On March 7, Chancellor Randy Woodson and College of Humanities and Social Sciences’ Dean Jeff Braden hosted a panel discussion called “The Heart of the Matter.” The matter was the future of the humanities and social sciences in the United States, based on a bipartisan report of the same name produced at Congress’ request by the American Academy for the Arts and Sciences. The panel consisted of Rep. David Price, one of the members of Congress who requested the report, Duke University’s President Richard Brodhead, who co-chaired the commission that produced the report, commission member and former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, retired U.S. Army Lt. General and Stanford Professor Karl Eikenberry and UNC-System President Tom Ross.
The general attitude during the discussion, which took place at Hunt Library, was in support of the humanities. One sentiment agreed on by the panel members was that a rounded education including the humanities is necessary for giving future members of the workforce the skill set necessary to keep up with today’s competitive world.
Another sentiment they concentrated on was the importance of the humanities to maintaining the U.S.’ economic and political role in the world. Explaining how the arts are necessary for the “projection of American influence,” Lt. Gen. Eikenberry recounted an anecdote wherein he was told by Tommy Koh, Singaporean diplomat and former U.N. ambassador, the best way for the U.S. to keep competing in the Asia-Pacific region is by sending in the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, i.e. by extending “American soft power.”
A third sentiment was neither related to unpredictable economic tides nor to U.S.’s role in the world. Rather, this stressed that “a democratic republic” can, as Lt. Gen. Eikenberry said, “only survive and retain its values through an informed citizenry,” which requires “the arts.”
I study philosophy and literature, and while I am a chest-thumping humanities-and-arts-chauvinist, I would not stand with this panel in its defense of these realms of culture and inquiry. I can only agree with the third sentiment, and even there, only by detaching it from ideology-laden terms such as “democratic republic” and “citizenry.”
The simplest point against such justifications is that the arts and humanities need not have such a utilitarian value: A true lover of the arts would not forget Jack Kerouac or Nina Simone just because they cease to serve some nationalistic (or anti-nationalist) or economic purpose.
But another point is that art has a way of stimulating critical sensibilities that wouldn’t be to the well-being of the status-quo the panel upheld. Be it by awakening our feelings and arousing a dynamic contemplation, or by providing a lens through which the world can be better understood—engagement with the humanities and arts will only move us toward a better society. (“A better society” being one not dominated by neoliberal ideology that values things by how well they adapt to and are useful to the market, one not marked by U.S. hegemony.)
Now, an interesting feature of the panel discussion was how well the third sentiment outlined above was made out to have an ethos in common with the other two sentiments. But the society implied by the flourishing of this sentiment—one wherein “the fabric of our democracy and the life of our community” is healthy, as Ross described to me at the post-panel reception—is actually antithetical to the one in which the public well-being has to keep up with the workings of capital and life is only good so far as the U.S. is a world power. But dominant discourse functions so as to obscure this opposition. It masks the reality of power structures and poses them as benign.
But how can we see through ideology? Through the social sciences, which present models to make sense of seemingly neutral social currents, through the humanities, which provide a broad palette of frameworks to think about our reality and ourselves as peoples, and through the arts, which nourish our vitality and make us acutely conscious of the poverty of existence under the state of affairs.
That’s why this side of human culture is to be cherished and fought for. Not because it maintains an oppressive social realm, as the panel implicitly and unconsciously said, but because it reveals this society for what it is—it discloses the heart of the matter—and allows to imagine worlds beyond it.