Hildegarde

Yesterday, in response to the posts, I got a pair of e-mails that don’t look, on the surface, as if they have anything to do with each other, but which I think are very much connected.   The one from John was about a teacher friend of his and her battles with the parents of her students, who think Junior deserves an A no matter what his work has been like and are outraged when she refuses to agree.   The one from Robert said the following:

>>>Truth is, the button of mine you push most often is not your defense of any work of literature, but your cavalier attitude toward those you despise as unworthy<<<

I’ve looked at that sentence a dozen times, and I still don’t get it.  I don’t “despise” works that are noncanonical, and I don’t see that anything I’ve said here indicates that I do. 

Nor do I assume that books have to be “worthy” in the sense that seems to be used above in order to be part of the canon–with the canon devised as a collection of works important in the intellectual history of the West, for instance, Uncle Tom’s  Cabin would make the cut where the minor novels of Jane Austen and all of Thackery except Vanity Fair would not, and Uncle  Tom’s Cabin is far worse of a novel (in the sense of fulfilling the defnition of a novel) than not only the Austen and the Thackery, but than Agatha Christie and Georgette Heyer and even Somebody Else’s Music.

There is something going on there in that assumption that not to include a work in the canon is to look down on it that I think is key to the argument here.  And  I think it’s the key to John’s teacher friend’s problem with the parents of her students.

First, it seems to me that great big whacking hunks of the baby boom generation came out of school feeling that they’d been unfairly branded inferior by the system and their teachers.

Second, that these same kids, now parents, are convinced that the branding was all the more egregious because the standard on which they think it was based–the humanities in general and literature in particular–is something they consider nothing but subjective taste.  In other words, it was based on nothing real.  It was mere snobbery.

Somewhere back there a while ago, I pointed out that part of the problem with explaining the humanities to people is that it’s far easier to illustrate why an equation is wrong than why it is an idea about literature is.   That doesn’t mean that ideas about literature are subjective, or just a matter of taste, any more than ideas about quarks are.  It just means that they’re harder to explain.

One of the reasons why they’re harder to explain is that they seem to be something that everybody “gets.”  I’m not an idiot, am I?  I can read, for God’s sake.  You’re just making up all that stuff about Moby Dick being an allegory.

But Robert doesn’t fall into that category, and I don’t think anybody else here does, either.  So why make the assumption that if I don’t think Georgette Heyer is literature, I must “despise” her work?  Where have I said anything that indicates I “despise” it?

I did say  I thought Heyer was escapist entertainment–does that mean I “despise” it?  If it does,  I spend a damned lot of time indulging in something I despise.  I can’t handle the cozier sort of cozy–cat detectives, and that sort of thing–but Martha Grimes is escapist entertainment, and I loved her early novels.  Dorothy L. Sayers is escapist entertainment, and I have her complete works of detective fiction in the house somewhere. 

Back in the days when we taught people how to really read, the conventional wisdom was that there were three ways to read, each a little more difficult than the last–for entertainment, for information, and for understanding.   A book that provided an opportunity for all three kinds of reading had more claim to be taken seriously than one that  provided an opportunity for only one. 

But note–the requirement is all three, including entertainment.  The very best books provide that level for people who want it.  You really can read  Moby  Dick as an adventure story about a whale.  You can also read it for the information it provides about whaling.  You can also read it to understand the allegory.

A writer I like very much–a writer most of whose work is definitely escapist  entertainment–once pointed out through a character in a novel called Small Gods that books that can tell you how to fix the plumbing are all very well and good, but books in the humanities (literature and philosophy and history) tell you how to be human.

I don’t think anybody can outright tell you how to be human, but I do think that if you’re looking for a way out of cultural decadence and decline, you’re not going to get it from books on physics or theoretical mathematics.  Science is a great good thing, and when it has an impact on day to day life that impact tends to be huge, but a lot of it is the examination of issues that are of no importance to most of the people on this planet and never will be.   I think the whole question of whether the universe will expand until it reaches a steady state or get to some kind of end and retract again until it forms another ball for another big bang a neat thing to read about, but don’t tell me that I value science for its practical usefulness in the real world.  There is no practical usefulness in that, and probably never will be.

Physicists investigate the fate of the universe because they want to know for the sake of knowing, and I’m all for that.  The liberal arts–and physics is part of the liberal arts–are those things we study for their own sake, not because they will be useful to us.

But Terry Pratchett had a point–the humanities do indeed try to tell us how to be human.  They show us the different ways in which people have worked out their humanity, played out their lives, made the decisions that let to the consequences that got them to their end in one state rather than another.  This is useful knowledge to have.   The wider our understanding of how human beings live their lives, the better chance we have to live our own with some kind of decency and to build a decent society around us.

Nobody who has a thorough grounding in the humanities will ever tell you that morality is subjective and relative to different cultures, or that all cultures are equally worthwhile and to be valued on their own terms, or that it’s “just your opinion” that FGM is morally unacceptable.  One of the big jobs of the humanities is to teach you better than that.

Part of what’s so crazy making here, though, is this;  I’m pretty sure  Robert believes in God.

The push to make scientific procedures and standards the only procedures and standards is usually the province of very militant atheists.  It provides them with a basis on which to deny any evidence that does not fit a rather narrow agenda.  If man is “just another animal,” for instance, then there’s no reason why we shouldn’t move to active euthanasia when someone is just “using up too many resources” and so threatens the “quality of life” of the rest of us. 

I’m not saying that all atheists have this sort of agenda–they really, really don’t–or that atheism in and of itself requires it (it really, really doesn’t), but the fact is that scientism–the use of “science” as ideology, the denial of all other kinds and enterprises of human knowledge–is a very useful tool for certain very specific political agendas.  It is not the political agenda Robert favors.  I don’t think it’s the political agenda anybody here favors.

Contrast that with the body of work of somebody like, say, George Steiner, who manged to work his way around to declaring, in Real Presences and Lessons of the Masters, that the existence of great art proved the existence of God.

Okay, not quite.  But close.  And  I have some real problems with Steiner, as a thinker.  But his basic point in all this is the same as Terry Pratchett’s.

The humanities are those branches of knowledge that deal with what it means to be human in particular.   That is, they deal with the things that make us different from every other creature that exists on this planet, and different in kind, not just in degree. 

Even medicine doesn’t do this.  It works off biological science that begins with the assumption that species are interconnected–that the digestive systems of mammals have a lot in common with each other, that the idiosyncrasies of the human digestive system are no more than that.  When neuroscience tries to “explain’ religion, or creativity, it talks about the ways neurons develop and the action of hormones on synapses–and in the end it tells us nothing about religion, or creativity, at all.

The danger of scientism is that we will begin to think science tells us about those things.  When people like Victor Davis Hanson lend their names and reputations to things like ID, it’s scientism they think they’re fighting, although they’re not.

The humanities are not subjective matters of taste with no objective foundation for understanding and evaluation.  They’re the only expression we have of our full and unique humanity and the only path we have to understanding it.

Trust me, science is not going to help.

To say that some work or other operates on the level of entertainment and entertainment only is not to “despise” it. 

And to set up a situation where we have only two choices–it’s great art, or it’s complete crap–doesn’t help anybody.