Enough has been said about the myriad crises our universities face; a much deeper and broader problem afflicts and attenuates our society at large. This is the near-total collapse of a shared culture of the humanities, which – for centuries, and indeed millennia – have been at the very heart of our civilisation. Yet there is, among all the institutions of Britain, a loss of faith in the transcendent power of the arts and humanities, as well as total confusion about what they even are. The result, for the public, is a loss of freedom to explore the accumulated treasures of the humanities; a loss of time to reflect on the deepest questions; and, in turn, a tragic loss of interest in the very things that give life meaning.
We find ourselves blinking at the uncertain dawn of an age of Artificial Intelligence. And whether the utopian or dystopian forecast of this rapidly-evolving technology emerges to be closer to the truth, one thing is certain: it is ipso facto impossible for any technology to be a human being, to experience joy and failure and grief and love. Far from being romantic optional extras to our core biological processes, these emotions are the quintessence of being human. In many sectors, however, and especially in education, the distorting lens of the social sciences, and the more tangible distractions of STEM, obscure this simple truth.
Everything we should desire for our culture – fostering curiosity about how we became who we are, spurring knowledge of foreign languages (and indeed English), nurturing a love of literature (and longer attention spans), forging a share sense of civic responsibility, and inspiring a desire to pursue the life well lived – hangs on the health of the humanities.
So what can we do to rediscover that which has kept our civilisation competent and coherent and content? How, in short, do we recover the humanities?
Dr David Butterfield is a classicist, Senior Fellow at the Pharos Foundation, and the editor of the journal Antigone.