Humanities on the edge: why the humanities have become peripheral. From the commentary:

I want to propose that such big thinking might begin with the idea that, in the West, secularization has happened not once but twice. It happened first in relation to religion, and second, more recently, in relation to culture and the humanities….

Faith has been lost across two different zones: first, religion; then, high culture. The process that we associate with thinkers like Friedrich Schiller, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Matthew Arnold, in which culture was consecrated in religion’s place, and that in more modest forms survived until quite recently, has finally been undone. We now live in a doubly secularized age, post-religious and postcanonical. The humanities have become merely a (rather eccentric) option for a small fraction of the population….

As a society, the value of a canon that carries our cultural or, as they once said, “civilizational” values can no longer be assumed. These values are being displaced and critiqued by other ostensibly more “enlightened” ways of thinking. The institution — the academic humanities — that officially preserved and disseminated civilizational history is being hollowed out, partly from within. Only remnants are left….

These two forms of cultural secularization — the erosion of canonicity and the loss of authority — are joined. That is why it has become almost impossible today to affirm the social or ethical value in studying, say, verse forms in John Dryden’s poetry; Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s relation to Moses Mendelssohn; the early modern Dutch ship-building trade; differences between humanist thought in Florence and Milan in the quattrocento; contemporary analytic philosophy’s technical debate over free will. Such topics are of course still researched and even taught, but they have become socially and culturally peripheral precisely because they are not connected to a communal acknowledgment of the high humanities’ value. Thus, at least in Anglophone countries, it has become all but impossible publicly to defend the use of taxpayer money on them….

Despite the humanities’ variety and dispersion, they accrue a power that is hard to extinguish just because they provide fertile ground for historicized reasoning, truthfulness, memory, conservation, imagination, and judgment. Being able to think logically (and dialectically); knowing more than others about the past; being good at checking things for their truth and accuracy; having a strong casuistical sense of what rules count when; being especially familiar with information and archives; being able to dream up possibilities and exciting impossibilities; being intellectually curious; being able to make quick and accurate assessments about whether this (version of an) image or a text is better in a relevant way than that one; having the ability to tell persuasive and accurate stories: All of these are dispositions and skills that secure authority and power for individuals in all kinds of situations. Such skills are not confined to the humanities, but they do thrive and expand there.

For other posts on the humanities crisis, see here.