What do the Humanities Do?

I used to read critiques of the New York Times by 60's radicals who declared that the paper was a dead relic of the past that had nothing more to offer the world. I was always mystified by this criticism. For years my morning started with an order of Beignets, a cup of cafe au lait at Cafe Du Monde, and the New York Times. Now my opinion has changed. I no longer read the Times with the joy that I once did. The writing has been in decline for years. What used to be a quick morning massage for the brain has long since turned into a dissipated flop in the Lay Z Boy.


Recently the Times has become a parody of itself. Who can remember the last time Maureen Dowd had anything remotely interesting or relevant to say? When every single social issue of the day is viewed through the writer's own relentlessly narcissistic sense of self-importance, the exercise is useless except for that rare voyeur whose sad urges are slaked by watching other people masturbate. Rather than the paper of record, it has become the paper of a time gone by. From its shameless and dishonest shilling of the Iraq war to its recent hiring of Bill Kristol the calender at the Times seems to have stuck at 1980.

Nothing could be more representative of this than the blog, Think Again, by Stanley Fish. Like Kristol and David Brooks he lives in a world where the calender always reads 1980 and grownups like himself save us from the excesses of the Sixties, and progressive values are constantly paired with the foolish excesses of youth. But 27 years have passed since 1980. The promised corrective of Reaganomics actually have produced the first generation that is no more educated, no more wealthy and will live less long than its predecessor. The incredible contention by all these authors is that the fate of the Reagan generation is the result of liberalism a now full generation removed.

Though Fish may be less brazen in his mendacity than Kristol or Brooks, his comments are far more insidious. He constantly tells us to ignore what our eyes tell us, and believe what he feels in his heart -- that the rejection of the liberalism of the 60's, which was itself a pale shadow of the progressivism of the 30's and 40's, will somehow bring us to the promised land. When he writes of the decline of public universities, he deigns to mention in passing the fact that funding has been slashed; but the real villains, he perceives, are regulation and the hippies from some 40 years ago. After going on a debating tour with Dinesh D'Souza, it is clear that Mr. Fish has gone native. His review of Indoctrination U does point out some of the holes in the "documentary," but he is careful to make it clear that he sees political bias in teaching as a problem, a big problem. In another post he goes further, stating that asking a student to compare Ahab to President Bush is prohibited despite the undeniable objective similarities. In other words, if the truth upsets a rightist political sensibilities, it verbotten in class.

When he lists departments that have a potential to be politicized he mentions, of course, Gender Studies, African American History, and the like. Noticeably absent of course are Economics or Business. I have a friend who had an entire class during medical school about why socialized medicine doesn't work. Did he mention this. And is his most recent book about lemming-like devotion to Reaganomics and what it has done to our economy. Of course not, it is, you guessed it, another book warning about liberal menace at Universities.

It isn't just in politics that Fish is stuck in the eighties. He completely fails to understand the nature of our current economy. In his most recent post, he explains how humanities serve no purpose but pleasure and emphatically denies that they have use in the economy. This might come as some surprise to George Lucas who literally invented the blockbuster with Star Wars, the classic hero myth reimagined, or J. K. Rowling whose Harry Potter: The Philosopher's Stone, a classic hero myth which suspiciously resembled Star Wars, made her richer than the Queen, or Rumiko Takahashi, the mangaka, whose innovative use of classical Japanese literary themes transformed manga and anime making her one of the richest women in Japan.

Fish fundamentally does not understand that 27 years have passed and everything has changed. He is the perfect example of what the times has become. To mangle John Lennon, all the Times prints is yesterday, now it is some other day.