocation of knowledge for its own sake with Schwartz and Borghesi. These values are cherished by many humanities academics. But they are not the values the discipline has projected to the world. That’s due, in no small part, to the fact these values often have been subordinated to an educational program that has tended to speak for the humanities.

At the end of the 1980s, many humanities academics began to see their chief role as a form of ­cultural opposition. Their purpose was to confront, undermine and dismantle the intellectual undergirding of Legge’s “civilised society” and, in the process, logic, reason — and meaning itself.

The high priest of the theoretical movement that swept the humanities academies in the US, Australia and Britain from the 80s was Jacques Derrida, and Derrida — whose fame was always greater in the Anglophone world than in France — was devoted to the dismantling of Western philosophy.

Derrida was an outlier for most of his career in France. He failed his first two attempts to gain admission to the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure, and had to wait until the age of 50 for his doctorate. He was, in the view of many philosophers, an intellectual impostor. American philosopher John Searle sliced him to shreds. But Derrida’s theories blazed a trail through the humanities.

At a certain point in the recent history of the humanities, writes Francois Cusset, a professor at the University of Nanterre, in his book French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, “Derridean critics and identity theoreticians” made “common cause against the White Western Oppressor”.

A tangential point made by Cusset, but nevertheless a suggestive one, is that texts subjected to the blowtorch of Derridean deconstruction, and related postmodern approaches, were not so much read as mined for resources in a culture war. He describes the process this way: “One evokes, one detours, one deconstructs the philosophers, but one does not study them properly speaking.”

The engagement with erstwhile “great” authors and texts was now a hostile — certainly an oppositional — act.

Writes Cusset: “Reading lists were acceptable only if they drew from the Western canon to expose its political faults — Shakespeare’s ethnocentrism, Balzac’s misogyny, and Defoe’s colonialism.”

A searching 2013 piece in The New York Review of Books notes that by the end of the 90s, Derrida had been taken up by disciplines across the humanities — with philosophy the exception. He was “perceived as a natural ally, someone who implicitly understood how cultural phenomena and institutions contrived to suppress the voices of minorities, women and gays”.

By the mid-90s, a few years after Legge’s graduation address, the humanities had become an oppositional dogma. It was opposed to the high culture that had been its traditional source, and to the Western tradition that had furnished it with its core — or under the new dispensation “privileged” — texts.

This theoretical movement has lost much of its force today, but its influence persists. It could be heard during the opposition to the Ramsay Western civilisation curriculum last year.

It doesn’t represent the humanities, yet it has come to represent them by default.

I should, at this point, make my own prejudices explicit. I don’t believe humanism is an exclusive product of Western civilisation. And I think, on balance, that there is a strong case for an under­graduate program in multicultural humanism anchored in the African, Asian and Middle Eastern ­traditions.

Western humanism can be defined as a movement in secular, as opposed to theological, culture emerging in Western Europe in the 14th century. But it was not exclusively secular.

The great minds of the Italian Renaissance, such as Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, were greatly concerned with spiritual questions. And while the Renaissance was primarily concerned with the recuperation of classical culture, the retrospective impulse was in many cases hard-edged and critical. Humanist Lorenzo Valla, for example, was a kind of humanist attack dog — Derridean in his way.

Valla’s fame lies chiefly in his exposure of a medieval fraud. He proved that a contract supposedly written by the 4th century emperor Constantine to grant the Western Roman Empire to the Catholic Church was a sham.

The humanist tradition is, in other words, more subtle and varied — more radical — than is ­generally believed. Valla was dismantling texts long before the deconstructionists. But his aim was modest. He wanted to expose falsehood and get at the truth. For many postmodern theorists, the notion of truth — or at least the realist theory of truth — is a fiction.

What has tended to be forgotten, in the almost 30 years since Legge’s graduation speech, is that the ideal of knowledge as an end in itself is at once individualistic — it doesn’t insist that you believe any one creed or adhere to a particular dispensation — and emancipatory. Knowledge frees us from the strictures of the present, stimulates an awareness of the past, and makes it available for the future. It makes us nimble and adaptable. It broadens us, opens our eyes.

Ideology, on the other hand, narrows our eyes and our minds. It is, in essence, a theological instinct. And in that sense it is everything that humanism was opposed to.