Four Ways to Defend the Humanities

Split along the axes of specialization and utility

Recently I came across a 2017 essay by Justin Stover entitled “There Is No Case for the Humanities”. As provocative as Stover’s point sounds, I knew better than to dismiss it, since Stover is an excellent classical scholar who was once a fellow at All Souls College, Oxford and now lectures at University of Edinburgh. I became acquainted with Stover’s work from research on Latin pastoral poetry for the benefit of my Virgil translation. He writes comfortably across the entire Latin (including medieval and Neo-Latin) literary tradition and exhibits a wide and deep knowledge of texts. I was impressed by his seriousness, rigor and penchant for “hardcore” philology. Given this tremendous expertise, I was curious to learn what is the source of his apparent pessimism.

Stover’s essay makes many compelling points and is a rewarding read. He upholds the value of specialization, arguing that for classical scholars, diligent research on a narrow and niche subject has been the historical norm. This is a normative as well as descriptive claim. He also attacks the mindset of utility, and freely admits that the greatest strength of the humanities is not to contribute to the general public, but to sustain a class of, well, humanities scholars. Stover offers something different and unusually candid compared to other “defenses” of the humanities I read before.

After reading the essay, I wanted to conceptualize various arguments made by advocates of the humanities in a clearer and more systematic way. So I mapped the different approaches they take onto a Cartesian plane, similar to a political compass. There is of course somewhat reductive, and I will inevitably miss out on the nuances, but I hope a schema can help to highlight their relative positions. Defending the humanities has become a terribly clichéd subject; the threshold question, namely how one defines the humanities, is open to debate. Like Stover, I will pass on this question and primarily deal with Greek and Latin classics, partly because they have occupied (until recently) a central role in the European humanist tradition, and partly because it’s the field with which I am most familiar.

My framework is informed by two lines of argument from Stover’s essay. The X-axis may be called the “specialization axis”, with specialists on the left end and generalists on the right. Specialists tend to emphasize traditional classics centered on the canon and typically devote themselves to a subset of this canon. Note that the term specialization is relative: a scholar who finds intertexts in a vast range of fragments yet limits his study in the literary sphere is still a specialist compared to one who combines the reading of texts with, say, material culture and social history. In other words, the specialist values—and accordingly, shows—more depth than breadth, and the generalist vice versa.

There is some resonance between this dichotomy with Isaiah Berlin’s analogy of the fox and the hedgehog. The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows only one thing. The source of this fable, Archilochus, says the hedgehog knows hen mega “one big thing”, which can be interpreted either as deep knowledge of one single phenomenon, or an overarching principle across varied fields. No one can accuse Dostoevsky or Proust of narrow-mindedness, but they are hedgehogs nonetheless, according to Berlin. Knowing one thing, however big and important it is, still makes one a hedgehog. By this token, followers of fashionable “theory” today are also specialists. A scholar of psychoanalysis, post-colonialism or radical feminist thought can, hypothetically, churn out monographs to treat one ancient author after another under the same lens. While these treatments differ in how appropriate or innovative they are, such an endeavor is specialist in nature.

The Y-axis may be called the “utility axis”. On the top end are those who justify the humanities by looking at how they may be useful: either in the form of self-help (“13 Marketing Lessons from Sun Tzu”) or social advancement (“What Greek Tragedy Teaches Us About Climate Change”). Utility lies in external factors (business success, climatology) that are independent from the objects of study; hence the same thesis can be transplanted to other disciplines with the methodology barely changed. Instead of Greek tragedy, one may face ecological apocalypse through Shakespeare, French opera, cubist art, et cetera. On the lower end are those who valorize personal enjoyment, edification or growth and take relatively little account of the greater good.

Again, the two views aren’t mutually exclusive, and the line isn’t clearly drawn: it can be argued that cultivation of personal virtue, for example, will naturally lead to a more peaceful and prosperous society. Alternatively, a global utilitarian might say everybody doing what they enjoy the most is automatically a net good for society. But it remains that the humanities are a minority pursuit in the general population, and for those who do pursue them on the lower end of the utility axis, the priority remains on a personal level, with social effects function more as a second-order effect or even as an afterthought. Confucius says: “The scholars of ancient times studied for their own sake, whereas the scholars of modern times studied for other people’s sake.”¹ By this standard, ancient scholars score low on the utility axis, whereas modern ones score high.

The two axes create four quadrants:

Top left: high specialization, high utility

I put here the university administrators who argue for a specific set of skills that studying ancient literature or history can bestow on students, skills which the society considers “useful”. Studying Classics helps you read and write, they say, engaging with strange and difficult material trains you to be a thinker who is detail-oriented but also logical and understands the big picture. This is the kind of litany I have recited at job interviews. The more blatant view is that a liberal arts graduate is better suited for the modern economy, sometimes mixed with a simile about generals and foot soldiers; new metaphors have popped up since the advent of AI, but the dynamic stays the same.

These are possibly all fair points. But it’s unclear why parsing Greek verbs does a better job at making one a productive member of the economy, as opposed to studying Napoleonic Wars or Jane Austen—not to mention the more straightforward majors of economics or business administration. Sure, they can say, Greek and Latin can boost your vocabulary and hone your grammar in English. Yet even if we steel-man this view, intense study of ancient languages (often with a couple of modern languages on the side such as French and German) seems an absurdly strenuous and roundabout way to achieve that goal. One does not learn Beethoven’s piano sonatas to prevent rheumatism.

Perhaps embarrassed by such arguments’ inadequacy (and, according to some, vulgarity), I have seen more contrived reasons to justify specialized study, again much to the satisfaction of admission officers and faculty deans. A specialist of New Comedy may develop a theory of humor to analyse today’s stand-up routines and identify the hidden power structures therein; a scholar of enslaved peoples of Imperial Rome may use her expertise to shed light on forced labour in Gulf countries or systematic racism in America. Some scholars themselves subscribe to this view. Yet the difficulty is explaining how this is more effective than tackling modern problems head on, like sociologists or political scientists have done. Furthermore, there are vast areas of modern concern that finds no equivalent in the ancient world—or only anecdotal connections, such as that between robotics and the automata in Hephaestus’ workshop from the Iliad—and vice versa. There’s always a risk that choosing a niche while driven by contemporary concerns may drive one towards marginalia.

Bottom left: high specialization, low utility

This is Justin Stover’s position. I once read a brilliant speech given at University College, London by A. E. Housman, who is more esteemed today as a poet but was a greater classical scholar, about why one chooses to study philology.² Like Stover, he refuted utilitarian arguments and admitted the patent uselessness and triviality of much of classical scholarship. In the end, he stated, it does not matter whether these studies have real-life applications or “enable the soul”; the goal is simply to quench a thirst to know. Housman goes all the way to reduce classical scholarship’s utility to nil, denying it even the value of self-improvement.

In my opinion, this notion of “art for art’s sake” is most applicable to textual criticism, arguably the most arcane and useless field in classics. It is like a humanities equivalent of number theory. The ability to conjure up ingenious emendations from thin air used to be the sign of a formidable intellect and the crown jewel of classical studies. Housman’s argument, when carried to its logical conclusion, confirms Stover’s slightly disturbing conclusion, namely the field is a self-referential ploy to maintain a courtoisie of humanists, and that outside its own framework, there simply is no case for the humanities. As compelling this view may be to those “in the know”, I am worried how much purchase it has to those outside the field—especially when the subject of study seems narrow and trivial on the surface.

Inscription on the grave of mathematician David Hilbert in Göttingen, Germany: “We must know. We will know.”

Top right: low specialization, high utility

Both marble head Twitter RETVRN guys and left-wing “Not All Dead White Men” activists belong here. The most blatant online trads unambiguously fall in this quadrant because their knowledge of the subject matter tends to be superficial and unsystematic. One wonders how much of their job is grift and has little to do with the classics per se; while they claim their goal is first and foremost to “save the West”, whatever good intentions they may have risks being negated by lack of competence (for example, in glorifying Thomas Kinkade as a master painter).

Putting leftist academics in this category is harder. Most of them have more depth compared to breadth and hence are, technically speaking, specialized; even the most woke academic typically started off with a specialized sub-field. But there are also erudite intellectuals whose work traverses disciplinary lines, such as Michel Foucault, whose forte lies in his breadth rather than depth. His specific factual findings may be disputed by professional historians, but it doesn’t affect the structural value of his over-arching narrative.³

Somewhere in the middle are the advocates of the “classical education movement”. They are ideological to various degrees, but are unified in the belief (which is understandable considering their line of business) that studying the humanities at secondary level leads to positive testing outcomes and tangible educational benefits. Since they target school-aged children and young adults, their model is by nature generalist as opposed to specialist.

Bottom right: low specialization, low utility

Just like in a normal political compass, where the lower right quadrant (right-liberals or libertarians) is the rarest type, this last camp also seems to me the most minority view. Some proponents of the Great Books program could fit comfortably here. The most famous specimen of this philosophy, St John’s College in Annapolis and Santa Fe, incorporates Euclidean geometry and music appreciation in its degree program, and even ventures into classics of other parts of the world. I saw an early version of their “Eastern Classics” reading list and have to say it leaves much to be desired.⁴ The same pitfalls of the top right quadrant are also present here, when stretching one too widely results in a lack of depth.⁵

I seldom come across this position in the discourse, namely the argument for intellectual versatility for its own sake, even without a unifying theme. The reason is perhaps straightforward: we all feel an urge to organize knowledge, and when venturing into an unfamiliar area of learning, we are usually motivated by a particular question. This is more pronounced in comparative studies, where it is commonality rather than difference that scholars are interested in. Therefore, a comparatist may spend a disproportionate time looking for resemblances and come up with similarities that are plausible but are nevertheless trivial. It is like one who compares an apple with an orange, and, having realized they are different in shape, colour, taste and, concludes that both have a leaf attached to their stem; what makes matter worse is that this person has bought both fruits pre-packaged from a supermarket, so that they are unable to conduct more detailed botanical study on the nature of the leaf, not to mention the trees where fruits come from.

An example of radical interdisciplinarianism is the ambitious work by the likes of Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee which is best characterized as philosophy of history. While Spengler and Toynbee possessed expert knowledge in certain areas of history, they stood out because of their daring to break boundaries and make sweeping statements—no matter true or false or somewhere in between—across the whole of human society. That style of universalist writing (and thinking) is already outdated in the academy; both names appear more often in caricature or mockery, and no serious scholar seems to cite them anymore. However, I still see their work like an enormous, monumental shipwreck that has been woefully forgotten and covered in rust, and I wonder how much value may be salvaged with the appropriate method.

I am myself most sympathetic to this last quadrant. What I long to see, given the technology and resources available in our age, are attempts to synthesize Eurasian civilizations. Limited by my own capacity, I can only opine on the ancient Greco-Roman world and Ancient China. From the former, one can look backwards in time and become an Indo-Europeanist, or look forward to the Middle Ages and early modern period up to the point when Latin ceased to be the lingua franca of Europe. From the latter, one can head inland and study the nomadic nations of Inner Asia, or face seaward and look at cultural exchanges with Korea and Japan. But to do either is a herculean task. I admit there will be incidental real-life benefits to this, such as greater facility to befriend a local of Shanghai, Naples or Constantinople. Once in a blue moon it may even generate valuable insights into contemporary geopolitics. But the real reward does not lie at the journey’s endpoint. Not knowing where such inquiries will lead us should not deter us from trying.

1. Analects 14.24, my own translation. An alternative interpretation is “In ancient times, men learned with a view to their own improvement. Nowadays, men learn with a view to the approbation of others.” (James Legge)

2. A highly entertaining read that exemplifies Housman’s style, including some scorching hot take on Shakespeare, brutal takedowns of Richard Bentley and a note on the correct usage of the word “cataclysm”.

3. Where Foucault himself falls on the utility axis is uncertain: some may think his whole agenda is to reform society, but I don’t think that is apparent from his writings. Karl Marx would certainly belong in the top right quadrant if he had stuck with his childhood education (he wrote school essays in Latin and a doctoral dissertation on Democritus and Epicureanism) and been more inclined to “purer” humanities.

4. At least when it comes to Classical Chinese texts, there is an over-reliance on English translations, leaving aside the haphazardness of text selection. The quality of translations is often poor, and without a specialist guide students can be easily led astray by red herrings of which the translators are responsible.

5. Even in the context of Western Classics, this model may have some blindspots. My undergraduate professor of ancient history once recalled meeting a student from St John’s College who had read Suetonius, Tacitus and the New Testament but was unaware of the chronology of Tiberius and Nero. This may be an isolated incident; but having gone through an American liberal arts degree myself, I was also ignorant of the dates of Roman emperors until I had to memorize a list of dynasts for an archaeology class when I studied abroad in Paris.