Chancellor Biddy Martin spoke last week as part of the Center for the Humanities Distinguished Lecture Series, where she discussed public perception of the humanities. “The culture wars and concerted systematic and public attacks on the humanities have taken their toll — that’s part of the story. … The inability of the public to understand what we do and our failure … to translate it for a larger public are also a big part of the story,” she said.

This raises some important questions: What do the humanities do? What purpose do they serve, and have they been serving that purpose?

The multi-discipline area of humanities (philosophy, literature, history, among others), as its name suggests, studies man, his culture and his institutions, as distinct from the natural sciences (such as physics and biology).

The humanities are responsible for providing basic answers on the nature of man, his relation to reality, ethical and political principles, pedagogical and epistemological methods, historical and literary analysis, etc. Principles and methods discovered and disseminated in these areas affect all other disciplines and human endeavors and underlie a society’s culture, its government and its view of science, knowledge and morality. Nothing could be more practical and necessary.

Although the subject matter of the humanities differs from natural sciences, it is still a quest for knowledge about entities in the world — in this case, man. Therefore, it has the same basic requirements as any science. It must study man, discover his nature, analyze the facts and arrive at concepts and principles.

Have the humanities lived up to this purpose? And if not, why?

Firstly, the humanities have almost completely ignored its object of study. The actual existents — individuals — have been replaced by reified abstractions of class, race, gender and community. But it is only by understanding man that these aggregates can be explored. Omitting the base of one’s field of study would be like a biologist refusing to incorporate cells into his field of knowledge.

Secondly, the humanities have a long history of hostility toward reason.

A common mantra in the humanities is that there are no wrong answers, only a diversity of viewpoints. Whereas science proudly teaches students to seek truth and rule out uncertainly by using logical argumentation and fact finding, it is common in the humanities to find “truth,” “facts,” “certainty” and “reality” in quotations.

In science, reality is the final arbiter and logic is the means of identifying the facts of reality. In the humanities, reality and logic are regarded as social constructs. We hear things like “whose reality?” or “feminist logic” or “logic is white-man oppression.”

Whereas discovering principles is crucial to any quest for knowledge, the humanities extol pragmatism, which is the rejection of principle. When confronted with this dilemma, pragmatists invariably muddy the conceptual waters with such incomprehensible amalgamations as “principled pragmatism.”

Instead of defining and clarifying crucial concepts like “justice,” we are offered rationally unusable terms like “social justice,” “public interest” and “diversity.” Even simple terms like “racism” are routinely obfuscated beyond recognition.

Even a cursory overview demonstrates a long history of hostility toward reason.

The humanities have been a citadel of Kantian philosophy, which claims our minds are cut off from reality. Students learn there are no objective ethical standards (multiculturalism), that words have no relation to reality (deconstructionism) and that abstract ideas are impossible (postmodernism). The ideas that truth is unattainable, there are no absolutes, certainty is impossible, everything is a matter of option and free will is an illusion are all mainstays of a humanities education.

The result of such education is not self-confident, reality-oriented or independent thinkers. Instead, we have a populace that increasingly cannot think in principle, that blindly follows consensus and is unable to grasp even basic concepts.

It is rare to find a student who understands the meaning of “democracy” or that America is not one. Most do not know what individual rights are or what capitalism is or how it differs from socialism and fascism.

In place of rational, fact-based, ethical principles, students are offered a social-subjectivist version of the Judeo-Christian code of sacrifice to “something higher than oneself.” And this is from a supposed scientific field.

The natural sciences are thriving because they seek knowledge. They look for principles and abstractions; they use logic, careful observation and rigorous adherence to facts. Scientists seek to clarify and refine their concepts, definitions and principles and to discover true ideas and communicate them with rational argumentation. These should be fundamental goals of any science.

The humanities as a field dedicated to reason, reality and scientific rigor is not under attack from the public; it’s a field that does not yet exist and one the public desperately needs.

Jim Allard ([email protected]) is a graduate student majoring in the biological sciences.