Why the Humanities Matter

Not Intended to be a Factual Statement, a.k.a…

2011-07-28T16:24:00.000-07:00

On April 8, 2011, Senator John Kyl of Arizona made a statement on the US Senate floor about Planned Parenthood. Over 90% of its activities, he said, were abortions. In 2009, Planned Parenthood reported that only 3% of its activities were abortion-related. When asked about the senator’s over-inflated statistic, his office reported that it was “not intended to be a factual statement.”

Language “not intended to be factual” can be categorized in another way: “bullsh*t.”

In a previous entry in this blog, I talked about Harry G. Frankfurter’s discussion of “bullsh*t.” It is, he determined, a statement where the difference between truth and falsity is irrelevant. A liar knows the truth, but wants to keep the listener from it; the bullsh*tter doesn’t care what the truth is.

As I noted at the time:

Frankfurter’s analysis is insightful, but he omits one important point, the bullsh*tter’s motivation. There is always an ulterior motive… people bullsh*t to get something from the listener.

Senator Kyl’s motivation is clear: he simply wanted to score a political point. It didn’t matter whether abortions amounted to 90%--or 3%--of Planned Parenthood’s activities. He wanted to appeal to his base, and the truth never entered the picture.

One of the practical applications of the humanities is awareness about how people use language. Bullsh*t is one such use. Senator Kyl simply provided us with yet another example of it.

Sorry for the Silence

2011-07-19T13:15:00.000-07:00

As Mark Twain wrote, "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."

Well, after several months--9!--of not posting on this blog, I'd like to say that reports of its death were... if not exaggerated, premature.

Now that it's summer, I'm planning to resume posting soon, including: an update to my "bullsh*t" statement, and links to blogs about *practical* applications of the Humanities (sorry to say, but I'm anything BUT practical).

-FRA

A Faustian Bargain

2010-11-03T12:33:00.000-07:00

I started this blog about a year ago, when I anticipated more hard times for my program at the University of Arizona. I decided to try to impact, in my own small way, the public perception of the humanities. So far, the hard times haven't come my way (knock on wood). But on October 1, 2010, George M. Philip, President of SUNY Albany, decided to close a number of humanities programs at his university: French, Italian, Russian, Classics, and Theatre.

Since then, there has been quite a buzz about the importance of the humanities in the general media. Stanley Fish wrote about it in his posting for The New York Times, entitled "The Crisis of the Humanities Officially Arrives."

This led to a discussion in The New York Times' online forum, "Do Colleges Need French Departments."

Both of the items from The New York Times make good cases for the state of the humanities and of the necessity of the humanities. But probably the best I've read is in a letter entitled "A Faustian Bargain." In it, the author, Gregory A. Petsko, makes an exquisite case--satirically--about the importance of the humanities.

In Defense of Laughter, pt. 3

2010-09-19T16:23:00.000-07:00

The Hangover is probably the most moral film in a decade. Seriously.

From classical times through the High Renaissance, comedies were more scabrous than any R-rated film out there. Niccolò Machiavelli (yes, that Machiavelli!) wrote several comedies in addition to his political treatises. In Mandragola (The Mandrake Root) Machiavelli told the story about a man who yearns to have sex with a woman, Lucrezia. The problem is that she’s highly moral. He succeeds because her husband is a nitwit who wants to have heirs. He convinces the husband that Lucrezia’s “sterility” can be cured if she drinks a draft of the mandrake root. But, he tells the husband, there’s a catch—the first man she sleeps with after taking the draft will be fatally poisoned. Now, if only they could find some man to do the job…

Although it was written in 1518, Mandragola is probably too lurid even for today’s R-rated comedies. And yet, it is a moral work.

Machiavelli was a highly educated man, and he based his comedies on the classical works of Juvenal, Horace, and Thucidides. He also assimilated their justification of comedies. The classical writers posited that comedies were a moral art. How is that possible?

They developed the notion of “the smart reader” (or: watcher) of comedies. Basically, they assumed that their watchers were smarter than any of the characters they put on stage. The watchers would thus recognize the characters’ idiocy, small-mindedness, and vice. Being smart, the watchers would reject the characters’ behaviors. In other words, the playwrights did not need to put a “mouthpiece” on stage commenting on the characters’ immorality. The smart watchers would just know not to behave in a similar manner.

And, freed from having to tell their watchers what to think, the classical and Renaissance writers could push their stories to the very limits. The results were stories that still elicit howls of laughter centuries—even millennia—after they were written.

So as you wheeze with laughter while the characters of The Hangover try to reconstruct their wild night, remember that the film is good for your soul. After all, you wouldn’t want to find Mike Tyson’s tiger in your hotel bathroom too, would you?

In Defense of Laughter, pt. 2

2010-09-08T06:35:00.000-07:00

Don’t panic! Laugh!

In the last entry, I talked about how Western culture associates laughter with pleasure, and hence with sin. So for centuries, the West has expressed some unease with laughter. But there is more to the picture than that.

From an artistic perspective, our culture’s suspicion towards laughter results in a similarly negative assessment of an entire genre, comedy. Notice how infrequently comedies win the “Best Picture” Oscar. Many people accept the idea that comedy is not the vehicle for expressing truths about the human condition; that’s the function of drama. But in reality, comedies can be expressive of deeper truths. By writing this, I don’t mean “comedy-but-with-a-message” movies, where the violins swell while Robin Williams tears up and intones platitudes. No, I mean that really funny comedies, like The Hangover, themselves express a deeper truth.

How is this possible?

To evoke laughter, comedy depends on the build-up of tension, which is released by a surprise. This explains why comedies cannot be rewatched with the same level of amusement—for the surprise to work, it needs to be, well, a surprise. If you know what’s going to happen, it’s not funny. For the same reason, a Cliff’s Notes version of a comedy isn’t the same as the comedy itself; a comedy just can’t be summarized. The point of a comedy, in short, is the moment-to-moment experience of it.

In this way, comedies reflect the way we experience life. We human beings think we can plan out our lives. But in the moment-to-moment experience, sometimes the unexpected happens. Comedies mirror those unexpected turns and twists of life.

Many of the world’s religions actually codify these vagaries of life. Nature religions personify aspects of existence with gods and goddesses. Storms, earthquakes, but also love and eroticism are forces that people need to cope with. Trickster gods are part of the pantheon. They personify life’s surprises that confound human beings and their plans. There is a wisdom here that monotheistic religions cannot express; a single, all-knowing, all-good and all-powerful deity simply would not place obstacles in front of people for sheer amusement. But there are times in life when it sure feels that way.

In ancient Greece, the trickster god was Pan, who amused himself by stymieing people as they went through their lives. Unable to comprehend the god’s humor, the people became increasingly frantic. The Greeks labeled that frenzy as “panic.”

So the deep truth of comedy is this: the next time that the unexpected causes you to revise your plans suddenly, don’t yell or cry or toss a houseplant out the window. Laugh. You’re in the midst of a panic. And you might just see that the joke is really on you.

In Defense of Laughter, pt. 1

2010-09-02T06:24:00.000-07:00

Why is it that movie bad guys always laugh? “The world will be mine… hahaha!”

We can put the question another way: why is it that laughter has become synonymous with evil? As a culture we don’t usually cast sadness and tears as markers of malice. In Dante’s Inferno Satan, the source of all evil, weeps throughout eternity. In real life too tears probably cause more ills than laughter. As anyone with knowledge about domestic violence knows, abusers often tearfully express their remorse, thus sucking the victims back in. And that’s just one example among many. But you’ll rarely see tears as symbolic of evil these days. What is it, then, that causes our cultural suspiciousness of laughter?

Umberto Eco discusses the value of laughter in his novel The Name of the Rose (1980). Set in an Italian monastery in the 1340s, the novel depicts a series of murders that need to be solved by a visiting friar, William of Baskerville. In a key scene, William gets into a debate with Jorge, an elderly monk, about an esoteric topic—whether or not Christ laughed. More broadly, did God sanction laughter, they argue, or did He avoid it and, by extension, expect His followers to do so as well? On the surface, this sounds like the kind of trivial theological debate that echoed throughout medieval halls. But while Eco’s work is fictional, and hence factually inaccurate, it also expresses a deeper truth; it is informed by a keen observation about Western culture.

As Eco knows (he is a renowned scholar of the Middle Ages), there is a long-standing tradition of denigrating laughter in the West. In a nutshell, laughter is symbolic of pleasure, while tears are symbolic of pain. Pleasure and pain, objectively speaking, are merely the brain’s subjective interpretation of nerve impulses. But for millennia, Western Culture has not treated pain and pleasure equally.

Pain is symbolic of Goodness: the Crucifixion of Christ, and the blood of martyrs. Pleasure is evocative of the joys of physicality. Pleasure, therefore, indicates the life of luxury that people should reject if they want to be saintly. Pleasure is sin, in short, and our culture’s suspicion of laughter is part of the West’s broader suspicion of pleasure. These connotations of pleasure and pain are the subtext to Jorge’s debate with William of Baskerville. They also explain that staple of action movies, the laughing evildoer.

So the next time some super-villain laughs while taunting a cape-clad hero, remember that the gesture is merely an arbitrary cultural artifact. He could just as easily be weeping bitter tears as he plots the destruction of all creation!!!

Conspiracy Theories

2010-07-18T07:01:00.000-07:00

When Archimedes discovered how to prove the purity of a gold object, the story goes, he ran naked through the streets of Syracuse shouting “Eureka!” The anecdote illustrates the depth of emotion a person feels when resolving a problem. Some neuroscientists contend that the pleasure center of the brain is activated when it solves a tough problem.

I make no claim to medical knowledge, but as a scholar of the humanities I do understand the power of stories. Neuroscience is but one factor in explaining the persistence of a folkloric narrative genre in our culture: the conspiracy theory.

Of course, pleasure isn’t the first emotion that springs to mind when thinking of conspiracy theories. But conspiracy theories take disparate pieces of information—sometimes even fictional information—and put them in a satisfying framework. They offer an explanation for the true (if hidden) nature of reality. And for those who believe in them, they tickle the pleasure center by answering the riddle of the real way that things are. They also appeal to a second, related emotion: hubris. Reality simply must be more complicated than what it appears on the surface—and I have figured out what you lesser minds cannot see!

Although stories similar to conspiracy theories have existed for centuries, their modern form has its roots in a nineteenth-century book. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was purported to be the true document of the Jews’ plans for global domination. Their tools were the banks, governments, and the modern media, all of which they supposedly controlled. The book thus offered a simple explanation to the social changes caused by the capitalist system and industrialization. It took unrelated cultural phenomena and gave them a narrative—and more importantly someone to blame. In reality, The Protocols was a forgery composed by the Russian security services at a time when Eastern Europe was racked with pogroms.

Not all present-day conspiracies are anti-semitic. But they still share the characteristic of presenting historical events as controlled by small, powerful cabals. They present a definable group of individuals posing a threat to us and to our society. And this leads to yet another emotion they play upon: self-protection. For adherents of the theory, we must defend ourselves from them. Of course, the history of the twentieth century illustrates that it’s a very quick pass from defending ourselves to assaulting them.

After you’ve seen a few conspiracy theories, however, it becomes quite easy to spot new ones. There is a monotonous sameness to them, although their characters and plots may change. Reality is often too prosaic to inspire people from shouting “Eureka!” It also may not induce people to acts of violence.

Computer-Assisted Learning

2010-07-11T08:23:00.000-07:00

A news story in the New York Times summarizes a recent study that challenges the accepted wisdom of the past two decades. It shows that computers in the home cause students’ grades to go down, not up. The belief had been that internet use—with all the information of the world just one Google-search away—would be an instructional boon. But proponents of the transformational power of computers forgot a couple of things.

First, they forgot history. As I man in my forties, I remember the audio-visual revolution of the 1970s. Yes, audio-visual technology was touted as innovative for educators, much like the more recent hype about computers. But I experienced “filmstrip days” as a child, not as an educator. I remember that sense of relief I felt whenever I walked into the classroom and saw the machinery—here was a day I wouldn’t be working (read: learning). Computer-assisted education isn’t really any different.

And this leads to the second major element that the proponents of computers forgot: the teacher. Tools are just that—tools. They are meant to enhance the education process. But in the rush to get the latest technology into the classroom, no one stopped to think how it would get integrated into a broader plan of education. Instead, in the case of “filmstrip days,” the program for a unit was stopped and an extraneous element—the technology—was thrust into the classroom. No one knew what to do with it, neither the students nor the teachers.

But in my opinion, the real problem with technology is human nature. As a professional teacher of Italian, I’m always fielding questions about which computer program is best for teaching a language. The truth is, none of them. Don’t get me wrong, the programmers can put together good explanations, and accompany them with well thought out activities. But in years as a language-instructor, I’ve never seen them work. Simply put, they fundamentally misunderstand what it means to educate.

“To teach” is a dative verb that requires an indirect object: a person teaches something to someone. This linguistic point underscores a deep truth about education. Students learn from teachers who motivate them. A fundamental component of the educational process is the human element: the interaction between one person with another. In the case of language learning, you learn a language to communicate with other human beings. It makes sense, then, that you’d learn a language from human beings, and not from a machine—after all, you’ll need to practice talking to people in that language from the start!

On Interpretation

2010-06-15T17:31:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the most important aspect to the study of the humanities is how it teaches about reading. Not “how to read”—although literacy is essential to the humanities—but about the nature of reading.

There is a peculiar tendency in American culture to believe in literal interpretations. From churches to legal scholars, there are populations who promote themselves as literalists. Other people “interpret,” while they simply go by “what the text says.” The problem is that literal interpretations are virtually impossible. Here’s an example:

On April 20, 2010 the US Supreme Court struck down a federal law that prohibited the sale of films of animal cruelty. The 8-1 decision reaffirmed the freedom of expression enshrined in the Constitution’s First Amendment. Several Justices, most notably Antonin Scalia, are literalists; they parse the meaning of the Constitution to understand what it meant when its authors wrote it.

So let’s look at the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” We normally read it to mean the freedom of expression; but that’s not what it says. The two main forms of mass communication in the eighteenth century were verbal (“speech”) or the printed word (“the press”). No other technologies existed at the time.

Film, in other words, is not literally covered by the First Amendment, only oral and written language. Yet the literalists on the court interpreted the First Amendment as covering film. So am I suggesting the US Congress apply bans to all other forms of communication? Not at all. I’m suggesting we challenge the fiction that anyone can read texts literally.

Meaning is not inherent to texts. It takes a human mind to derive meaning from scratch-marks on a page. But that human mind does not exist in a vacuum. It has its own history, including personal and social experiences, other works it has read, and idiosyncratic forms of reasoning; and it brings all these to bear when approaching a text. Interpretation is central to the humanities. The power of the humanities is understanding the nature of interpretation. The beauty of the humanities is seeing the range of reasonable interpretations of the same text.

Just the Facts?

2010-05-22T06:07:00.000-07:00

In Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, the narrator Ishmael spends an entire chapter explaining why he believes that whales are really fish. There is just one problem: whales are mammals, of course.

In this blog, I have written a lot about “the Truth” or “truths”—how the humanities express some of the deeper realities of life. But what about the inaccuracies, when works of art are just mistaken? What do we make of texts when they get the facts wrong?

This isn’t a minor question. Literature has a long memory because we still read classics composed hundreds—sometimes thousands—of years ago. Almost any historical piece of fiction will get something wrong. Any cosmology written before the seventeenth century will be geocentric, even though the solar system is heliocentric. There are numerous anachronisms in Shakespeare’s tragedies. In his Julius Caesar for example clocks struck time, when in fact the mechanical clock was invented in the fourteenth century.

The first response to these errors is: so what? We don’t read Shakespeare to learn about the history of technology, but to gain his insights. We don’t read Moby Dick to learn about whales, but about Ahab’s very human obsession. We can usually compartmentalize the authors’ insights away from their flawed understanding of the world. The only one who can be upset about Ishmael’s mistake is, well, a whale.

But the situation is actually very complicated. Factual errors are one thing, but what about flawed perceptions of other human beings? There’s reason to interpret Richard Wagner’s deformed and corrupt character Alberich as a Jewish stereotype (although this isn’t entirely clear—but Wagner really was a renowned anti-semite). With this in mind how should we approach his Ring Cycle? We can’t simply discount it, because it’s a musical masterpiece. Its impact on European music cannot be measured. But we can’t pretend that he didn’t hold and express offensive opinions. Nor can we take refuge behind that old staple, “he reflected the beliefs at the time.” Many people in the nineteenth century did not share his beliefs, and some challenged Wagner’s anti-semitic writings. Cultures are never monolithic, after all. What now?

It comes down to insightful readers. Writers don’t simply dictate to passive readers; readers aren’t mere sponges, absorbing indiscriminately everything the author thought. Readers engage with and interpret literature. It is the on-going interaction between works of literature and their readers over the years that makes them great. The acknowledgement of objectionable opinions doesn’t change the writers, who are usually dead, but it destroys two-dimensional images of them. And that can be a positive development. Calling people “great authors” glosses over the fact that they were human beings who blew it sometimes.

Isn't It Ironic?

2010-04-18T20:54:00.000-07:00

Among the allegations about childhood sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Europe earlier this month, Father Raniero Cantalamessa caused further scandal. He likened the media’s interest in the story to anti-semitism. The outrage was intense, particularly among Jewish groups: how could anyone compare the experience of Holocaust victims to the publication of credible accusations?

Father Cantalamessa fell into a common trap regarding language use. A staple among apologists for the Church is the idea that anti-Catholicism is the last religious prejudice tolerated by the mainstream culture. Prejudices against all other religions are considered politically incorrect; but denigration of Catholicism is still countenanced. Hence, anti-Catholicism has become the anti-semitism of our age, they argue. Father Cantalamessa mangled the argument, however.

But the problem was greater than simply one person’s clumsiness. Languages develop within groups of people, and insiders become used to the group’s expressions, arguments, and stories. The group members become so habituated to their own language that they can succinctly allude to it, sometimes with a mere word. The problem, as Father Cantalamessa discovered, is when they do so with outsiders, who do not share a similar background.

One theory of the novel is that it is a genre that represents the society’s many languages. The author brings together the speech of different groups, and puts them in dialogue with each other. The author can do this by having characters that are insiders. Their statements naturally reflect the group’s opinions and thus contain the group’s language. But the author can also do so by imbedding the statements in the prose, by “citing without quotation marks.” If you listen to passages, you can tell that the narrator is making indirect reference to someone else’s words.

When done right, the novel’s collision of languages yields fruitful results. With all due respect to Alanis Morisette, irony is not “rain on your wedding day.” Irony is the literary technique of making a statement that conveys the opposite meaning. Irony, in other words, is the technique of taking insiders’ language and revealing its artifice: its presuppositions, its biases, and omissions. And irony highlights the flaws in their argumentation.

Despite the fact that many editorial writers try to be ironic, irony is actually a difficult technique. But Father Cantalamessa perfected it, probably on accident.

Don't Count on It

2010-03-28T06:24:00.000-07:00

A recent story in the New York Times discusses Google’s improved translation algorhythm. A scientist at Google said: “This technology can make the language barrier go away.” Don’t count on it.

I performed a little test, one we language teachers do for the benefit of our students. I translated a simple passage into Italian; then I translated the translation back into English. Sounds simple enough, right?

Here’s the original:

Hello my name is Fabian. How are you? I'm forty-four years old, and I've been teaching since nineteen eighty-eight. I am married and have a seven-year old daughter. I've lived in Tucson since nineteen ninety-seven.

Here’s the translation of the translation:

Hello my name is Fabian. How are you? I'm forty-four years, and I taught from eight nineteen eighties. I am married and have seven year old daughter. I lived in Tucson since nineteen ninety-seven.

What’s really funny is the translation itself. In Italian, it rendered “forty-four” as “forty-two four” (“quarantadue quattro”) and “seven-year old daughter” as “seven years daughter” (“sette anni figlia”). It didn’t even attempt “nineteen” but left it in English (“ottanta nineteen-eight” and “nineteen novanta sette”). Strangely it translated some of these unreadable items back into readable English.

And none of this even brings up the inevitable cultural references in everyday speech. “Caporetto” translates as “Caporetto.” You need to know that it was the site of a major rout of the Italian army in World War I to understand why it’s commonly used to describe catastrophes large and small.

I have no beef with Google or any web-based translation. There are many websites that can be made accessible by their technology. But when people conclude that technology can make language study obsolete, well, that’s just not the case. Take it from me, I taught from eight nineteen eighties.

Eppur si muove (And yet, it moves)

2010-03-08T06:48:00.000-08:00

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two is four. If that is granted then all else follows.” —George Orwell, 1984

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) is renowned as one of the founders of modern science. This year marks the four-hundredth anniversary of his discovery of the moons of Jupiter, a discovery that induced him to accept Copernicus’s sun-centered view of the solar system. What is less well known in the United States is that he was also a great writer. Nowadays we tend to divide the humanists from the scientists, but Galileo was both.

Dan Brown cast Galileo two-dimensionally as the first casualty of the war between science and religion. But Galileo saw no distinction between faith and reason either. He wrote that God composed two holy books, the Bible and Nature. When the two seem at odds, it’s only because people are reading the Bible incorrectly. The Bible, he wrote, uses metaphorical language that is easy to misinterpret; it ascribes a mouth and hands to God, for instance, a limitless Being who literally has neither.

Because it was the creation of God, Galileo held an equally expansive view of Nature. In one lyrical passage, he wrote a parable of the scientific method. A man wants to learn about Nature’s sounds. He begins with the singing of a bird, then the chirping of crickets, the vibrations of strings and the whistle of a reed. Each time the man thinks he’s categorized all the possible sounds, he discovers another way that Nature creates them. He concludes that he knows a few ways that Nature creates sounds, but there must be thousands of others that he has not experienced.

As a figure, Galileo exemplifies that the categories we find so natural—science v. literature, science v. faith—are artificial. He illustrates that, when done correctly, they all work in the service of the truth.

Perhaps the best example of Galileo serving the truth didn’t occur in reality. The legend has formed that, just after the Inquisition forced him to recant the heliocentric theory, he muttered “Eppur si muove” (“And yet, it moves”). The meaning of the statement is clear; the Inquisition could force one man to deny the truth, but it couldn’t actually change the truth. The statement doesn’t express defiance so much as faith: Nature’s truths are always available for someone—anyone—to see.

There is great comfort in the sentence “Eppur si muove.” George Orwell wrote of a frightening government that defined truth as whatever the party needed. Through torture, it makes Winston actually see that two fingers plus two more can equal five. Our society is unlike Orwell’s dystopia, but we are inundated with falsity, misinformation, half-truths and spin. From urban legends to political commentators to advertisements, it seems that the truth, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. The legend of Galileo reminds us to have faith. Despite some people’s cynical efforts, the truth remains unchanged, inviolate, and will someday be revealed.

Dante with Pecs

2010-02-21T08:22:00.000-08:00

This month Dante’s Inferno has gotten a lot of media attention. By Dante’s Inferno, I don’t mean the great poem. Xbox just released a game entitled Dante’s Inferno, in which players lead a buff warrior-knight, Dante, through the nine levels of hell. He must battle his way to the very bottom to save the soul of his beloved Beatrice, who had been kidnapped by Lucifer.

I write that Xbox’s game is “entitled” Dante’s Inferno and not “based on it” because it bears little resemblance to Dante’s poem. In the poem, Dante journeys through hell and interacts with the damned. There is some action, as when his enemy Filippo Argenti tries to grab him. But it is nothing like game character blasting his way through a horde of unbaptized babies in Limbo. Xbox kept Dante’s infernal topography and the names “Dante,” “Virgil” and “Beatrice.” But they changed everything else to make a more exciting game. Indeed, in the poem, Beatrice is a heavenly being who Saves Dante. “Saves” with a capital “s,” because her intervention allows him to turn from sin towards redemption.

Xbox’s game raises the question of the difficult relationship between mass media and the arts. When mass media—movies, TV shows, and now video games—are based on literary works, they have to transform the texts, sometimes dramatically. Film scripts need to shorten and condense the plots of novels; they have to simplify complex ideas, and put them in the mouths of characters. No one would play a game literally based on Dante’s “Inferno”—it’d be too plain dull!

Of course, there is a positive side when mass media is based on literature. Games and films generate interest in the works among people who otherwise might not read them. And when they are successful, more interest—and sometimes money—goes toward the works and the people who study them.

What causes consternation among readers of those works is not so much how the media alter them. That is to be expected. It’s how the new versions actually supplant the originals in many people’s minds. The show (or game) becomes the new “standard,” and has the tendency to marginalize the original. JK Rowling’s books are rich, nuanced works, which the films strip down to their most simplistic form. Yet for as many times as I’ve read all of them, I can’t help but picture Harry Potter as Daniel Radcliff.

At times, people expect the original to have the changes—and the special effects—of the latest movie, TV show, or game. Worse still, others don’t realize that those changes have nothing to do with the original.

Case in point: conjure up the image of a velociraptor—about the size of a man, green lizard-skin, maybe 12 feet long from nose to tail. This is the velociraptor from Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. And it’s incorrect. Scientifically speaking, velociraptors were about 6 feet long, and stood about waist-high to a person. As happens with literary works, the movie-version has totally supplanted the scientific reality in people’s minds.

Oh, and they were probably feathered too.

Sick at Heart

2010-02-07T12:33:00.000-08:00

Help! The king is ill and is killing his subjects!

After learning that his beloved was unfaithful the king lost his mind. He began marrying young women, bedding them on the wedding night, and then executing them the next morning. But when Scheherazade was in his bedchamber, she told him a story; she embedded one story into the first so that when the evening ended, the narrative was incomplete. She thus postponed her execution by a day. The next evening she did the same thing, and so on for many more nights to come.

After a thousand and one nights, however, a funny thing happened. The stories came to an end and the king was cured of his insanity.

A more dramatic cure takes place in Boccaccio’s Decameron. During the plague of 1348—a real event which killed over a third of all people throughout Eurasia—ten youths escape to a Tuscan villa. They spend two weeks telling a hundred tales. But at the end, they return to Florence… and the plague is gone.

Of course, I’m not going to suggest that literature can cure mental illness, to say nothing of physical ailments. But for centuries literature has brought comfort to readers.

For centuries, the history of literature was about giving voice to different groups—people of a common language, heritage or citizenship, or of a particular region or belief. The process is still ongoing.

For example, in a society that still undervalues certain groups—women, people of color, of lower socio-economic status, or of certain sexual orientations—it can be uplifting for individuals to “read their story.” Of course, the works are fictional, and therefore not literally “their story.” Still it is important for people to see themselves as actors in the world, even when the society defines them otherwise.

But socio-politics is only part of the picture. Literature can speak to difficult experiences, and can help people make sense of them. Whether dealing with emotional betrayal or universal calamity, it gives a person the sense that someone else understands their predicament. And that knowledge alone can be crucial.

Literature may not change tragic circumstances, and it won’t cure psychosis. But it can make a difference in how someone faces their situation. And sometimes, that makes all the difference in the world.

No One Saw It Coming

2010-02-01T06:55:00.001-08:00

Economist Thomas L. Friedman has discussed how the world economy has made national borders obsolete. You might think that the languages would be valued more highly right now. Yet Americans still learn foreign languages at woefully low rates.

As I have stressed several times in this blog, the value of the humanities transcends the question of job preparation. But the question increasingly posed to all academics these days is the value of their fields—“value” often understood strictly in terms of economics. Will this information help someone get a job? For many reasons, the humanities fare worse in answering this question these days.

My field, Italian, suffers the same fate as the rest of the humanities. Sometimes more so. We simply haven’t done a good job overall of explaining the benefits of Italian. People associate Italian with pleasure—food, fashion, art, and opera. But business?

For decades, Italy has been a part of the G-7 (or G-8 or G-20) groups of economically powerful countries. Last year Italian automaker Fiat announced its take-over of Chrysler. Business has become transnational, and Fiat’s acquisition of Chrysler is only another example of that fact. Fiat’s acquisition of Chrysler is a clear example of how Italian is a valuable business asset.

I wish I could say that I had some foresight of Fiat’s owners’ decision. I had no more prescience than anyone else in the US. And that’s precisely the point I’m trying to make.

No one saw Fiat’s decision coming. But in the wake of Fiat’s purchase, Italian appears a little bit more essential. Funny how that works, isn’t it? Particular areas of knowledge seem trivial until they suddenly become necessary. In the first half of the twentieth century, physics was a backwater. Then World War II necessitated the production of an atomic bomb, and then the Cold War required many more. With the government’s interest—and investment in—nuclear physics, it became the cutting edge. Similar shifts take place all the time. When President Nixon declared a war on cancer, oncology research became a booming field. With the threat posed by the Soviet Union, federal moneys went to Russian and Slavic languages. And what field could be less lucrative than paleontology—until, that is, Hollywood produces a blockbuster about dinosaurs.

A university education benefits the individual, of course, but it also benefits the society. The community profits by having people trained in many different areas. It is arrogant to presume that some fields of knowledge are essential and others are not. Because who can tell? It is just a matter of time before circumstances require a group of individuals trained in those areas.

Making College Relevant

2010-01-16T07:40:00.000-08:00

The January 3 2010 issue of the New York Times contained a story entitled “Making College ‘Relevant.’” It details the pressures on universities to justify their programs in the current economic climate. Increasingly administrators—and the general public—are demanding that university programs do a better job of preparing students for their future employment.

Many people assess the value of an academic field in terms of job preparation. They wrongly assume that the humanities offer little in terms of job skills. As several people argue in the story, however, the humanities contribute greatly to future employment. Employers do not want students to over-specialize in their youth, but to have a broad range of skills. Some of those skills included:
• Critical thinking
• Clear use of language
• Educating people for a lifetime, and not merely as job preparation

As people mentioned in the story, these are areas the humanities excel at teaching.

Some of the news items are troubling, such as the closure of programs in philosophy and classics, which are central to university education. The explanation offered for closing philosophy is equally troubling; the perception that philosophy is an essential program “has lost some credence among students.” Thus, students’ opinions on the field’s value now determine the curriculum.

If students and the general public do not see the relevance of a field of study, then there is indeed a problem. The answer is not for humanists to dig in our heels and reiterate old arguments. We need to conceive of ours fields in new ways and make a better case for them to a skeptical public (skeptical in my opinion, not hostile). As the story shows, many people are currently addressing the importance of the humanities. The fact that more people are dealing with the question gives me hope.

The Troubles with –ibles (and –ables)

2009-12-28T19:23:00.000-08:00

Despite appearances to the contrary, there are practical applications to the study of literature. Perhaps the most important is the deep knowledge of language. English contains up to a quarter million words. Imagine a tool calibrated to a quarter million settings; that’s a high degree of precision. The study of literature brings with it a greater awareness of the clarity of language. Conversely, it can teach the dangers of imprecise language. During December 2009, my blog entries dealt with the uses and abuses of language.

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I’ve dedicated this month to the deep knowledge of language that comes from the study of the humanities. But in my previous entries, I’ve defined the humanities almost exclusively as the study of literature. The humanities, however, encompass both literature and languages. It’s easy to see the practical application of a foreign language for travel, or for dealing with tourists in the United States. But how does the study of a foreign language, like Italian, help in the knowledge of English?

Those of us who teach second languages know that they help a great deal in understanding English. The American Council of Teachers of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) has a national standard based on five “c’s”: communication, cultures, connections, comparisons, and communities. The fourth “c,” comparisons, is about learning about one’s first language by reference to the second.

All of this is pretty abstract, so let me use one simple example—spelling. Spelling is the bane of every learner of English, whether it’s your first or second language. The reason is simple: English spelling isn’t phonological, but etymological. That means that it doesn’t reflect present-day pronunciation, but the history of the word. Right, write, and rite all sound the same now, but are spelled differently because in the past they were entirely different. The fact is, the spelling of many words simply needs to be memorized.

As kids, we all faced two lists of words to be memorized, -ibles and –ables. As in edible and eatable; responsible and answerable. The differences between the two lists were imponderable. We suffered considerable anguish and spent unreasonable amounts of time, but our results were often risible. English is incredible! Sometimes the pronunciation helped, as in possible and probable. Much of the time it didn’t. If only there were a rule…

Actually, there is an easy rule as to when it’s –ible or –able. In Latin, verbs came in three forms, with endings that were either –are, -ere or –ire. The rule is this: if the word’s derived from a Latin –are verb it’s –able; if –ere or –ire it’s –ible. And any verbs of non-Latin origin get treated as if –are, hence doable, drinkable and readable.

Ok, few English-speakers know Latin etymologies. Is there any other way to learn the rule?

In its evolution from Latin, almost no Italian verbs changed category. So –are verbs in Latin are almost always –are in Italian (likewise with –ere and –ire). Hence, in Italian we have adjectives that are either –abile or –ibile. Those adjectives are almost identical to their English equivalents (i.e., possibile, probabile). The difference is, in Italian, -abile and –ibile are pronounced differently from each other, so spelling them is rather easy. The shortcut is this: if it’s –abile in Italian then it’s –able in English, -ibile in Italian then –ible in English.

But if you’ve never learned Latin or Italian, well then you’re just plain out of luck. Start memorizing!

Danger! Metaphors!

2009-12-24T05:06:00.000-08:00

Despite appearances to the contrary, there are practical applications to the study of literature. Perhaps the most important is the deep knowledge of language. English contains up to a quarter million words. Imagine a tool calibrated to a quarter million settings; that’s a high degree of precision. The study of literature brings with it a greater awareness of the clarity of language. Conversely, it can teach the dangers of imprecise language. During December 2009, my blog entries dealt with the uses and abuses of language.

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Warning: Metaphors ahead!

Probably the single most important literary technique is metaphor. For the readers to identify with a fictional character, they must view it as representative of themselves. Odysseus’ ten-year struggle to return to Ithaca therefore can be symbolic of some personal struggle for the readers. The study of literature familiarizes the students with metaphor, and that’s highly important. In the wrong hands, metaphors can be dangerous.

No, I’m not being facetious. We all learned about metaphors in middle school. Metaphors and similes are two types of analogy. Similes have the word “like” or “as,” and metaphors don’t. Simile: “My love for you is like a rose.” Metaphor: “my love for you is a rose.” What’s the problem?

The problem is that all analogies are fundamentally wrong. Love is not literally a flower. I may recognize one aspect of it as similar to a rose. With a simile, everyone is conscious of the analogy. “Like” reminds everyone that it’s just a comparison. Metaphor doesn’t offer that help, so its meaning needs to be implicit. But sometimes its meaning becomes too implicit. If a metaphor becomes commonplace, people can easily forget that it is, in fact, a metaphor. Instead, it gets treated as a truth statement. Here lies the danger: people propose courses of action based on the analogy, rather than the facts at hand.

For example, in 1992, presidential candidate Pat Buchanan proposed that the US military should “protect the border” from illegal immigrants. Consider that for a second: how would the government have used the military? Would the government have deployed tanks against border crossers? Shelled northern Mexico? And how exactly would the US Air Force have figured in? Buchanan hadn’t entirely taken leave of his senses. For years, the illegal immigration problem was discussed in certain quarters with the language of invasion. The word invasion was metaphorical, but Buchanan proposed a course of action as if it were literal.

Another example: in 2002, during the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq, French President Jacques Chirac opposed the invasion on the grounds that the UN weapons inspectors should be given more time. In agreement with him were the governments of Germany, Russia, China, and the Vatican, among others. But in the US, there was great anger directed specifically at France. Why France and not the other countries? During the run-up to war, many people compared Saddam Hussein to Hitler and the current crisis to World War II. And, of course, the US liberated France in World War II. It struck many US citizens as an act of betrayal that France didn’t support the US in this World War II. They confused the metaphor for reality. But Saddam Hussein was not literally Hitler, the Iraq invasion was not literally World War II, and in retrospect Jacques Chirac was absolutely right that the UN inspectors should have had more time to search for the (non-existent) WMD program.

If you pay attention to everyday discourse, there are many examples of people confusing common metaphors for reality. And I haven’t included the very tragic cases when demagogues defined another group of individuals as vermin or an infestation, and then the masses acted accordingly.

Here then is a societal benefit to the widespread study of literature. An informed citizenry, cognizant about literary techniques, might stand less of a chance of confusing metaphors with reality.

Flattery, Hype, and Bullsh*t

2009-12-21T05:34:00.000-08:00

Despite appearances to the contrary, there are practical applications to the study of literature. Perhaps the most important is the deep knowledge of language. English contains up to a quarter million words. Imagine a tool calibrated to a quarter million settings; that’s a high degree of precision. The study of literature brings with it a greater awareness of the clarity of language. Conversely, it can teach the dangers of imprecise language. During December 2009, my blog entries dealt with the uses and abuses of language.

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In one of the lowest portions of hell, Dante comes across the flatterers. The flatterers are immersed in a large, stinking pile of excrement. They wallow in it, and their bodies are smeared all over by it. The symbolism of the passage is quite clear. Flattery is no better than dung. There is a modern-day term that strongly recalls Dante’s allegory: BULLSH*T.

Recently, the philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt published a study entitled On Bullsh*t. Frankfurt tries to determine the very nature of bullsh*t, in particular how it differs from lies. He concludes that a liar accepts the truth (but wants to keep you from it), while a bullsh*tter speaks with no consideration of the truth. A lie is based on the truth, albeit negatively. Bullsh*t is language where the distinction between truth and falsity is irrelevant.

During this month, this blog is dealing with the contemporary uses and misuses of language. The previous two entries have dealt with meaningless language; how people use words without consideration to their meanings, and worse, how people refer to entire texts without consideration of their messages. Both entries are dealing with essentially the same phenomenon. In a word, it’s bullsh*t.

To use examples from the earlier entries, a bank promoted itself as “extreme banking,” and Nike used the Beatles’ “Revolution” in its advertisement. “Extreme” means nothing in relationship to banking, and the Beatles’ song has nothing to do with shoes. These are all different from basic errors in grammar. In common speech and emails to friends, everybody makes mistakes. But in multi-million dollar ad campaigns, every word and image is picked over. Someone somewhere chose to make all those statements, regardless if they reflected the truth or not.

Frankfurter’s analysis is insightful, but he omits one important point, the bullsh*tter’s motivation. There is always an ulterior motive. This is where Dante’s Inferno is quite helpful. One of the flatterers in Dante’s hell is a character from classical literature, the prostitute Thais. Dante recalls her false praise of her customer’s sexual prowess. Of course, he wasn’t really good in bed, but she wanted to ensure his repeat business. Sound familiar? Just like flatterers, people bullsh*t to get something from the listener. The hype in today’s advertising is no different from Thais’ flattery.

Sometimes bullsh*tters want to impress you by making themselves look better; or sometimes they want to make someone else look worse. These are the most common examples of bullsh*t in political discourse. After the US House of Representatives approved President Obama’s healthcare reform, those opposed rallied on the Capitol’s steps. Someone had erected a sign with a photograph of the bodies at Dachau under the caption “Socialized Medicine.” So… by extending coverage to all Americans, which would save lives, the law is somehow like the extermination of millions of human beings?

BULLSH*T!

Verba pro re vera

2009-12-15T05:28:00.000-08:00

Despite appearances to the contrary, there are practical applications to the study of literature. Perhaps the most important is the deep knowledge of language. English contains up to a quarter million words. Imagine a tool calibrated to a quarter million settings; that’s a high degree of precision. The study of literature brings with it a greater awareness of the clarity of language. Conversely, it can teach the dangers of imprecise language. During December 2009, my blog entries dealt with the uses and abuses of language.

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Quick: what do revolutionary Jamaican theology and politics have to do with a lobster?

In last week’s entry, I discussed George Orwell’s essay, “Politics and the English Language.” In 1946, Orwell decried the staleness of language when people weren’t concerned with expressing their own ideas clearly. Instead, they co-opted other people’s ideas, and the result was muddled writing. The problem is still occurring. Politics plays a role, but today commerce causes many abuses of language. The words in much advertising really say nothing. The advertisers capitalize on the emotional impact of words with no consideration of their meanings.

The problem, however, is far worse than meaningless words. Entire texts get divorced from their meaning.

For example, in 1987 Nike used the Beatles’ “Revolution” to sell shoes. When the Beatles wrote “Revolution,” it was their response to the hard-left. The working-class boys from Liverpool disappointed European Marxists who’d hoped that they would promote revolution. Violent revolution. What does that have to do with running shoes?

Absolutely nothing. Perhaps Nike wanted consumers to think that their shoes were revolutionary. You know the line, “You say you want a revolution….” Except that the song is about rejecting revolution, not embracing it. However you look at it, this song isn’t good material for a commercial. And yet, Nike paid millions for it.

This type of abuse is common. Cruise lines promote themselves with Iggy Pop’s paean to heroine “Lust for Life.” Why would they want to connect Caribbean vacations to addiction? They don’t. They want you to think of the excitement of the song itself, but not what the song’s about.

The Latin title of this entry means “words as things.” The technical term is “reification,” which happens when people treat concepts as objective things. Reification also occurs to entire texts. At a certain point, it becomes so popular that it overshadows its own meaning. People remember the work as a thing, but not as the medium of a message.

Reification happens with many different works, not just songs. In Rome, the Catholic Church is sponsoring a stage performance of the Divine Comedy. The Church has forgotten how many bishops and popes are in Dante’s hell. What Dante wrote is overlooked, in favor of merely having his masterpiece on their side. In the US, political parties always invoke the Founding Fathers, often with a limited understanding of them. The slave-holding Thomas Jefferson, to take one example, edited the New Testament to remove any notion of the divinity of Jesus, including his miracles. Nowadays, Jefferson couldn’t be elected in either political party… but, boy, can they conjure his ghost!

Advertisers, the Catholic Church, political parties… they all associate themselves with texts as things. The problem is that the writers’ ideas—which are worthy of consideration, discussion, even debate—do not enter the picture. In an earlier entry, I lamented the dearth of narratives in today’s society. Reification is also part of the problem.

In high school, we all knew insecure people who wanted to be part of the cool clique. They used cool slang, or dressed how the cool kids dressed. But it never worked. In their mouths, cool expressions were out of place. The uncool kids came across as awkwardly as a child wearing a suit for a wedding. People who reify a text behave just like them. They desperately hope that some of it coolness will rub off on them. But they miss the point about why the work is cool.

To answer the question at the start of this entry: Bob Marley. Seafood restaurant chains now market themselves with his songs… and he was calling for a revolution. Of course, the restaurant doesn’t want you to think of his politics. They just want you to think Bob Marley was cool. And since they’re playing his song, they want you to think they’re cool too. Just like a high school sophomore wearing a tie.

You Keep Using that Word...

2009-12-10T06:08:00.001-08:00

Despite appearances to the contrary, there are practical applications to the study of literature. Perhaps the most important is the deep knowledge of language. English contains up to a quarter million words. Imagine a tool calibrated to a quarter million settings; that’s a high degree of precision. The study of literature brings with it a greater awareness of the clarity of language. Conversely, it can teach the dangers of imprecise language. During December 2009, my blog entries dealt with the uses and abuses of language.

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Probably the most important essay about language is George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” Although it is over 60 years old, many of his insights are still relevant to today—and in some respects more relevant than ever. The essay is extremely well written, so no summary will do it justice. Everyone should read it in its entirety.

Orwell writes about the staleness that characterizes contemporary writing. He points out how much writing is not about expressing good ideas clearly. Writers co-opt the ideas of other people, and therefore their muddled thoughts result in muddled writing. Orwell writes: “prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.” The result is language that is fundamentally meaningless.

Little has changed since 1946. We are inundated with language that’s meaningless. Throughout the past few months, people opposed to President Obama have accused him of being a “Fascist,” a “Nazi,” a “Socialist,” and a “Jihadist.” Each of those words has a precise meaning, which is incompatible with the others. The most common slur, “socialist,” actually is diametrically opposed to the others. Among those who slander President Obama, accuracy isn’t really the point. They are capitalizing on the emotional connotations of the terms with no thought given to their denotations.

The emotional content of words is often foremost these days. Take advertising, for instance. A bank recently tried to attract college students by describing itself as “extreme banking.” Extreme? Really?? Perhaps if they located their ATMs 15 feet above the ground, requiring customers to rock-climb up to them; or if their ATMs gave an electric jolt to randomly selected users. Needless to say, no activity could be described as “extreme” less than banking. And with the recent banking crisis still not resolved, do we really want banks to put themselves in the same category as bungee-jumping? Its marketing department selected that word for its emotional effect, with no regard given to its actual meaning. Indeed, in that context “extreme” meant absolutely nothing.

Sometimes advertisers choose words that contradict their message outright. Several years ago Coca-cola began a new marketing drive: “Coke, Everyday.” Coke’s advertising wizards were tapping into the renewed interest in the Sly and Family Stone song “Everyday People.” And, of course, they wanted people to drink Coke daily. There was just one problem: when written as one word, “everyday” means “ordinary” or “commonplace.” That’s not exactly a concept they’d want associated with their product.

The study of literature depends on the proper understanding of language. To understand irony, or to see the subtlety in poetry, the students need to know exactly what the words mean. That exactitude can be translated to their future writing.

But perhaps the perfect reply to thoughtless language does not come from literature. In the film The Princess Bride, one of the criminals kept repeating the word, “inconceivable.” One of his henchmen sagely responded, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” This is precisely the attitude most of us need to take.

Fairy Tales and Grown-Ups

2009-11-28T13:47:00.000-08:00

I have already written about the problems of defining education strictly as job-preparation (see my September entry entitled “The Essentials”). But job-preparation is often what college-aged students expect out of education. Practical skills are self-explanatory but the humanities aren’t. What the humanities impart is something a bit deeper than job-preparation. In many respects they are life-lessons.

Take fairy tales, for instance. Despite the commonplace idea that fairy tales are for children, in their natural context, their listeners were adults. A person needs to have some experience of life to see the wisdom in fairy tales.

Take any authentic fairy tale (not one that was artificially composed as a narrative for children, such as a Dora the Explorer episode). For the sake of argument, Beauty and the Beast, which is found throughout Europe. Everyone knows the outline of the story: to protect her family a young girl finds herself in the household of an older, frightening creature. At first, she seems powerless, and he appears all-powerful. But in truth, she is the powerful one. Through her love, she transforms him into a kind man. This isn’t actually a story about magic at all. Arranged marriages were common throughout Europe until recent centuries. Beauty and the Beast is about a successful arranged marriage from the point of view of the wife—specifically, from the point of view of the wife long after the fact. Only someone who had already lived through it could tell the tale. It is the wisdom of the aged passed on to someone facing a similar difficulty.

Beauty and the Beast highlights a problem facing the humanities right now. Society has changed so much since the story was developed—is it even relevant? Should we still bother with a narrative about arranged marriages in a time when arranged marriages are no longer the norm? Of course, discussing Beauty and the Beast about only arranged marriages is highly reductive. The stories are more than simply what they’re about.

Take fairies. Opinions differ, but one common belief is that they were originally the minor gods of the pre-Christian nature religions. Again, our culture no longer follows a nature religion, by and large. Is there value in these tales? The word “fairy” is derived from the Latin word fata, which is etymologically related to fate (fatum). Conceptually speaking, fairies were forces that affected one’s destiny. Central to the stories is the interaction between will and destiny, not good and evil. An encounter with one changed the course of a person’s life. Sleeping Beauty was cursed to sleep for 100 years—that was bad. But then the prince broke the spell and she awakened—that was good. This is a teaching of fairy tales that is still relevant: what is a curse one moment can be a blessing later (and vice versa). One’s weakness is really one’s strength.

The humanities are essential to any education because they pass life experiences from one generation to the next. They are guides to life difficulties which youth are likely to face

Other People’s Ideas, Part 2

2009-11-25T11:58:00.000-08:00

In last week’s entry, I spotlighted other people’s arguments about the value of the humanities. For the sake of simplicity, I omitted one of the most prominent writers of the subject. Stanley Fish, a Dean Emeritus for the College of Liberal Arts (University of Chicago), writes a blog for the New York Times online. His writings deal with many topics, not just the humanities. Nonetheless, the state of the humanities recurs in his entries.

In one entry, Fish reviews Anthony Kronman’s book Education’s End (see my October entry entitled “Book Report” for my assessment of it). In it, Fish argues that the humanities need no justification because justification “confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance.” The humanities, he concludes, are their own good.

In a follow-up, Fish answers some of the responses to his blog and clarifies his opinions. When he wrote that the humanities are without justification, he is not saying that they are worthless. Rather, the humanities need no justification because they are valuable in their own right.

Fish also reviews Frank Donoghue’s book The Last Professors. In it, Donoghue views the current state of the humanities as the culmination of a century-long attack. (To be perfectly honest, I find Donoghue’s study to be too bleak. Just because some people criticized the humanities not mean that they changed the cultural assessment of them. As I try to show in some of my entries, the debates about the humanities go back millennia.)

In another entry, Fish assesses a “translation” of Milton’s Paradise Lost… into modern English. His lengthy assessment demonstrates that a simple summary of a classic—even a summary of equal length—is no substitute for the original.

Other People's Ideas

2009-11-20T04:50:00.000-08:00

Because of the current recession, many people are discussing the place of the humanities in education. Recent articles in the New York Times and Daily Pennsylvanian provide good overviews of how the current environment is affecting the humanities. Here is a selection of other people’s arguments:

Stanley Romanstein notes that students who study the humanities score higher in math and reading assessments.

Bruce Watson asserts that the sciences describe the world, and the humanities explain it. Leon Wieseltier comments that the humanities change one’s perception of the world.

David Tebaldi writes about Clairborne Pell, the founder of the Pell Grants, and his positive view of the humanities.

Dario Diorio stresses that the humanities awaken the spirit and provide inspiration.

And Matthew Reisz reports on several people’s opinions of the value of the humanities in the UK.

Shameless Self-Promotion

2009-11-07T07:46:00.001-08:00

This week the show "Arizona Illustrated" (KUAT, PBS channel 6, Tucson) did a show on the University of Arizona's Italian Program. This is, of course, good news for my Italian Program.

You can watch the show here.

In it, several of my students explain the importance of studying Italian, and foreign languages in general. Their comments are directly relevant to the question of the importance of the humanities.

Balloon Boy

2009-10-28T09:18:00.000-07:00

The ability to think critically, to pose logical questions and challenge comfortable assumptions, is probably the single most important outcome of a university education. It is the very purpose for the paper-writing assignment that is the staple of almost every university class. Yet as exemplified by last week’s major news story, critical thinking is sorely lacking in American journalism.

By now the story is well known. A family in Colorado called police claiming that their 6-year old son was aboard a homemade balloon 10,000 feet in the sky. For hours, the news stations filmed the silvery balloon as it drifted. Eventually, it came down… and it turned out the son was hiding in the attic. Interviews and media frenzy followed, in which it came out that whole event was a hoax.

Perhaps the most important guide for critical thinking was the fourteenth-century William of Ockham. He developed a line of reasoning known as “Ockham’s razor”: when choosing among competing theories, the simplest is probably correct. So even before the hoax was revealed, what would “Ockham’s razor” have suggested? The family had spent weeks building a balloon, but after launch they couldn’t find the child: was he aboard the craft he’d accidentally launched, or somewhere on the ground? Of course, the simpler answer was the second—which turned out to be correct. But the media opted into the less logical, more sensational answer.

Assessment of a situation takes time, something the current 24-hour news cycle doesn’t allow for. In last week’s entry, I wrote about the need for time, and this story exemplifies my point perfectly. Undoubtedly the decision to air the story was instantaneous, but it takes time and calmness to assess the situation, and hence to formulate relevant questions: could a balloon of that size carry a child? Why didn’t the family have the safety features in place to prevent accidents (i.e., a fence, or a redundant launch protocol)? Is this really news? And perhaps most important, did the story even rise to the level of national importance?

The major news organizations spent several hours covering a lone balloon. What other information could have been provided in that amount of time? What other valid news stories could have been aired which might have served the populace better?

Uncritical judgments do no service to the society. What happened last week was a collective failure of critical thinking on the part of the media. Sadly, uncritical journalism has become the norm. Jon Stewart has made a career of skewering ill-informed newscasters who can’t discern fact from hyperbole.

Instruction in the humanities is an important aspect of learning critical thinking. Insightful readings can provide a model of rational analysis. Writing assignments teach students to express their opinions. More importantly, they remind students that valid opinions are based on facts, and facts can be ascertained only by asking the right questions. Over time students learn to challenge pat answers—the kind of pat answers comprising the anchors’ uninformed commentary as a balloon soared through the sky.

Post Script

2009-10-23T08:45:00.000-07:00

In today's New York Times, Thomas Friedman writes about the need for new skills for workers. They can't just wait for new jobs to be "handed to them," but need to think creatively. Sound familiar? The humanities are about creativity, and viewing things in a new way.

Read Thomas Friedman's editorial here.

It's About Time

2009-10-22T07:44:00.001-07:00

It’s easy to blame other people. But what probably harms the humanities the most right now is not a decision that anyone made. No one made a case against the humanities that has now become widely accepted. No one unilaterally decided to stop teaching them, although budget priorities are often elsewhere. Instead, the damage to the humanities may have simply happened. Probably the most insidious harm afflicted against the humanities is the prevalent mode of life in the US.

In 2009, people are working ever increasing amounts of time. With the prevalence of technology, it is difficult to distinguish between time on the job from time off. If I’m at home with my family, but available to my employer via email and cell phone, am I truly at leisure? Worse, if I’m sitting at the dinner table, but my mind is on the day’s events, am I even present? Compounding that is the urban planning of North America, which throughout the twentieth-century was predicated on the idea of private ownership of cars. So when suburban sprawl is factored in, long commutes subtract further from private time. And none of this discussion includes the busyness of home life, such as household and family responsibilities, sleep, and time spent just plain vegging out.

The charge of elitism is often leveled against people who promote the arts. And elitism—let me stress—is absolutely unfounded. People of all walks of life can appreciate the humanities, and they do, from all backgrounds and differing levels of education (beyond the basic education which allows them to read and understand the works, of course—naturally, literary studies presuppose literacy).

But the one thing required of anyone who wants to enjoy the humanities is time. The humanities require time. People dabbling in other fields can read condensations. Amateur scientists can keep up to date by reading summaries of recent studies. A lot of non-fiction books can be understood just fine by reading reviews, sometimes only the dust jacket. In many areas, the gist of an idea is all that’s needed.

But the humanities are different. Reading a novel is absolutely not the same as reading its synopsis; Cliffs Notes can tell you what it’s about, but what it’s about isn’t really the point. What the arts provide is an experience. By reading a literary work you live the events. The same is true of viewing a work of art, or listening to a piece of music. To be sure, it is a vicarious experience, an experience of the imagination and not in the real world. But it is an experience nonetheless. To have the experience art provides requires time—free time.

It also requires brain power. Not necessarily smarts or an advanced degree, but the ability to process the artwork. A reader (or viewer, or listener) can set aside the time, but if she is stressed, exhausted, preoccupied, the experience will be diminished. Or ruined outright.

The humanities don’t only have a requirement, but they also make a demand. It’s not enough to read, the readers must find meaning in the works. Few stories are like Aesop’s fables, which end with a moral. Indeed, most great works of literature cannot be reduced to a one-dimensional meaning. But making sense of art is what makes art great. Again, this places an additional requirement of time and brain power.

The arts can adapt to today’s busy readership. They can be composed more simply, with more direct language, but that won’t fully address the problem. In many respects the problem is getting worse, as the notion of a “24/7” work schedule gains acceptance. As it grows, not only will the experience of the humanities be further degraded. Human experiences of all types will suffer.

Of Ducks and Women

2009-10-17T20:32:00.000-07:00

The debates about the value of the humanities are as old as the humanities themselves. In his Republic (4th century BCE), Plato argues that in an ideal republic the arts would be banished. Part of his rationale is that they arouse the passions. The humanities play on people’s emotions leading them to behave in unwanted ways. This is, of course, an early iteration of the charge of the immorality of the arts. In the last several decades, the degeneracy of culture—and hence of the humanities—has been commonplace in political rhetoric in the United States.

An unusual defense of literature occurs in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (ca. 1351). The work, a classic of world literature, is comprised of one hundred tales. Boccaccio situates the tales within a frame story of ten youths who escaped the plague of 1348, and who amused each other by telling tales for ten days. But at the start of the fourth day, the author breaks into the narrative and offers a defense of his art.

Boccaccio claims that some people have read his tales and have accused him of immorality. The presence of the defense indicates that his tales probably circulated individually as he composed them. And in this instance the suggestion of immorality is not unfounded. The last tale of the third day consists of a particularly saucy story, involving an old hermit who teaches a young woman to serve God by “putting the devil into hell.” Ahem.

At the start of day four, Boccaccio does not argue about the charges against him, nor does he apologize for his bawdy tales. The defense of his art consists of yet another narrative—yes, the Decameron actually contains one hundred and one tales. He tells of Filippo Balducci, a saintly man who had decided to become a hermit after his wife’s death. Now advanced in years, he must journey into the city with his son, whom he had raised exclusively in a cavern. Balducci’s son is amazed at all the new sights of the city—the tall palaces, the fine clothing, and all the hustle and bustle—but when a group of young women passes by, the old man commands him to lower his eyes.

“They are evil,” he tells his son, who had never before seen a woman nor knew of their existence.

“Father, they are more beautiful than the angels painted in our cave. What are they?”

Trying to prevent any lustful thoughts in his son, he responds, “They are ducks.”

“Please father,” the son begs, “can’t we take home a duck?!”

Boccaccio then notes how powerful nature is. Even this young man, who was raised in a purely holy environment, immediately felt desire for opposite sex.

Boccaccio apparently had Plato in mind when he composed the story. Filippo does everything in his power to curb his son’s natural urges. He even struggles against language—the very stuff of literature—by deliberately using the wrong word. By not naming the women, he hopes to prevent sexual attraction. Yet he fails. With the tale Boccaccio rebuts the charge of that the humanities result in immoral acts. The passions exist naturally, whether people talk about them or not. To castigate, control, or even ban literature outright would have no effect on people’s actual behavior. The story of Filippo Balducci exemplifies how culture is powerless in the face of nature.

I am always reminded of this tale when I hear about “abstinence-only” sexual education. Much “abstinence-only” education is predicated on the idea of not teaching facts about birth control; if people don’t know about responsible sexuality, the thinking goes, they’ll be too scared to engage in any sexual behaviors at all. I have no problem with instructors preaching abstinence, but they have a duty to teach contraception and disease-prevention. Instead, the purveyors of “abstinence-only” are acting like Filippo Balducci, hoping to prevent sexual activity altogether by controlling the language about sex.

Numerous studies are now showing that “abstinence-only” is about as unsuccessful as Filippo Balducci. A recent study shows that teens who learn “abstinence-only” are just as likely to have intercourse, but less likely to take necessary precautions. As in the case of Filippo’s son, even someone entirely ignorant of the language of sex still has sexual impulses. The last time I checked, internal drives led teens to sexual exploration not literary works. Silence and misinformation will do nothing to stave off sexual activity. Call it a duck if you like or call it nothing at all, even go so far as declaring a “culture war,” but human nature is still in full force.

Book Report

2009-10-14T06:24:00.000-07:00

Many people have been discussing the merits of the humanities. One recent noteworthy book is Anthony T. Kronman’s Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (Yale, 2007). Kronman’s thesis is that academics need to get back to teaching the fundamental question of the humanities, the meaning of life. It’s not that great literary works provide an answer, but that they reformulate the question in different ways, thereby challenging facile, comfortable solutions.

Kronman believes that as universities focused more on research, humanists became absorbed with the minutiae of literary study. How the literary tradition enriches everyone’s lives is no longer taught in the humanistic classroom. Furthermore, literary research turned increasingly impenetrable, so that the reading public could no longer understand cutting-edge publications. A growing percentage of the population, therefore, ceased caring about the humanities.

Kronman’s ideas are worthy of consideration, and it is not my intention to argue directly against them. Instead, I want to illustrate the challenges inherent to Kronman’s thesis. Taken to its logical conclusion, literary classes should teach only those works which address the meaning of life, either directly or indirectly (or some variant on the question like “what is the life worth living?” or “how should people find meaning in their lives?”). Don’t get me wrong: many great works of literature touch on these philosophical questions, and challenge the readers’ own comfortable assumptions. These are works often at the heart of the canon and hence of the curriculum. But what about works that simply don’t rise to that level?

Many works of literature simply do not deal with the Truth—The Meaning of Life—or even raise questions that reflect on it. Rather, they deal with truths, finding meaning in particular experiences. Lyric poetry, for instance, often reveals the deeper significance in mundane experiences. The poetic techniques convey the everyday in almost mystical terms, thereby compelling the readers to see it in a new light.

Richard Wilbur’s poem, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” is a text that illustrates the profound meaning of a mundane experience. My brief synopsis won’t do it justice. It relates how the squeaky pulley of a laundry line awakened the poet. Half asleep, he sees that “the morning air is all awash with angels. / Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses, / some are in smocks: but truly there they are.” The poem is a masterpiece in describing the first moments of the morning. I’m just not sure that it deals with the Meaning of Life per se; discussing it in such a manner would be a stretch. But it beautifully encapsulates an experience most people have had. Before the responsibilities of the day come rushing in, the residual dream-state allows us to view our surroundings in different—special—ways.

Yet art cannot simply be treated as a delivery-device for philosophical questions. Aesthetics are not mere sugar coating, which will allow readers to swallow otherwise bitter discussions of the Truth. Wilbur’s poem doesn’t merely talk about a particular experience. By versifying it, Wilbur allows the readers to re-experience it themselves. Would anyone suggest that lyric poetry like this shouldn’t be taught?

Furthermore, even works that purport to convey the Truth can’t be reduced to just their message. In postwar Italy, when the Communists were highly popular, novelist Elio Vittorini publicly broke with the Italian Communist Party. The party leader, Palmiro Togliatti, insisted that the Italian Communists should follow the Stalinist model regarding artists; that is to say, writers should rigidly toe the party line and only convey orthodox communist ideology. Whatever we might think of Leninist-Marxism, it did provide its adherents with an answer to the question of the Meaning of Life. In his “Letter to Togliatti” (1947) Vittorini, an avowed socialist, asserted the autonomy of the arts. The role of the artist, he argued, was not merely to “play the fife for the revolution.” Following his example, numerous socialist artists demonstrated their independence from the party, giving rise to the Neorealist movement in the 1940s and 50s.

Vittorini and the Neorealists demonstrated that creativity couldn’t be constrained to the Truth or truths, even those espoused by its own authors. Something about creative fantasy makes art transcend its messages, even the most profound. Indeed, those historical periods and societies that enforced a particular form of the Truth—the Catholic Counterreformation, Soviet Socialism—rarely produced great works of art. In any of its numerous incarnations, agitprop makes claims to communicate the Truth, but it almost never amounts to more than its message. It is quickly forgotten and rightly so.

Kronman’s argument is subtler than I give it credit here. He is right to stress that literature teachers should raise relevant philosophical questions. That is part of what it means to be a good teacher. But no discussion of art should be reduced to any single dimension. Great art raises numerous questions, many of them worthy to be taught and studied.

The Golden Rule

2009-10-07T08:42:00.000-07:00

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” —Matthew 7:12

This well-known teaching—to the point of being a cliché—encapsulates a deep truth that is central to the question of the humanities.

One of the difficulties facing the humanities is the medium itself. Literature is, by and large, fiction. That is to say, its authors employ imagination to describe the world. We can acknowledge, of course, that the authors’ imaginations are themselves grounded in observation and culturally relevant facts. Nevertheless in our science-dominated culture, many people look suspiciously at the accuracy of fantasy as a vehicle for the truth.

The subject of the biblical passage, compassion, is easily misunderstood. Put simply, compassion is not an emotion. The emotional response to suffering—that impulse to weep with someone else—is not compassion. It’s pity. Just like any other humane emotion there is nothing wrong with pity. But Jesus didn’t extol pity for a reason. Like any other emotion, it is a purely instinctive reaction. No thought goes into pity, so pity doesn’t transform the woman who experiences it. Pity doesn’t lead one to a deeper understanding of another person or his predicament.

So what is compassion? Jesus tells us to engage in an imaginative act: if I were that person, how would I want to be treated? What follows are the logical consequences of that presupposition. He tells us to inform our imagination with facts from our experiences, from what we know to be true of the world, and factual reasoning. Jesus commands people, in effect, to perform a type of thought experiment. They then should derive any ethical conclusions from that experiment.

Christianity is not unique in this regard. Most major religions have some teaching similar to the Golden Rule. Buddhism makes a central tenet of compassion. But the biblical passage not only promotes compassion, it also explains how to achieve it. Compassion is an act of imagination, which is informed by experience.

This leads back to the humanities. The arts are nothing if not thought experiments. What if…? Authors and artists employ fantasy to pose questions, and then use their knowledge of the world to follow those questions to certain conclusions. Attentive readers, furthermore, are led to see, at the very least, the point of view of someone in those positions. Readers are induced to experience compassion, and in the process they are transformed; they transcend—momentarily, subtly, but no less validly—their previous self-centered experience of the universe.

The Essentials

2009-09-30T16:44:00.000-07:00

The art of reading as of learning is this:
to retain the essential, to forget the non-essential.
—Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 14

Few people today would willingly agree with Hitler about anything. But when it comes to educational priorities, what should be taught and what should be cut, many people unwittingly share Hitler’s opinions about essentials and non-essentials.

The film October Sky (1999) portrayed the childhood of Homer Hickam, who grew up to become a scientist for NASA. Based on Hickam’s memoir, it relates his growing fascination with rocketry following the launch of Sputnik. His interest in outer space conflicted with the ideas of many of his educators. Living in a West Virginia town dominated by coal mining, few of his teachers wanted to encourage his “hobby.” The town’s chief industry was the coalmine, he was the son of a miner, and everyone in his position ended up working in the mine. Why should they teach him something he’ll never use? As educators, they only needed to instruct him in the essentials, namely those subjects that would make him a successful miner.

Before Brown v. The Topeka Board of Education the argument for segregation was based in part on similar reasoning. Since people thought African-Americans were congenitally predisposed for manual labor, they reasoned that they be taught in a different manner from Whites. Their education should consist solely of the essentials—practical information necessary for careers as laborers. For millennia, men used the same line of reasoning to give girls substandard educations or to deny them education entirely. Women were nothing more than baby-makers, so knowledge of reading and writing were inessential for them.

Sadly, the predominant educational philosophy in the United States still consists of variants on this argument: education is essentially about the skills necessary for an adult life, in particular job preparation. That’s it. Nothing else. Few people would admit to holding such a belief, but the next time there’s a budget crisis, see what gets cut as inessential. The budget priorities reflect the ideology that education consists primarily of job preparation. Nowadays education is no longer about creating new miners or manual laborers; but creating the next generation of mid-level managers is no less inhumane. It reduces people to their mere stations in life. Education in the United States is rarely about nourishing the individual.

There is an alternative to the reductive view of education. To express it, I want to refer to a biblical passage. The unnamed prostitute who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and dried them with her hair is traditionally identified as Mary Magdalene. Prostitution was an abject situation, which brought with it a great deal of social disdain—she was just a whore! But Jesus brought her into his inner circle and after the resurrection he appeared first before her. This is a powerful statement. Jesus was saying, in effect, what you do—or did—does not define you. No human being is just something… just a prostitute… just a woman… just a miner… just an African-American… or just an employee. By treating Mary Magdalene as valuable, Jesus acknowledged that all human beings transcend their stations in life. There is an inner essence to people that cannot be constrained to one single socially determined circumstance. Whatever their status, they possess dignity, they have a story, and they hold a perspective that warrants consideration.

This is where the humanities re-enter the discussion. No one would argue against teaching the basics. But they are considered basics for a reason. Education is about developing the whole person, not simply her or his eventual job title. To do so, it must pose deep questions. It needs to reveal the great ideas of world culture, and transmit the joys of the aesthetic experiences of art and music. It also must challenge comfortable assumptions of life and the world, and thus demonstrate to the students that there are other possibilities to the social order and predominant teachings around them. Education should treat its students as individuals, and give flight to their souls.

The Asinine Fever Epidemic

2009-09-24T14:57:00.000-07:00

Right now there is great concern about swine flu. But our society also is plagued by an epidemic of asinine fever.

Toward the end of Carlo Collodi’s novel Pinocchio (1881), the puppet once again disobeys Geppetto. Instead of going to school as he’d promised, Pinocchio steals away to the Land of Games with his friend Lampwick. After five months of non-stop play, a terrible thing happens: Pinocchio and Lampwick grow asses’ ears. They’ve come down with asinine fever, and like all the other boys in the Land of Games, they completely transform into donkeys.

Collodi’s message is clear enough; those boys who ignore their studies are condemned to be asses. An ass, of course, symbolizes ignorance. In the class-structure of nineteenth-century Italy, however, it was also a social metaphor. When Italy was a predominantly agrarian society donkeys were beasts of burden. Collodi cautioned his young readers not to disregard their education, or else they’d spend their lives as menial laborers.

And in fact, that’s precisely what happens to Collodi’s Pinocchio. Eventually he’s sold to a circus, but when he breaks his leg, he suffers the fate of any working animal in the nineteenth century. His owner ties a rock around his neck and hurls him into the ocean. Fortunately for him, the fish eat the flesh off his skeleton, which consists of… a wooden puppet.

So Pinocchio reflected the realities of nineteenth-century Italian society. But is it still relevant in the twenty-first century? When Disney turned Collodi’s tale to a cartoon in 1939, one of the few scenes they kept was the Land of Games. Disney rendered it as an amusement park with roller coasters, carousels, and fun houses. Disney’s interpretation of the Land of Games is an indictment of the modern entertainment industry. Entertainment is synonymous with amusement, which is also synonymous with diversion. The etymologies of all the words convey the idea that entertainment is really a distraction. A distraction from what, we might ask.

Nowadays, entertainment is everywhere. But the entertainment industry is not about the real world, about hard choices and complexity. It holds a pacifying mirror up to its viewers, telling them that a simplistic understanding is all that’s necessary. Evildoers do evil because they’re evil; but not to worry because eventually the hero will dispatch them with a one-liner. The consumers of mass media entertainment delude themselves that they are knowledgeable of the world. The real result is a pseudo-sophistication built on trite aphorisms and wish fulfillment. It is, in short, a game. And its worldview has permeated even the news industry. TV journalists routinely speak in platitudes and simplified language. During the last presidential campaign, they chided Candidate Obama for his “nuanced” answers, forgetting that the world is, in fact, nuanced. The next time a shark attacks a swimmer, see how long it takes before the anchor describes the animal as a “mindless killing machine.” Do they even know that they are citing the movie Jaws? The institution designed to inform the citizenry has reduced itself to the intellectual level of summer blockbusters.

Yet diversion can take many forms. Nowadays people are more distracted than ever by electronic gadgetry. It seems that text messages, cell phones, Twittering and other social media are everywhere. On the surface it appears that people are continuously hard at work. But at least one recent study shows that people who “multitask” actually perform their activities worse than they believe. They’re not so much working—not in any real sense—as turning their attention away from their immediate circumstances. Other researchers recently demonstrated that people who compose text messages behind the wheel are as dangerous as drunk drivers. That study is disturbing for the safety of our roadways, of course. But it also suggests another troubling conclusion: doesn’t this mean that the people who spend a lot of time “multitasking” are living much of their lives as if drunk? Listen closely and you can hear the braying right now.

For decades the United States has been the economically dominant force in the world. But nothing lasts forever, and we are currently in the worst recession in decades. And what about Collodi’s Lampwick? What happened to him? Just before Pinocchio transforms into a boy, he resolves once and for all to work hard. He takes employment turning a mill to replace a dying donkey. Pinocchio goes to him and comforts him as he breathes his last. Lampwick, like all the other boys from the Land of Games, dies an ass.

'Nuff Said

2009-09-19T20:53:00.000-07:00

It is well known that Americans are among the least educated when it comes to foreign languages. According to one statistic, only about a quarter of all US citizens can speak a foreign language proficiently. There are many factors as to why that occurs, of course.

One unfortunate side effect of that low number is that many people actively disdain the study of foreign language. After all, world business is conducted in English, they say—why should I study their language? One of the basic assumptions against the study of foreign language is its impracticality. A small percentage of the population gets the opportunity to travel extensively to another country, so why should anyone else go to the trouble? One blogger in 2004 wrote: “The utility of having American children devoting years mastering a language other than English is rather dubious from any utilitarian standard I can think of.”

The futility of teaching foreign languages is summed up in another quote:

It is impossible to understand, for example, why millions of people in the course of the years must learn two or three foreign languages, only a fraction of which they can make use of later, and hence most of them forget entirely, for of a hundred thousand pupils who learn French for example barely two thousand will have a serious use of this knowledge later, while ninety-eight thousand in the whole further course of their life will not find themselves in a position to make practical use of what they once learned. They have in their youth, therefore, devoted thousands of hours to a subject which later is without value and meaning for them. And the objection that this material belongs to general education is unsound, since it could only be upheld if people retained all through their life what they had learned. So in reality, because of the two thousand people for whom the knowledge of this language is profitable, ninety-eight thousand must be tormented for nothing and made to sacrifice valuable time.

If you’re inclined to agree, you might want to learn the source of the quote, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1923: p. 419-20). You might also reflect on the ultimate outcome of his disdain for the knowledge of languages and cultures other than his own.

‘Nuff said.

Pythagoras Lied

2009-09-14T14:05:00.000-07:00

Probably the most important aspect to the sciences is quantification, that is, the ability to transform data into (and out of) numbers. What many scientists may not realize is the idea of quantification comes from the ancient philosopher Pythagoras. Pythagoras believed that numbers revealed the true nature of the cosmos. Given the prevalence of science in our culture, the notion of quantification is pervasive. We have become a Pythagorean society because virtually everything, it seems, can be turned into a number. A person does not need to employ good writing or clear reasoning, merely the cold, hard statistics to get something done. There is one simple problem with this perspective, however: Pythagoras lied.

Of course there are many areas that cannot really be quantified. One of them is the importance of the humanities. Oh sure, we could take a poll and ask people to rate the humanities, but that would only gauge public opinion, not true importance. We could assess earnings from the publishing companies, but that would rate sales. We could look at enrollment data from universities, but that would evaluate the interest of students. So how can we understand the true importance of the humanities?

One example of the importance of the humanities comes from Primo Levi. His famous memoir of the Nazi Holocaust, Se questo è un uomo (“If this is a man”) was translated with the unfortunate English title Survival at Auschwitz. It is unfortunate because, as the original Italian suggests, he describes the horrors of “The Final Solution” as a process of dehumanization.

One episode is key to Levi’s memoir. Since he’d had training as a chemist, he worked in Auschwitz as a pharmacist (yes, Auschwitz had a pharmacy). At one point a French prisoner nicknamed Pikolo noticed he was Italian, and asked him about an episode from Dante’s Inferno. In a striking passage, Dante meets Ulysses in hell. Ulysses tells of his final voyage, during which he inspires his men with his oratorical skills. He tells his men that they have a duty to explore the world, reminding them that they were not born to live as animals. The parallels with Levi’s situation are striking: he too was in a type of hell, reduced to the level of beasts.

Ulysses’ speech is so famous that Italian school children learn to recite it from memory. But at that moment in the Death Camp, Levi could not remember it. And his failure to recall Dante’s verses caused him great anxiety. He spends the next couple of hours piecing together the portions he could remember. Imagine: Levi was in Auschwitz, with all its horrors and brutalities—a true hell on Earth if ever there was one—but for a short while he got caught up in the inability to recite Dante.

He was in Auschwitz, for crying out loud—why would he care about poetry? Simple: to remember Dante momentarily negated the Nazis’ dehumanization of him. Animals don’t have poetry or the arts, but people do. It was a means to reassert his almost-lost humanity. His inability to recite it at that moment elicited the doubt that perhaps the Nazis were right about him. Instead of taking place on a battlefield, his struggle took place in his memory, indeed within his very soul. To us now it seems strangely trivial, but to recite Dante in that context would be an act of rebellion.

Here, pay attention Pikolo. Open your ears and your mind, I need for you to understand:

“Consider your birth:
you were not born to live as brutes,
but to follow virtue and learning”

It was as if I’d heard it for the first time: like a trumpet blast, like the voice of God. For a moment I forgot who I am and where I am.

Here then is the failure of Pythagorean thought. How could someone quantify Dante in that moment for Primo Levi? At that instant, the great poet was a potent reminder that Levi was not a sub-human entity worthy only of death. Dante’s poetry was beyond any numerical value. And it still is. It always is. Levi’s adherence to Dante is dramatic given his inhumane circumstances, but throughout the world there are millions of similar stories like his when poetry makes a difference to someone.

Numbers can tell a lot about human conditions, but they say nothing about the human condition. On the contrary, they have a strange de-humanizing effect on the persons involved. Perhaps the most telling indictment of Pythagoras was uttered by another twentieth-century monster, Joseph Stalin, who proclaimed: “The death of one man is a tragedy, but the death of millions is a statistic.”

Changing Lives

2009-09-06T18:58:00.001-07:00

One of the difficulties for the humanities is that the benefits of other fields are so obvious. Engineers construct bridges and dams, pharmacists dispense medicines, and scientists make new discoveries. Business graduates receive substantial starting salaries. These are all tangible benefits. So what are the practical applications of the humanities? What benefits to society does the study of literature, the arts, history, and languages bring?

One cliché about the humanities is that they change your life. And frankly, they do. Wrap yourself around a literary classic—really delve into it, so that its worldview becomes your own—and it will change you. Sometimes, that change will be subtle, and sometimes it will be a bolt from the blue.

Perhaps the oldest classic of the Western canon is Homer’s Iliad. The story begins with a dispute over the spoils of war: for complicated reasons, the king Agamemnon needs to return the slave Chryseis, part of his spoils, to the Trojans. Agamemnon refuses out of the desire not to be humiliated before his men—-a king, after all, should have the most spoils of all. When he relents, he summarily takes as recompense the slave of his most powerful warrior, Achilles. Achilles, now humiliated before his fellow Greeks, simply refuses to fight, and, to summarize the rest, the Greeks nearly lose the war.

So much has changed since Homer's time that it's tempting to see his story as irrelevant to 2009. Spoils of war and the heroic ethos of the classical world are entirely foreign nowadays.

But what hasn't changed are the desire to save face, and the feelings of humiliation when face is lost—both emotions born from the prideful embrace of one’s social status. And Homer illustrates how the inability to face those feelings head-on can cause one to make self-defeating choices.

Business schools and technical colleges teach vital new areas. But they don’t demand that their students change, that they question their most basic assumptions, or that they learn and really comprehend human motivations, particularly their own. So last November, as the automobile industry sought the financial support of the federal government, the otherwise bright CEOs of the three largest car manufacturers each flew to Washington DC in their private jets. Like Agamemnon, as captains of industry, they had to maintain their prestige in the face of adversity… and like Agamemnon’s refusal to cede Chryseis, it was precisely the wrong thing to do: they were publicly pilloried for it.

Similarly, after the banks got the largest bailout in US history, people were scandalized to find out that executives still received huge bonuses. Again, like Agamemnon, who took Achilles’ spoils to assert his sovereignty, they tried to reassert their supremacy, as if they had records of stellar performances and did not need to beg for bailout funds. With no reason for self-reflection, they, too, did precisely the wrong thing.

I like to think of the benefits of the humanities in the most un-human terms. Imagine a computer. You can put more information into it. You can update it. But at a certain point, there’s an upper limit on its performance. To get more out of it, it simply needs to be different. That's where the importance of "changing people's lives" becomes seriously relevant.

Humanities and Mass Media

2009-09-01T19:06:00.000-07:00

“Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.” —George Orwell, 1984

For at least a decade now, numerous humanists have decried the “crisis in the humanities.” To many people, the idea of a “crisis in the humanities” seems counter-intuitive. The entertainment industry earns greater profits and has a wider reach than perhaps ever before. How can there be a crisis?

But quantity, as we all know, is no reflection of quality. I can fill up on potato chips, but that doesn’t mean that I’ve had a complete meal. On a life-long diet only of potato chips, I’d become bloated and obese, but at the same time my body would be starving for many essential nutrients. In a sense, our mass media-dominated culture is itself on a diet of potato chips: temporarily sated, but not fed in any real way.

I’ll use myself as an example. I grew up on rock and roll music. One of my earliest memories is the cover of my brother’s Meet the Beatles album (I must have been about two). The sound of an electric guitar still gets my heart racing. But for almost a decade now, I’ve pretty much abandoned rock and roll music. Here’s why: rock and roll speaks to the desires and anxieties of youth. It has no application to my life now. Rock and roll all night? I’m 43-years old, married, with a 6-year old daughter. I’m asleep by 10:15pm. And party every day? I have a satisfying day job and responsibilities.

What am I supposed to get out of rock and roll anymore? What is a repeatedly divorced twenty-something going to tell me—who have been happily married for fifteen years—about love? What insights will I gain from a group of teenagers in the latest “boy band” about sex? They probably don’t even know what a clitoris is!

What I’ve said about rock songs can just as easily be applied to most mass media forms. I love spectacle as much as the next person, but a blockbuster about giant robots saving the planet has no relevance for my life. As George Lucas was completing his second Star Wars trilogy, he explained that he wanted to explain the origins of evil, of how Darth Vader became Darth Vader. The only lesson I learned was not to trust a Sith—ok, I can do that, but it’s not a message I can readily put to use. Page-turners are a good way to pass the time, but I already know that criminals deserve to be caught and punished. All these types of mass media are potato chips, which are fine now and then, but my soul needs a steak. I know I’m not alone in that hunger, either.

I began this essay with a quotation from George Orwell’s distopia 1984. In his novel, the totalitarian system deliberately reduces the number of words in order to eliminate the possibility of freethinking. In our mass media-saturated society, we are living an analogous situation. The number of words hasn’t gone down, but the number of authentic narratives has. The common references we can make to astute observations about people, society, the world—ourselves—are disappearing. We can pass the time watching computer graphics and hearing electronic sounds, but in the end they mean nothing. Human beings need meaning.

The True Value of the Humanities

2009-08-28T11:07:00.000-07:00

The real problem facing the humanities is the difficulty of seeing its practical benefits. What purpose does it serve, people wonder, to study literature?

Recently, however, a public event occurred that succinctly illustrates the very real value of the humanities to society. In late October 2008, following the failure of several giant financial institutions, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan addressed Congress. In a highly revealing statement, Greenspan expressed astonishment at the short-sightedness of the banks. He said: “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder’s equity—myself especially—are in a state of shocked disbelief.”

Alan Greenspan is a highly thoughtful and well-educated man, of course. But his statement reveals a profound flaw in his worldview. As an economist, he applies principles of the market to human behavior, expecting that the collective desire for maximum profit would induce self-control. His admission of shock illustrates that in formulating his theories Greenspan ignored the humanities. In short, he didn’t read Dante.

The great Italian poet Dante portrays the afterlife in his masterpiece The Divine Comedy. In the most famous portion, hell, he systematizes all human evil. He broadly divides the sins into three headings: fraud, violence, and incontinentia or lack of self control. The last category, incontinentia, is comprised of lust, gluttony, and greed. While fraud represents the use of intellect for perverse ends, and violence destroys the bonds of human brotherhood, the sins of incontinentia are simply natural drives left unchecked.

At the outset of his work Dante allegorizes incontinentia with the image of a she-wolf: she is frighteningly skinny, but after eating she is only hungrier. Through the symbol of the she-wolf Dante makes an insightful statement about our natural human impulses. Lust, gluttony and greed are not about reaching a specific goal; they are not desires that disappear once they have been fulfilled. Here, then, is one truth about the human condition that only the humanities can offer.

Why do so many lottery winners end up spending themselves into bankruptcy within a year or two? How much money can possibly be enough? Why do so many people with doting spouses have wandering eyes? Why do restaurants serve ridiculously large proportions, often followed by equally oversized desserts? With his she-wolf, Dante offers a disquieting answer. We human beings delude ourselves that happiness will come once we acquire that one object we want, whether it’s a flashier car, a more attractive lover, or a richer chocolate cake. But we are mistaken. That’s the hellish thing about base desires: the things we want are not really the point. As we attain them, we simply want something else, and the process starts all over again. Like the she-wolf who feels greater hunger after eating, when it comes to sex, food and money, human beings want more as they acquire more.

In a nutshell, had Alan Greenspan, economists and policymakers considered Dante’s dark view of the human heart, they would not feel shock that the banks did not act with self-restraint. Greed, as the film Wall Street reminded us, is the motivating factor in market decisions. But greed is also fundamentally about being out of control, an ever-present hunger that no amount of money, however large, will truly satisfy. Lacking a humanistic element to their worldview, economists like Greenspan never examined the nature of the primary motivation of financial decisions, greed.

So policy was set with the unquestioned belief that uncontrolled greed might result in self-restraint. In the drive to satisfy an insatiable desire, inevitably the leaders of banks behaved irresponsibly. To stave off an even greater crisis Congress then needed to intervene with bail-outs.

And now we have a very specific answer to that age-old question: what are the humanities worth? About $700 billion and counting.

Human Beings from the Inside

2009-08-26T20:00:00.001-07:00

There are, of course, many things to learn from the study of literature. Great literature sometimes deals in the Truth, but more often it deals in truths: observations about life, society, people and events. I like to think of literature as providing a map to the human heart: what motivates people or scares them, or what affects them.

In this respect, it might be easy to view the study of literature as if an imperfect human science, like sociology or psychology. But it is, in fact radically different.

Fundamentally, sociology deals with populations. It can reduce the activity of a group to a statistic, but it cannot examine the inner life of an individual.

Like literature, psychology deals with individuals from the inside, but its fundamental focus is on pathologies. It examines the behaviors of the ill, and works to treat their illnesses.

As valuable as both sociology and psychology are, they do not examine the human soul, not really. Evidence? Influential psychological theorists, like Carl Jung and Bruno Bettelheim drew many insights from their patients, but also from the folklore (Jung, mythologies; Bettelheim, fairy tales). And Sigmund Freud mined literature for its insights, from Greek mythology to Leonardo da Vinci. Surely their patients provided them ample factual evidence for their theories—so why would they make recourse to literature?

Great authors are keen observers of human activity. In literature, they use their creativity to convey those observations in realistic ways. Even when dealing with extreme characters, great literature gets inside their heads and makes their actions understandable. But because it deals in narrative, literature does not portray the human soul in a vacuum—as if the soul can be reduced to a few key drives, with social forces or historical events playing a minimal role. Literature instead shows individuals interacting with a society, historical period, or other similarly flawed people. In great literary works, human beings are never simply islands unto themselves, nor mere automatons motivated by external forces. It is, instead, a complex dance of inner-motivations and external forces, both at play in the destiny of an individual.

Say "Ciao"

2009-08-24T20:01:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in my initial entry to this blog, the administration of my university announced today that it would make “differentiated cuts” among the different faculties. Those fields that the administration views as “essential to economic development” will be spared; those that aren’t—in its imperfect estimation—will bear the brunt of the cuts. What that means in practice is that the areas already starved by the administration’s budgets, like the Humanities, will take on the lion’s share of the cuts.

But the administration’s reasoning is woefully flawed: the Humanities do indeed contribute to economic development. I’ll give one simple example from my own field of Italian to show how flawed their thinking is.

Earlier this year, Italian automaker Fiat announced that it had finalized the take-over of Chrysler. In the US, the news of the merger was presented as part of the broader economic crisis facing our country these days. Undoubtedly it is that, but I also see it as prime example of the importance of learning foreign languages, in this case Italian. As Italian money pours into the American auto industry—followed inevitably by Italian managers—people employed in Chrysler management will need to brush up on their Italian. Indeed, in the future anyone involved in the US auto industry, who might find themselves doing business with Fiat / Chrysler, might want to dust off their Italian phrasebooks. While Italy has always been a member of the G-8 group of highly industrialized nations, in the US Italian has just re-established itself as an important language in world business.

So to any future business-school graduates who might find themselves employed in Detroit in the future, I say this: good luck brown-nosing your bosses after only completing Italian 102 in your freshman year. And so there won’t be any doubt: yes, they will be talking about you behind your backs.

Why the Humanities Matter

2009-08-24T17:38:00.000-07:00

I am a professor Italian, which means I teach the humanities (language, literature and culture). Just today, the administration of my university announced that it will make "differential budget cuts," meaning that not all colleges will bear the same cuts. Its criteria were based on, among other things, "economic impact" to the state. Of course, at my university, the Humanities will bear the highest cut.

What that means in practice is that those areas that are already well-funded will bear the smallest cuts, while those that have been starved over the years will bear a greater cut.

And while it's true that the Humanities do not prepare students for a career the way business colleges do, to say we have no economic impact is FALSE. After all, we teach students how to write, how to read critically, and how to speak foreign languages. Is there no economic impact if American students write poorly and are set out in the world?

But I've realized that the problem is that we, in the Humanities, do not present ourselves well to the public. The public at large does not know what we do, or why it's important. And that's why I started this blog. I hope, in the coming years, to explain to a general readership some of the importance of the humanities. I know that there are others who do this work, most of whom will do a better job than I; BUT most of what I've seen is for insiders--for other people who already accept the value of the Humanities as a given. It's preaching to the proverbial choir. I want, instead, to reach a literate but non-specialized audience!