For my part, I am not going to defend the current guardians of the humanities. They are stupid and have been for some time. I am going to say the two ways in which they ACTUALLY move forward. If you read Wieseltier’s piece carefully, it is defensive, not offensive. He is telling others to stay away, not where to go.
1. In my view, the humanities should recognize the subjective element of the human experience–our subjectivity, our non-object-ness, but it should be as objective as possible in its measurement of outcomes. For example, what is the effect of reading Herman Hesse when one is 15? What lasting effects, if any, are achieved from exposure to art, and are they positive or negative?
Or to use my own proposal in my essay on Goodness, why not search for models of the rejection of self pity, perseverance, and a blossoming perceptual capacity, and see how, particularly in ritual, religious traditions, they are cultivated. What is essential in ritual for actual, measurable outcomes useful to the modern Western world? If I was still in Religious Studies, that is the direction I would likely try to take, and be denied. (which is why I am no longer at a university.)
Put another way, and I hate to say this, but I agree with Pinker that particularly psychology–current psychology, and particularly the psychology of optimal well being–should be incorporated into the academy.
Ultimately, we pay teachers to be USEFUL. If they teach history, they need to teach the lessons of history. If they teach English, or Philosophy, we need to teach people to THINK and to express themselves with felicity. There is surely some means of measuring this.
To the extent literature or art is consumed for pleasure, it HAS NO BUSINESS in the university. It can be consumed outside the university, and no pretence need be made that the activity is other than autotelic (to use Czikszertmily’s (sp definitely off) word from “Flow”). Reading or other ways of the pursuing the arts are quite useful as recreation and for the processing of experience.
Studying HOW literature is good for the soul WOULD be the proper domain of academics. One of my many projects is getting certified in the Tomatis method, which involves listening to a lot of Mozart and Bach through specialized headphones that as I understand it periodically block certain frequencies, so as to resensitize your ear to them. The effects are supposedly salutary on many levels.
How much have you read about Tomatis? Likely little.
2. In important ways, though, I side with Wieseltier’s root project, which is making our consciousness PRIMARY, our subjectivity PRIMARY, and recognizing that any effort to make of humans objects necessarily deducts from what is most important in our lives, which is our sense of self. If Dennett truly acted daily like the machine he thinks he is, he would kill himself. He enjoys things, such as what he is pleased to call science. He probably likes walking his dog, and drinking good tea, even though within his own system his life is completely meaningless, and he is not different in principle from a cockroach scuttling along the sidewalk.
Again, to be clear, we are told that “consciousness” and “free will” are illusions with the same dogmatism and shitty thinking Dennett accuses Wieseltier of, but the simple fact is that AMPLE evidence exists showing that mind and brain are severable, and that the mind is not confined in its potential consciousness to its immediate domain.
When we get to the level of what is “really real”, our best model for the root reality is that it doesn’t exist. Everything we see and touch is the product of consciousness, it is CONTINGENT on consciousness. This means that at the very heart, the soul of their project, proselytizing materialistic atheists stand not on shaky ground, but NONEXISTENT ground, at least according to “science” as it exists today.
General Relativity–which IS a materialistic model–was falsified by the Alain Aspect’s measurement of non-locality. It is not true. God DOES play dice with the universe. Physicists have been trying without success to avoid this truth for 50 years.
People like Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker have done an excellent job of explaining human consciousness from B to C, but the universe goes from A to G. They do well within their domain, and thus never leave it.
This needs to be pointed out, as it is a terrible flaw. Whatever merits they see in telling the “truth”–which leaves out mountains of available but contradictory empirical data–the sociological fact is that the notion that we are machines made out of meat, devoid of “mind” in a higher sense, and that our freedom is illusory, have pernicious effects. No, it doesn’t floor people immediately. They wear nice sweaters, and drink good coffee, and become ardent socialists or Objectivists.
But as Malcolm Gladwell noted in “Outliers”, over long periods of time small differences can have enormous effects. All the problems we have in solving social issues, of finding meaning, devolve in my personal view into varying accounts of the nature of life.
My beef with these people is that they are failing to avail themselves of the very good data, as one example, in support of the theory that souls survive death. Science CAN and SHOULD meet religion. Christianity may be empirically untenable–that is my own view–but large segments of its core tenets may be salvageable.
Why argue about what sort of God would commit capricious acts? Why not have the balls to look at ALL the data with an open–scientific, not scientistic–mind?