Ammon News - At a recent conference of German and American literary scholars, I suggested that our high-level discussions would matter only if we helped change students’ lives. It is not enough to tell students how the skills developed in reading literature can “transfer” to other parts of their lives. Rather, we must help them become better interpreters of each other, so that they can become better friends, family members, and citizens.
I had anticipated that this argument would meet with skepticism or insistence that studying great works of literature is important for its own sake. To my surprise, the response went much further than that, and even included an accusation that I was condoning “tyranny”. The idea that we might teach people how to live well, I was told, wrongly assumes that we ourselves know how to live well, and that we are right to impose our views on others.
There is some logic to this concern. After all, far-right politicians in many countries are currently trying to impose their values on students by banning certain subjects and books. But I was not advocating for university instructors to tell people how to live. My point was simply that we should help our students connect the classroom to their daily lives through meaningful reflection. The heated response I received speaks volumes about how some humanists have abdicated their historic role: to help people find meaning.
Too many teachers nowadays avoid engaging in serious conversations about living well. With the future of humanities instruction in doubt, this is a grave mistake. We urgently need to reconnect the humanities classroom to the age-old quest for a meaningful life, not least because there is deep yearning for this kind of education. From 2013 to 2019, sales of “self-help” books increased annually by 11 per cent, and that was before they became an even bigger hit during the pandemic. Psychological treatment for stress and anxiety continues to rise, with reports of year-long waitlists just to see a therapist. In many countries, there simply are not enough mental-health services to meet the demand.
Moreover, as universities have gradually ceased to be centers for deep conversations about life, people have been creating their own forums for humanistic engagement. Groups like the Catherine Project, Night School Bar and Premise are bringing people together outside of universities to hold wide-ranging discussions about life and art. It is little wonder that when universities do offer these kinds of classes, students respond. Three of Yale University’s most popular courses are about happiness, death, and how to lead a life worth living. Unfortunately, these are the stand-out exceptions that prove the rule.
In the absence of thoughtful guidance, people will increasingly seek meaning elsewhere, and not always in healthy or fruitful ways. Social-science research demonstrates that when people feel adrift or deprived of meaning in their lives, they become more susceptible to authoritarian leaders. Open-minded humanists should probably worry less about the “tyranny” of helping people find meaning, and more about how the lack of meaning can lead to actual tyranny.
Given that there is massive demand for humanistic knowledge, why has such teaching been marginalised in the university? One reason is rooted in the Enlightenment’s ideal of disinterested knowledge. Modern scientific investigation was supposed to free itself from “interests,” especially misguided quests to deny science and follow religious dogma. But as science freed itself from oppressive theology, it also moved away from the search for meaning. Scientists rightly wanted to explain what was empirically verifiable, and there was no mathematical formula for how to live well.
Humanistic research also went down this path. For example, many scholars stopped trying to understand what poetry can teach us about how to live, and focused instead on offering formal, sociological and historical accounts of poetry’s role in human society. But as worthwhile as such research may be, it became too dominant, unwittingly leading to an academic monoculture of knowledge production that marginalises the bigger questions of life.
The good news is that we can re-engage with these bigger questions without recreating the problems of the past. Considerate classroom discussions of big humanistic questions can help everyone (students and instructors alike) better understand what a good life can be; and the knowledge of modern scholarship about topics like ecology, identity, narrative and interpretation can be valuable aids in adding depth and relevance to these discussions.
The coming years may offer humanists a major new opportunity to reinvent themselves as the people who can best help students explore the wonders and challenges of human existence. Since the start of the pandemic, when so many people began to question economic pieties about the increasingly career-oriented nature of college, universities around the world have reported a resurgent interest in humanistic study. In the current academic year, for example, the number of declared humanities majors at the University of California, Berkeley, surged 121 per cent compared to last year.
To be sure, these are preliminary figures, and we will have to see if the trend continues. But even a small uptick represents a crucial opportunity for the humanities. Even as we avoid “tyrannically” imposing our own assumptions on our students, we should be equally wary of neglecting to help them understand how to live well on their own terms.
The humanities can do that, and it is an instructor’s job to show students how. Our classrooms should be places where the thorniest issues of life are considered, debated, and reimagined; where meaning and purpose are kindled and cherished; and where everyone can work together to understand and appreciate the fullness of life. It falls to us to ignite new enlightenments, where we combine the best of our scientific knowledge with the wisdom to make a meaningful world for all.
Avram Alpert, a research fellow at The New Institute in Hamburg, is the author, most recently, of “The Good-Enough Life” (Princeton University Press, 2022). Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2023. www.project-syndicate.org
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