Not Dead, Just Relocated

9 April 2024

Some while ago, the New Yorker published a think piece titled “The End of the English Major.” The article chronicles a strong trend away from studying the humanities in universities: “In 2022, only seven per cent of Harvard freshmen planned to major in the humanities, down from twenty per cent in 2012, and nearly thirty per cent during the nineteen-seventies.”

The author seems confused by the trend: “English professors find the turn particularly baffling now: a moment when, by most appearances, the appetite for public contemplation of language, identity, historiography, and other longtime concerns of the seminar table is at a peak.”

It’s not some big mystery. Speaking as a humanities teacher, I find that both students and adults continue to love painting, architecture, music, poetry, essays, novels, etc., when they’re given a chance. That hasn’t changed. But students no longer get that chance.

The richness of the humanities is the possibility of getting out of your own place and century and getting a deeper perspective on life, but exposure alone does not guarantee that perspective. Good habits of engagement are essential to receive the benefits. Good reading habits require a submission to the author and original audience first, and then a step back to exercise sober judgment. Neither submission nor sober judgment come naturally; both are disciplines developed under the tutelage of a skilled teacher who embodies those traits and can call them forth in the student. It’s a beautiful experience, and I was blessed to have two teachers in particular who invested themselves in giving it to me. (Thank you Mrs. Bornarth and Mrs. Brinkley!!!)

But academic humanities don’t do that anymore. At the university level, humanities faculties quit teaching their actual disciplines a couple generations ago, and the rot continues to spread to ever-lower levels. We’re now to the point where it’s entirely possible not only that your high school aged kid’s English teacher doesn’t know how to read a text; neither did his teacher, nor his teacher!

There’s a wide difference between reading a text for what the author is doing, and reading a text for our particular preoccupations. Say we’re interested in Elizabethan dueling customs. We’d be better off reading George Silver than Shakespeare, but it’s legitimate to read Hamlet and see if we can pick up some tidbits. We might be able to learn something, but only an idiot thinks that’s what Shakespeare is writing for. We’re imposing our own categories and interests on the text — and ditto with a Marxist reading, or a post-structuralist reading, or an intersectional queer Asian feminist reading.

Readings driven by contemporary preoccupations aren’t seeking understanding, still less to get out of their own century; they’re using the text before them as a springboard for their own preferred talking points — which are current, fashionable, and (predictably) boring as hell. Reading a classic text in that way is the very definition of provincialism, and it’s pointless besides. Why read a 400-year-old author to get all the same drivel you can read on Twitter?

Precisely that sort of reading predominates in university humanities departments, and has for at least two generations now. The students have finally noticed, and they’re voting with their feet, in droves. And good for them!

Does this mean that the humanities are dead? Not a bit of it. It means that university humanities departments are dead. The humanities themselves are alive and well. We’ve never been more able to access great art and architecture and music and dance and literature than we are right now. Anywhere with a functioning internet connection puts you in touch with more great works than you could contemplate in a lifetime. You can watch—and read, and listen to, and fall in love with—some of the most beautiful works the human race has ever produced, right on the same device where you’re reading this post right now. And having found something that you love, why would you keep it to yourself? Share with your friends! I introduced my barista to Antoni Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia just last week, and she loved it!

We could live in a rich culture of sharing and participating in beauty, and there’s only one thing stopping us: us. We just gotta do it. What are we waiting for?

Comments Off on Not Dead, Just Relocated | Beauty, Hammersmith, Humanities | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

An Unexpected Baptism

5 March 2024

The year was 1994. Trent Reznor was 29 years old, and his industrial rock band, Nine Inch Nails, was completing work on its paradoxically-named second studio album, The Downward Spiral. The band had already seen substantial success: their first studio album Pretty Hate Machine (1989) went triple platinum, and their EP Broken (1992) went platinum as well. NIN t-shirts were ubiquitous in high school hallways, as some of us are old enough to remember.

The final cut on The Downward Spiral, “Hurt,” written by Reznor, was released in early 1995 as a promotional single in advance of the full album. The song charted at #8, and judging from the album’s 3.7 million sales, “Hurt” did its job. “Hurt” would also garner Reznor a nomination for best rock song at the 1996 Grammys. (Nor did the song lose its appeal with age; by 2020, NIN had 9 studio albums and 3 EPs out, and Billboard ranked “Hurt” #3 on its list of NIN’s all-time best songs.)

By the numbers, Reznor was on an upward spiral, but the song itself tells a radically different story. Watch the live performance, listen closely to the music, with its intermittent nail-on-the-chalkboard theme, and note the imagery that Reznor chose to show his audience to go along with the lyrics. How does that hit you?

Hold that thought.

Fast-forward to the early 2000s. Producer Rick Rubin is working with an aging Johnny Cash, and–not without some difficulty–convinces Cash to cover “Hurt.” Cash’s cover will come out in 2002, the year before he dies. Watch the music video to see what Cash made of it.

Rubin’s own account of making the song shows that he understands the overwhelming gravitas of Cash singing Reznor’s lyric. It is, as Rubin says, a far more powerful gut-punch coming from an old man than from a guy in his twenties, with decades still ahead of him.

But Rubin (at least in that interview) misses the note of redemption Cash brings to the song. By changing a single word in the lyric–Reznor’s “I wear this crown of shit/upon my liar’s chair” becomes “I wear this crown of thorns/upon my liar’s chair”–Cash turns the entire song inside out. The iconography of the video adds to the effect, but it’s already there in that single change in wording. Reznor’s wording is an evocative and powerful image of pointlessness, shame, and waste. He chooses from a wide range of disturbing video imagery to depict a world gone mad, and its none-too-subtle effect is to redirect moral responsibility for his own madness. In such a world, is it any wonder that his life is a complete train wreck?

Cash’s “crown of thorns” wording evokes the crucifixion of Jesus Christ–and the crucifixion is never the end of the story. The iconography of loss, waste, and regret in Cash’s video–unlike Reznor’s, drawn overwhelmingly from his own life–is deeply real. He isn’t pulling any punches here. But if an aging Cash wears his regret like a crown of thorns, reinforced by a few well-chosen video images of Jesus’ crucifixion, then there’s a resurrection coming. As one commentator (I forget who) put it, Reznor wrote a suicide note, and Cash turned it into a hymn.

Reznor’s response? “That song isn’t mine anymore.”

He’s right. Cash didn’t just cover the song; he baptized it, and by the power of Jesus Christ, what was dead is now raised to a new life.

And that’s how “despoiling the Egyptians” is done.

1 Comment | Hammersmith, Humanities, Reviews | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Trying on a Mind

5 December 2023

I was raised to be a student of great thinkers. My parents were modeling and teaching good hermeneutics in family Bible study before I could even read. My whole life, I was taught to do the research and expend the imaginal effort to grasp the situation of the writing: what was happening for the writer? For the readers? What was their culture, language, cause for writing the message? It was understood (long before I ever heard of speech act theory) that writing is hard work, and the writer isn’t just spouting off for self-expression; he’s trying to do something to the readers. What are the readers supposed to see and hear? What are they supposed to do?

All this is just basic to being a good student of the humanities, but being raised on the sacred text, there was also an additional dimension: application. Of course a good teacher can bend your ear at length about the value of, say, Abraham Lincoln’s discourses on slavery or St. Patrick’s Confessio for our present day, but a student can just add them to his fund of knowledge of history with no particular thought to present-day lessons. A faithful Christian student of Leviticus has no such luxury. Our fundamental orientation toward the Scriptures is obedience.

Some Scriptures are written closer to our immediate situation (e.g. Romans), and others (Leviticus) further away, but toward all of them we bring a desire to hear what the Holy Spirit will say “Today, if you will hear His voice….” Failure to bring that desire to the text is a moral failure, as demonstrated in the next breath: “…do not harden your hearts as in the Rebellion.”

Coming into my own as a student of the humanities in high school, I applied all my background to my studies. My biblical lessons gave me a leg up on my classmates in grasping the underlying source material for the (Western) literature we studied. More than that, my reflexive habit of looking for application added dimension and depth to my study and commentary. Which is not to say that I had nothing to learn: I came out of high school with two big additional pieces. First, I fell in love with the beauty of the arts. I didn’t come from a background that appreciated beauty, so waking me up was not a trivial task. I was blessed with teachers that tackled the job with great enthusiasm. (Bornarth, Brinkley, Kuyper, and Virgo: Thank you all!) Second, I learned how to drill down into an author’s biography and body of work, to become a student of that author in particular and begin to see the world as he or she saw it.

My first project of that nature was a months-long team effort with two other students, focused on George Bernard Shaw. It had honestly never occurred to me that one could develop that kind of grasp of a particular person’s work. I was hooked. Since then, I’ve devoted serious attention to authors as diverse as Plato, Euclid, Flannery O’Connor, St. Patrick, Matteo Ricci, Stephen Barnes, Rex Stout, George Leonard, Peter Leithart, Orson Scott Card, Frank Herbert, and N. D. Wilson.

Every human is handcrafted for eternity; there’s not the slightest chance that even a prolific writer will successfully convey all their own depths to even the most apt of readers. Happily, you need not be the most apt of readers to immerse yourself in a particular person’s thought for a time. The strength of this sort of experiment is that you get a chance to try on someone else’s mind, see what they see, think what they think. It’s never a perfect fit. Of course it’s not. The places that fit don’t fit easily are the whole point.

Comments Off on Trying on a Mind | Autobiography, Hermeneutics, Humanities | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols