https://blog.ayjay.org/bad-humanists/
N. Ángel Pinillos
asks, Why
Are Humanists So Bad at Defending the Humanities? — and his answer is
that humanists’ defenses of the humanities fail when they argue that the
humanities have any kind of intrinsic, as opposed to instrumental,
value. Now, Pinillos says that he happens to believe in the intrinsic value of
the humanities, but people outside the humanistic disciplines don’t, so the
intrinsic-value argument, “deployed as a public argument, has lost us the
public. …
…
Pinillos seems to think
that this case has “been ignored,” though for half-a-century I
have been reading essays about how a humanities education makes you a better
citizen. He also says straightforwardly that we professional humanists “teach a
set of skills that you cannot get anywhere else,” which seems to me … well, I
started to say that it seems to me a debatable proposition but in fact I think
it is demonstrably false. I know many people who can do all the things Pinillos
lists in the paragraph quoted above who have never taken so much as one course
in the humanities.
…
He says that his
essay is a defense of the humanities, when in fact it is an argument that
universities should continue to fund humanities departments — because of
their instrumental value. [emphasis added] If you could show that students
can learn to read contracts and evaluate communications from doctors without
the help of courses in the humanities, then nothing would remain [emphasis
original] of his defense of “the humanities.”
I say, in reply, that
(a) the humanities are not to be conflated with courses in universities that
bear the “humanities” designation, and therefore that (b) Pinillos has not
defended the humanities at all, but instead has simply pleaded that
university administrators and boards of trustees allow people like us to keep
our jobs. [emphasis added]
…
Maybe Frank Zappa would say it’s like the advertising
representatives and talent scouts saying that they are the people who need to
keep their jobs in the music industry because if you don’t have them you don’t
have the music industry. The
musicians? Well, uh, anyway, never mind
them for the moment.
