Alan Jacobs on bad arguments for the liberal arts that defend the funding of jobs and departments rather than the liberal arts themselves

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. …

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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. 

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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]

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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. 

I can't help but be reminded of Jacques Ellul riffing on the role art critics came to play in technocratic societies, blogged about here and here.  Ellul observed that the arts critic has only been with us a few centuries, the implication obviously being that the super-majority of the history of human artistic activity has never required arts critics or arts departments for productive activity. At a more rudimentary level Theodor Adorno kicked off Aesthetic Theory with the observation that now that art had been liberated from service to throne and altar it was free, yes, but it has been stuck in an intractable crisis of purpose and legitimacy from which it can't possibly escape. Ellul, for his part, said that Adorno correctly grasped the state of the arts presented the Scylla and Charybdis bind, art either serves a state or is a hermetic technocratic cult that has no appeal to outsiders. 

I previously mused upon the idea that without a gatekeeping element to their role an arts critic is a super-consumer in a world of consumers.  The crises presented by AI-generated arts are crises for educators and gatekeepers before they are crises for consumers. Last summer I wrote "Why the priests of Art Religion can't accept an AI-generated offering on its altar: remainder humanism; AI-generated music; and a figural reading of Levitical rites on the question of whether The Velvet Sundown is even a real band"  An academic can talk to students about whether something is a duck or a rabbit. I have been suspecting in the last year that the crisis of AI-generated art is that it replicates at a massive scale the lies promulgated about the arts from within academic traditions.  To put this another way, if humans can be trained to create duck-rabbit drawings and taught how to interpret the same image as a duck or a rabbit and to toggle back and forth between them, the threat of AI may be that the AI slop people worry about has to be programmed to present just the duck or just the rabbit.  In chains of ones and zeroes there's not room for a 0.005, a 0.2341 or a 0.66666 is a way to put it, but those fuzzy and fudged cases are where art happens, to put it in a purely and slickly bromide way.