A number of years ago — sometime in the decade between the financial crash and the advent of Covid — I found myself at the hotel bar of the Modern Language Association’s annual conference (in Vancouver? Boston? Chicago?) arguing with a professor about modernism. Or rather, about modernism as a field of current scholarship in literary studies. I wondered why the distinguished English department in which this professor taught, having failed for several years to replace a retired modernist, did not have a single senior scholar of modernism on its faculty. “Well,” he said, “it’s hard. It doesn’t help that modernism has a problem with anti-Semitism, racism, and fascism.” What could he mean, I wish I’d asked him, by characterizing the first literary period in the West in which Jews were absolutely central to the literary establishment as having a “problem with anti-Semitism”? Or the movement that included the Harlem Renaissance and, elsewhere, négritude and affiliated developments as “racist”? The period in which modernism flourished was, of course, one of world-historical ideological mobilization; fascism, racism, eugenics, and so on carved out their vicious territories across the face of the world and the world of the mind. But it was also the period of suffragettism, of varieties of national determination both liberatory and murderous, of Bolshevism. Did the professor just mean that some of the most important modernists were themselves fascists and anti-Semites? That is true, of course. Did he mean that in some cases modernist aesthetics and fascism drew on common idioms, made use of common sources? That is true, too, but so did modernism and anarchism; and so did modernism and socialism; so did modernism and a certain species of secular liberalism. I didn’t raise those obvious objections because I was so surprised. My interlocutor was an intelligent and sensitive scholar and normally not susceptible to this sort of faddish moralizing. Had I quarreled, I am sure he would have withdrawn the sloppy charge. But the fact that this judgment, in a moment of thoughtlessness, emerged so easily is testament to its status as a piece of common sense in the field. Thoughtless remarks can be very revealing. The professor was guilty of a reflex, a sort of professional hiccup—a regurgitation symptomatic of the extent to which the study of literature has become the terrain of a certain brand of vaporous politics. “Politics.” Or pseudo-politics. There are of course serious ways of approaching modernism’s fascism problem. One of the greatest scholars of modernism, the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson, wrote a book, Wyndham Lewis: The Modernist as Fascist, exploring with unrivaled rigor the modernism of fascism and the fascism of modernity, including aesthetic modernity. Even if every modernist were a Wyndham Lewis or an Ezra Pound — and every modernist was not — the movement would demand scholarly attention. Totalitarian warts and all, it made us into who we are. Modernism remains, as T.J. Clark, another brilliant Marxist critic, wrote, “our antiquity … the only one we have.” To have abandoned it as a hiring field will, in the not-too-distant future, deprive college students of access to one of the keys to any understanding of the present. Modernism’s curtailment on pseudo-political grounds is an aspect of a much larger phenomenon: the precipitous decline in the prestige of the humanities in general, a decline which has seen precincts of study that seemed vital a mere fifteen years ago reduced to husks of their former selves. The situation is too well known to need detailed rehearsing here. Christopher Newfield, in his presidential address to the Modern Language Association in 2023, summed things up neatly, as least as far as literary studies is concerned. “Our profession is in trouble. We all know this. We can all instantly name the troubles that we must fix: a shrinking academic job base, in which tenurable faculty with academic freedom are replaced by a reserve army of precarious workers; declining numbers of majors in literature and language fields; program closures and consolidations; and very small quantities of research funding for literature and language scholarship and for the humanities more broadly.” The fundamental question bedeviling all analyses of this grim situation can be posed simply: Are the causes of the crisis external to the humanities, or do they reflect something gone awry in humanistic study itself? No satisfying answer should insist that either the external or the internal side of the problem is decisive. Plainly the catastrophe is, as they say, overdetermined. Declining state-level funding is obviously a problem from the outside. Administrative failures to limit adjunctification reflect problems both external (declining funding) and, to a degree, internal (a symptom of the collapse of faculty self-governance within the university). Declining major rates are more confusing. Do they reflect a sudden incapacity to feel the relevance of inherited cultural and interpretive traditions, a large-scale societal shift that the critic Simon During has called a “second secularization”? Or have students simply been warned — by parents, teachers, the broader culture — on financial grounds against taking classes in things that otherwise interest them? Or has the nature of the humanistic enterprise itself, at least as institutionalized in our colleges, changed in ways that have rendered it no longer appealing to students? No one can be certain, and the question has polarized the academy’s diagnosticians. Many observers — conservatives especially, but also some disenchanted liberals and leftists — point to what they see as disciplinary moral orthodoxies run amok, while others — including most academics themselves, at least when speaking publicly — emphasize a combination of state-level defunding and our society’s philistinism, its larger hostility to humanistic inquiry on both political and instrumental grounds. The fact is that no one knows exactly how to distribute blame; anyone who pretends the crisis is univariate is propagandizing. The current intellectual culture of the humanities cannot be responsible, all on its own, for the material crisis that academic humanists face. 
Yet that is hardly a reason
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence