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As part of Chancellor Biddy Martin’s declared “Year of the Humanities,”, speaker Martha Nussbaum presented a talk on Monday night entitled, “Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities.”
Nussbaum’s message is best summarized in her own words: “If we do not insist on the crucial importance of the humanities and the arts, they will drop away because they don’t make money.”
Certainly, the humanities are of crucial importance, but Nussbaum’s analysis of their demise reverses cause and effect. The humanities are not viewed as unimportant because they don’t make money. They don’t make money because they are viewed as unimportant.
At one time, the arts did make money. Before the rise of modern nihilist “art” and government endowments to keep it afloat, individuals valued and supported art en masse. It was a profit-making business. What changed is not the value or need for art but the content of the “art” being produced. Beautiful, value-centered artwork was replaced by the unintelligible and irrational works of Picassos and Pollocks. Is it any wonder the art establishment ceased to have value in the minds of average Americans?
The same is true throughout the humanities. Philosophy, history, literature and other humanistic disciplines are crucially important as fields of study, but whether their content is valuable is determined by the substance and ideas in each field at any given moment.
Yet, rather than question the ideas being taught in the humanities, Nussbaum would have you believe that our culture is just too short-sighted and blinded by greed and profit-seeking to see the importance of the humanities.
As she stated in her commencement address to Connecticut College, “Democracies … are prone to some serious flaws in reasoning, to parochialism, haste, sloppiness, selfishness, lack of imagination. Education based mainly on profitability in the global market magnifies these deficiencies, producing a greedy obtuseness and a technically trained docility that threaten the very life of democracy itself, and that certainly impede the creation of a decent world culture.”
Is it possible that the humanities are unprofitable because of their view of profit? How on earth does educating for profitability lead to “flaws in reasoning, parochialism, haste, sloppiness” and “lack of imagination”? Being profitable in a global market requires reasoning, long-range thinking, planning and plenty of imagination. Just ask Sam Walton, Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.
The irony of Nussbaum’s criticism is that it is precisely profitable areas of education — engineering, biological, medical science — that are the new bastions of reason, imagination and long-range thinking. Individuals in these fields are “technically trained,” for sure, but they are anything but docile or obtuse. They are dedicated to using their minds, thinking critically and dealing with others through argumentation and persuasion, the very virtues Nussbaum promotes.
While it’s true that the humanities often deal with abstract issues that have broader implications than engineering or business administration, it does not follow that practical, profit-driven pursuits are “lower” or short-sighted, whereas philosophy and anthropology are somehow “lofty” and noble. Unfortunately, Nussbaum seems to support this ivory tower attitude.
Nussbaum warns of a society of “useful profit-makers with obtuse imaginations” and quotes approvingly from author Rabindranath Tagore, who writes, “History has come to a stage when the moral man, the complete man, is more and more giving way, almost without knowing it, to make room for the … commercial man, the man of limited purpose.” Is it any wonder that the humanities are seen as impractical and unimportant?
Positing that the humanities somehow transcend lowly materialistic pursuits to reveal a world of justice and peace is a proscription for making the humanities obsolete. It places a wall between material pursuits and intellectual pursuits — between the body and the mind — and severs the humanities from reality.
Men, however, do not live in ivory towers; they live in the real world where the commercial man — the man seeking material wealth and profit — is the noble man. He, like the philosopher and the artist, uses his mind to pursue the values that sustain his life. He is not, as Tagore claims, “the man of limited purpose.” Nor is he merely “useful,” as Nussbaum asserts. Rather, he is the embodiment of abstract ideas, able to put those ideas into practice, uniting the abstract and the concrete, turning the potential into the actual.
The humanities need to discover that there is no dichotomy between the material and the intellectual, between profit and morality, or between the commercial and the intellectual. Even the humanities must earn their value and are subject to supply and demand like everything else. If they want to be valued, they must earn it.
Jim Allard ([email protected]) is a graduate student in the biological sciences.
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Hmm, a Randroid criticizing non-Romantic art and spouting pseudo-philosophy? Well I never!
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Finally, something in the BH Opinion section worthy of its print space (and then some). Thank you.
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The fact that Mr. Allard can say that “beautiful, value-centered artwork was replaced by the unintelligible and irrational works of Picassos and Pollocks” and call the works produced by such artists “nihilist art” pretty much disqualifies him from being able to an informed and reasonable judgment about the arts and humanities. Maybe his problem is that he has not taken enough humanities courses himself. Moreover, he must not have been paying attention at Nussbaum’s lecture, since the approach she was defending was anything but “ivory tower”; rather, she was pointing to the importance of the engagement of the arts and humanities in our everyday (and especially political) lives.
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Doesn’t Allard have an MA thesis or a dissertation to write?
Nothing irks me more than seeing some grad student take up space in a university newspaper. Anyone can write for this newspaper, but graduate students and faculty generally understand that university newspapers are intended to foster the talents of undergraduates. Grad students and faculty, if their ideas are worthy of print, have outlets outside the university.
Those of us who already possess the BA, let alone the MA or PhD, have an unfair advantage over undergraduates. Simply put, we write better than they do.
Allard should let the undergrads write for the newspaper and develop their skills. He already had his chance in college and is using his easy ability to get into an undergraduate newspaper to grandstand.
Worse, he no doubt knows that his obscure libertarian politics have few outlets and he is using the university newspaper for easy publication and c.v. padding.
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Shut up. This has been the first worth-while thing to read in the Opinion section that wasn’t a whiny piece of drivel complaining about the Greeks, people complaining about the Greeks or lazy students in general. Who cares if it’s written by someone better than half of the BH or Cap Times and State Journal put together. Yes, I do rank the BH higher than the two Madison papers.
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You just say that because you didn’t understand it. It’s okay, I don’t blame you—you want to sound smart, and Allard uses lots of big words. But don’t let his big words distract you from the fact that really, he’s just full of hot air, and all that hot air occupies the space where other people would put a thesis statement or a point.
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Shut up? Seriously?
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I assure you, that when I referred to publications outside the university, I meant newspapers and journals like the New York Review of Books, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Nation, the Atlantic, and the New Republic. That, of course, does not include the academic journals to which UW grad students and faculty primarily contribute.
The Cap Times and the Wisconsin State Journal are fine publications and UW grad students and faculty do contribute to them when their expertise might shed light on local and state matters. Faculty and grad students do not, however, use local publications for the sake of writing a weekly political diatribe.
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I hope Allard doesn’t intend on teaching undergraduates when he is finished with grad school, because this kind of proselytizing does not look good to search committees. Successful future faculty do not use undergraduates to spread their politics. He may think this is all an “ivory tower,” but he will understand how academia is integrated into the “real world” when would-be employers pass him over after a quick google search shows that he thinks undergrads are his minions. Who is his advisor? Why is he or she not explaining this to him?
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“Successful future faculty do not use undergraduates to spread their politics.”
True - they IMPOSE their politics on undergraduates.
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Actually, no.
One, students are thinking beings and are free to challenge their professors. Little is imposed on them. Most of them don’t even do the reading, so what could possibly be imposed on them?
Two, more to the point, if a search committee can see that a potential faculty member is an ideologue, that candidate is not likely to get hired. The web is making it much easier for committees to screen such candidates. Forget about libertarianism, grad students who hold positions in the TAA have a lot of trouble finding work as professors. It used to be that people in TAA would just leave that off their C.V.s, but the web makes it impossible to hide their involvement. Few faculty want to work with ideologues who see the world through one lens.
For that matter, academia is not UW-Madison. While it may feel that the faculty at UW “impose” their (I presume leftist) politics on you, that is not true at most universities. Allard will not be hired at UW, because UW rarely hires its own graduates straight out of grad school. He would have to get work at another institution, which will not likely be as tilted left as Madison. Like most colleges and universities, the politics of its faculty will likely be pretty centrist.
Nevertheless, any search committee would have a huge problem with any graduate student—lover of Ayn Rand or Glenn Beck or Hilary Clinton or anyone—using an undergraduate publication to schlep their politics. Bottom line, they’d have a problem with any candidate who did not understand that the purpose of an undergraduate newspaper is to give undergraduates the opportunity to express their ideas and to learn journalism skills.
If an undergraduate wrote this column, I would have no problem with it. Its politics are irrelevant. The problem is that a graduate student, who should know better, wrote it. I suspect no one is telling him of the consequences of writing this and other pieces, because they don’t want him to succeed in academia.
Sorry, if that upsets you, but Allard should really know that if he wants to get a job in academia. It’s not the utopia of ideas removed from reality that he seems to imagine it to be. It’s the real world.
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“are free to challenge their professors”
Ya sure, as long as they don’t care about their grade.
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There’s a difference between challenging your professor by presenting a different viewpoint based on facts and evidence, and just being an ass and telling your professor he’s full of crap.
You seem to be describing the latter.