A few weeks ago, Stanley Fish wrote a blog entry that I spotted on The New York Times website: "Will The Humanities Save Us?"
"It is not the business of the humanities to save us," he writes. "What then do they do? They don't do anything, if by 'do' is meant bring about effects in the world. And if they don't bring about effects in the world they cannot be justified except in relation to the pleasure they give to those who enjoy them."
Fish then ends his essay by trying to make thousands of liberal arts students all over the world feel better: "An activity that cannot be justified is one that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good."
Well look at us, swimming upstream. After all, who would want, after a $200,000 education, to feel part of "some larger good?" Not me; I was hoping my tuition dollars and years of study would one day allow me to look back on them as totally ineffective and meaningless. Yes, sir, just give me some Keats poems to enjoy, and I'll just forget about personal fulfillment.
My perhaps snippy response to Fish's article is due to a truism that a fellow Bowdoin English major once pointed out to me: "English majors are always looking for justifications for reading dusty old books." The suggestion that there is no "justification" is clearly a painful blow to this throbbing, vulnerable insecurity.
I'm apparently not the only one whose education is plagued with this concern. On Facebook, there are a number of groups dedicated to the very subject. One entitled "Non-humanities Majors Lack an Informed and Nuanced Outlook On Life" is a little elitist for my tastes. Besides, I'm pretty sure anyone who understands the physics behind the molecular composition of, I don't know, giraffe bile, probably has a more nuanced view of the world than myself.
Another Facebook group tries to laugh away the matter entirely: "I Picked a Major I Like, and One Day I Will Probably Be Living in a Box." But this, too, I think misses the point. The idea that I will almost certainly make thousands and thousands of dollars less than my pre-med or economics major peers will is a fact that sunk in some time ago (after I learned exactly what an "investment banker" is).
It is more the suggestion that my study of English "cannot be justified" or won't "bring about effects in the world" that makes me a little defensive. Most likely because my suspicion that it's true is increasing as the semesters go by; as I write 12-page papers on the sexuality in Renaissance drama, it occurs to me that these subjects probably won't launch our society's geopolitical issues into a new era of discussion.
It's been suggested that reading literature gives us a sense of place in our society; that by understanding the concerns and nuances of our own culture, we have the potential to look at and interpret the cultures of those around us. Thus, literature can bridge the gap between immense cultural differences.
A beautifully uplifting notion, but times and circumstances being what they are, my faith in the idea that worldwide, national leaders will read international literature and reform their politics accordingly, is, at best, shaky.
Literature does not provide capital to aspiring businesses. It doesn't send workers and volunteers to underprivileged areas. It doesn't pass legislature, and it won't fight wars. Besides the very pages on which it is written, it is totally free of any market value.
And clearly, it is unique in that aspect. At almost any point in time, whatever you are doing, you can look around and realize that everything around you is completely at the mercy of the economy. The electricity you use, the clothes you where, the food you eat, the room you live in, the time you take up to stop and observe all these things, has a price on it. When the market is bad, everything around you becomes more expensive. The expression "money's tight" stems from the overwhelming idea that the market has a chokingly fast grip on us.
And while this market economy has certainly given us, by and large, an extraordinarily lucrative American society, it can frequently cause us to lose our sense of humanness, of our ability to be entirely unto ourselves.
Our saving grace, perhaps, is that words never lose their value. A book's contents, a love letter's poetry, a diary's musings, picked up after decades of economic growth or weakening, have the same meaning they did when they were first composed. The strength of the United States dollar has no effect on the value of our language.
That such a thing exists is remarkable, and, to conclude my dilemma, entirely worth study. Reading grants us the ability to simply "be," without the weight of monetary value looming over us. We are able to become intimately involved with something in a way not dictated by the movement of the economy. That we can, if only temporarily, be humans not encompassed in an atmosphere of cost, is, for our society, an extremely important?and very worthwhile?"larger good."