This is the text of a short talk I gave in Oct. 2025 at a symposium on the role of the humanities in the good life. I’ve lightly revised it following some very clarifying conversations with my colleague Eric Wilson, but it wasn’t destined for publication, so the usual caveats apply. Given the occasion and the audience, it was a polemical talk. While there are plenty of places where the arguments could be deepened, more historical detail given, more connections drawn, etc., I stand firmly by the conclusions. If I had had more time I would especially have liked to engage further with Postman’s work, which is no less incisive or vital today than when it was written.

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Conservation as counterculture

My theme in these comments is why the humanities might matter, a question that itself can be read in two senses. The first is why they might matter to any particular person; that is, what role the study of the humanities plays in certain conceptions of what it might mean for you or for me to lead a good life. The second, which is not always clearly distinguished, is why their study matters to society at large; that is, why the persistence of the humanities might be any sort of social good. This question arises in especially pointed form when it is asked why we should spend public dollars funding university departments that specialize in them, or induce students to major in them rather than more seemingly practical fields.

Defenses of the humanities abound in the face of this challenge, but they are almost always instrumentalist. On such views, the good of the humanities lies in their being good for something else. Often these external goods are political. A prominent example is the notion, advanced by Martha Nussbaum in her 2010 book Not for Profit, that the humanities make people especially suited to be citizens of a democracy, or that they foster the qualities necessary for sound civic or corporate leadership. In this conception the humanities are a basic public good, perhaps even a necessary precondition for rational self-government.

Other familiar arguments are economic. Think here of the proposal that the humanities provide a set of generalizable skills that can be applied across many different careers, with “critical thinking” being the prime candidate. As Claire Elise Katz notes in a recent article, surveys regularly appear that assure us that employers value qualities such as “analytical thinking, the ability to listen and consider different perspectives, ethical decision-making, and the development of good judgment” (p. 2) over mere narrow technical expertise. In this guise, the humanities appear as a kind of meta-vocational training, and it is as such that we are encouraged to peddle them.

Defenses that center on the development of specifically ethical skills and capabilities—which I will call moralizing defenses—are also, at their core, instrumentalist. To take a timely example, the proliferation of various kinds of “X Ethics” implicitly relies on the premise that the humanities provide frameworks for moral reflection that can be applied to the improvement of any domain of public life: medicine, business and management, information technology, etc. Again, the value of the humanities lies not in themselves but in the service they can render to other enterprises. Under this rubric I would also include Nussbaum’s proposals that the humanities offer a form of moral education, such as the idea that they make us more empathetic, expand our moral imagination, or promote other forms of virtuous character. It is also, I believe, behind Jennifer Frey’s proposal that the best case for the humanities lies in their contribution to forming the general intellectual and moral habits of students; that is, as a way of developing character. While these may be viewed as desirable modes of self-improvement (or, in a more cynical vein, as a kind of self-help), they are still instrumental insofar as the humanities are valuable not only for what can be learned through their study, but for their other beneficial effects.

All of these proposals strike me as misguided. In no small part this is because they are predicated on substantial promises about the political, ethical, and moral benefits bestowed by the humanities that simply are not borne out. Or, at least, they are not known to be. For one, I am skeptical that there is any such thing as “critical thinking” or “perspective taking” in general, detached from the practice of thinking with a particular subject matter. And even if there were, I doubt (for reasons I will come to in a moment) that the humanities are best viewed as a route to acquiring those skills. These concerns also extend to the arguments from civic virtue, insofar as they also assume that a person’s being a full participant in democratic society depends on their being steeped in humanistic traditions, or that the humanities inherently promote democracy itself. Broad claims about the liberatory potential of history and philosophy have rarely been seriously tested, and there are certainly reasons for doubt.

It is especially noteworthy that the humanities long predate democracy in its modern sense, and for much of their existence they thrived in what by our standards would be hierarchical and illiberal, if not outright oppressive, political conditions. The connection between “critical thinking” and citizenship becomes even more tenuous in light of the origins of mass education in democratic societies, which Agustina Paglayan argues was concerned largely with the need to control and indoctrinate the population by forging adherence to politically useful norms of “good citizenship.” These norms, typically conveyed as being unquestionable, promote deference to elite authority and proscribe behavior that disrupts the established social order. Humanistic learning can be turned to any number of vicious political ends. I am even more profoundly dubious that the study of classics, philosophy, literature, and history are any sort of route to improved individual moral character. History itself, not to mention close acquaintance with many academics, suggests that one can easily be both highly cultured and quite depraved. Instrumentalist arguments for the humanities are grounded at least as much in ideology as in evidence, and the evidence itself is at best murky and equivocal.

But suppose that my somewhat jaundiced portrait is incorrect. Even if these load-bearing empirical claims were true, should we be content with instrumentalist justifications? I think not. Ceding ground to instrumentalism leaves us with the wrong sorts of reasons for valuing the humanities. It implies that if they brought no benefits in the marketplace, or if they failed to deepen our empathy, that they could have no value at all. The good of the humanities, however, lies plainly and simply in what they themselves provide, namely certain forms of knowledge, insight, and understanding that are stubbornly at odds with any attempt to instrumentalize them, whether elevated or crude. It is precisely their resistance to instrumentalization that is their greatest strength.

Here it is useful to recall that, first and foremost, the humanities are disciplines, which is to say that they are regimented ways of interpreting and critiquing their subject matter: artworks and images, literary, religious, and philosophic texts, languages, historical figures, movements, and events, and so on. Crucially, disciplines discipline us. Becoming disciplined is a long and complex process. Among other things it involves acquiring a characteristic sensibility—that is, a way of seeing things in the world as worthy of interest, as potentially arousing our curiosity and meriting our attention. Linked with this are a distinctive way of posing questions about such things and a framework, method, or set of heuristics that prescribes how to answer those questions, along with the skills and knowledge necessary for doing so. This includes such things as procedures for handling evidence, constructing arguments, and communicating conclusions. Finally, disciplines possess standards for recognizing what might count as an adequate answer; that is, they have some conception of what it means to get it right with respect to their subject matter. This interlocking mental apparatus for inquiry makes up what we might call, to borrow a term from historian of science A. C. Crombie, a style of thinking.

The styles of thinking that belong to philosophy, art history, or media studies determine how we come to know and understand some part of the world in discipline-specific terms. The same objects appear differently when handled by each discipline, and they prompt different kinds of investigation. An intellectual historian and a literary critic look at the same texts in radically different ways, just as philosophers and art historians have their own purposes for looking at paintings. Competence in one discipline does not inherently transfer to any other, as the unfortunately middling character of most interdisciplinary work testifies. This is just to say, to return to our earlier point, that what it means to think critically or to adopt a certain perspective is always relative to the methods and standards that disciplines have developed for engaging with their objects.

The history of each discipline is the testimony of generations of students and scholars reporting not just their factual discoveries about such objects, but also their own personal forms of understanding and interpreting those discoveries. It is a discursive tapestry woven from the traces of countless individual encounters and struggles. The value of this enterprise rests on the fact that it is, all things considered, good to know and understand the world and ourselves in richer, deeper, more striking and insightful ways, whether or not this turns out to have any other use, or to promote any other virtues. I suspect that many defenders of the humanities balk at acknowledging their radiant uselessness. It seems to cede too much ground to their critics, and the flight to instrumental or pragmatic justifications reflects this anxiety. But, to pick an example not entirely at random, I see no reason that seeking to understand the matrix of historical forces that led to the fascinating uses of panoramas in 19^th century fiction should need any kind of justification beyond achieving understanding itself.

It’s worth noting that much work in “STEM” is equally obscure in terms of its potential application. The move by many scientific funding agencies to requiring some sort of translational or practical benefits as a condition of receiving grants has promoted an enormous amount of shifty rhetoric and institutional self-deception on this point. Much of science (let alone mathematics) makes little or no practical difference at all; certainly as little difference as the scholarship produced by, say, medieval art historians. It would be worth doing even if it made no difference, and for the same reasons. In light of the fact that science departments are no less immune to being shuttered for lack of enrollment, this point of commonality should encourage greater solidarity across the STEM-humanities divide.

To be clear, I have no idea how to argue for this claim about the intrinsic value of understanding against a stubbornly incurious interlocutor who disagrees with it. That is always the case for non-instrumental values. Not all persuasion is argument, though, and some of the distinctive pleasures of a life dedicated to this sort of activity are well expressed by Becca Rothfeld: “I loved the ideal, rarely realized, of an intellectual community—a group of people committed to thinking together rather than competing against one another for a vanishingly small spate of jobs. And I loved the promise, equally notional, that there might be a retreat from worldly preoccupations, a place reserved for thinking, just for the sheer delight of it.” Even those who have not taken up the humanities as a vocation should, I hope, see the appeal of carving out a place within one’s life where the larger world, with all its pains and demands, cannot penetrate, a place that offers us the opportunity to sate those most human of desires, community and curiosity.

As disciplines, the humanities are both durable and fragile. Durable because they belong to vast, interlocking traditions that have persisted across some of the harshest and least hospitable intellectual and social conditions; but also fragile, because their persistence is never guaranteed. The chain that passes on the skills and knowledge necessary to be a participant in the tradition depends on the reliable reproduction of styles of thought in each new generation, and the methods by which this reproduction is effected are as various as the forms of education that have been devised. Much of what is involved in passing on a style of thinking is conveyed inexplicitly, through imitation, coaching, and close observation of peers and mentors. Take away the opportunities for such informal pedagogy and it is entirely possible for people simply to forget how things are done.

This risk of disciplinary fragmentation is especially acute at moments when, in the culture at large, instrumental uses become valued above all others. In America, this tendency has always been present to some degree or other. In the 19^th century Yale and other universities were excoriated for having a curriculum that was out of step with the needs of the business community and for being insufficient to students’ career needs. The formation of land grant universities was similarly predicated on serving “the liberal and practical arts,” with emphasis on the latter, especially as suited to industry and agriculture. The neoliberal decades of the latter 20^th century brought the now-dominant model on which universities seek to fuse with (or mutate into) corporations. The endpoint of this trend is that whether something is taken to have cultural value is proportional to the degree that it can be monetized, or contribute to productivity and technological progress, or otherwise be measured relative to some economically quantifiable standard (now including attentional metrics such as clicks, or shares, or time-on-platform).

At the moment, humanistic traditions are largely maintained in schools and universities, but this too is a contingent, and possibly fleeting, arrangement. The research university operating at mass scale is a relatively recent experiment. And thanks to the corporatization of education, market logic now permeates universities as well, which accounts for the fact that departments must meet administratively established targets for enrollment and majors or else face the chopping block. In the face of this situation, either we will collectively decide to carve out a cultural niche within which inherently valuable non-instrumental activities can exist and thrive, or we will find out just how much degradation is compatible with their continued existence at all. Colleges and universities, even in their currently problematic and compromised state, still have some chance of serving as this niche.

My own preferred vision of the university sees it as precisely a place for conserving the parts of our history and culture which society at large neglects, devalues, or disdains. This idea was nicely expressed by media theorist Neil Postman in his 1979 book Teaching as a Conserving Activity: “Education tries to conserve tradition when the rest of the environment is innovative. Or it is innovative when the rest of the society is tradition-bound… The function of education is always to offer the counterargument, the other side of the picture” (p. 25). Postman calls this a “thermostatic” conception of education, a metaphor that depicts schools and universities in cybernetic terms as cultural governors ensuring that a kind of balance of forces is maintained. Hence education is fundamentally countercyclical; it has as its task “putting forward the case for what is not happening in the culture.”

Looking around, it is not hard to list any number of things that might merit conservation. To take just one case, arguments that we are careening towards a post-print (and therefore post-literate) culture have been around since the development of television, but they land much differently now that the arts of reading texts and looking at objects slowly, closely, and with sustained attention have been more or less disintegrated in the face of our always-on screen-based existence. Books are the common medium of the humanities, which live and die on people’s ability to engage with the texts that are significant within the tradition. If universities were recalled to their genuinely thermostatic purpose, they would be vigorously making their stand on a defense of these book-centered traditions of knowledge, and the forms of life that they foster.

Mounting a defense on the grounds of the humanities’ inherent rather than instrumental value further strikes against the dominant cultural demands for productivity and utility. Universities that enacted their conserving mission would be places where alternatives to the prevailing values and ways of life could flourish, and where projects that might lead nowhere productive could be nourished. In short, properly defending the humanities will require universities to embrace their role as the true, and perhaps final, home of the counterculture.