Bonfire of the Humanities

Over the past four years, I have warned humanities scholars and publishers to prepare for a future when publishers, like myself, would go from publishing too many books to too few. What good are books? What are publications for?

My motive in these questions is my immoderate love of books, and if this be idolatry, I am guilty. Collectively we may stand—as Click|keyword[Marshall+McLuhan]" >Marshall McLuhan suggested years ago—at an exit from the time when the book, with its writing, its publication, and its reception, was central to human flourishing. We owe it to ourselves, then, to figure out what it was we, as members of the human species, most valued about the book, so we can try to preserve it.

The humanities must now take steps to preserve and protect the independence of their activities, such as the writing of books and articles, before the market becomes our prison and the value of the book becomes undermined. It was not always so. Click|keyword[John+Milton]" >John Milton once wrote that good books are "the precious lifeblood of a master spirit." Today the humanist should look back to such expressions of illuminated belief. The task is to engage in constant re-examination.

illustration: Rachel Salomon

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More About

• Markus Meister
• Lindsay Waters
• Marshall McLuhan
• John Milton
• Joseph Stiglitz

If humanists do not keep firmly in mind what they are about, no one else will. Humanists study books and artifacts in order to find traces of our common humanity. I argue that there is a causal connection between the corporatist demand for increased productivity and the draining from all publications of any significance other than as a number. The humanities are in a crisis now because many of the presuppositions about what counts are absolutely inimical to the humanities. When books cease being complex media and become objects to quantify, then it follows that all the media that the humanities study lose value.

Money has restructured the U.S. academy in its own image, and money is a blunt instrument. Until World War II, almost all higher-education institutions were founded in the name of religion. When some god was the ultimate framework for the academy, the sky was the limit for the sorts of work that could happen in the academy, because all gods are beyond definition. I don't mean to ignore the fact that religion has often hobbled and even shackled free inquiry in the past. But when the