To wake up one morning and learn that one’s job might soon be “disrupted,” or outright eliminated, by the emergence of an overhyped new technology that excites rich people is – let’s start here – a pretty common experience by now. It puts you in good company. A club that includes linotype-machine operators, taxi drivers, some farm workers, and the original Luddites, but somehow never includes capital owners or their profligate children: this is, all things considered, not a bad club, and one would wish to join it but for the sparsity of the accommodations. But if the prediction of redundancy comes true, this solidarity in misfortune will probably prove cold comfort.
Say, for example, you’re a college English teacher, and a significant portion of the nation’s venture capitalists seems convinced that a machine can now do – or will soon do, very soon, just a few more gigatons of water from now – what you are supposedly training your students to do. Say as well that these same machines, supposedly, are only one or two more clicks of Progress’s wheel away from being able to judge and grade the work thus generated. Clearly, you and your thousands of colleagues are now free to seek exciting new opportunities in our ever-moving economy – that is, to reap the punishment that you deserve for having cared about writing and reading in the first place. You ought to have learned to code, a skill that is itself also supposedly on its way to being rendered redundant by this new technology. Funny how that works out.
Sophie Dumont, Amarillo, oil on canvas, 2023. All artwork by Sophie Dumont. Used by permission.
This has happened to me over the last couple of years, as a result of breakthroughs in what is (carelessly) called “artificial intelligence,” or (more accurately) large language modeling. Granted, I don’t know the extent to which my line of work is actually threatened by the eerie, vaguely-writing-flavored products that programs like ChatGPT generate. I can’t say I’m blown away by the results I’ve seen so far. And the nation’s bloviators do seem to enjoy predicting the end of higher education “as we know it,” given the way they seize on every new technology or modality as an excuse. I have taught college English for almost twenty years, and I have never done my work under any but the gloomiest of forecasts. Had I started twenty years earlier, the same may well have been true. (Already in the 1980s, academics could lament that the days of the GI Bill and Sputnik had passed.) If I have stubbornly proceeded in the face of discouragement, that is not from confidence, but rather from desperation, its reasonable facsimile. A person who is simply incapable of being any other way than he is learns to live with a high degree of uncertainty. Meanwhile, the “disrupting” trends come and go – a decade ago it was Massive Online Open Courses – and at least some of us are still standing, thanks either to the last vestiges of tenure or, as in my case, our unions.
It turns out that there is some benefit to working in an industry that is clearly contracting but has not yet died. It forces you to think. Which is anyway your job, if you’re a teacher. As Samuel Johnson said of the death penalty, it concentrates the mind. Granted, one is hardly thinking from a position of disinterest, any more than are the various gadget-mongers and module enthusiasts who constantly assert that they will, with a little more venture capital funding, finally overthrow your tyrannical grip on the process of “education” (which is to say, your tenuous grip on a day’s pay for a day’s work). But love is a form of knowledge, or so I think, and I love what I do. So before I am replaced by an automated grader, an “AI” tutor, and an underpaid, non-union “learning facilitator” who is making a third my salary to coach three times as many students through a college experience for which, somehow, Silicon Valley will figure out how to charge even more than we do, I want to try to get a grip on what that loved thing I do actually is. What is it worth? Who is it for? Why is it important to me that the academic study of literature and writing should survive?
I ask myself this, and the answer is as unambiguous as it is indefensible. Literature seems to me – and I say this with no intention to denigrate theology, the ancient claimant to this title – the queen of the sciences. How can this be? John Calvin, in one of the least objectionable remarks he ever made, posited that our knowledge comes in two kinds – knowledge of God and of ourselves – and that it’s hard to sort one from the other. So when I say that it seems to me that literature is the queen of the sciences, maybe I just mean that literature is a particular kind of theology, one in which the created starts to know its Creator, obliquely and sidelong, through the study of itself. And theology, in turn, “is a kind of gigantic and intricate poetry,” as Marilynne Robinson once wrote. The urge that makes me read novels makes me read theology too. You can’t cleanly separate the two.
But why literature specifically, as compared to other art forms? It’s not like I don’t admire painting, or sculpture, or music. Film has some of the advantages of literature, plus (due to its comparatively recent invention) a canon of masterpieces small enough a dedicated person might actually be able to watch most of them in a lifetime. One hundred twenty-odd years’ worth of films that average around two hours of your life to “read” – that’s a lot more doable than thousands of years’ worth of literature. But there’s something about literature, an art form that evokes consciousness while being composed of language, which for many (though not all) of us is the medium in which consciousness makes itself felt. Literature is fractal in this way – it is about, among other things, the thing that it’s about other things with. One text can hold seemingly (though not actually) everything.
My high view of language used to force me into a position of strong human exceptionalism. Due to the influence of such thinkers as Mary Midgley, David Bentley Hart, the Buddha, and the bulldog who used to live downstairs, I have moved on from this way of thinking. Some animals, such as elephants, seem to share the quality of being that we call “personhood” because we know it primarily through looking at and through our personal selves. Though language still strikes me as uniquely ours, I now think of it more as a gift that we possess for everyone and for everything. We are the world’s way of knowing itself and telling itself to itself, and this special job we have actually entails not having a swelled head about it.
The case for literature, then, is just “it’s impossibly beautiful and rich.” I came of age during a period of ugly public contestation about the content and meaning of university-level literary studies. As is usually the case when I look back at a war, the sides in that one seem to be drawn all wrong. A war asks you to pick one side or the other, after all, and it is therefore inconvenient not to have all the good and bad on opposite sides. I can’t fight with the single-minded aggression and hatred that culture war, like every other kind of war, demands of me if I’m fighting on the side of fifty-two percent good versus forty-eight percent bad. And when I look back at the “canon wars,” though there is a side that I tend to fall on, for both practical and moral reasons – the side generally understood to stand for pluralism, multiculturalism, diversity, expanding or eliminating canons, and, not incidentally, letting the children of guys who work at Walmart (i.e., me) study at university in the first place – I have never been able to fully belong to my army.
Sophie Dumont, Green Library, oil on canvas, 2018.
Broadly speaking, I think that we gave up too easily on the language of the true, the beautiful, and the good, ceding it to sincere traditionalists but also insincere provocateurs. Many of us enthusiastically adopted arguments from the social sciences that treat all of our aesthetic experiences more or less the way Darwinism treats love: as a smokescreen. You think you love your spouse, but actually you’re just following your genes’ orders, says Richard Dawkins. You think you love the last two paragraphs of James Joyce’s “The Dead,” but actually you’re just enjoying all of the sweet, sweet cultural capital that Joyce represents, says Pierre Bourdieu. (Occasionally Bourdieu hedges on this point, just as Dawkins does, but the thrust of the argument is unmistakable.) Once you’ve broadly bought into this worldview, the only remaining justification for studying old art is to help you understand the various discourses that have brought us to our current historical moment so that we can then change our political direction. It’s a lot of work for potentially little strategic payoff. Very few literary scholars and teachers really believe any of this in a thoroughgoing way; you can ask them about their favorite novels, and they’ll speak like lovers. But for some reason, we have allowed this language to become the dominant disciplinary currency. If you want to make an argument that everybody will have to defer to or at least reckon with, you have to make it in this language.
So much for beauty. As for truth and goodness, I’m not sure what happened, frankly. Many of the people I know – most of my work friends, people I love, people who I think are good to their students and their coworkers – talk, some of the time, like relativists. When it counts, they never act like relativists; they act like people who have actual principles that they believe are real in some sense. (Otherwise I wouldn’t be friends with them.) We could talk about the relativism of Heidegger or certain anthropologists or other major thinkers, but I think this tendency predates and underlies any particular academic trends; it is an ancient tropism of the middle class. When you live uncomfortably in the space between two incompatible realities – that of the poor and that of the rich – it’s easy to find yourself babbling about how everyone has their own truth. It’s certainly easier than picking a side.
As it happens, it’s very easy to make the case for cultural diversity, for widening the canon, for treating a wide variety of people and their works and days with respect, using the old language of truth, beauty, and goodness. (There is no such thing as “eliminating the canon,” at least not for literature; our time on earth is too limited, and bad books, unlike bad movies or bad songs, take too much energy.) Marginalized people tell the truth and make good things all the time. It is good not to be a snob. It is evil as well as stupid to be a racist. Advocates of particular marginalized literatures sometimes get themselves all tied up in the idea that “illegibility,” “unreadability,” “unrecuperability,” or the like are meaningful concepts in themselves, and that they constitute the grounds of these literatures’ importance. Ultimately, though, we’re one species – forgetting that was the original sin of the Western-civilization triumphalists – and we like books that are beautiful, truthful, and interesting. These criteria are what we have to work with. We study literature, and, humbly, we emulate it, because it is good.
That’s the case I make when I’m speaking to friendlies. What I’d like, of course, is a case that easily justifies my job to the people who want to get rid of it. Unfortunately this is probably impossible. You cannot finally justify yourself to nihilists. Plato’s Socrates tries at least twice – in the Gorgias and in the Republic. It makes for thrilling reading in both cases. But all he really manages to do to his antagonists – Callicles in the first dialogue, Thrasymachus in the second – is to press them on the points where they are still capable of shame. Which is to say, points on which they are insufficiently committed to the nihilistic principles they have espoused. I’m not sure all Silicon Valley types have that problem.
I’ve used the word “nihilists.” In some cases, it probably fits. In other cases, perhaps it doesn’t. One of the worldviews that seems to appeal to the folks who are so excited about ChatGPT is “long-termism,” which assumes that humankind as a whole has a destiny, and that our tools will help us to reach it somewhat faster. What that destiny is, nobody knows. But work and education are hindrances to it, and, to the extent that they are necessary, should be sped through as quickly as possible. Since no real account is usually given of the thing that we are speeding to – it will involve space travel, algorithms, asteroid mining, and spreadsheets, but there’s a great nothing at its center – this worldview functions like nihilism. To me, work and education – like rest, love, worship, culture, strange hobbies, village pantomimes, dumb mistakes, chants that children jump rope to, heartbreaking last-quarter fumblings of the ball, graffiti on ugly bridges, all of it – are things we do because it is our job to be people. They are not in themselves hindrances. It is such a basic, obvious, and profound difference in worldview that I have no idea how I would communicate it to someone like Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. It would be like trying to convince Charles Manson that an egalitarian marriage to an adult woman is fun. You’d alternate between points that are true but that your audience can’t understand, and semi-utilitarian arguments that misshape and distort the thing you’re trying to talk about.
Sophie Dumont, Literature, oil on canvas, 2022.
Nor can I justify mass education in serious, grown-up reading and writing habits to people who regard themselves or their children as natural aristocrats, and liberal education as a possession only meant for such aristocrats. Why should the servants and drones need any knowledge beyond exactly that knowledge that they, the Little Lords Fauntleroy of the universe, require them to have? And it is this agenda, only this agenda, you should hear behind attacks on the liberal arts and recurrent conversations about which majors are “responsible” and “irresponsible” to study. If you’re from the class of people who are not necessarily expected to go to college – I was – then any college at all, whatever your major, puts you in a better position than you started from. I will always be incredibly grateful to my parents for realizing this early and not trying to browbeat me into being a mathematician or a “consultant,” a scenario I often see playing out in the lives of students who come from backgrounds like mine. You don’t have to go to someplace as ridiculously expensive as the University of Michigan, where I work, let alone Harvard. (Colleges, by the way, are expensive because tuition is usually an unrestricted money source, not because adjunct lecturers and grad students or even tenured faculty are living high on the hog. We’re not the ones seeing most of that money.) You do not have to major in business or STEM if you don’t want to. You can go to community college or a good, cheap state school and study what interests you, so long as the state legislature or some ambitious college president hasn’t cut all those classes. If you are coming from anywhere but the working class, such a choice may lead you to make less money than your parents did, but the unfortunate fact is that if you’re middle or upper class, you’re already going to make less than your parents did. The globe is getting warmer and stuff is getting scarcer and America’s position in the world is probably at least settling a bit, like an old house. You might as well fashion a life that you can live with.
How will we save the academic humanities if the AI enthusiasts have their way? (Nonacademic humanities will continue as long as civilization does, of course, but the point is to reserve a version of the humanities that isn’t just a hobby of the leisured.) The prospects are a little grim, but they aren’t nonexistent.
Since business school is the one kind of school nobody seems to question the value of, I do sometimes wonder why we in the humanities don’t spend more time trying to colonize it. A person would learn far more about, say, how to conduct a careful negotiation between hostile factions from reading Water Margin – that medieval Chinese classic in which a confederacy of outlaws hashes out a tenuous social order – than from any textbook. Certainly you could understand the real political economy of the world better from, say, reading Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, crosschecking as you do so every firm mentioned in that novel against the day’s issue of the Financial Times, than from the Benthamite just-so stories we furnish to the modern clerical class via Economics 101. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is a masterclass in “resilience,” in “adjusting to challenges,” though putting it that way makes me a little sick. If these end up being the only terms on which the study of actually good books survives in higher education, I will overcome my gag reflex sooner or later.
The other form of education that our society seems willing to respect, which is little modules and workshops dispensed to well-off professionals, also seems a likely enough vehicle for the survival of some sort of literary culture. Tell a bunch of young men that you can teach them what women really want, and then, when they show up, give them a plateful of nachos, a copy of the collected works of the Brontë sisters, a burned CD of ten or twelve Joan Armatrading songs. Maybe throw in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.” You’d be doing them a favor. Fans of high culture should welcome vulgarization in a pinch, the same way that devout Sunday school teachers welcome the untutored, inarticulate, undirected faith of a child. People gotta start somewhere.
But we, as a society, are thankfully not starting from this point, though we may well end up at it. We still have thousands of institutions of higher learning, and the political means to reorient these institutions away from the pursuit of profit and toward the common good.
Ultimately, the discussion about justifying the humanities is simultaneously too complicated, too easy, and beside the point. You can spend your entire life making it, examining its endless intricacies, without saying anything that will persuade the unpersuadable. You can also make it in a few words and say everything necessary: beauty, truth, and goodness are for everybody.
So no, there is no point in making a Case for the Humanities to the people who are most excited about getting rid of them. What will work with these people, finally, is force. Relax, reader; I’m a Christian writing for a Christian publication, and I’m not going to recommend any tactics that would violate its nonviolent criteria. I just mean labor militancy. When your upper administration invites McKinsey or Deloitte to come to campus and do their standard-issue How to Ruin a College and Still Go Broke slide show, tell them no. Tell the students what their administrators are doing, and what these plans have done for other schools (ruined them). Make sure the parents know too. Reach those donors and regents who seem like they might have souls. Then go on strike for a month. That, not “new efficiencies,” is what will save mass higher education, if anything does. Finally, even the densest rich people want enough of these institutions to continue standing that they have someplace to send their children. Practically speaking, that is how you make the Case for the Humanities in a way that preserves their presence on college campuses. The people in my profession will grasp this before it’s too late, or they won’t.
