Kill Your Inner Doomer

The Humanities are Dead, Long Live the Humanities

If you care about the humanities, there are many reasons to despair.

Humanities departments around the country are in decline, with some of them being shuttered. Even at elite universities – Yale, Chicago, and the like – universities have little apparent interest in maintaining a robust humanities education. So, they weaken requirements for the Classics major, or they eliminate classical languages entirely, or they axe the philosophy department, or they reduce the English department into a cohort of freshmen writing instructors — the list goes on. It is now commonplace for academic exiles, myself included, to spend a fair amount of time publicly lamenting the decline of the humanities.

Adam Walker, someone I’m proud to call a fellow worker in the public humanities, recently characterized the history of the humanities decline in the United States.

Within the academy and outside of it, the humanities (the studies of literature, art, culture) are embattled on all sides.

The political right and left have done much to weaken the academic study of the humanities over the past four decades. From the right, conservatives and neoliberals have pushed universities toward vocationalism by seeing education as job training. And as state funding for university education was increasingly cut in the 1970s and ‘80s, the cost of tuition rose significantly. Disciplines without clear economic utility are deemed wasteful, at best, Quixotic.

From the left, many humanities disciplines have turned from studying the true, the beautiful, and the good to analyze structures of power and to promote a kind of scholarship political activism. While post-structuralism and critical theory yielded helpful insights, their dominance often reduced literature and art to political symptoms (colonial, patriarchal, capitalist, or otherwise) at the exclusion of aesthetic, formal, spiritual, and moral inquiries. Criticism became political diagnosis rather than appreciation and evaluation. The ideological left became the new orthodoxy in literary studies, often determining admission into programs and job placement on the market.

While the right emptied the humanities of value by reducing education to utility, the left emptied them of meaning by reducing texts to ideology. Both sides risk forgetting that the humanities exist to form human beings (not just money-makers and activists) to cultivate imagination, empathy, wisdom, and moral discernment and to help people find meaning and beauty in life. Erosion from both sides wore down the humanities, no longer celebrated as a shared moral and imaginative education for public and spiritual life.

The humanities suffered a full-frontal attack. Neither left nor right seemed interested in pursuing them for their own sake. And of course, the logic of the modern university cannot make sense of the humanities: ‘Disciplines without clear economic utility are deemed wasteful, at best, Quixotic.’

The Journey of the Magi

But Walker doesn’t end his piece here. No, he is interested in a revival of the humanities. He believes there could be a renaissance. The fact that we are undergoing such a dramatic upheaval may be evidence that a renaissance is on the way.

Speaking of a “new Renaissance” here, I suggests that the very signs we take as symptoms of decline (such as technological disruption, institutional distrust, cultural anxiety) may also be the early signs of a rebirth.¹

If there is a rebirth, there will be birth pains — and false starts. Jennifer Frey, about whom I have written before, is a defender of the humanities, always ready to make the case for why a humanistic education is essential for everyone. She has also become the reluctant public face for the humanities’ decline. After being ousted from the Honors College at the University of Tusla – a successful college she shaped and built after being recruited to the university – and seeing the Honors College then hollowed out (something like 90% of its budget was cut), she’s made a series of public appearances to discuss what can be done about the humanities. (She and I recently recorded an episode, which will eventually be released on my new podcast.)

Frey’s career represented the possibility for the rebirth of the humanities, a mission freed from the strictures of the Carnegie system and university rankings which prioritizes research dollars and research outputs. The curriculum at the Honors College at Tulsa took students from Homer to Hannah Arendt in four semesters. They read slowly, in community, centered around a common reading list — and they grew in wisdom, virtue, and friendship, the core values around which the curriculum was designed. But then this was ended after a few short years. The university decided to ‘go in a different direction’, removed Frey as dean of the Honors College, and radically reshaped the curriculum. Their website still mentions the shape of Frey’s original curriculum, featuring four seminars: Three Ancient Cities (Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem), The Long Middle Ages, The Birth of Modernity, and the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. But I do not know if this is anything like Frey’s original vision.

The humanities are just one example here — an example I know well, so an example that I like to discuss. But I do not know if anyone is happy with how the modern university comports itself, save for perhaps business professors. And the problems we face individually and collectively extend far beyond campus boundaries.

In the face of all of these problems, it can be easier to succumb to ‘Doomerism’, to become a Doomer. The Doomer has given in to despair. The Doomer has no hope. The Doomer believes there is nothing to be done.

If Frey became a Doomer, I would find it hard to blame her. Yet, this was not the sense I got from our conversation. She believes in the humanities, and for that reason she is willing to do what it takes to save them. She’s offered public defenses of the value of the humanities in multiple venues, and there is no indication that she will stop anytime soon.

The Doomer

There are many reasons to be a Doomer, to be blackpilled, to decide that nothing matters or, even worse, that things do matter but that there is nothing to be done about it. On top of that, it is cool to be a Doomer. You feel like you are above it all. You understand the magnitude of the world’s problems, and so you can rest assured that you are correct in your assessment that we are all doomed. Climate change, superintelligent and misaligned AI, political malfunction, corporate consolidation — the list goes on, and as you enumerate this list in your mind, your sense of doom and dread grows stronger. Some may even find that being a Doomer offers them a sense of relief, because a Doomer is absolved of all of his responsibilities. And we all have a little Doomer in our soul, that voice that tells us that giving up might be the best course of action.

This cannot be our only way. To be a Doomer is to give up on being human. Human beings are striving creatures. We crafted tools out of raw materials, made complex systems of communication, and built entire civilizations — some of which crumbled, yet few of which fully disappeared. For ages, we have looked at the world as it is and thought We can do better, and we’ve often been correct in that assessment. That striving is never easy, nor is success guaranteed, nor is the subsequent progress without its negative consequences, but history bears out that it was worth it. And none of that would have happened had we succumbed to Doomerism.

You have to kill your inner Doomer.

---

Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to write a piece about resisting Doomerism without mentioning hope, and it is nearly impossible to discuss hope without veering into sentimentalism and cliché. It is too easy to talk about how hope is necessary and the hopeful will triumph — too easy, and also unsupported by reason. Many of the hopeful will not triumph. Revolutionaries have a lot of hope; many revolutions fail. Every inventor has hope that they will succeed, but few do. Hope is no guarantee of success. It is not even an indicator.

We’re prone to Doomerism because we’re prone to cynicism, and in our cynical age, it is easy to read a poem about hope and suspect that it, too, is guilty of this sentimentalism:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -

And sore must be the storm -

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -

And on the strangest Sea -

Yet - never - in Extremity,

It asked a crumb - of me.

Sophisticated readers of Dickinson will assure you there is no trite sentimentalism here, but that’s beside the point — the point is that we see discussions of hope and immediately conclude that it must be sentimental. We should resist descending into sentimentalism, and so we conclude that the best response is irony, detachment, despair — in short, Doomerism.²

So what should we do if we do not want to give in to Doomerism? Here is the best argument I have. Doomerism is too confident, yet if adopted it guarantees its own truth. Doomers say nothing can be done to make the world better, and they are right if everyone is a Doomer. That is because you have to have at least the hope that something can be done in order to try to do something, and the Doomer lacks this hope. The Doomer has in fact totally rejected it. So, in Doomer world, Doomerism is guaranteed to be true. But if we break free from Doomerism, if we even sometimes stop worrying about sentimentalism and just decide to be hopeful, we can fight back against decline in nearly every domain.

And this brings me to the humanities once again. Those who publicly lament the humanities’ decline claim to do so out of love. They care so much about literature, languages, philosophy, and the like that they are driven to despair by how these subjects are treated by the public and the modern university. But Henry Oliver has rightly seen through this and gotten to the heart of the matter when he writes:

First, we stop the laments. Maybe it is a terrible thing. Maybe we are seeing civilization start to crumble. Will our complaints hold up the edifice? Will righteousness prevail at a certain number of clicks, likes, or howls? Will wickedness shrink away if we get loud enough?…There’s too much doom and gloom, not enough humanism…I am constantly told that we can choose what happens to us. So go ahead and choose. Choose not to be a philistine. In a darkening world, the best thing you can do is to keep the flame alive.

I’ve mentioned here and elsewhere the Catherine Project, an organization that runs free reading groups of classic texts. Since 2020, they have offered over 600 courses. Those courses take time, effort, dedication, and money to run, but in truth we have the time, effort, dedication, and money to do even more. But all of those are finite resources. Every moment we spend merely lamenting the problem is a moment we aren’t spending solving it. That’s giving in to the Doomer in the soul — the very same Doomer we need to kill.

I’ll remind you, then, that we’re currently reading Aristotle’s Politics together on this newsletter, and next year I’m running a full-year reading group on the philosophy of technology. Every time you participate, you’re striking back against Doomerism.

1. Walker cites an interview I gave with UnHerd, which I include here for completeness. When asked about the possibility of entering into a ‘post-literate’ age, I suggested that a renaissance can follow a ‘dark age.’

2. I blame Hollywood movies, and most lately Marvel movies, for the reduction of hope to sentimentalism. But that’s an idea best explored another time.