What good are the humanities? I think they have many different uses, including a certain finishing school quality that creates the veneer of the elite sensibility. But I view that as a kind of corruption, a cooptive use.
Consider, this broad curriculum in a different way put to a different use.
At their best, the humanities can teach a certain kind of critical thinking and practice that lays at the foundation of modern societies under the enlightenment project. Virtually all my books from poetry, literature, and art to philosophy, history, and social commentary have created and exemplify this critical thought system. Even the math books do, in some way.
So, in my view, gutting the humanities in the public university system is in effect the erasure of critical thought and practice. This system of thought lays behind the French and Russian revolutions and the German revolution of 1919 and experimental Weimar Republic. The latter failure produced a fantasic array of creative work---that critically weakened many concepts thought to be foundational and were not. Somehow in the machinations of social history, they re-invented Modernity. These people and their works of course were crushed.
In a much less concentrated way, the large public university systems in the US post-war produced my stepfather, mother, and slightly later my generation (50s-60s), who for some reason went seeking these critical systems of thought. There was nothing special about these two generations. It was an unintended consequence of educating a former working class. That post-war period was what happens when too much of the working class hits the books and finds out who and what they are.
So, that is what is at stake. Corporate USA may or may not understand what it is up to, but it certainly knows in an intuitative way, what threatens its existance.
While you can get something of an education at the community college level, IMHO, the education tends to be procedural and not critical. State college is better, but it too tends to the procedural.
While some of my best teachers were at the state college level, looking back they were under near constant duress. In the last few years I tried to trace their career path and they all left CSUN within just a few years of when I had them as professors.
CSUN in the 60s was brand new. It's administration and its institutional ways had not been fixed into that deadening state of fixity that I think of as the death of an intellectual life. I was there by accident of time and place.
Where I really found some sense of the critical sensibility was UCB at the graduate level and in the arts and humanities: languages (i.e. literatures--most German and Russian, some French, some Italian and Spanish), philosophy, and history. The exclusionary nature of these fields was being contested on almost all fronts by a wave of women and minorities who re-constituted the university system at the intellectual base. The result was the production of all kinds of histories and cultural systems of thought that constituted a grand critique.
The most interesting aspect was not the curriculum or its changes, but the student and faculty culture and their struggles with the administration and state governance. This was where my best learning took place---in the practice of resistance.
How can I communicate this? An example. One day I was filling out the registration card which used to be an open card file system on the second floor of Sproul. Like the old card file system in Doe, you could sort through to find anybody, if you knew their name. You could find their address, phone number, and major. Then I realized it was also the database the Selective Service, FBI, the City, County, State, and US Attorney used. Mind boggling dimensions of potential repression, all at the aid of the administration for the exercise of state power.
You can see the inheritance trace from the long ago to the present in this open contest in many small videos done last fall 2009. Start with Nancy Scheper Huges and work your way along:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03TTVQNzZog&feature=related
Sorry it's incomplete, but you can get the general idea by sampling the video series. You don't need all the detail, just assemble it in your mind. Here is an extension of Laura Nader's thinking that is really awesome in its critical dimension:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfdfhACuhjk&feature=related
T.J. Clark in the prior video was joined by George Lakoff, Laura Nader, Nancy Scheper-Huges and others: Art, Cognitive Science, Cultural Anthropology---these are/can be the critical and its tools. You match these people with the likes of David Harvey and the UCB Geography Department, and you get some idea of what a critique of society actually looks like in its latest incarnation.
What am I pleading here? See the big picture, as they used to say. We are in a class driven war over education which also translates into the intellectual grasp of human society (its variations) and the world.
Well, going though these videos communicates what was a Berkeley style synthesis of radical thought.
So much for friends. Now I want to imagine the consumate enemy. I need a mask of evil, something that captures Empire and Law and I have found it, here:
http://what-buddha-said.net/Pics/Buddha%27sface.jpg
This golden mask of state is the heavy lided face of John Yoo. John Yoo is a fascinating man. When he is challenged his face relaxes to a place of no emotion, his eye lids drop and he finds a beautiful legal reason to exterminate the vermin of the earth. This guy is real live evil in its most exquiste sense. He teaches constitutional law at Boalt. Staggering.
CG
