bad humanists

N. Ángel Pinillos asks, Why Are Humanists So Bad at Defending the Humanities? — and his answer is that humanists’ defenses of the humanities fail when they argue that the humanities have any kind of intrinsic, as opposed to instrumental, value. Now, Pinillos says that he happens to believe in the intrinsic value of the humanities, but people outside the humanistic disciplines don’t, so the intrinsic-value argument, “deployed as a public argument, has lost us the public. It has lost us the legislatures, the parents, the donors, the students, and — most painfully — many of our own colleagues.” So what we need to do instead is say things like this:

You will, at some point, need to advocate for your child at her school. You will need to read a teacher’s email carefully enough to notice what it is and is not saying, and write a response that is firm without being inflammatory, and recognize when an administrator is performing concern rather than offering it. You will need to talk to a doctor about a parent’s care, or your own, and follow an argument about risk and tradeoff that the doctor is making quickly and imperfectly, and ask the question that exposes the assumption the doctor has not examined. You will need to understand the context of someone who grew up in a place very different from you, with radically different values and experiences. You will need to read a contract. You will need to read a ballot measure. You will need to argue, in public or in private, for the candidate or the policy you believe in.

Pinillos seems to think that this case has “been ignored,” though for half-a-century I have been reading essays about how a humanities education makes you a better citizen. He also says straightforwardly that we professional humanists “teach a set of skills that you cannot get anywhere else,” which seems to me … well, I started to say that it seems to me a debatable proposition but in fact I think it is demonstrably false. I know many people who can do all the things Pinillos lists in the paragraph quoted above who have never taken so much as one course in the humanities.

There are a number of things about Pinillos’s essay that I’m not crazy about. His effusive praise of himself as a teacher is offputting, as is his celebration of his use of chatbots to write his essay — along with his excitement, articulated in other essays, about outsourcing much of his student evaluation to chatbots. (Which he thinks “reason” demands and only “emotion” could question.) (And any disagreement he characterizes as a “rant” and an attenpt to “shame” him.) Let’s set all that aside. This is my fundamental objection to his essay:

He says that his essay is a defense of the humanities, when in fact it is an argument that universities should continue to fund humanities departments — because of their instrumental value. If you could show that students can learn to read contracts and evaluate communications from doctors without the help of courses in the humanities, then nothing would remain of his defense of “the humanities.”

I say, in reply, that (a) the humanities are not to be conflated with courses in universities that bear the “humanities” designation, and therefore that (b) Pinillos has not defended the humanities at all, but instead has simply pleaded that university administrators and boards of trustees allow people like us to keep our jobs.

Pinillos is especially unhappy with Jennifer Frey’s defense of the humanities in a recent conversation with Ross Douthat, and I agree that Frey’s defense is not a good one — but its shortcomings do not derive from its being intrinsic rather than instrumental. I’m in an odd position here, I suppose, because I believe that

Frey’s argument is not intrinsic at all, but rather instrumental in a different way than Pinillos’s;

but that’s okay because all arguments for the humanities — and for all other human activities — are instrumental, and the key question is: To what ends is this particular activity instrumental?

So we need to abandon the idea that any defense of the humanities can validly describe the study of the humanities as “intrinsically valuable” or “valuable for its own sake”;

however, Pinillos’s argument is the worst kind of instrumentality because it’s directed not at human flourishing in any form but only at preserving a certain category of jobs in universities.

Got that?