Essays from the Nick of Time

by Mark Slouka

  Having raised this wobbly tent, Overbye promptly drives a truck over it. Mr. Hu’s inspiring words, he notes, have sadly “not yet been allowed to come true in China” because Hu himself was purged. (Science, he neglects to add, has done quite well in China regardless.) So, could this be a problem? Could the case of Mr. Hu suggest that the trickle-over theory, which holds that science’s spirit of questioning will automatically infect the rest of society, is, in fact, false? Could it be that science actually keeps to its reservation, which explains why scientists tend to get in trouble, generally speaking, only when they step outside the lab?5 Though he’s not aware of it, Overbye has already answered these questions in the affirmative. Science is a good thing “to get gooey about,” he notes, because “nobody was ever sent to prison for espousing the wrong value for the Hubble constant.”

  Which is both true and precisely, even eloquently, to the point. The work of democracy involves espousing those values that, in a less-democratic society, would get one sent to prison. To maintain its “sustainable edge,” a democracy requires its citizens to actually risk something, to test the limits of the acceptable; the trajectory of capability building they must devote themselves to, above all others, is the one that advances the capability for making trouble. In sum, if the value you’re espousing is one that could never get anyone, anywhere, sent to prison, then strictly democratically speaking, you’re useless.

  All of this helps explain why, in today’s repressive societies, the sciences do not come in for the same treatment as the humanities. Not only are the sciences, with a few notable exceptions, politically neutral (there is no scientific equivalent of the samizdat pamphlet), their specialized languages tend to segregate them from the wider population, making ideological contagion difficult. More importantly, their work, quite often, is translatable into “product,” which any aspiring dictatorship from Kazakhstan to Venezuela recognizes as an unambiguous good, whereas the work of the humanities—largely invisible, incremental at best, ideologically combustive—almost never is.

  To put it simply, science addresses the outer world; the humanities, the inner one. Science explains how the material world is now for all men; the humanities, in their indirect, slippery way, offer the raw materials from which the individual constructs a self—a self distinct from others. The sciences, to push the point a bit, produce people who study things, and who can therefore, presumably, make or fix or improve these things; they are thus largely, though certainly not exclusively, an economic force.6 The humanities offer a different product.

  One might, then, reasonably expect the two, each invaluable in its own right, to operate on an equal footing in the United States, to receive equal attention and respect. Not so. In fact, not even close. From the Sputnik-inspired emphasis on “science and math” to the pronouncements of our recently retired “education president” (the jury is still out on Obama), the call is always for more investment in “math and science.” And then a little more. The “American Competitiveness Initiative” calls for doubling federal spending on basic research grants in the physical sciences over ten years, at a cost of $50 billion. The federal government is asked to pay the cost of finding 30,000 math and science teachers. Senator Bill Frist pushes for grants for students majoring in math and science.

  Whether the bias trickles down or percolates up, it’s systemic. The New York City Department of Education announces housing incentives worth up to $15,000 to lure teachers “in math and science” to the city’s schools. Classes in history and art and foreign languages are cut back to make room for their more practical, “rigorous” cousins. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute announces its selection of twenty new professors who will use their million-dollar grants to develop fresh approaches to teaching science. Nothing remotely comparable exists in the humanities.

  Popular culture, meanwhile, plays backup, cementing bias into cliché. Mathandscience becomes the all-purpose marker for intelligence: it’s cool, it’s sexy, it has that all-American aura of money about it. Want to convey a character’s intelligence? Show him solving equations on a napkin. Want to sex up homework, send a redeeming message to the kids? Make sure your romantic heroine (like Gabriella in High School Musical 2) gets As in math and science.

  To appreciate how far the humanities have fallen, imagine Gabriella quoting The Federalist Papers or Common Sense. Imagine her, between dance numbers, immersed in Nietzsche’s The Atheist Viewpoint or Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. It’s nearly impossible; worse, it’s weird. Clearly the girl’s a troublemaker, one of those people who “have ideas,” who are always complicating everything, who are never content to leave well enough alone. You say she gets “As in mathandscience”? Ah, now we get it. The kid’s smart. She’ll get a good job. She’s on her way to a quality adult outcome.

  State of Play

  We want our students to grow up into people

  who are curious, teachable, and

  clear-minded. We want them to take into

  their interactions with others, into their

  readings, into their private thoughts, depth

  of experience and a willingness to be

  wrong. Only a study of the humanities

  provides that.

  —MARCUS EURE, ENGLISH TEACHER,

  BREWSTER HIGH SCHOOL

  No assessment of the marginalized role of the humanities today is possible without first admitting the complicity of those in the humanities themselves, myself included. Outmanned, outfunded, perpetually on the defensive, we have adapted to the hostile environment by embracing a number of survival strategies, among them camouflage, mimicry, and, altogether too effectively, playing dead. None of these is a strategy for success.

  Which is not to say that the performance is without interest. Happily ignoring the fact that the whole point of reading is to force us into an encounter with the other, our high schools and colleges labor mightily to provide students with mirrors of their own experience, lest they be made uncomfortable, effectively undercutting diversity in the name of diversity. Some may actually believe in this. The rest, unable or unwilling to make the hard argument to parents and administrators, bend to the prevailing winds, shaping their curricula to appeal to the greatest number, a strategy suitable to advertising, not teaching.

  Since it’s not just the material itself but also what’s done with it that can lead to trouble (even the most staid “classic,” subjected to the right pressures by the right teacher, can yield its measure of discomfort), how we teach must be adjusted as well. Thus we encourage anemic discussions about Atticus Finch and racism but race past the boogeyman of miscegenation; thus we debate the legacy of the Founders, but tactfully sidestep their issues with Christianity; thus we teach Walden, if we teach it at all, as an ode to Nature, and ignore its full-frontal assault on the tenets of capitalism. Thus we tiptoe through the minefield, leaving the mines intact and loaded.

  Still, the evasions and capitulations made by those on the secondary-school level are nothing compared to the tactics of their university counterparts, who, in a pathetic attempt to ape their more successful colleagues in the sciences, have developed their own faux-scientific, isolating jargon, effectively robbing themselves of their greatest virtue, their ability to influence (or infect) the general population. Self-erasure is rarely this effective, or ironic. Not content with trivializing itself through the subjects it considers important, nor with having assured its irrelevance by making itself unintelligible, the study of literature, for example, has taken its birthright and turned it into a fetish, that is, adopted the word politics—God, the irony!—and cycled it through so many levels of metaphorical interpretation that nothing recognizable remains except the husk. Politically neuter, we now sing the “politics” of oculocentric rhetoric. Safe in our tenured nests, we risk neither harm nor good.

  If the self-portrait is unflattering, I can’t apologize. Look at us! Look at how we’ve let the fashion for economic utility intimidate us, how we simultaneousl
y cringe and justify ourselves, how we secretly despise the philistines, who could never understand the relevance of our theoretical flea circus, even as we rush, in a paroxysm of class guilt, to offer classes in Introductory Sit-Com Writing, in Clown 500, in Seinfeld; classes in which “everyone is a winner.” Small wonder the sciences don’t respect us; we shouldn’t respect us.

  And what have we gained from all this? Alas, despite our eagerness to fit in, to play ball, we still don’t belong, we’re still ignored or infantilized. What we’ve earned is the prerogative of going out with a whimper. Marginalized, self-righteous, we just keep on keeping on, insulted that no one returns our calls, secretly expecting no less.

  Which makes it all the more impressive that there remain individuals who stubbornly hold the line, who either haven’t noticed or don’t care what’s happened to the humanities in America, who daily fight for relevance, and achieve it. Editors, journalists, university and foundation presidents, college and high school teachers, they neither apologize nor equivocate nor retreat a single inch. Seen rightly, what could be more in the American grain?

  Let the few stand for the many. Historian Drew Faust seems determined to use her bully pulpit as president of Harvard to call attention to the distorting force of our vocational obsession. Don Randel, president of the Mellon Foundation, the single largest supporter of the humanities in America, speaks of the humanities’ unparalleled ability to force us into “a rigorous cross-examination of our myths about ourselves.” Poet, classicist, and former dean of humanities at the University of Chicago Danielle Allen patiently advances the argument that the work of the humanities doesn’t reveal itself within the typical three- or five-year cycle, that the humanities work on a fifty-year cycle, a hundred-year cycle.

  Public high school English teacher Marcus Eure, meanwhile, teaching in the single most conservative county in New York State, labors daily “to dislocate the complacent mind,” to teach students to parse not only what they are being told but how they are being told. His course in rhetoric—enough to give a foolish man hope—exposes the discrete parts of effective writing and reading, then nudges students to redefine their notion of “correct” to mean precise, logical, nuanced, and inclusive. His unit on lying asks students to read the “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” letter from the Sun and Stephanie Ericsson’s “The Ways We Lie,” then consider how we define lying, whether we condone it under certain circumstances, how we learn to do it. “Having to treat Santa Claus as a systemic lie,” Eure notes, “even if we can argue for its necessity, troubles a lot of them.”

  As does, deliberately, Eure’s unit on torture, which uses Michael Levin’s “The Case for Torture” to complicate the “us vs. them” argument, then asks students to consider Stephen King’s “Why We Crave Horror Movies” and David Edelstein’s article on “torture porn,” “Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex.” Inevitably, the question of morality comes up, as does the line between catharsis and desensitization. Eure allows the conversation to twist and complicate itself, to cut a channel to a video game called The Sims, which many of the students have played and in which most of them have casually killed the simulated human beings whose world they controlled. The students argue about what it means to watch a movie like Saw, what it means to live in a society that produces, markets, and supports such products.

  Challenged to defend the utility of his classes, Eure asks his questioner to describe an American life in which the skills he is trying to inculcate are unnecessary. Invariably, he says, it becomes obvious that there is no such life, that every aspect of life—every marriage, every job, every parent-teacher meeting—hinges in some way on the ability to understand and empathize with others, to challenge one’s beliefs, to strive for reason and clarity.

  Muzzle the trumpets, still the drums. The market for reason is slipping fast. The currency of unreason and demagoguery is daily gathering strength. The billboards in the Panhandle proclaim “God, Guns and Guts Made America Free.” Today, the Marcus Eures of America resemble nothing so much as an island ecosystem, surrounded by the times. Like that ecosystem, they are difficult, unamenable, and necessary, and, also like that ecosystem, their full value may not be fully understood until they’ve disappeared, forcing us into a bankruptcy none of us wish to contemplate.

  Perhaps there’s still time to reinstate the qualifier to its glory, to invest our capital in what makes us human.

  1. To glance at the “Arts in the News” column of the New York Times is to understand that the only news that’s fit to print is monetary: which record went platinum, which show garnered the highest ratings, which novel received the fattest advance, which painting sold at Sotheby’s for how many millions. The revenue generated by our words and deeds isn’t just part of the conversation, it is the conversation; market share is the new talent.

  2. There’s something almost sublime about this level of foolishness. By giving his argument a measured, mathematical air (the students only achieve better adult outcomes “on average”), Brooks hopes that we will overlook both the fact that his constant (success) is a variable, and that his terms are way unequal, as the kids might say. One is reminded of the scene in the movie Proof in which the mathematician played by Anthony Hopkins, sliding into madness, begins a proof with “Let X equal the cold.” Let higher SAT scores equal successful adult outcomes.

  3. The ranking of “leaders” here is worth noting given the ostensible subject of the advertisement.

  4. Despite the “debates” surrounding issues like evolution, climate change, and stem cell research, science in the West continues to enjoy almost unimaginable fiscal and cultural advantages.

  5. Andrei Sakharov leaps to mind, though of course the roster of genuinely courageous, politically involved scientists is extensive.

  6. As Don Randel, president of the Mellon Foundation, recently pointed out to me, part of the success of the sciences in the United States is due to the willingness of some in the scientific community to market themselves as a job-generating force despite the fact that the vast majority of scientific research conducted in America has, rightly, little or no economic utility.

  Acknowledgments

  Though I am wary of institutional loyalty, in this instance, an exception is in order. Many of these essays first appeared in Harper’s Magazine, and I am deeply grateful to that prickly, irreverent, essential publication for regularly providing me with a brass trumpet and a lot of rope; that I have managed to make a little noise without hanging myself conclusively is largely due to the diligence of a number of individuals there, primarily Ben Metcalf and Colin Harrison, whom I thank for their guidance and their kindness. May the magazine that has supported us all, that first appeared a year before Moby-Dick was published, continue, unbowed, for another 150 years.

  Of the many personal debts incurred, I want to single out my debt to Sacvan Bercovitch. At times, in these essays, I’ve drafted off his brilliant work in American literature and culture, just as, in a larger sense, I’ve drafted, these thirty-five years, off his fascination with the world, his nose for the absurd, his humor, his grace.

  Photo: Maya Slouka

  Mark Slouka is the author of a collection of stories, Lost Lake; a book of nonfiction, War of the Worlds; and two novels, God’s Fool and The Visible World. A contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine, he lives with his wife and children outside of New York City.