December 31, 2021
While I have written in previous newsletters about the purpose and value of liberal education, and of literary education in particular, a recent debate among high-profile scholars prompts me to approach the question from a somewhat different angle. In the December 20, 2021 issue of the New Yorker, Louis Menand, professor of English at Harvard and one of our most eminent public intellectuals, takes issue with two recently published books, both of which argue that an education in the humanities makes us better people. The article is preceded by a little hook: “The humanities are in danger, but humanists can’t agree on how—or why—they should be saved.” The humanities do not provide job skills or a pipeline to a career. If they do not change us in some way for the better, then why indeed should they be saved?
Liberal education, with the humanities at its center, has long been defended on the grounds that it expands students’ vision beyond the narrow perspective of financial success and security, important as those may be. I have read neither of the books Menand attacks, and what he says about them makes them sound vulnerable in some ways and outright wrong in others. But his tone seems one of barely restrained impatience, and that impatience leads him to a rather brusque-sounding conclusion:
Reading Weinstein and Montás, you might conclude that English professors, having spent their entire lives reading and discussing works of literature, must be the wisest and most humane people on earth. Take my word for it, we are not. We are not better or worse than anyone else. I have read and taught hundreds of books, including most of the books in the Columbia Core. I teach a great-books course now. I like my job, and I think I understand many things that are important to me much better than I did when I was seventeen. But I don’t think I’m a better person.
It is of course impossible to disagree with the judgment on academics: I am, like Menand, an English professor, and I have spent a lifetime among academics, and I can readily vouch for our lack of saintliness. But simply to walk away from the discussion at that point is to abandon the humanities at a time when they are more threatened with extinction than at any other—maybe not at Harvard or Columbia and other protected enclaves, but as part of American higher education in general. And if study of the humanities is not potentially transformative, why should these endangered species be preserved, especially since students are paying tuition that they often can barely afford in order to help subsidize them? John McWhorter, whose New York Times newsletter of December 17, 2021 alerted me to Menand’s article, makes his own argument that liberal education can indeed make one a better person. Someone who titles both a podcast and a newsletter Expanding Eyes clearly agrees that there is something potentially transformative about studying literature, mythology, and other “productions of time,” in William Blake’s phrase. But Menand’s challenge is legitimate, and the issue needs to be clarified: the armies are fighting in the dark, with the usual result that it has become hard to distinguish enemies from allies.
The problem is raised by Menand and McWhorter in terms of “great books” programs, in which students, as a part of a general Core curriculum, study certain texts whose fame and wide influence have made them canonical. Titles mentioned include some of the usual suspects, such as Plato’s Republic and Dante’s Divine Comedy. I have no quarrel with the “great books” approach, on the grounds that good teachers can adapt almost any kind of framework to good purposes. The limitation of the “great books” philosophy, however, is that it implies that the transformative power of literature—from this point I will restrict my argument to the study of literature, both for simplicity and because that is what I know—resides in the books on the syllabus. But even the greatest books are not transformative without an active response on the part of a reader. And readers have to choose to engage actively with a text and open themselves to being transformed by it. It does not happen automatically, by mere exposure, or even for that matter by the best teaching. The implication, and it is the main point of this newsletter, is that it is the readers who are responsible, by an act of free choice, for the influence of a text upon themselves. This is no original insight of my own: it is Milton’s argument in his great prose work Areopagitica, where he is arguing against censorship. As he puts it, with typically acerbic wit, “A wise man will make better use of an idle pamphlet than a fool of holy scripture.” What’s more, the fool is capable of perverting the Bible, that greatest of all great books, into something as foolish as he is.
Does this mean that it does not matter what we put on the syllabus? Actually, it means we ought to be more thoughtful than ever: a syllabus of canonical works does not ensure profundity, and a syllabus of non-canonical works could lead to time-wasting frivolity—or it could lead to a recognition of the possibilities latent in works, even in whole genres, often dismissed or disapproved of. Those defending the value of studying literature are likely to use the novel’s capacity for empathetic insight into the minds and hearts of other people as their first example: David Brooks did so in his column on the imagination, which I discussed here some weeks ago. And yet when the novel appeared in the 18th century as a new literary genre, it was scorned as, at best, the utmost time-wasting frivolity; at worst, a bad moral influence, especially on young women. After all, look what happened to Madame Bovary because of reading all those romance novels. I have taught the “greats,” including Shakespeare and Milton. At the same time, I have taught genres like science fiction and the graphic novel, both of which have suffered from a similar kind of disapproval.
If Menand does not believe in the study of literature as transformative, how then does he defend it? Actually, what he does offer does not exactly amount to a ringing defense, to such an extent that one ends feeling rather puzzled. At a few points, he seems to fall back upon the traditional rationale of scholarship as pure, disinterested knowledge. Humanists, he says, “should be defending their role in the knowledge business.” In the subsequent paragraph, he continues, “Art and literature have cognitive value. They are records of the ways human beings have made sense of experience. They tell us something about the world.” Knowledge is something solid and defensible, whereas his complaint about the literature-as-transformative people is that their claims are vaporous, vacuous, most likely phony:
And if, as these authors insist, education is about self-knowledge and the nature of the good, what are those things supposed to look like? How do we know them when we get there? What does it mean to be human? What exactly is the good life?
Oh, they can’t say. The whole business is ineffable. We should know better than to expect answers. That’s quant-thinking…. It all sounds a lot like “Trust us. We can’t explain it, but we know what we’re doing.”
Literary study as the disinterested pursuit of knowledge relates it to the rationales of the natural and social sciences, and Menand is quite right to insist that the authors he is critiquing are wrongheaded in their attack on science. In my own university, there is a School of Arts and Humanities. “Arts” here means liberal arts according to a traditional definition—and it comprises both the natural and the social sciences. The contrast is with the other “Schools,” which are professional and practical rather than liberal arts: Business, Education, Nursing, the Conservatory, Engineering, Math and Computer Science. To study physics is to study one of the liberal arts. The massive exodus from the humanities is not into the sciences but into the practical, professional disciplines. As liberal arts disciplines, the sciences are beleaguered in the same way that we are. Biology survives partly as a pre-med subject; chemistry partly as a pre-nursing subject. And social demand for some kind of practical relevance complicates the scientific pursuit of pure knowledge: any scientist can tell humanists about how research that promises some kind of practical application is more likely to get funded.
To say, “I teach knowledge of a subject” is readily demonstrable. To say, “I am an agent of transformation” is decidedly not. Hence Menand’s mild-mannered irritation, which I find understandable up to a point. But his exhortation to the “great books” advocates to “get out of their silos” more may have a different kind of applicability to himself. For whatever may be true at Harvard, to defend a literature course on the grounds that it imparts knowledge has become, well, indefensible under the demands of “assessment,” which universities need to undergo in order to be accredited. These days, what you are required to put in your syllabus under Course Objectives is not what students will learn but “what students will be able to do” after taking this course. Funneling information into students is no longer considered an accreditation-worthy goal. English courses can claim that the students will be better able to read, write, and think critically, which is true but reduces English to its most basic “language arts” level. On the other hand, transformational pedagogy does no better. If you say under Course Objectives that “students will become better human beings” by the end of this course, you have to be able to assess through objective tests the degree to which they have been bettered, with results that are preferably quantifiable.
Nonetheless, if we set aside assessment and other forms of social pressure to prove that this seemingly ivory-tower form of education really is practical after all, and therefore that parents and taxpayers are getting something for their dollar, and return to the question of whether studying literature or any other humanities subject can make students better human beings, we find that Menand is actually predisposed to grant it under the right circumstances:
And some students experience a kind of intellectual awakening, which can be inspiring and even transformational. For students who are motivated—and motivation is half of learning—these courses really work. They are happy to read Dante in translation and without a scholarly apparatus, because they want to get a sense of what Dante is all about, and they know that if they don’t get it in college they are unlikely to get it anywhere else.
This is exactly right, as I can attest from 38 years’ experience. Not only that, but when Menand qualifies by saying that the inspiration and transformation happen to “students who are motivated—and motivation is half of learning,” he goes right to the heart of the matter. Can studying literature make students better human beings? Yes, but only when students are motivated to open themselves to being transformed: it is a matter of free will and choice. And not just the students: the same is true of their professors.
It is frustrating—now I’m the one getting irritable—when literary study is dismissed because it doesn’t automatically work on students (or anyone else), like taking a pill. Even Jesus did not come up to that standard. Jesus was an oral teacher, without a text, but he was still a teacher—and he suffered the same frustrations as any other teacher. As he put it himself, sometimes the seed falls upon hard ground, or goes into the bushes, and only on occasion falls on fertile soil, takes root, and grows into the kingdom of heaven. The scribes and Pharisees, despite their intellectual sophistication, were rock-hard ground, whereas some uneducated but good-willed folk listened and understood. In the middle were earnest seekers like Nicodemus, with his honest struggle to understand the metaphor of being “born again.” The disciples were no better: there is a hilarious scene in Mark 4 in which Jesus loses it and yells at his disciples, “Know ye not this parable? How then will ye know all parables?” Any teacher can relate.
In a typical classroom, you are likely to find three types of students. There are those who are open, eager, hungry, seeking something even when they may not be sure what. There are no guarantees, but these students may very well become better human beings by studying literature. Then there is a large component that is basically asleep, dormant, there in class because there is a requirement or because the course fit into their schedule, but not so much resistant as merely passive. With luck, at least some of these may be awakened, to a greater or lesser degree. You never know—I never dismiss students out of hand, always assume there is a possibility that they could become engaged. Finally, there is the hard ground: students who cannot or will not be reached. Sometimes it is because their lives are so dysfunctional; sometimes because they are actively resisting, like the football player who once looked me in the eye and said, “I’m really only here to play football, you know.” Even then, I never assume that a change of mind or heart is impossible. But the point is that the students must freely choose to become better human beings. If they do, transformation is possible, whether or not it can be measured by assessment. If not, well, in the words of a song by Kieran Kane and Kevin Welch, “You can’t save everybody. / Everybody don’t want to be saved.”
So far, we have not addressed Menand’s skeptical query as to whether the phrase “become a better person” has any real content, and, if so, how this process of betterment works. In actuality, it is not ineffable but perfectly straightforward and down to earth, beginning on the simplest level with fairy tales told to children. Folk tales (to use the more expansive term) migrate all over the world and are adapted to the values of a wide variety of cultures. Composition textbooks sometimes include a unit on folk tales, in which a half-dozen versions of the same folk tale are provided so that students may compare them, analyzing what is culturally relative and what is universal. I have taught a unit on “Cinderella,” in which many details differed dramatically due to cultural values: in a Russian version, the Cinderella character marries a poor but honest farmer rather than a prince; in an Algonquin (!) version she marries an invisible spiritual being. In a Vietnamese rendition she is killed and reincarnated twice and has no qualms about taking horrifically violent revenge upon the evil stepmother and nasty stepsister characters. But what was completely constant was the moral contrast between the generous, unselfish, good-willed Cinderella character (her name of course varies) and the cruel, self-centered, nasty stepmother and sisters. Children listening to the tale are being presented with a choice: you should choose to be like Cinderella rather than like the other characters. The tales are clearly told in hopes that children will become better people by listening to them, taking them to heart, and choosing what they will be, learning that life choices have consequences. Cinderella’s goodness is defined in terms of empathy: she is kind and caring to other people, but also to animals, some of which aid her, and she inspires empathy in beings of a higher world—like fairy godmothers—who intervene on her behalf.
Is the lesson of literature that childishly simple? One could retort that there are all too many adults who have failed to grasp the folk tale lesson that they should treat other people with kindness and learn to share their toys. One could also point to the fact that the story of Adam and Eve, according to Biblical scholars, was once an independent folk tale—one that emphasizes the tragic consequences of making the wrong choice. That is why Milton chose to dramatize it at epic length in Paradise Lost, for the freedom to choose, and the temptation to choose wrongly, is Milton’s great theme in all his major works, including the temptation of Christ in Paradise Regained and the temptation of Samson in his drama Samson Agonistes. The line “Reason is but choosing” appears in both Areopagitica and Paradise Lost, and in the latter Milton shows how the consequences of a selfish and evil choice are not just external—the loss of paradise—but internal and psychological. Immediately after Eve eats the fruit she delivers a long soliloquy in which it is evident that eating it has corrupted her nature, made her selfish, manipulative, dishonest, and hungry for power. The real punishment for evil lies in what you become.
Shakespeare dramatizes the same theme in both Macbeth and Othello, which are both dramas of the imagination. Both protagonists learn that when you make the wrong choice, the imagination turns demonic and stalks you like the Furies in Greek mythology. But the demonic mostly stalks you from within, possessing you until you yourself become demonic. Macbeth becomes a genocidal maniac; Othello a superstitious, murderous “savage.” They have gone over to the dark side of the Force. As that allusion implies, the same lesson about the choice to become a better person or a worse is played out in modern works that are essentially modern folk tales, Harry Potter being another example. In Stephen King’s The Shining, it is the child, Danny, who chooses rightly, out of his generous, sympathetic nature, and the whiny, self-pitying, resentful father who chooses, out of his narcissistic self-absorption, to become possessed by, and finally to become, something demonic.
There are of course realistic novels that dramatize the same pattern of moral choice. Indeed, there are critics, from F.R. Leavis to John Gardner, who define the whole history of the novel as a moral tradition. George Eliot, Dickens, Stendahl, Balzac, Conrad, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, James, Faulkner: it is an easy argument to defend. Perhaps the most valuable contribution of the realistic tradition is its insistence that the choice between good and evil is almost never simple. Motives are mixed, and moral choices are rarely black and white. Still, it seems clear that the authors of “great books” in the literary tradition, whether realistic or visionary, wrote in order to make their readers better people.
The choice of becoming either a better person or a worse one is not merely individual but has a social dimension, because our actions affect the lives of others. Tolkien exemplifies this vividly in The Lord of the Rings, written during the darkest days of World War II. Today, in the United States, we are witnessing something similar, as millions of people succumb to the temptation of fascism’s will to power. But there is always a choice, and responsibility for that choice. Even to surrender our will to a charismatic leader, to a cause, or just to the collective mentality of a mob is itself a choice. Literature can teach about that, and by doing so provide a vision of human nature that is clarifying and potentially transformative. No, the study of literature does not inevitably make someone a better person. But if it does not have the capacity to change us at all, then the authors of all those “great books” wrote in vain. I do not think that Menand believes that. Nor do I.