Simon During, Losing Faith in the Humanities, The Chronicle Review, December 18, 2019.
... in the West, secularization has happened not once but twice. It happened first in relation to religion, and second, more recently, in relation to culture and the humanities. We all understand what religious secularization has been — the process by which religion, and especially Christianity, has been marginalized, so that today in the West, as Charles Taylor has famously put it, religion has become just one option among a smorgasbord of faith/no-faith choices available to individuals.
A similar process is underway in the humanities. Faith has been lost across two different zones: first, religion; then, high culture. The process that we associate with thinkers like Friedrich Schiller, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Matthew Arnold, in which culture was consecrated in religion’s place, and that in more modest forms survived until quite recently, has finally been undone. We now live in a doubly secularized age, post-religious and postcanonical. The humanities have become merely a (rather eccentric) option for a small fraction of the population.
Cultural secularization resembles earlier religious secularization. What happened to Christian revelation and the Bible is now happening to the idea of Western civilization and “the best that has been thought and said,” in Arnold’s famous phrase. As a society, the value of a canon that carries our cultural or, as they once said, “civilizational” values can no longer be assumed. These values are being displaced and critiqued by other ostensibly more “enlightened” ways of thinking. The institution — the academic humanities — that officially preserved and disseminated civilizational history is being hollowed out, partly from within. Only remnants are left.
For all that, we should not insist too strongly on analogies between the two secularizations. Doing that risks downplaying the ways in which they differ. The power of the “second secularization” thesis is not just that it helps us recognize the humanities’ plight in their largest context, but that it helps us view them dispassionately.
One difference is that the humanities and religion operate differently in terms of class. Unlike religion, the humanities have always been classed. In their formalized modes especially, they have belonged mainly to a fraction of the elite. Another difference: Cultural secularization is less unified than religious secularization in the sense that it has had two different targets.
On the one side, cultural secularization involves a loss of status and perceived functionality on the part of “high” cultural canons and intellectual lineages. Quite suddenly, having a detailed knowledge of and love for Bach’s music, say, stopped being a marker of a “cultured” or “civilized” person and became just a matter of opinion and personal interest.
On the other side, cultural secularization entails the loss of belief in the ethical and intellectual value of the traditional academic humanities disciplines — what we can call the “high humanities.” The idea, current since Kant, that the disciplined humanities lie at the basis of academic life cuts little ice today.
These two forms of cultural secularization — the erosion of canonicity and the loss of authority — are joined. That is why it has become almost impossible today to affirm the social or ethical value in studying, say, verse forms in John Dryden’s poetry; Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s relation to Moses Mendelssohn; the early modern Dutch ship-building trade; differences between humanist thought in Florence and Milan in the quattrocento; contemporary analytic philosophy’s technical debate over free will.
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