Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

I’ll admit to being biased here. Teaching a great books course at Columbia — I was a graduate student, my charges were freshmen — was the pedagogical experience of my life. I was never the same again, and I know that many of my students also weren’t, because they told me so, and because, decades later, some of them still tell me so. It confirmed me as a convert to the mission: to great books courses in particular, and to the humanities in general, as unique and indispensable parts of the undergraduate experience. So when that mission is attacked — or defended particularly well — I tend to pay attention. Lately, it’s been both. Last fall, Roosevelt Montás, a senior lecturer at Columbia and former director of its Center for the Core Curriculum, published Rescuing Socrates, a beautiful, powerful, personal argument on behalf of great books programs. Together with another book, The Lives of Literature by Arnold Weinstein, a senior professor at Brown, Rescuing Socrates elicited a rebuttal — in the scornful, condescending tone he takes on such occasions — from none other than Louis Menand. Menand is a professor at Harvard. It has long been fashionable, among a certain kind of wised-up academic, to dismiss the humanistic enterprise as hopelessly naïve and retrograde. Such is also the case with another recent book, Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age, by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon, professors of Germanic studies at Ohio State and the University of Virginia respectively. The authors describe the development of what we now call the humanities (as an idea, an ideal, and an institutional structure) across the German nineteenth century, with inroads into the American twentieth. But their attitude toward that ideal — the belief that the humanities can play a unique role in the moral development of young adults — is much like Menand’s: sneering, patronizing, and contemptuous. Before we get into the meat of this, a few disclaimers. I figure myself in both critiques. Menand lists my book Excellent Sheep, from 2014, in a roster of similar (and, in his view, similarly misconceived) polemics. Menand, I should say, is a writer I have long admired, so much so that I have asked him more than once to blurb my books. He has demurred, which in retrospect is just as well. For as long as I’ve admired him, I’ve also been infuriated by him. He is as clever a critic as they come, with an elegant wit and a bloodhound’s nose for humbug. But he also exemplifies Wilde’s definition of a cynic. If I were asked to edit a selection of his work, I would call it The Price of Everything. As for Reitter and Wellmon, I appear in their volume, along with Nietzsche, Dilthey, Edward Said, Andrew Delbanco, and others, as a “melancholy mandarin” (although I am neither), one of the nostalgic fools who actually believes in the humanities’ transformative potential. If the authors understand the other targets of their inquiry as badly as they do my work, their book is worthless. But to give them the benefit of the doubt — they seem more careful when it comes to their principal areas of concern — they do appear to be a useful pair of guides to the historical dimensions of the issue. What is that history? It is one of discontent, on the part of certain scholars (by no means all of them in the humanities), with the direction of their institutions: their perception that the modern university, especially with respect to its teaching of undergraduates, is excessively utilitarian in its approach — overly specialized, narrowly practical, subservient to market values — and that it is therefore failing to discharge a crucial spiritual obligation. “Professors have been making the same complaints,” writes Menand, “ever since the American research university came into being, in the late nineteenth century.” In fact, as Reitter and Wellmon show, the words “American” and “late” can be deleted from that formulation. The criticism dates to the beginning of the modern university, circa 1810, in Prussia. For Reitter and Wellmon, as for Menand, that very persistence negates it (“it’s a song that never ends,” Menand writes), as if the duration of a problem were a brief against its existence. But the criticism persists because the problem is structural. “The conflict these professors are experiencing between their educational ideals and the priorities of their institutions,” Menand writes of Montás and Weinstein, “is baked into the system.” Indeed it is, but that is not, as he intends, a strike against them. It is precisely the point. The modern university came into being under the banner of Wissenschaft, to use the German term: systematic empirical research and scholarship, conducted by specialists trained in one or another of an emerging set of academic disciplines — philology, history, chemistry, physics. The word for that in English, before its meaning became restricted to a specific branch of Wissenschaft, was “science.” The modern university, as it is often said, is a “knowledge factory,” supplying that essential raw material for modern industry and modern states, enhancing the profits of the one and the power of the other, and it is on that basis that it has secured its lofty levels of prestige and funding. Wissenschaft in all its dimensions — the investigation of reality — is a noble and magnificent endeavor, and its results represent the greatest intellectual achievement (one of the greatest achievements, full stop) in human history. But something, some have always felt, went missing in the enterprise. For universities are not just centers of research. They also teach and, in particular, teach undergraduates. In this they inherit the role of the institutions from which they emerged: in Europe, the pre-modern universities, with their feet in the Middle Ages; in America, the early colleges, which were largely church-affiliated institutions. Both understood their mission, at its core, in moral terms: to inculcate virtue, to shape character, to produce men, or gentlemen, of cultivation. So what