Tropophilia

a guest post by Daniel H.

On January 6th, the prominent theorist, writer and scholar Stanley Fish wrote an intriguing article in the New York Times, called “Will the Humanities Save Us?”  In it, he makes the following claim:

You can talk … about “well rounded citizens,” but that ideal belongs to an earlier period, when the ability to refer knowledgeably to Shakespeare or Gibbon or the Thirty Years War had some cash value (the sociologists call it cultural capital). Nowadays, larding your conversations with small bits of erudition is more likely to irritate than to win friends and influence people.

If this is true, it presents serious problems for our culture. I wish to discuss why this might be a problem though I understand it may be a bold move to counter a guy like Stanley Fish.  This being said, however, I feel that it may be possible to offer an intelligent reply to his somewhat myopic article. Also, I want to relate this discussion to our larger conversation concerning “change” in our lives.

If well-rounded citizens have begun to be less-useful to society, we must ask the question, “why?”  I suspect it might be because the values of our society have become more and more mechanized, in-tune with a capitalistic culture which pursues the bottom dollar before any other intrinsic value.  We want the cheapest, most efficient solution to any problem.  Therefore, we value an education which will produce the most efficient worker, even at the cost of education which may enhance a student’s understanding of and ability to relate to the world.

The reason this might be a problem for us, as humans, is implicitly stated above.  Without the humanities to complement the physical or social sciences,  we risk losing our ability to relate to a changing culture with any thoughtfulness or criticism.  Just as novels can teach one to write better than a “writing manual,” the humanities more broadly can help us to think more objectively and critically about the world around us by exposing us to countless new and challenging ideas.  If Mr. Fish argues that well-rounded people have no cash value, I argue in response that it would be dangerous for our country, and dangerous for our economy to produce a workforce of “efficient” workers who do not read, create, make art, philosophize, or understand our current political and social affairs outside of the context of human history.  For these reasons, I would be willing to pay cash for a well rounded employee, even if Stanley Fish calls it useless in light of the bigger picture.

This week’s required reading:  Twilight of the Books, from the Dec. 27th issue of The New Yorker Magazine.

Image courtesy of Sewanee.