Studies in Pride, Envy, Pointlessness, and Death
I have recently seen a study showing how badly English literature has fallen from its old, prominent place in the academy to near irrelevance: only 1 in 60 college students choose it as a major. Some blame a resurgent utilitarianism. “What can you do with your degree in Gender Studies?” asks the would-be conservative, snorting. “You, or rather your parents, spent a couple of hundred thousand dollars for that? What were you thinking? And you expect me to continue to bankroll your student loans, or even to forgive them, sticking everybody in the nation for the bill for your own stupidity? Pay it yourself.” Meanwhile, young men especially look at what’s on offer at college and decide instead that they can make a good living, and a lot sooner, doing things: wiring houses, laying pipe, installing new roofs, and so forth. If they want to develop their minds, and I urge them most vehemently to do so, they can read books on their own, as people once did. (RELATED: A Bag of Rocks for $400,000?)
But the utilitarianism that English professors now decry is only a different form of what they themselves have been peddling, in my experience, for at least 40 years. Every course in “Shakespeare and,” subordinating Shakespeare to some political or sexual preoccupation the professor wishes to promote, turns Shakespeare into a mere utensil, a gear or a lever. The aim is never to employ, in criticism, that breadth of human imagination that Keats, thinking of the poet, called “negative capability,” the large-hearted willingness to set aside, at least provisionally, one’s own beliefs and desires, in order to listen to what someone else has to teach, to illustrate, to reveal, or merely to suggest. Such a critic or professor becomes, provisionally, the Bible-besotted radical William Blake, to do justice to that wise madman’s view of the world — Blake, who was a better man and a better poet too than his moral philosophy warranted. I have become, provisionally, an Epicurean atomist to do justice to Lucretius, whose De Rerum natura was my first of seven major works of translation. “Such wickedness religion can incite!” I wrote, translating his powerfully climactic line, tantum religio potuit suadere malorum — I, the faithful Roman Catholic, who believes that without religion there is no such thing as human culture, and that therefore Epicureanism is an acid that must be diluted considerably, because in pure form it will consume whatever social vessel purports to contain it. (RELATED: At the Tip of Your Fingers)
Before the wholesale politicization of the academy, before it turned to a form of utilitarianism that, like Marxist economics, is peculiarly useless, like a rubber hoe or an iron parachute or a roof riddled with holes, general survey courses not only helped keep professors honest; they developed in them the habits of broad reading and forbearance. If you are teaching a course in 19th century British poetry, you will have to come to terms not just with the radical libertarianism of Shelley; you will have to deal with the sober and high-minded Tennyson, and the Catholic Hopkins, with his acute insights into the nature of the created world and the strife and difficulty of the moral life. The sheer variety of it all, as you turn from one poet to another, demands a supple and flexible mind, not the stiff and brittle incompetence of political ideology.
Intolerance does not arise from believing in moral truth.
But you cannot have that mind in the first place unless you believe that goodness, truth, and beauty are objectively real, and that therefore we are to be grateful wherever we find them. What I have just said may appear paradoxical. If I believe in objective moral truth, for example, I must find appalling Shelley’s attempt to justify, in “Epipsychidion,” open adultery; and so I do. But the person who says he does not believe in moral truth is either a fool or a liar. It is quite simply impossible for us human beings to refrain from making moral judgments. If these are not based upon fundamental and true axioms, they will be based instead on political desiderata, current fads, and personal promptings actuated by the professor’s own habits — usually, in our time, sexual habits. Intolerance does not arise from believing in moral truth. It arises from not believing in it, because then there is no more persuading or rational arguing to be done; the aggressions of incessant propaganda take over, backed up by, or superseded by, outright force.
And, if the professoriate will deign to do what all human beings should often do, though but sporadically and feebly, that is, to take stock of themselves, their treacheries, their sins, and their follies, they will see that people energized by political haranguing are not pleasant to be around. Why should a young man, for example, take yet another course in feminism when he’s had them all his life long, and when the feminists are unpleasant, usually bitter about something or other, and not likely to praise him if he dares to cross them in the least? Having been subject to 12 years of the equivalent of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s resentful story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” he probably believes in almost everything the feminist has to say; he simply does not want to hear it all over again. Why should he enroll in the Queer Theorist’s course in Renaissance drama, when he has already bought the amorality of the sexual revolution, and has seen online a thousand things far more radically disorienting than a boy playing the part of a girl playing the part of a boy? Shakespeare enjoyed the merry comedy of errors that such a thing invited, while he believed most firmly in the goodness of male and female and their being made for one another. The professor does not believe in the love between man and woman; the student probably does not believe in it, either, except as it may come about accidentally. So why bother with trying to twist Shakespeare into pretzels? You can have a whole bag of them for nothing, everywhere you turn.
The high cultural calling of the humanities was once, to quote Matthew Arnold, to study “the best that has been thought and said.” If you say there is no such thing, you have already killed your subject’s reason for existence. You are not bringing wisdom, since you have already asserted that there is none. What then is the difference between you and a charlatan on a soapbox selling an elixir to cure everything from gout to heart disease? These two differences, as far as I can tell: You don’t have to mortgage your house to buy a bottle, and it likely has a lot of alcohol and spice in it, so that if it doesn’t cure anything, it at least tastes good.
Will professors turn back and forsake their foolish ways? Not likely. A degree in the humanities, if it cannot confer wisdom that the professors themselves do not believe in, is not wholly without effect. It can confer pride, or, in people too painfully aware of some pinching inadequacy that pinches them, envy. You may imagine a lawyer returning his fee for a case he has lost; you may imagine a politician resigning after the law he has pushed results in disaster; you may imagine a ballplayer telling the referee that the call he has made for the player’s team was in error; you may imagine the moon falling from the sky; but nothing more unlikely can be imagined that a set of people insulated from the effects of their stupidity, people who cannot plane a board or set a nail, people who on some level know that they are not Matthew Arnold and hate him all the more for it, will suddenly grow humble and admit that they have fouled their homes and left the beams and joists to rot.
So the humanities die, gnawed to sawdust by their own termites, and this in a time when the very definition of humanity is being threatened by cultural withering, the phenomena of the masses, a collapsing population, and “artificial intelligence.” I shed no tear for the professors. I shed a tear for the ignoramuses we are raising in our midst, at exorbitant cost. And I will weep outright for Homer and Dante and Shakespeare, for Blake and Shelley, for Tennyson and Arnold and Hopkins; and for all the professors of old who gave so much, and whose work, being scorned, has fallen into ruin.
Of course, here as in so many other arenas of cultural dilapidation, we must rebuild. But that means we must know what we are rebuilding and why. No utilitarianism, economic or social or political, can give the answer; arsenic is not the antidote for aconite. The answer must come from the objective realities we have denied.
READ MORE from Anthony Esolen: