The humanities will not make you moral

They do offer access to a world of aesthetic excellence that is good for its own sake

Written by Bo Winegard.

Perhaps it will be a mercy killing. The humanities have finished their life cycle from triumph through decadence to decay. All that is left is the dying.

When I am in a surly mood, this seems right. The humanities deserve to die. They have abdicated their cultural responsibility, draining colleges of precious resources while promulgating progressive balderdash. Their eulogy, like that of a once-great man who became an eccentric crank in old age, will focus on the glory of their youth, passing over the waste of their later years in tactful silence.

Yet it’s hard to resist the feeling that something irreplaceable is vanishing beneath the decay. However degraded the modern humanities may have become, they still preserve fragments of a great inheritance: Homer and Virgil, Dante and Shakespeare, Melville and Tolstoy. One cannot watch such a tradition collapse with indifference. Instead one is led to melancholic reflection and interrogation: What purpose do the humanities, at their best, serve and what exactly is being lost with their disappearance?

My answer is unashamedly elitist.