The Humanities Inside and Outside Academia
In The New York Times, Jon Baskin and Anastasia Berg—both editors at The Point—revisit Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom got many things right, they argue, but he focused exclusively on the liberal arts in academia and ignored how institutions outside academia might nourish “humanistic education”:
“Bloom’s insights are vindicated today not only by the shrinking enrollments in English, history and philosophy departments, but also by the rise within those departments of conceptions of humanistic education that privilege scientistic knowledge accumulation, political activism and the cultivation of ‘analytical skills’ thought to be prized in Silicon Valley. But, ironically, it is these very developments that also reveal the folly of the argument in Closing — that questions about the virtuous life and just societies could be addressed only within the confines of academia . . . In recent months, in the midst of a pandemic, a protest movement and a presidential election season, millions of Americans have gravitated to online reading groups and book clubs, attended Zoom panels on the burdens of history and the meaning of open discourse, watched philosophy lectures on YouTube and flocked to longform, humanistic magazines (as editors of one of them, The Point, we can attest that our readership has nearly doubled since March). Those who truly care about the future of the humanities, as opposed to the viability of certain career paths, might begin by seeing such public-facing pursuits as central, rather than ancillary, to their mission.”
I like The Point and other small journals like Hedgehog and The Hudson Review, but boy do you also read a lot of claptrap in supposedly serious magazines today (I’m looking at you, New Yorker and New York Review of Books!). So I am not as hopeful as Baskin and Berg when I look at humanistic discourse outside academia. Things are terrible both inside and outside, and we need to fix both by returning to serious liberal arts education and supporting publications that have not capitulated to illiberalism.
In other news: Earlier this year, the BBC reported that the newly retired Lee Child would hand most of the writing of the Jack Reacher series to his brother. The first supposedly co-authored book has now been published, and it’s a mess, says David Sexton: “Andrew Child knows what he should be doing; he just can’t manage it. Reacher’s fabulous taciturnity? The killer phrase ‘Reacher said nothing’ is dutifully reproduced several times, but this Reacher says far too much. He’s a loquacious bore, a pedant, quibbling about words and given to explaining things at great length before he takes action. His mystique is dissolved by too much information all round. Andrew Child knows his brother’s maxim: ‘You should write the fast stuff slow and the slow stuff fast.’ But the slowed-down action sequences simply don’t work. They have none of the grace of Lee’s own rhythm and syntax. Peculiarly fixated on left hands and right hands, they read like instruction manuals translated from another language.” Janet Maslin agrees: “The Sentinel shows the same grisliness that was beginning to turn up in Lee’s later books; Andrew wrote that way from the start. It’s also action-packed to a fault, which robs it of the leanness that is one of the series’ main attractions . . . It’s presumably Andrew who externalizes much of Reacher’s thinking into chatter, turns every fight into a multipage affair and calls excess attention to Reacher’s intrinsic genius for geometry and physics. (Lee’s tricks were smarter and quicker.) And I have no idea why Reacher needs to do so much shopping this time, but he does.”
Vice has always been a junk publication, but at least it made money. Not anymore, it seems: “After being perceived as the red-hot center of Millennial-based media culture for the past decade or so, Vice’s place is harder to pinpoint now. Some of it is still edgy and provocative. But increasingly the impact of its work feels more like the proverbial trees falling in the forest. On top of that, there is the brain drain, along with the ongoing existential advertising crisis across much of digital media—all of which has many investors wondering what the deal is with Vice these days. The answer depends on whom you ask. Top executives at Vice tell you the present is pretty damn fabulous, while the best is yet to come. Former employees—or at least those willing to speak out despite confidentiality provisions in their contracts—say Vice is an unmitigated disaster and it’s only a matter of time before TPG, its private-equity overlord (TPG also has a stake in Air Mail), takes control of the company and tries to salvage what it can of its $450 million preferred-stock investment, made in June 2017 at an ungodly valuation of $5.7 billion.”
The clocks of Windsor Castle: “As the clocks go back this autumn, the horological conservator at Windsor Castle will be busy changing more than 400 clocks from the Royal Collection Trust.”
How to make citizens and save America: Robert Pondiscio reviews E. D. Hirsch’s “farewell” book: “Hirsch has refined his message and mustered fresh evidence in each of his subsequent books, but now, at 92, in what he says is his farewell book, his project has taken on fresh urgency. The aim of How to Educate a Citizen is not merely to save American education from demonstrably false ideas about teaching and learning, but to save America itself. This sounds grandiose, but it follows from Hirsch’s core thesis. Education and nationhood are functionally the same idea. ‘Intellectual error has become a threat to the well-being of the nation,’ Hirsch warns. ‘A truly massive tragedy is building.’”
“T. S. Eliot wrote of Henry James: ‘He had a mind so fine no idea could violate it.’ That was a compliment,” George Scialabba writes. “Eliot thought D. H. Lawrence’s mind was continually and ruinously violated by ideas.”
Alfred Nicol reviews Maryann Corbett’s collection of poems, In Code: “Maryann Corbett spent thirty-five years working for the Minnesota Legislature in the Office of the Revisor of Statutes. Here is how she describes the straitjacket of legalese her writing had to wear all those years: ‘Ours is a stunted tongue, / mostly unmouthed, rarely licked into life. / In it, one may not exclaim, / wonder, or boast … / … Laughter / is illicit, poetry impossible.’ No wonder she has experienced such an outburst of creativity since leaving that position. In the last dozen years, Corbett has authored five books of poetry, one of which, Mid Evil, received the Richard Wilbur Award in 2014.”
