The Party's Over

Harvard University reports a dramatic decline in students choosing to major in some one of the humanities, as well as generally lower enrollments in humanities courses.  We live in an era in which making money is an all-consuming passion; the economic decline accompanying the Great Recession has not ended,  and it has rattled everyone's nerves.  The pundits insist that no one can succeed without a college degree, students are convinced that they must study something that is somehow technical so that they can justify the enormous sums of money spent on their education.  "Technical" means knowing specifically how to do something, some strategy, technique, system.  Spending time understanding Cinquecento painting, or learning to parse the obscurities of Pindar's Odes is not the same thing.  Humanism started in northern Italy as Petrarch and others began to order their prose after the style of the Latin of Cicero and his colleagues; they no longer were simply interested in studying the grammar of the ancient languages, they wanted to assimilate the style, the mental habits, the very being of their Roman forebears; they were coming out of the enormous all pervasive intellectual fog and spiritual debilitation that the spread of the Christian Church throughout medieval Europe had induced.  Humanism was the antidote; that body of knowledge became in nineteenth century Germany a kind of science, "klassische Altertumswissenschaft" as it was called, which was imported into England and North America.  In England "classics," however, became something else, more mystical, more of a form of social identification.  The English upper classes, or rather the males of that class, learned Greek and Latin, studied the classics as their posh private schools because it was that knowledge which was to set them apart from the middle classes where boys were intended to go on in the professions or business.  Upper class boys with their Latin and Greek were destined for the upper echelons of diplomacy, imperial service, the military or the church.  A knowledge of the literature and cultures of Greek and Roman antiquity was a private language which this class could use as short hand when talking to one another.  The literature which was the focus of their study was all about males who dominated, heroes, gods, generals, Achilles, Agamemnon, Alcibiades, Apollo.  It was not ever focused on the skivvy in the kitchen or the stable boy walking the horses.  In point of fact, the stories that dominated this literature steadfastly avoided a look at those who had walk-on roles in life's stage.  In the United States of America without so rigid a class system nor the relentless need to sequester and denominate groups, little by little the study of antiquity opened up to notice that, yes, there were women whose stories were maybe back stories but which nonetheless determined the shape of the foreground if sufficient imagination were applied, yes, there were all manner of marginal men and women, some from alternative ethnicities, whose attempt to move center stage was consistently repulsed.  Somewhere along the way, the heirs of the great unwashed became the principal cohort studying in American colleges, and their need to know more about the abusive, exploiting class and their psychic needs declined.  That was the beginning of the end for the humanities.  The great psychic, social, intellectual dramas were just as real and immediate in contemporary art whatever the medium; humanism of the last two millenia was just too expensive in every way to try to retrieve or maintain.