How Not to Defend the Humanities

by James Hankins

In Renaissance Italy, the birthplace of the humanities, there

were people who believed in literature. Not just people who
read literature, wrote literature, studied literature, professed
literature, packaged and sold literature, as today, but people
who really believed in it. They believed that certain old books—
containing poetry, history, moral philosophy, drama, oratory—
could reshape the souls of the young and remake the state,
society, the arts and sciences. They could turn barbarians into
civilized people. They thought these books contained the secrets
of a long-dead empire, the greatest empire the world had ever
seen. These were books that taught you how to be powerful,
wise, and good; how to speak so that everyone would be
convinced by your words; how to make your city peaceful,
strong, and beautiful; how to live in harmony with nature; how
to escape the superstitions of folk religion; how to rediscover a
forgotten world of the spirit. Those who studied these classic
books were said to be engaged in the study of humanity, to

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distinguish them from others who studied divinity, religious
books.

The man who more than anyone else invented the humanities
as a coherent program of study was Francesco Petrarch, mainly
known today as a great Italian poet. He lived in an age, the
fourteenth century, when good men and women despaired of
their times. Europe was threatened by the armies of the
Ottoman Turks, the rising Islamic power in the East, but
Europe’s political leaders, obsessed with their own quarrels, did
nothing. The Holy Roman Empire was a powerless sham. Italy
was ruled by bloody tyrants. Worse, the religious authorities of
the time who set the tone of Europe’s culture were appallingly
corrupt. The popes with their courtiers had left the holy city of
Rome, consecrated with the blood of martyrs, and gone to live
in the gay Mediterranean city of Avignon, where they whored
and drank fine wines from Burgundy. All they cared about was
money and status. The Church, the greatest financial power in
Europe, was under the control of French aristocrats, colluding
with bankers and oligarchs in Italy to siphon off her wealth for
themselves. Her prelates, charged Petrarch, had grown fat on
the leanness of Christ’s paupers. “Nature, fortune, and the
custom of the age have rendered you shameless.” The plagues
which wiped out a third of Europe’s population after 1348 were
surely God’s punishment. Worse still, the fair body of Italy had
been ravaged for generations by bands of mercenary soldiers
who could only be stopped from rapine and destruction by
immense bribes from the towns and cities they threatened.
Otherwise, fire and murder. “War without fire is like a sausage
without mustard,” said one mercenary captain, famous for his
cruelty.

At an earlier time in his life, Petrarch thought the solution to

Europe’s problems was political revolt of the people against
their lords. That was why, at first, he supported the popular
revolution of Cola di Rienzo in Rome in 1347. Eventually the
latter’s vanity, inexperience, and mercurial temperament
brought him down. After baronial rule was restored, Petrarch
conceived a surprising new idea about how to save Europe from
self-destruction: the studia humanitatis, study of the
humanities, which could also be translated as “zeal for humane

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culture.” He had come to see that what needed changing was
not the forms of rule but the moral quality of Europe’s rulers:

Certainly since piety and truth and loyalty and peace are in
exile, while impiety, falsehood, treachery, discord and warfare
are ruling and raging over the whole earth . . . , since morals are
polluted, education is perverted and customs disfigured, it is
obvious that the evil is completely and exclusively rooted in
human beings.1

In particular, the quality the Romans called humanitas and the

Greeks philanthropia needed resuscitation. At its root the term
meant kindness, sympathy for others, but its connotations
broadened out to signify something like “civilization” or
“civilized conduct.” Its lexical opposite was immanitas,
barbarity or cruelty.

Petrarch thought that the noble humanitas of the old Romans

could be recovered by studying the books they had written and
taught in their schools. For several generations literary men in
Italy had sought inspiration in ancient Latin writings, but
Petrarch now redirected their efforts to the reform of human
character through the study of classical literature. The
movement he created is called “humanism” by modern
historians, though it had exactly nothing in common with the
anti-religious humanism of modern times. In fact the humanists
inspired by Petrarch and later Erasmus and Thomas More saw
themselves as helping to rebuild Christendom by returning it to
its ancient roots. They believed the study of classical languages
and literatures, neglected in the Middle Ages (a period concept
they invented), could improve character and create a love for
wisdom and true piety.

How was this supposed to happen? Character was believed to be

a habitus, an acquired disposition that resided within the
human soul. To form a good character required effective
persuasion and examples of noble conduct. Human beings
would not be inspired to return to ancient models of noble
conduct by reading the products of late medieval literacy:
technical treatises on logic, medicine or theology; works of
popular piety; chivalric tales and the bawdy stories of Boccaccio.

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They needed Plutarch, Seneca, Cicero, Livy, and
Aristotle’s Ethics, the last retranslated into eloquent humanist
Latin. Eloquence was a key goal. Men of high character were
naturally charismatic, the humanists believed, but to
communicate their charisma they would need the eloquence of
the ancient Romans. The flat, ugly, and impersonal Latin of
the schools—likeacademic prose today—was not going to launch
Crusades or govern cities with wisdom and justice. Virtue
needed the trumpet of eloquence. So the humanists became
philologists, lovers of language, anxious to recover the language
arts of antiquity: the art of correct speech (grammar) and the
art of persuasive speech (rhetoric). This too required intensive
study of ancient literature, especially poetry and oratory, where
the ancient mastery of speech had reached its zenith. In due
course the humanists realized that the greatest speakers of
Latin had gone to school in Greece, so they studied Greek, too.

Then there were history and philosophy. History and its sister
biography were the school of prudence—one of the four cardinal
virtues. They provided future leaders not only with models of
noble conduct but with an awareness of recurrent patterns in
human activity. They built up the virtue of prudence, the ability
to see what followed from good and bad actions. Love of the
good was not enough; it needed to be strengthened by a vivid
sense of the disorders and suffering caused by human depravity.
History also granted the reward for virtue: glory, a fragrant
memory after death, among posterity. Lord Chesterfield,
formed in the humanist tradition if ever a man was, wrote to his
son:

History animates and excites us to the love and the practice of

virtue by showing us the regard and veneration that was always
paid to great and virtuous men in the times in which they lived,
and the praise and glory with which their names are
perpetuated and transmitted down to our times.2

Philosophy added rational argument to history’s examples. The

humanists favored moral philosophy above the more abstruse
sorts; most of them regarded technical philosophy as a waste of
time. But the type of philosophy depicted in Cicero and in the
Socratic dialogues of Plato—wise and noble men asking serious

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questions about how to live—this they saw as useful for
corroborating virtue. Philosophy also provided its devotees with
a vision of the cosmos in which rational and therefore good
human conduct was in harmony with the law of nature. “Live in
accordance with nature” was the philosophers’ maxim for lovers
of virtue. Renaissance philosophy urged upon the classically
educated person a different form of status-seeking than was
enjoined by corrupt human society. Through wisdom and
goodness one could raise one’s dignitas or rank in nature, wrote
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: one could fly up to the heavens
with the angels, or one could descend to the level of the beasts
and lose one’s humanity. True nobility came from virtue.

Petrarch inspired several generations of Italian literary men

who believed in the power of old books. Towards the end of the
fifteenth century their movement spread to northern Europe,
where it was led by Erasmus and Thomas More. The literati of
Europe created a new form of cultivation they called bonae
litterae, “good letters,” the letters that made you good, or
the literae humaniores, the literature that made you more
human. The humanities became an educational tradition which
dominated Western schoolrooms for over four hundred years.
The arts curricula in European universities and European
culture as a whole were gradually transformed by them.
Humanism inspired the movement we call the Renaissance, but
it remained pulsing through the bloodstream of the Western
educational system down to recent times. By the end of the
eighteenth century, however, its fundamental assumption, that
guidance for life could and should be found in antiquity and
could be accessed through knowledge of ancient languages, was
being swept under by the rising belief that individuals and
societies could and should create new modes of living, enabled
by science. We should progress towards a future we have chosen
for ourselves, fulfill our potential, remake ourselves as
individuals, “raise up on high the pyramid of [our] existence,”
as Goethe put it. Or we should march shoulder-to-shoulder in
equality towards a more just society. To teach conformity to
models of conduct inherited from an outworn, feudal past was
worse than merely retrogressive. It was to keep mankind in
slavery.

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Humanities after the Nineteenth-Century Revolution
Educational practice is always conservative, however, and it
took more than a century for the gospel of Progress to dislodge
the traditional humanities from the schools. But fast-forward
now to the twenty-first century, to the present “crisis of the
humanities.” Modern commentators have deplored a crisis of
the humanities for at least four decades. With each passing year,
it seems, the humanities become ever more marginal inside the
academy and outside it. At my own university, Harvard, the
percentage of entering students who say they want to study
humanities has fallen from 30 percent around 1980 to less than
15 percent today, despite efforts in the admissions office to
admit disproportionately more students for the humanities.
New teaching positions in the humanities have become rarer,
especially in the last few years. Teachers of the humanities seem
unable to convince either students or administrators (to say
nothing of state legislatures) of the value of what they teach,
and attempts to reshape the humanities to promote political or
cultural agendas have only succeeded in dividing humanists
among themselves and arousing the active hostility of their
natural enemies. But why are the arguments of modern
humanists for the value of their own discipline so weak? The
answer lies in what the humanities have become since the
nineteenth century.

The traditional humanities curriculum inherited from the

Renaissance, centered on classical literature and moral
formation, came under attack in the United States in the second
half of the nineteenth century, an attack led by Charles W. Eliot,
president of Harvard. Eliot, a chemist by training, founded the
“elective system” in the belief that modern students needed
more freedom to choose their own educational paths. Literary
study could no longer be valued as a unique initiation into
civilized values but should become just another subject matter,
just another menu item in the buffet of educational choice. John
Dewey, the leading Progressive educational theorist of the
twentieth century, held that education should be completely
reshaped. It should no longer force children to master dead
languages but engage them in “active learning” relatable to their
daily experience and growth as social beings. It should not focus

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on acquiring a fixed set of facts, but should aim to help students
learn creativity and self-expression, using their chosen skills to
effect social change and democratic reform.

As the research university took shape in late nineteenth-century

America, the humanities could only survive by emphasizing the
aspect of their tradition most capable of professionalization,
namely philology: the history and science of texts.3 The
humanities split up into a welter of disciplines and
departments. By the end of the Second World War the original
rationale for the study of the humanities had dropped down the
stream of history. If in our time some new Erasmus should arise
and try to articulate it, most educators would surely respond
with blank incomprehension, hostility, or ridicule.

Abandoning HUMANITAS
Unquestionably it is hard for most people in the twenty-first
century to look on the traditional humanities with much
sympathy or to see much relevance to present concerns. Latin
grammar and rhetoric? Latin today retains a certain snob value,
but is mostly irrelevant to educated discourse; even professors
of classical languages often lack full command of its subtleties.
Sadly, the majority of language experts in the modern world see
the attempt to distinguish good usage from current usage as
deeply undemocratic, and the word “rhetoric” carries a strong
negative charge in contemporary culture. Courses on rhetoric,
once staples of college curricula—one was required at Harvard
College as late as the 1950s—have long been abandoned in the
universities. Today, even so rigorous a defender of the liberal
arts as St. John’s College in Annapolis would not claim that
college curricula should consist entirely of the study of classical
authors in original languages. Even the handful of
countercultural programs in American high schools that
describe themselves as offering “classical education” do not go
so far. Few teach much Latin, fewer Greek. It’s clear that any
attempt to revive the humanities in anything like their
premodern form would turn out, at best, to be a kind of quixotic
antiquarianism, at worst the obsession of Dr. Dryasdust.

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The substantive fields of the traditional humanities—
history, poetry, moral philosophy—are today in the hands of
professors. Their function is no longer to nurture humanitas,
promote virtue and wisdom, or kindle a sympathetic loyalty to
the best in our civilization. The older generation of professional
academics see classic books as a field for quasi-scientific
research. Making “contributions to knowledge” to be read by
other professors within their discipline (or rather by a small
coterie within their discipline) is the center of their professional
life. At best such professors might see themselves as providing
their students with literary pleasure or the fun of intellectual
problem-solving or “cultural literacy.” By reading old books
students become citizens of the globus intellectualis, able to
recognize allusions which pass over the heads of others. This
skill feeds their sense of being “smart” (the new code word for
“elite”), superior to the uneducated or, shall we say, the
differently educated. Knowing about classic books is a kind of
geekiness that is widely admired among the young, but its moral
effects are limited, possibly even negative.

To be clear, teaching “cultural literacy” is never to be deplored.

Knowledge is better than ignorance. But it should not be
confused with the deeply transformative effects on mind and
character sought in traditional humanities education. More to
the point, a set of disciplines that produces know-it-all students
taught by hyperspecialized research drones, manufacturing
unreadable studies of interest to no one but themselves, is not
in a good position to make claims on the resources of society at
large. Serious scholarly research in the humanities can be a
noble calling, and it does serve important civilizational ends; it
ensures an accurate memory of our past. But the way
humanities research is produced and evaluated in universities
today too often is unmoored from any larger moral purpose.

University professors, to be sure, have other ways to defend the

humanities. The more politically minded professors use old
books as a corpus vilefor the exercise of what Paul Ricoeur
called “the hermeneutics of suspicion.” They are texts whose
surface meanings need to be unmasked and exposed as the
poisoned fruits of a corrupt socioeconomic system, or of racism,
sexism, and other approved targets of moral opprobrium.

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Reverence for old books is suspect. To foster an attitude of
respect for classic texts merely serves the dominant social class;
it supports a hegemonic ideology perpetuating the interests of
that class. On this view, the traditional humanities are hardly
more than a complex form of socialization designed to justify
elite claims to power. The old educational system that aimed to
teach eloquence and virtue must have “really” done so in order
to legitimate the social and political power of the educated. It
perpetuated the values of the elite by presenting them as
normative or natural. Such politicized exercises in the
hermeneutics of suspicion thus act as prophylactics of the soul,
preventing readers from receiving or being changed by what
classical poets and philosophers had to say. They cannot
undergo the psychic midwifery of Socrates or respond to his call
for true virtue without feeling guilty about their complicity in
oppression.

In more practical, student-minded terms, radical hermeneutics

allows students to reduce classical literature to a few names and
easily learned buzzwords, before getting on with the next
assignment. Which raises the question: Why should students
immerse themselves in what the ancient authors actually wrote
(and in Latin and Greek, no less!) when their teachers have
already dismissed those authors as toadying mouthpieces for
The System? Why spend long hours reading a difficult text
when consulting Wikipedia is all you need to impress others
with your theoretical sophistication?

Some radical professors have belatedly realized that politicizing

the syllabus in this way has the long-term effect of destroying
their own disciplines. Once all the statues have been toppled,
once all the portraits have been taken down, there is no more
work for iconoclasts. Why go on reading old books once they
have been exposed? The spectacle of radical professors trying to
justify their own existence is an unedifying one, even mildly
comic. They try to change the canon to embrace more radical
texts. They change literary theories, replacing old models with
the latest French or German imports. They pride themselves on
teaching “critique,” the risible claim that exposing malign
political subtexts in Jane Austen will help their students decode
more effectively the myths of modern politics. But the

9
humanities do not flourish when used as instruments of
partisan politics—especially when you have to find donors to
support faculty positions, or when your side loses the election.

The sad truth is that politicizing the humanities by critiquing

past authors has not produced the radicalism that it originally
proclaimed. The politicized humanities summon the past before
today’s students only to subject it to ritual criticism from the
enlightened standpoint of the present. Reading old texts in this
guise has produced the very degeneracy that it set out to
challenge. The humanities which supposedly served the
powerful of the past now, through their critique, serve the
smugness of the present.

The Perils of Rearguard Action

To be sure, the treason of the clerks is only part of the reason
the humanities are dying off in higher education. Much has to
do with the gradual spread of vocational education within even
elite universities, mirroring the materialism of American
society, and the consequent tendency to regard the humanities
as relatively inexpensive luxury goods: enjoyable,
undemanding, but without much cash value. Majoring in
literature or philosophy will not improve your chances of
employment, and the future income stream of economics
majors or engineering majors is vastly in excess of what the
average English major can expect to earn. So the humanities are
defended as vaguely “enriching”; they promote the life of the
mind and enable graduates in later life to enjoy museums and
concerts and lectures.

All this is no doubt true and of real value to those of us who

have had the benefit of a humanistic education. We are grateful
for what our teachers have given us. But the average state
legislator, who is less likely to sympathize with humanistic
education, is going to ask: What do the humanities contribute to
the economy? Why should the taxpayer pay for a luxury good?
Why should I fund a tool of my political opposition? Parents
who send their children to university, hoping for them to enjoy
a better life—“a better life” that is most often understood in
material terms—will hear with alarm that their child intends to

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major in Women’s Studies or Folklore and Mythology. They are
paying out their life savings so that their children can entertain
themselves, make themselves unemployable? Professors tend to
keen with impotent rage against unsympathetic state legislators
and to smile condescendingly at parents concerned with the job
prospects of their children. Neither response, however, does
much to increase understanding and support of the humanities.

Some humanists, however, have begun organizing to prevent

further losses of political and financial support for the
humanities. This means defending the humanities in terms that
can be understood by the lumpen politician or by anxious
parents. A fairly typical example of this approach to defending
the humanities is an international initiative called
“4Humanities,” a web-based group that describes itself as “an
international initiative for advocacy of the humanities, drawing
on the technologies, new-media expertise, and ideas of the
international digital humanities community.” Its membership is
drawn primarily from Anglosphere academics in small liberal
arts colleges and in state-funded universities, those most
threatened by the decline of humanities funding. Among other
things the group monitors public discourse about the
humanities in Washington, D.C., in state legislatures, and
elsewhere with a view to offering constructive responses to
misperceptions. It tries to make positive arguments for
humanistic studies that can register below the empyrean realm
of the wealthiest private universities and European research
institutes.

A visit to the websites of this organization and its affiliates

shows what they consider effective marketing in today’s
environment. There are, broadly, two lines of defense. One is to
emphasize the skill sets and financial payoffs that an education
in humanities can produce. An infographic published by the
organization, with the rather shrill headline “The Humanities
Matter!”, informs us that humanistic study teaches us “how to
deal critically and logically with imperfect information.”
Students are said to learn effective oral and written
communication, problem-solving skills, and the empathy and
cultural understanding necessary to work in large, diverse
organizations. Evidence is said to exist that employment

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opportunities for arts, humanities, and social science graduates
are as good (or even better!) than for graduates in natural
sciences and technology. Sixty percent of chief executives in
corporations, it is claimed, had degrees in the humanities.
Furthermore, underinvestment in language skills is said to cost
the British economy £9 billion annually, while universities there
are said to contribute £45 billion to the economy. Yet despite
these wonderful benefits to business, government, and the
economy, the U.S. federal government only commits 0.45
percent of research money annually to the humanities, and even
the presumably more enlightened Europeans commit only 1.06
percent of their research budget to both social sciences and
humanities. The message is unsubtle: Take our courses! Fund
us! It will pay off!

The second line of defense now being offered by the humanities,

especially in the last decade, is far more sophisticated and rests
on serious historical research as well as a growing digital
infrastructure. The strategy is essentially to claim that the line
drawn between the humanities and the sciences in modern
academic culture is a recent and misleading one. The
humanities have always been scientific in character, made
important contributions to science rightly understood, have
inspired innovation in the natural sciences, and are today
engaged more than ever in advanced scientific, computer-aided
research. Current scientific research in the humanities,
commonly referred to as “digital humanities,” relies on Big Data
and stands at the forefront, as the Alliance of Digital
Humanities Organizations claims, “of areas such as textual
analysis, electronic publication, document encoding, textual
studies and theory, new media studies and multimedia, digital
libraries, applied augmented reality, interactive gaming, and
beyond.” We do more than just teach Dante and Jane Austen!
Major research universities, the National Endowment for the
Humanities, and private foundations like the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation, formerly known for supporting high-quality
scholarship, have been pouring money into digital humanities.
The ability to use digital teaching and research methods is
rapidly becoming a compulsory credential in the portfolio of
young humanities scholars eager for promotion.

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Defining the Humanities Down
Perhaps the leading mover and shaker in the movement to
repackage the humanities as sciences is Rens Bod, a professor at
the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at the
University of Amsterdam. A specialist in the computer-aided
study of linguistics and musicology, Bod is a powerful analytic
thinker, competent in many languages, whose A New History of
the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from
Antiquity to the Present (Oxford, 2013), rather surprisingly, is
the first comprehensive history of the humanities. The book
deserves a more detailed review than can be given here, but its
major claims can be sketched as follows. Humanistic disciplines
(or disciplines now labeled as humanities) have since antiquity
invented powerful methodological principles to discern patterns
in the “expressions of the human mind” such as literature, art,
music. Those principles and patterns were elaborated in
disciplines such as linguistics (grammar), philology,
historiography, art theory, logic, rhetoric, and poetics. There is
no good reason not to regard these disciplines as sciences in the
full sense, and historical study reveals that the figures identified
as natural scientists in modern histories of science were always
involved in, and frequently inspired by, the wider humanistic
sciences of their day. In other words, the progress and scientific
innovations of the West and of other cultures have always
depended on humanistic research, working in concert with what
would be described more narrowly today as scientific research.
And that situation remains true even in our time. Bod sees the
value of the humanities in their contributions to innovation and
progress, and attaches little or no importance to the moral ends
of humanistic study as they were traditionally understood. He
even goes so far as to claim that the attachment of humanistic
philology to texts such as the Bible or the great classical authors
was in certain respects and at certain times retrograde for the
advance of humanity. This de-moralization of the humanities,
this indifference to older civilizational values, is a tendency Bod
shares with other modern defenders of the humanities.

To be fair, a deeper dig into the 4Humanities and digital

humanities websites will reveal that many modern academics
still appreciate the real humanities, the humanities some

13
teachers and some students still love. They know the soul of the
humanities is prolonged contact with the great literature and
philosophy of the past, the integration of the young into a
cultural tradition, the discovery of the self in the mirror of great
minds. They know that to defend the humanities by selling only
the extrinsic benefits of humanistic study sells them short. But
they no longer believe that the real goals of the humanities can
be explained in so many words to those who today control the
university’s purse strings. They think they have to use the
camouflage of science, technology, and economic productivity
to preserve public goodwill for their vocation.

Whether they will succeed is open to doubt. The Western

tradition has been here before. In the High Middle Ages, from
the late twelfth century to the early fourteenth, university
teachers also tried to convert the study of canonical authors into
a package of pre-professional skills. They turned grammar into
linguistic theory and rhetoric and poetics into practical, how-to
handbooks. They stopped reading the classical authors for their
own sake. The moral vacuum that resulted is the main reason
why humanists like Petrarch began the renaissance of the
ancient authors in the late fourteenth century. De-moralizing
the humanities—turning them into a set of skills, into a training
in empathy, into politics by other means, or into handmaidens
of the natural sciences—is a misguided strategy. Their
moralizing purpose will always flow back in. The best way to
disrupt the current pattern of decline in the humanities is to
return them to their original, now discarded purpose of
challenging cultural complacency by holding aloft what is best
in our civilization.

Repositioning the Humanities

But can the humanities learn again how to make a moral
argument for themselves? That depends, I believe, on whether
what they teach is worth defending. As a classical rhetorician
would have put it, it depends on the circumstantiae: who is
making the argument, to whom, and the nature of the case
being argued. If the goal is to save our jobs, we should by all
means retrain and jump aboard the digital humanities
bandwagon. If the goal is to save our civilization, however, the

14
road ahead will be more difficult. It may not be possible for
teachers of traditional humanities to find support much longer
in the universities, given current attitudes there. It may be that
the traditional humanities must seek places outside or on the
periphery of the university, in programs like the ones run by the
admirable Paideia Institute or in independent “Great Books”
programs. This would not necessarily be a bad thing: it would
mean returning the humanities to their roots, since the studia
humanitatis in the Renaissance began as a movement outside
universities and only gradually found support inside what
previously had been, for the most part, illiberal, preprofessional
institutions. Modern universities are institutions driven above
all by the need to accumulate prestige. If humane letters are
taught in an inspiring way outside their orbit, if they start
producing impressive leaders again, men and women who
defend what is good with elegance and power, it can be only a
matter of time before universities will be obliged to form a new
and higher estimate of their value.

Much more important than where the humanities are taught is

what they teach. Those who understand and value the
traditional humanities need to make the case for them in
morally serious and nonpartisan language. They need to show
how the humanities keep alive in the present the best of our
past. They need to demonstrate why it is important to
remember the great achievements of Western civilization as
well as its failures. They need to dispel the canard that
traditional humanities teaching inculcates uncritical acceptance
of every opinion (many of them certainly noxious) espoused by
writers in the Western canon.

It is a serious misconception, in fact, to believe that humanities

teachers in the past ever studied their classical authorities
passively, with unquestioned belief. Even in the Renaissance
itself—especially in the Renaissance—humanists always
encouraged readers to exercise their own moral and spiritual
discernment when reading old books. In the Renaissance and
early modern period they took great pains to align what they
read in pagan authors with their own moral, political, and
religious commitments. That was how the humanities
understood the admonition of the Delphic oracle to “Know

15
Thyself.” There were always active debates about which aspects
of pagan piety might be admirable and worthy of emulation by
Christians; whether and to what extent the lives of Cicero
(accused of abuse of power) and Seneca (accused of serving a
tyrant) deserved approval. An intense argument continued for
centuries as to whether Caesar was a tyrant or the strong and
wise ruler Rome needed to end the corruption of the old
republic; whether Augustus’s transformation of Rome into a
monarchy was necessary or a catastrophic betrayal of Roman
traditions. Praise and blame, the chief topics of Renaissance
rhetoric, were tools of moral discernment. Down to modern
times the study of classical literature, history, and philosophy
was always linked to moral evaluation. Humanists always
understood that antiquity was full of moral degradation and
error as well as heroic virtue and sagacity, but they also thought
that ancient men and women had qualities of nobility and
wisdom that were missing or rare in their world. They are even
rarer in ours. And they have never been more needed.

The Humanities and Morality

At their origin in the Renaissance the humanities were not just a
collection of old books studied by antiquarian enthusiasts. They
emerged on the scene to challenge what they saw as political,
cultural, and educational degeneracy. From the beginning—
and perhaps never more than now—thejustification of
humanities lies in the fact that they have always been poised to
expose the soulless routine of our education and the moral
complacency of our elites. Today, the left-political critique of
the past can no longer claim to be revolutionary. It has become
dull and predictable; it asks questions to which we already know
the answers. Whether the humanities endure within the
university or take a step outside, they will retain their original
potential to slow corruption and to ennoble our world by
rallying educated people around the praiseworthy conduct that
is now in short supply. Why is this?

The reasons why the humanities can exercise this power may
seem counterintuitive, but they constitute the core of the case
for the humanities. The first involves the simple merits of
language study. The basis of all the ethical systems, first

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discovered by the thinkers of the Axial Period in antiquity—
by Confucius, Socrates, the Buddha—was the teaching that
other people, beginning with our family, friends, and country
but extending ultimately to the whole of mankind, deserve our
help and sympathy. The great moral traditions of the human
race teach not merely that we should do good to others with the
calculation that they will reciprocate, that one hand scratches
another. They teach the value of selflessness in the Buddhist
sense, the filial piety and natural sympathy among men taught
by the Confucian tradition, the Socratic doctrine that it is better
to suffer than to do evil. We can and should substitute sympathy
for self-interest; we can cooperate as well as compete.
Cooperation requires trust, understanding, and empathy, and
these are impossible without language study. They depend on
precise standards and the correct use of our own language. They
depend on the power to understand someone else’s speech in
their own language and to translate that speech accurately into
one’s own. This is a basic necessity of human social life and it is
a scandal that the modern humanities do not attach a higher
value to it.

Second, the value of eloquence. Sometimes, when listening to

recordings of orators like Winston Churchill or John F.
Kennedy, or when we read the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, we
become acutely conscious of the absence in our own political
culture of eloquence, of convictions forcefully and beautifully
expressed. We have recently in America had many proofs of
how imprecision of expression and unconcern for one’s
own ethos or moral personality can poison political discourse.
The study of writing should teach more than how to write a
clear and polite business letter. As good writers know, writing is
a moral exercise, a form of self-knowledge. If we are honest in
writing we come to realize our own intellectual and moral
shortcomings. If we have any good in us, if we have things we
believe in, we need the arts of writing and speaking to
communicate them. Bonum diffusivum sui. What is good needs
to be passed on. As political consultants know, the most
powerful arguments are always moral arguments. Leadership is
most effective, perhaps only effective, when leaders have moral
weight and eloquence. Even for writers not called upon to lead,
the cultivation of eloquent speech and writing is a valuable

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moral discipline. True eloquence, as Cicero wrote, comes from
the good man skilled in speaking, the vir bonus dicendi peritus.
When we write or speak well, we show what we are. Since
human beings naturally want to be loved rather than despised,
the aspiration to correct and powerful expression becomes a
school of character. Just as real teaching, teaching that cares
about the character of the taught, requires the teacher to be
morally good as well.

Finally, a case for the traditional humanities has to include a

reorientation of teaching towards the formation of character
and judgment. In the study of literature, history, philosophy,
and the arts we need to abandon the refusal to make “value
judgments” characteristic of demoralized modern culture. We
need instead to teach a more courageous sort of discernment: to
declare what is good and bad in our arts and our literature, to
defend our convictions about the best way to live. Renaissance
humanists always insisted that full humanity and dignity, true
nobility, went beyond wealth and status, beyond a successful
career. It mattered what you were more than what you seemed
to be. Your character, as David Brooks has recently argued, is
more important to your happiness than your résumé.4 The old
Christian humanists believed that receptive reading of
classical authors—reading built on respect for tradition—
would help students see what was truly admirable and
worthwhile in human life. Like the young Marcus Aurelius, they
could not help but admire noble souls and want to be like them.
Where this door has been closed to contemporary students, it
must be reopened—not for the sake of praising the vices of the
past, but for finding models that we need to emulate.

That sort of response, I venture to affirm, is still possible, and it

is still necessary. In our time, as in all times, the voices of Vanity
Fair shout at us that if only we have enough wealth and power
we can get everything we want and can force others to do our
will. The voice of uncivilized humanity, in other words, teaches
us to be sociopaths. The voice of the old humanities, which is
the voice of the best in our civilization, teaches another lesson.
It teaches that our life is more valuable when we care about the
sort of person we are becoming, when we learn to love what
deserves to be loved, when we are admired by people whose

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 good opinion is worth having. It prevents us from becoming
ideological puppets of the powerful, it defends us against the
sham values of commercialized culture, and it gives us a center
that is our own. It makes us, in a word, humanior—more
human.
This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume I, Number 4 (Winter 2017): 193–209.

Notes

1Francesco Petrarca, Selected Letters, trans. Elaine Fantham, 2 vols.

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), 2:535–37.

2Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son and Godson, Selected, ed. Henry H.
Belfield (New York: Maynard, Merrill, 1897), 13.

See especially James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern
3

Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).

4 David Brooks, The Road to Character (New York: Random House, 2016).

About the Author

James Hankins is a professor at Harvard University and a

historian of philosophy and political thought.
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