Humanities in Crisis

About a week ago, Martin Cothran  linked to this article by David Brooks on the subject of why the liberal arts are such a joke in education.  Brooks writes “the humanities are not only being bulldozed by an unforgiving job market. They are committing suicide because many humanists have lost faith in their own enterprise.” What is the reason for this? According to Brooks “Somewhere along the way, many people in the humanities lost faith in this uplifting mission. The humanities turned from an inward to an outward focus. They were less about the old notions of truth, beauty and goodness and more about political and social categories like race, class and gender. Liberal arts professors grew more moralistic when talking about politics but more tentative about private morality because they didn't want to offend anybody.”

I had the opportunity to see this first hand in my time at A&M, especially in my class on Literary Theory. Truth, in the class, was debunked and talked about as an unreal or irrelevant thing, and the focus was on how writers were influenced and how their works could be twisted to mean anything we wanted, thus proving an author had no control over his work. This was the subject of an essay I wrote for the class which I may post here at some point in the near future. Several people at The Imaginative Conservative have written replies to Brooks article which are very interesting, especially that of Louis A. Markos where he brings in a very enlightening quote from C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters.

However, while everyone points at the problem quite clearly, I think that most of them are missing the root of the problem. As Charles Clough says often, it all comes back to origins.

If evolution is true, if humans evolved from monkeys, then the humanities are a complete waste of time.

If mankind is evolving through history, which is the primary point of today’s scientism and atheistic revolution in the meaning of morality, then what Aristotle said thousands of years ago is monumentally irrelevant. What is driving much of the debate around abortions, gay marriage, euthanasia, social security, gun control, political philosophy, is the belief that mankind is advancing along a rising slope that begins with slime, rises through apes, rises through us today and beyond.

The problem with the humanities is that they deal with people, events, and philosophies all resting on that line between us and the apes, not between us and what we must become. They are, in effect, below us.

The humanities only make sense if we are created by a rational God who has revealed himself and his truth to mankind through the ages. Only if mankind is created in the image of God do the ancient philosophers have anything meaningful to offer besides a look at un-evolved man which should be taken quickly and mockingly.