APT Virtual Reading Group 2011

Wrap-Up and Next Steps

2011-08-01T10:37:00.000-05:00

Stefan's last comment provides a great starting point for our final week of VRG discussion before the panel at October's APT meeting. He writes:

"Nussbaum's attention to the political climate justifies her approach (in part), but her attention to politics is only a half-measure that ignores a larger problem. Yes, we can and should talk about the utility of the humanities for democracy, but we should also be talking about the political and institutional prerequisites for democratic humanism to flourish. I think this is why her general strategy of "making the humanities safe for democracy" is a sound one, since only by establishing a consensus on that ground will enable us to challenge the increasing privatization of the academy."

What do you think?

Chapter 7: Democratic Education on the Ropes

2011-07-24T15:07:00.009-05:00

I have learned much from Martha Nussbaum's scholarly writing, and I admire her attempts to bring the knowledge she has acquired in her scholarship to bear on matters of concern in our public life. But I do not think she is nearly as effective in the latter role as she is in the former, and I believe the book under discussion here provides a good illustration of her limitations as a public intellectual. Though I agree with the thrust of the book (what political theorist wouldn't?), I do not think the argument she puts forward is anywhere near as strong as it needs to be to address the challenge the book is designed to confront. I say this with regret because we badly need to confront this challenge, and the issues at stake are just the sort of thing those of us in the humanities (especially political theorists) should be able to address effectively. But if Nussbaum's way of making the case is the best we can do, we are in even deeper trouble than she suggests.

By the time one gets to the end of a book which makes a sustained argument, one tends to have something more than just the argument of the final chapter in mind. So in these remarks I am going to take the liberty of commenting on more than just the chapter I have been assigned, which is in many ways a summing up of the claims made in the preceding pages.

Why am I dissatisfied with the book? Let me focus on what I regard as the most serious problem with it, buidling on some of the things Ryan Balot has already said. The problem, in a nutshell, is this: surely Nussbaum knows otherwise, but in this book she acts as though the relationship between democracy and the humanities were unambiguously positive and complementary. But that is just not the case. One could well argue that just the opposite is true. There is plenty of evidence that could be cited in support of the proposition that democracy and the humanities are inherently in tension with one another, and that the potential for conflict this represents is something that can only be avoided by carefully controlling the terms on which both political and cultural life are conducted.

This is just what Nussbaum does, of course. She gives us an idealized picture of democracy and pairs it with an equally idealized characterization of the humanities which nicely complements the things she has to say about democracy. But even those of us who love the humanities and also consider ourselves to be democrats know the matter is more complicated than that. I do not mean to suggest that the picture she paints is altogether artificial; undoubtedly there have been situations where political and cultural life have been conducted in a manner that approximates the state of affairs she has in mind. But situations of that sort are hardly the norm. It is much more common for people's actual experience with both democratic politics and the humanities to be much more conflictual than Nussbaum acknowledges in this work.

I wish she had recognized more forthrightly that democracy is an inherently contested idea rather than simply stipulating her view as though it were self-evidently the correct one. I say that because I am sure that if the argument she advances in this book were ever to become a subject of public debate, one of the first objections it would encounter is that these days Americans, at least, tend not to conceive of democracy in the manner she does. I don't want to exaggerate the difference; those who have a less elevated (and more utilitarian) view can be expected to affirm some of the things she identifies as the marks of democratic regimes (regular, free and fair elections, e.g.). But if a person believes democracy is primarily a means to create (and maintain) an environment that is conducive to the enjoyment of private goods by individual citizens, I doubt they will be much impressed by a line of reasoning that emphasizes the quality of debate and deliberation in public life. Not without more of a supporting argument than Nussbaum provides, at least. And my hunch is that it will not be easy to come up with a version of such an argument that would really be effective in changing people's minds.

To be fair, Nussbaum does provide at times hints of such an argument, suggesting that the quality of the decision-making that occurs in public life is likely to be better if the participants are imbued with the qualities that can be expected to derive from exposure to the humanities. But most of what she has to say in this vein is expressed in passing, and it has the same stipulative (and highly moralistic) quality that characterizes the rest of her argument. So it fails to confront at all directly the obvious objections to it. Admittedly, if one has the values she espouses, it is surely better for public life to be conducted in such a way that the interests and opinions of minorities are treated fairly. But what if one does not share those values? What if one does not conceive of democracy that way? What if one thinks of democracy as an arena for struggle among forces that are competing for comparative advantage? In that case it is hardly self-evident that a more inclusive (much less a more empathetic) politics is desirable.

If the assumptions Nussbaum makes about the nature of democracy and the character of democratic values are debatable, even more is that true about the assumptions she makes about the humanities and the effects of exposure to them. I don't doubt that a humanistic education can have the sort of effects she proposes, but it is just stating the obvious to suggest that it can have other sorts of effects as well--some of which are patently un and even anti-democratic. Nor is it just the fact that humanistic learning exposes people to eloquent expressions of antidemocratic views that I have in mind in saying that, either. Even more it is that humanistic learning all too easily functions as what Bourdieu aptly characterized as cultural capital--i.e., a resource that can be used by those who possess it to "get (or stay) ahead" of their fellow citizens.
Here again, I am puzzled by Nussbaum's neglect of the subject. I recognize that she occasionally alludes to the fact that the humanities have a long history of association with aristocratic purposes, but in this work at least, she seems to be oblivious to the fact that the problem of class bias has not been solved just by making humanistic education more widely available and incorporating into it materials that reflect democratic values. But as any sociologist who has taken up this matter at all seriously will tell you, the problem is real, and it is almost certain to figure prominently in any public debate about the role of the humanities in our societies.

I share Nussbaum'e belief that humanistic learning can improve the quality of our public life, and I am convinced that the quality of our shared life is diminished when such learning is missing. But I think we need to face up honestly to the fact that all too often its effect is to produce a sense of superiority in the minds of those who have acquired it--and that it often is perceived that way by those who lack such "refinement." Undoubtedly this effect is in part a result of the way educational opportunity is distributed in our societies, but it cannot be taken for granted that it derives from just that. It could be that something deeper is involved--is there something inherently elitist about humanistic learning?--and I would submit that any serious discussion of the issue Nussbaum has raised in this book needs to come to grips with that possibility.

But is that not true of any learned knowledge? Is it not also true of the sciences and related technical fields? Yes and no. Any serious learning places demands on the learner that some people will find it easier to satisfy than others, and inherent in that circumstance is the possibility of significant inequalities. Indeed, it presents the possibility of forms of rule that are patently undemocratic. But I have the impression that that in our time, at least, there is a significant difference between the sciences and the humanities in this regard. It comes from the fact that the values that are assumed to be served by scientific inquiry and the resulting technological advances are much more widely believed to be in the interest of us all. Surely it is not an accident that even in these days of intense debates about such matters as global warming, scientists are much less likely than humanists to be accused of "elitism." Or that even when our students are not very good at learning science, they still tend to respect its value in a way that is not true when they find humanistic learning difficult. You don't find many of them saying that physics is "irrelevant," much less resenting its existence.

None of this is said, I reiterate, to suggest that Nussbaum is wrong in principle about the role the humanities can play in democratic societies. But it is to suggest that the matter is considerably more complex than she indicates, and that it will take much greater sociological realism than the book under discussion here offers to do justice to that complexity.

Let me add, in conclusion, one other illustration: as far as I can tell, there is not a word in this book about the role popular culture has played in creating the difficult situation in which we humanists now find ourselves. In so far as Nussbaum provides an analysis of how our societies got into this situation (a subject about which the book has far too little to say), her emphasis is entirely on economic developments. The story she tells is all about economic "imperatives" being imposed on us in such a way that almost everything else that matters to us has had to be sacrificed, to some degree.

No doubt that is true, but it is not the whole story. To explain, let me propose this thought experiment. Imagine where we would be if somehow, magically, our societies could find their way out of the economic predicament in which they now find themselves and our institutions of higher learning were flush once again in the manner they were, say, back in the 1960's. Imagine what the state of the humanities would be if, as a result of a development of the sort I have just described, we were authorized to reestablish the departments that have been closed and to expand significantly the number of faculty appointments available to us. Would that solve the problem? Would it get us out of the crisis? Undoubtedly it would relieve the pressure, but I don't think it would really do away with the crisis. Why? Because barring an equally dramatic change in the character of the popular culture, we would still be living in societies where much of what people encountered in popular venues was antagonistic to the habits of mind that are required to respond appreciatively to what the humanities have to offer.

The tension between popular culture and anything remotely resembling high culture is not a new phenomenon, of course. It is an old story, but the problem it presents seems to me to have been getting worse in recent years, due in no small part to the newer technologies now available to us and the way they have been exploited commercially. There have always been people who have been impatient with the disciplines required to learn--or create--anything that is intellectually complex, and popular culture has encouraged that tendency. But today the drift of our popular culture is such as to make it socially acceptable (and even chic) for people to be ignorant about all kinds of important subjects and to be impatient with any suggestion that they need to subject themselves to the kind of (disciplined) learning that might enable them to deal with intellectually challenging topics effectively.

I trust that in this forum I need not go into much detail in explaining that claim. Even those of us who are privileged to teach good students in institutions that value the humanities can feel the pressure being exerted on our work by the pervasive tendency in the more popular parts of our culture, at least, to simplify--and yes, dumb down--virtually everything that is discussed in that domain. We see it in our students (and sometimes even in ourselves), whose habits of mind are all too often alien to the kind of serious, sustained attention to complex texts we are trying to foster. The better ones find ways of giving such texts the attention they deserve, to be sure. But even for them it tends to be an effort, while for so many others it is effort that is just not worth making. Why devote any serious attention to, say, Plato, they wonder, when we have so many easier and quicker ways of answering the questions he addressed? And if by chance we do find that we need to know something about Plato at some point in our lives (for some practical purpose), we can always look it up on the Internet.

I concede that the current preoccupation with economic goods makes it easier to people to think this way, but I don't think it is the only reason why they do so. At least as important, I submit, is the fact that in our time some of the most powerful forces at work in shaping our cultural life appear to have taken an anti-intellectual turn. They seem to have deliberately turned againsgt intellectual sophistication, in fact, and their efforts have on the whole been well received by the public (a development that probably should not surprise us but still should give any committed democrat pause). So we find ourselves in a situation where even ostensibly well educated people see no point in acquiring anything more than a veneer or cultural sophistication (if that). That is what we are up against, and as far as I am concerned, this state of affairs poses an even more dangerous threat to the health of our polity than the one on which Nussbaum has chosen to focus her attention.

Chapter 6: Cultivating Imagination

2011-07-18T15:45:00.000-05:00

My thanks to all who’ve participated in this project so far. I’ve found reading the posts and comments intellectually satisfying, with a richness, depth, and diversity that reflects well on both APT and Nussbaum’s text. I share the reservations of many, even most, who’ve posted in this forum, but the capacity of Not for Profit to provoke such engagement over such a range of issues offers evidence that her text is worthy of debate. That stipulated, I was disappointed by Nussbaum’s argument. I read her short post in the NY Times “Do Colleges Need French Departments?” roundtable last fall, which summarized the arguments of this book, and I was eager to see those points defended more fully. I’ve found, unfortunately, that the expanded defense dilutes the power of her assertions. Nonetheless, I do share Nussbaum’s faith in the power of the humanities to transform students and foster a better democratic society, and offer the comments that follow in that spirit.

My initial comment is more of a quibble, though I think it illustrates concisely some of the flaws of this book. It is not at all clear to me that “play” generates “empathy,” nor that empathy is a necessary prerequisite to flourishing democratic citizenship. Winnicott “had confidence in the unfolding of the developmental process, which would produce ethical concerns – and the basis for a healthy democracy – as an outgrowth of early struggles, if things went well enough” (98), but should I have such confidence? Isn’t it plausible that a well unfolded developmental process might produce self-satisfied egotists draped in self-regard? Perhaps it is the case that these dispositions are largely genetic or products of evolutionary development? More importantly, the core of the argument of this chapter is, characteristically, simply slipped into the sentence between the hyphens of Winnicott’s quote, unintentionally but accurately signaling how lightly this assertion rests within the argument. The idea that a healthy democracy has at its base the capacity for ethical concern and empathetic imagination receives little sustained attention or defense apart from Winnicott’s parenthetical conviction. It is offered as if evident, with the authority of Winnicott and the progressive educational theorists as warrants. I’ve no doubt this sort of narrative imagination contributes to an ethical disposition and that such a disposition will lead to a better life for such individuals, but I’m genuinely confused as to how the ethical character of individuals provides a foundation for democratic citizenship. Is it at all plausible to condition the health of democracy upon the ethics of its citizens, especially in the pluralistic world of clashing comprehensive doctrines within which we live? Such a person might find the going difficult in Madison’s realm of clashing ambitions or Weber’s consequentialist vocation.

But taking the grounds as given, how does humanistic study nurture the democratic imagination Nussbaum feels essential? In part, it appears, by creating a place for play that adults might otherwise be unable to find. Winnicott “held that a primary function of art in all human cultures is to preserve and enhance the cultivation of the “play space,” and saw the role of the arts in human life as, above all, that of nourishing and extending the capacity for empathy” (101). Leaving aside the grandiosity of his claimed understanding of all human cultures, the assertion here seems problematic as a defense of the humanities. First, to assert the primacy of art as the means to preserve play does not imply that only art can serve this function effectively. What about actual play? The idea that adults lack “play space” without the arts is bizarre. Adults engage in actual sport, play games of skill and chance, inhabit virtual worlds and communities, and compete with one another in a multitude of modes. I’m sympathetic with the idea that play and democracy reinforce one another, and accept that the arts help sustain that sense of play, but aren’t the many opportunities citizens have to engage in real play just as important? Certainly the Greeks understood the value of the agon, and the citizens of Athenian democracy saw competitive play as an essential element of democratic life. It may be the case that our contemporary public life is too sedate, too serious, too unplayful to be healthy, but the arts are not likely to provide the solution for everyone, or even the majority.

Second, Nussbaum’s account of how the arts encourage play and build empathetic capacity betrays a surprisingly instrumental view of the humanities, a tendency others have identified as well. Note the central description of the educative role of the arts, which are intended to both cultivate empathy and “address cultural blind spots” through “carefully crafted instruction” and equally careful selection of texts that will advance these purposes. This is not an argument for the inherent value of the arts and humanities, and if better tools were discovered to teach empathy and cultural understanding then the argument might be easily turned against this style of education. Her instrumentalism also leads Nussbaum to propose fairly undemocratic criteria by which this careful selection of texts occurs. We need, she argues, to teach the “right” literature and exclude the “defective” literature (108-109), a distinction determined by the capacity to produce the correct sort of imagination. This is Socratic in the wrong way: are we really to prohibit those “artworks that exclude uneven sympathies” (109)? And how do we sort out the defective “literature” from the functional? The quotes around literature here are Nussbaum’s, implying literature which fails her test should be considered not merely insufficient for use in education but not even literature at all. Surely a robust defense of the humanities must recognize that its lessons exceed those intended by the instructor and that an authentic encounter with art may be both edifying and destructive? The power of art is not one to be harnessed in the fashion Nussbaum describes; fear of this uncontrollable power is what led the Socrates of the Republic to restrict poetry, music, and drama, and Nussbaum’s similar instinct demonstrates a similar fear.

Even if we were to accept this instrumentalist view of the arts, could we live with the implications for our culture? Consider, as just one example, Homer. We know the Socrates of The Republic thought the epics should be edited to remove dangerous passages, but Nussbaum’s criteria would seem to exclude these texts altogether. Parts of the Iliad lend themselves to cultural respect and moral imagination, particularly Achilles’s grief at the death of Patroclus and his recognition of the humanity of Priam when he decides to return the body of his son. But Achilles’s grief leads not to peace but his willing return to war, a war from which he had abstained not for moral reasons but out of petulance at having his human prize stolen from him, and in the funeral games in the book prior to the wonderful moment with Priam Achilles casually, and without any comment from the authorial voice, sacrifices twelve Trojan prisoners to sanctify the games. The challenge for a modern to inhabit this world is substantial and doing so in meaningful ways stretches one’s capacity to comprehend the complexity of human cultures, but its deeply held assumptions about the status of women, slaves, enemies, and inferiors surely demonstrates the “uneven sympathies” Nussbaum believes justifies exclusion from the curriculum of democratic citizenship. The Odyssey is equally problematic as a source of lessons in tolerance and cultural empathy. Only by inhabiting Odysseus anachronistically might one develop empathy for others; he certainly doesn’t show it in his actions. Only the intervention of the gods at the conclusion prevents yet more bloody civil conflict, a conflict Odysseus eagerly seeks out despite the combatants being his fellow Ithacans and despite their understandable anger that he has killed some of their sons. And the casual ways in which he disposes of (multiple!) crews of various ships hardly indicates a validation of their equal humanity.

Homeric epic won’t be alone in failing the task Nussbaum sets. Many bad artists delivered bad messages through great works of art; while some of them might teach tolerance and empathy, many or more reveal darker aspects of human character or indulge unreflectively in the deeply held prejudices of their time. Hers is not a justification for teaching arts and literature I can endorse, both because it might be so easily undermined and because I think it is simply wrong. The arts should teach us about the ambiguity, complexity, glory and failings of human experience, not only that portion of historical experiences that serve our contemporary ideals. The strangeness of inhabiting an alien perspective that immersion in the art of other cultures provokes might very well foster empathy for those we find strange or unsympathetic in our daily lives, but it might also merely set us to thinking, without any ethical or intercultural payoff at all.

I fear Nussbaum’s argument that democratic citizenship demands the capacity to imagine the perspectives or experiences of others is based upon a misconception of what democratic citizenship actually entails. Leaving aside whether or not arts and literature can achieve her objectives, it seems plausible to suggest that the demands of democratic citizenship are shallower that Nussbaum implies, and if democracy can function just fine without the widespread presence of properly formed narrative imaginations, than this particular defense of the humanities will lack traction. What does contemporary citizenship entail? For many citizens, little or nothing – a majority do not even vote. And among those who do participate, what do they do? Even helping select those who will make policy and trying to influence their decisions describes a fairly high level of engagement, one that is uncommon. Mainstream political science assumes these activities are governed by the pursuit of interests or mobilization by elites; how would things change if the work of common citizenship were informed by narrative imagination? It’s hard to see how voting for candidates would be impacted, since voting is a rather crude tool and candidates’ positions are often unclear. Perhaps the partisan identifications of voters might shift toward the more empathetic party, though given what we know about the origins of partisanship and the post-hoc rationalizations that partisan identity elicits, I imagine this unlikely. Perhaps a more widespread sense of empathy would contribute to greater levels of political mobilization intended to influence policy makers between elections, but absent far more information and sophistication than most citizens now possess, such empathetic mobilization might be ineffective, contradictory, or manipulated. It might be the case that empathy and imagination will inspire citizens to gather information, learn the intricacies of political influence, and consider the sometimes brutal trade-offs involved in governing, but I am skeptical, and see little evidence to support such a hope. Perhaps solving the crisis in civics education should be a precursor to resolving that besting the humanities?

It might instead be the case that the empathy learned from contemplation of the great art and literature of the world will make policy-makers themselves more sensitive to the impact of their work on the needy and more respectful of the weak. But if the argument depends upon the actions of elite citizens, the wisdom of the investment necessary to foster this skill in all citizens might be questioned. In any case the evidence of our recent history would bode poorly for Nussbaum’s hopes: most of those responsible for the least empathetic and most destructive decisions of the last decade attended elite institutions where the humanities were central to the curriculum, with some earning degrees from programs defined by a commitment to the great books. Their love of the humanities did not prevent them from planning unnecessary wars, trampling democratic liberties, trafficking in public deceptions, or justifying torture. If emphasizing arts and literature is essential to democratic citizenship because it makes citizens better decision makers, then the argument is weak for at least two reasons: most citizens are spectators rather than decision makers, and the evidence that education in the humanities leads to better decisions is scant at best.

As a normative vision of democratic citizenship to which we should all aspire, I endorse Nussbaum’s ideal. I, too, hope to live amongst engaged, empathetic, culturally sensitive, and ethically attuned fellow citizens. But the absence of such a citizenry does not make for a crisis of democracy, unless the crisis has been perpetually with us. Here is where I encounter a recurrent frustration with this text. The frame of the book suggests study of the humanities will be justified in practical terms, showing that democracy needs such education to thrive. The “crisis” of the humanities imperils democracy. It is not pitched as an argument for how the humanities might bring into being the model democracy of an imagined future, or even an ideal type against which to measure our own practices. This strategy is wise, as an argument meant to convince people to devote resources to humanities education now in the name of a utopian future has little hope of success. But the rhetoric of the argument repeatedly falls back to the ideal, to the exception, to the anecdote, and to the evocative, all couched in intensely normative terms. I find this rhetorical mismatch exasperating, especially since I believe a practical argument can and must be developed to defend the humanities. Nussbaum seems unwilling to make such an argument, but also unwilling to endorse a full-throated normative defense of the inherent value of arts and literature. We end up with an argument unpersuasive to any constituency: not practical enough for skeptics, not passionate enough for the already persuaded.

Moreover, the trope of loss and decline she employs throughout implies that our democracy was healthy once and could be healthy again if we found the means to defend the humanities from the alleged attack upon them. But when was this lost past to be found? As I argued in a comment early in this collective project, her nostalgia speaks to a time of elites, when a very small portion of the American population graduated from institutions of higher education. Certainly the 7% of citizens who earned degrees in 1950 received a strong education in the humanities, and the argument for imaginative citizenship proposed in this chapter applies to this cohort, largely identical with the class that eventually governed the state and society. But if President Obama’s goal of restoring the United States to preeminence in postsecondary attainment by 2020 is met, then closer to 60% of Americans will need to earn degrees. It cannot suffice to argue that the best way to serve this extraordinarily different population of students, students who will be participating in a much greater range of social roles than those graduates of the 50’s and 60’s, is to return to “pre-crisis” version of the curriculum that so inspired many of us who became professors. It might turn out to be the right response, but that argument requires evidence, both of what these students need and what a humanities education can do for and to them. Nussbaum stipulates the conclusion (study of the humanities is necessary for healthy democracy), asserts the humanities are in decline (itself a highly contentious claim), and then proceeds to suggest why and how reinvigorating the humanities will make democracy work. But it’s the conclusion that needs to be demonstrated, and apart from normative assertions and anecdotal accounts of individual transformation, that conclusion is left largely undefended.

I do believe the value of the humanities can be demonstrated, and in ways that do not depend upon an already shared commitment to their importance. Unlike Nussbaum, however, I think this argument can and must be grounded in meaningful evidence in addition to normative and rhetorical argument. Nussbaum repeatedly asserts, throughout the text, that the value of a humanities education simply cannot measured, that its outcomes cannot be quantified, and that its effective delivery demands a particular (and particularly expensive!) kind of pedagogy. I contend that she is wrong. The educational benefits of the humanities are difficult to assess, but many of the most interesting research projects in social science encounter such difficulty. To claim phenomena cannot be understood systematically betrays a failure of imagination or understanding. If we can define, rigorously and transparently, the growth we expect to see in students as a result of their participation in a humanistic curriculum, we can also figure out ways to evaluate whether or not students achieve these goals. Nussbaum clearly understands what she wants the humanities to do for students. She offers wonderful stories illustrating how the humanities transformed particular students, like Billy Tucker and Amita Sen. These anecdotes define beautifully the outcomes she thinks an education in the humanities can deliver: Tucker demonstrated growth in abstract thinking, developed the ability to discern flaws in political arguments, and produced arguments in support of positions with which he did not agree. As a result of these concrete outcomes Tucker became a more respectful citizen inclined to look for consensus and commonality. This is a wonderful description of what the humanities can do. Moreover, we have a pretty good idea of how do produce such transformations, as Nussbaum details in her discussion of Tucker’s philosophy course (55-56). But the anecdote begs, for me, the central question: what of the other students in Billy Tucker’s philosophy seminar, or the other students in other sections of this required course? Did this course transform them all? Did they all demonstrate growth in abstract thinking, critical analysis, and understanding of diverse perspectives? Did the methods that worked so effectively with Tucker, methods Nussbaum asserts can only happen using a very particular sort of pedagogy (55), work as well for the rest of these students? If not, what texts or pedagogies might be more effective for the median student rather than the exception? Did Tucker develop these skills because of this course, because of a series of courses, as part of co-curricular experiences, or because of the process of intellectual maturation that takes place in young adults concurrent to their enrollment in traditional colleges and universities? How would we know?

We would know if we were willing to take assessment seriously. I realize I risk touching off a nasty conflict in the comments by posing the claim this directly, but so be it. I want to know whether or not humanities education (and social science, and natural science, and everything else we teach) actually transforms our students, and I want to know how our curriculums can do so more effectively. If we want to claim the humanities produce impacts of the magnitude Nussbaum suggests, surely we can define what evidence of movement toward those impacts looks like in the work students produce for us. And surely we can devise meaningful methods to evaluate this work in ways that will help is revise and improve the effectiveness of the course of study so that we begin to reach all our students, and not merely the exceptional ones. The move from anecdote to outcome is not a difficult one to make; in fact, one of the best ways to help faculty figure out what they hope their program of study should do is to ask them to describe the skills and disposition of their ideal graduate. If we can figure that out, we can also figure out what skills every graduate of a program should demonstrate, and whether or not they are all actually expected to do so in the courses we require and the work we assign. From there it’s only a small step to collecting this work in order to reflect collectively on our effectiveness. There is no conflict between this sort of careful articulation of the concrete objectives of humanities education and the ineffable beauty of these texts. Frankly, if the humanities teach critical thinking, develop comfort with ambiguity, instill a passion for life-long learning, and build skills in problem solving, then humanities faculty should be better at this than any of our peers.

Nussbaum asserts that “the economic growth culture has a fondness for standardized tests, and an impatience with pedagogy and content that are not easily assessed in this way” (48), and thus dismisses efforts to collect evidence of learning as a corruption of the educational mission. In her index the entry for “assessment” says “see testing,” as if the two were one and the same. But her allergy to evidence renders her argument weaker than it might otherwise be. How much more persuasive to external audiences would this argument be if she could articulate clearly the essential skills that courses in the humanities develop, explain exactly how these skills developed in the classroom translate into improved capacities for democratic citizenship, and show persuasive evidence that those skills are actually developed for all or most students who complete such classes? It is true, as Nussbaum says, that only “a much more nuanced qualitative assessment of classroom interactions and student writing could tell us to what extent students have learned skills of critical argument” (48). But there is no reason we can’t develop such more nuanced tools, if we are willing to engage seriously in the investigation of student learning and take responsibility for defining what we want students to be able to do and know. If Nussbaum is right, and I think she is correct despite my objections to the way she presents her argument in Not for Profit, then this is a challenge we should take up with vigor, precisely so the reductive tools of the “growth model” don’t become the only ones taken seriously. Our resistance to measurement is leading toward that outcome, and it is undermining our ability to defend the things we love.

I had one final point to make about Nussbaum’s implicit vision of democracy, but this post is getting overlong as is. If appropriate I’ll develop this argument in the comments, but for now will say only this: Nussbaum assumes democracy is a means to reach the best answer, not a set of institutions developed to channel irresolvable conflicts into peaceful but contingent outcomes. Much of her defense of philosophical education as essential to democratic citizenship derives from her unstated premise that reason will lead the correct answer, and thus democratic conflict needs the guidance of reason. This is how she views the value of Socratic education: the Socratic citizen will uncover the common ground necessary to “help fellow citizens progress to a shared conclusion” (51). Democracy becomes, on this model, a mechanism to generate truth, perhaps the best mechanism or only legitimate one, but clearly a means to a greater end than itself. If, by contrast, we posit that no correct answers exist within the realm of democratic contestation and that democracy is justified precisely by this absence of certainty, then those citizens who come to see their role as shepherding the rest of us toward the truth betray a lack of understanding of the purpose of democracy. The unruly, contentious, disrespectful, and fickle democracy of classical Athens, the democracy Socrates so despised and that Nussbaum believes needed his corrective influence, seems to me a far better model for a truly egalitarian politics. I would prefer a competitive, agonistic model of democratic politics, where we might agree to accept the outcome of any particular vote as legitimate without believing it embodies a consensus or a common ground, and where the arguments are always revisable, including even the grounds of reason itself. This sort of agitation and conflict is significantly more “utterly unauthoritarian” (50) than the Socratic impulse to bring the people to consensus upon the truth. And this sort of ribald democratic order needs the humanities as much or more than Nussbaum’s consensus model. Nussbaum prefers a Socratic democracy. I think we need more Aristophanes.

5. Citizens of the World

2011-07-08T16:54:00.004-05:00

First off, I’d like to echo John’s words of thanks to the organizers of this discussion for getting it going, and for inviting me to participate. It’s been great fun thinking about the book and reading through the posts—both activities have forced my brain to work (albeit sluggishly) in the melting heat. I’d also like to preface my fairly critical comments with two caveats: First, there’s much about Martha Nussbaum’s scholarship and work as a public intellectual that I admire. Second, I’m acutely aware that it’s much easier to point out what I happen to think could and should have been done in this book than to write it myself.

So said, I want to pick up and further develop a thread of criticism raised in different ways by many of the previous posts, namely, the disjuncture between the substance of Nussbaum’s argument and her mode of argumentation. As others have suggested explicitly or implicitly, Nussbaum consistently fails to enact the pedagogical, political and epistemological principles central to the claims of the book. John points out, for example, that Nussbaum’s brief for the connection between the liberal arts and democracy is decidedly autocratic and reductive in style and form. Lawrie underscores the unacknowledged mechanisms of power (and indoctrination?) involved in the production of students (and citizens) who think for themselves. Neville emphasizes the problem with a book celebrating critical thinking and careful sifting of evidence that largely proceeds by association and implication, and Ryan foregrounds the distinct lack of Socratic self-examination in her deployment of the categories of “democracy” and the “humanities.”

The following comments are an effort to detail how this problem plays out in chapter 5, in which Nussbaum builds on the previous chapters and her other work on cosmopolitanism to posit a connection between the liberal arts and “citizen-of-the-world education.” In the process, I’d like to suggest that this disjuncture is not a tangential matter of style or consistency, but undermines the very coherence and persuasiveness of her substantive arguments.

As many of you have pointed out with reference to the previous chapters, the book really orbits at a level of abstraction that rarely touches down to grapple with the messiness of concrete situations. In chapter 5, many of her claims are similarly abstract and reductionist, stated as fact without nuance, qualification, or supporting evidence. For example, (p. 83) she writes that “[c]hildren are naturally curious about the rituals, ceremonies, and celebrations of other natures and religions.” On p. 81, she states that “ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behavior.” Both of these claims may be true, but the devil is in the details. Who, precisely, is she talking about, where’s the evidence to substantiate such broad assertions, and what about all the knotty epistemological problems that inevitably accompany such statements about nature and human behavior?

Some might contend that these kinds of abstractions reflect the conventions of philosophical argument and/or that the simplicity of the claims are related to the broad audiences to which the book is pitched. This may well be the case, yet these tendencies ultimately work against the persuasiveness of her argument, even to those (like myself) predisposed to agree with her. To take just one specific example: she writes that the pervasive equation of Islam with terrorism can be combated through education that cultivates an appreciation and respect for differences. On the one hand, there is surely something right about this. On the other hand, it sidesteps entirely the fact that the current tendency to equate Islam and terrorism is not traceable to a lack of knowledge or misunderstanding; rather it’s generated and reinforced by a number of historically specific cultural, socioeconomic and geopolitical developments too numerous and familiar to reproduce here, and that are unlikely to be erased by curricula emphasizing respect for difference. In fact, while such equations and assumptions have recently gathered steam, they are structured by broader cultural discourses that predate the U.S.-led “War on Terror” by decades and even centuries. Consider the fact that characterizations of Muslims as uniquely violent and intolerant have a long and distinguished pedigree in European history and scholarship. Here Ernest Renan’s famous 1883 address to the Sorbonne is instructive. For Renan, the Muslim is constrained by an "iron clasp around his head, which makes it completely closed to science, incapable of learning anything, or of openness to any new ideas. From the time of his religious instruction, around the age of ten or twelve, a Muslim child–until then somewhat receptive–suddenly becomes a fanatic, full of the deluded pride of holding what he knows as the absolute truth, happy as though privileged in possessing what actually makes him inferior."

This leads to another point, namely, that the chapter misses the crucial opportunity to specify precisely how liberal arts education turns “awareness” into “concern for” (p. 82) other cultures, groups and living conditions that exist both within and beyond national borders. It’s well known that awareness of and exposure to different cultures and practices can serve and has served to shore up self-serving prejudices, conceits of superiority, and antipathy to difference, in some instances justifying imperialist ventures, ancient and modern. The central question, then, is precisely the one Nussbaum neatly sidesteps: which pedagogical practices facilitate the crucial move from “awareness” to “concern,” and how precisely do they work? The key, it seems to me, is not only which texts are read, for example, but how they’re read, not only what kinds of claims are made (say, about the virtues of critical thinking), but whether and how they’re actually enacted and modeled in the classroom. Nussbaum appears to recognize this point when she refers to the BJP’s Hindu supremacist version of world history, but does not follow where it leads.

At its best, a liberal arts education involves (among other things) exposure to and familiarity with a range of traditions, past and present; critical examination of the content and premises of facts about the world expressed in our language and categories of analysis; and cultivation of the capacity for deliberation among fellow-citizens, citizens who may in this way become responsible political actors in an increasingly globalized world. These aims are undermined by pedagogical practices that exclusively affirm top-down, autocratically delivered knowledge or curricula that include only texts, cases and evidence that confirm rather than challenge, reassure rather than disorient. The move from cognizance to concern, then, likely depends upon those pedagogical practices that not only 1) facilitate awareness of the variety of peoples, languages and histories within and beyond national borders, but do so in a way that 2) curtails tendencies to project our own preoccupations and experiences onto others or rummage around through other people’s histories and cultures in search of arguments that simply confirm our own and 3) facilitates critical reflection toward our own assumptions, commitments and inherited shibboleths. The last step is particularly crucial to the move from awareness to concern, as such critical distance makes it possible (but far from inevitable) to recognize the extent to which our own “values” and arrangements are not nearly as natural, inescapable, and coherent as we assume and, concomitantly, that what is radically unfamiliar need not be misguided, threatening, or incomprehensible.

In chapter 5, Nussbaum makes the case for 1) while neglecting 2) and 3). I might put the point even more strongly and say that she argues for 1), but exemplifies precisely what goes wrong when a well-intentioned scholar rummages around the “non-West” in search of arguments and thinkers that confirm her own while failing to critically examine her own assumptions and categories. The result is an argument for a global-citizen education characterized by a fairly pinched vision of the world and its cultures. Her arguments are narrowly organized around democratic (liberal) states which, in turn, makes India a stand-in for the “non-West,” and Tagore a stand-in for India, countered by the ‘bad’ example of the BJP. Too often, her references to humans and “us all” turn out to be shorthand for Americans, Europeans and Indians. Religion–and especially Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism--is an object of study, an indication of otherness, and a litmus test for the kind of tolerance a “citizen-of-the-world education” should produce. Beyond her focus is the potential of these religious traditions to be not only objects of study but interpretive frameworks that may themselves (under certain conditions) help cultivate precisely the kind of global awareness and sympathetic imagination (in Bruce Robbins’ words) she celebrates.

This raises other kinds of questions, such as: Can the pedagogical practices conducive to such critical thinking transpire under the rubric of (and I know this is heretical to ask) religious education, or outside of formal institutions of education altogether? What are the potential connections between such practices, transpiring in unexpected arenas, and emergent democratic politics in nonliberal states? Such queries may seem unfair, as they are admittedly outside of the stated focus of her inquiry, yet that seems to me precisely the point. To build on Lawrie’s post, it seems to me that questions about the harder cases and more complex evidence her argument excludes or sidesteps could productively challenge her assumptions, in part by forcing her to more carefully and precisely connect certain kinds of pedagogical practices with critical thinking, and then to connect such thinking with the kind of sympathetic imagination conducive to moral action.

Had Nussbaum actually enacted rather than just endorsed Socrates’ exhortation to lead the examined life, moreover, she would have had to engage in 3) above. This would have required, among other things, careful disaggregation of the many assumptions, aspirations, mechanisms and phenomena here bundled into the category of “democracy.”Such analysis might well have opened up her argument about democracy and the liberal arts to all sorts of examples and evidence from so-called “non-Western” societies that her narrow focus precludes.

For it seems to me that there are at least two registers to Nussbaum’s truncated understanding of democracy in the book. The first register is signaled by references to democratic states; here she emphasizes elections, rights, institutions, laws, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” (p. 24-25, 28). In the second register, democracy is signaled less by laws and institutions than democratic practices where debate, reflection, critical thinking, imaginative sympathy toward differences, and (less explicitly) a willingness to challenge authority are central. The first might be said to emphasize the features of a liberal state, the second to emphasize what some have termed a democratic ethos. The focus of the book permits Nussbaum to take the two as smoothly continuous and compatible. Thus she sees no need to decouple them, to analyze them not only as different constellations of concepts with different histories and not always compatible presuppositions, but as political phenomena that might well work against one another.

As Sheldon Wolin argues in “Fugitive Democracy,” for example, the liberal state and its institutions regulate the amount of democratic politics “let in,” domesticate the “voice of the people” by permitting popular energies to be released in only in intensely scripted, highly regulated, periodic doses called ‘elections,’ and thereby contain the transgressive, boundary-challenging energies of popular power. By contrast, he argues that “[d]emocracy is not about where the political is located but how it is experienced,” and is particularly evident in moments of revolutionary transgression by which the demos destroys “boundaries that bar access to political experience. Individuals from the excluded social strata take on responsibilities, deliberate about goals and choices, and share in decisions that have broad consequences and affect unknown and distant others.”

Whether or not one agrees with Wolin in general or in detail, this argument foregrounds an understanding of democratic practices unrelated to–and in significant tension with--the establishment and survival of the liberal state. This is a particularly helpful way to think about the existence and potential of pedagogical practices that transpire beyond institutions of formal education (as is evident in a number of societies that fall outside of her inquiry), and their connection to emergent democratic practices in non-liberal states. A case in point are the revolts currently taking place in the Middle East. From Pearl Square to Hama, ordinary people often seen as powerless have acted in concert to challenge the barriers to their own participation in politics. In reclaiming popular power, they are enacting democratic politics, yet it is crucial to point out that these demonstrations aim at more than bringing about states reflective of and accountable to its citizenry. To quote an organizer of one of the many new Egyptian political parties: “Democracy is not just about electoral ballots and politics at the national level–it is about how you run your organization, how you run your small neighborhood, it is about having a say in every aspect of your life.” The outcome of revolts from Tunisia to Yemen remains uncertain to say the least. Nevertheless, they exemplify those moments when deeply entrenched patterns of power and powerlessness are disrupted–a moment when many of the established shibboleths about Muslims, about Arabs, about democracy, globalization and foreign policy are outpaced by events. It’s a moment of great danger as well as of tremendous possibility. But regardless of how the dust settles, they are reminders that such democratic power still erupts, if only episodically, in a world where events so often seem to be determined by bureaucracies, globalized markets, and remote elites.

Of course, these revolts erupted after the publication of NFP, but there are other, previous moments elsewhere that reveal dimensions of democratic politics routinely obscured by the focus on states and institutions. Such examples would have challenged the way Nussbaum’s focus on liberal-democratic states permits her to assay the “non-West” entirely through the case of India. This, in turn, might also have enabled her to grapple with why it is that (as John points out), at the very moment the death of the liberal arts is declaimed in America, there’s a notable uptick in interest in the liberal arts in the “non-West” and in non-liberal states in particular (I witnessed this first-hand recently when Wellesley hosted a committee of educators from China seeking our guidance in establishing liberal arts curricula). Both would have provided a much-needed way to interrogate and broaden the assumptions about democracy, about the liberal arts, and about the potential connection between the two underlying the book.
Roxanne

2011-06-28T08:57:00.002-05:00

Dear All,

Peyton has asked me to re-post my submission. Here it is:

I’ve been asked to comment on the central chapter of Not for Profit, which is entitled “Socratic Pedagogy: The Importance of Argument.” This chapter is the centerpiece of the book’s argument, I think, since Nussbaum persistently evokes the connections between Socratic critical thinking and flourishing democratic politics. Like previous contributors, I have reservations about the arguments Nussbaum offers. I would like to pose several challenges and questions, in the spirit of a friendly critique, and in the hope that they will stimulate further discussion about these important subjects.

I find a certain tension between humanistic education and the “values” or convictions, not to say dogmas, that underlie Nussbaum’s enterprise. (The scare quotes are meant to signal an irony that Nussbaum would find unwelcome. As my colleagues Edward Andrew and Ronald Beiner have argued, the term “value” in Nussbaum’s sense is originally drawn from the vocabulary of the marketplace. It fossilizes both the instrumental calculations characteristic of the marketplace and the subjective norms of evaluation that govern economic transactions – norms that are alarmingly ill-suited to the “not for profit” theme and, more deeply, to the universalizing, naturalistic arguments Nussbaum offers elsewhere in the “capabilities approach” and in the scientific and Freudian paradigms of human psychology found in Chapter 3 of the present volume.)

Lawrie Balfour alluded to the tension between humanistic education and Nussbaum’s democratic convictions, via her reference to Louis Menand’s recent essay on “why we have college.” With Balfour and Menand, we might explicitly raise as a paradox the “normalizing” tendencies of contemporary liberal education – the tendency of universities to extol intellectual autonomy while producing conformists. This paradox becomes especially acute in Nussbaum’s discussion of Socratic pedagogy. Nussbaum knows, and knows that she knows, perhaps as befits a manifesto, that democracy, equality, autonomy, participatory citizenship, and so on, are good things; she offers a clear and precise anatomy of the human soul based on modern social science and cognitive neuroscience; and she presents a progressive history of childhood educational philosophies that culminates in her own emphasis on “choice” (70-71), on “practical engagement” and “real life” (66), and on the close interconnections between philosophical work and pragmatic political activity. The students in Nussbaum’s university will presumably come to recognize and appreciate the same “values.”

But Socrates, along with whatever pedagogy benefits from association with him, knows that he does not know “the greatest things,” i.e. the precise character of human excellence (or “virtue”) and the human good. This knowledge of one’s own ignorance is called “human wisdom” in Plato’s Apology. (To see the importance of this point, we can, and probably should, leave aside the myriad questions surrounding the relationship between the historical Socrates and the Socrateses presented by Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes, and Aristotle – not to mention the relationship between Plato’s Socrates as represented in Plato’s short, so-called “Socratic” dialogues, and Plato’s Socrates as represented in longer, more ambitious philosophical works such as the Republic or the Phaedrus.) Socrates’ awareness of his own epistemic limitations led him to believe that the only life worthy of a human being was one of continuous, rational self-examination, usually conducted in dialogue with others. Such self-scrutiny or self-auditing had, in principle, no limits: it extended, for example, even to the question, explored thoroughly in Plato’s Gorgias, of whether doing or receiving injustice provides greater benefits to an individual, or to the question, in the Republic, of whether philosophers should rule. Are these questions genuinely “up for grabs” within Nussbaum’s framework?

Socratic inquiry also questioned the goodness of democracy as a regime-type, and, of course, there is no reason in principle why philosophical questioning should feel itself constrained by Nussbaum’s liberal, progressive opinions about politics, ethics, and the human good. Hence, a humanistic education, and particularly Socratic pedagogy, is worthy of its name only if it invites students, along with their instructors and fellow-travelers, to “live the questions” surrounding what it means to live a good human life – including questions about the goodness and character of cherished ideals such as freedom, equality, and even democracy itself. There is not a seamless continuity, as Nussbaum suggests, between philosophical inquiry and the practices of democratic citizenship. And one of the questions a humanistic education might or must address is precisely the relation of philosophy to democracy, and vice-versa. (And perhaps philosophy has more important things to worry about, anyway – at least it’s worth raising the question.)

For if the European and North American traditions of philosophy have persistently raised questions about democracy as a regime-type, then democracy equally, as Tocqueville and Aristophanes recognized in their different ways, has always harboured questions about the benefits and trustworthiness of philosophical inquiry, not to mention the pursuit of a philosophical life. The Athenian democracy executed Socrates and thought that philosophers were buffoons. In 1835-1840, Tocqueville foreshadowed Nussbaum’s present lament, when he predicted that Americans would increasingly emphasize the profit-motive over the study of classical literature, theoretical science or mathematics, and speculative philosophy. Tocqueville, of course, offered a comparative analysis of democracy with aristocracy and pinpointed the features of democracy that tend to militate against the careful and time-consuming work required for philosophical inquiry. In his recent book Human Dignity, in fact, George Kateb picked up this line of thought and asked whether democracy as a regime type tends to undermine the development of the arts or corrode the supportive culture that enables philosophy to flourish. Is democracy as such, or only a corrupt democracy, hostile to the liberal arts and sciences?

It’s a good question, but an uncomfortable one – and not one well suited to the public speeches of President Obama, who, later in the book, draws fire from Nussbaum, despite the very real rhetorical and political constraints under which he operates. Imagine President Obama arguing forcefully, during his upcoming campaign, for the educational importance of questioning whether democracy is the best regime. But that’s what Socrates would have him do, and Socrates would then go on to ask whether politics altogether is an important, or rather an insignificant, sphere of human activity, by comparison with pursuing philosophical questions about the “greatest things.”

To put these points differently, Nussbaum doesn’t explore very deeply the categories of “democracy” and the “humanities” that are at the heart of her passionate manifesto. Yet, if the questions are to become vivid and our practical judgments are to make sense, then we need to find a more searching account of these categories and of their ambiguous interrelations. At all events, a sound humanistic education will not simply produce likeminded individuals, but rather non-conformists, sometimes at a very deep level of non-conformity. Even if democracy tends to corrupt humanistic study through emphasizing the profit-motive, perhaps equally its goodness lies, at least in part, and in its liberal manifestations, in granting us the freedom to pursue Socratic questions to the hilt, wherever they may lead.

I can’t resist pointing out that right in the opening sentence of Nussbaum’s chapter these ambiguities assert themselves with great intensity. Here is Nussbaum’s opening sentence: “Socrates proclaimed that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being’” (47). And here is Socrates’ own statement, from the Platonic Apology: “If on the other hand I say that the greatest good for man is to fashion arguments each day about virtue and the other things you hear me discussing when I examine myself and others, and that the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being, you will believe what I say still less” (38a, tr. Allen, adapted). Leave aside the subtle but significant point that, according to Socrates himself, the democratic jurors could not be persuaded that the best life was the life of rational self-examination. The real question is this: Is Socrates making a robustly demanding claim to the effect that only the philosophical life, only a life devoted to continuous questioning, every day, is worth living for a human being, and that a life devoted to democratic citizenship, not to mention productive economic activity, is not worth living for a human being? Or does his remark, which is not casual in any way, admit of degrees of self-examination and thus of a spectrum of lives ranging from less worthwhile to more worthwhile? And would a committed, progressive, cosmopolitan democrat, such as Nussbaum, even tolerate this line of questioning?

To some extent I hesitate to make these remarks, because I favour both democracy and a humanistic education; and I don’t want to weaken the cause of either by suggesting that the two are in conflict. But it would be less than honest to skim over the thorny tensions and paradoxes that characterize their relationship – paradoxes to which Socrates’ life and arguments draw attention. Hence, even more intolerable questions will necessarily follow. It’s true that Socrates represents himself as a gadfly rousing a sluggish democratic horse, as Nussbaum points out; but, as Nussbaum does not point out, Socrates also asks in the Apology whether horses are better trained by an inexpert multitude, such as the Athenian democratic citizenry, or by an expert horse-trainer – to which the answer is obvious. And then, in a characteristic move, Socrates proceeds to question the very idea of expertise in educating human beings about the greatest things. And so we are left, I think, not with a progressive narrative that confirms our pre-existing opinions, but rather with a host of new questions, now hopefully clearer and better defined questions, that raise genuinely serious, provocative, and uncomfortable issues about democracy, humanistic education, and human flourishing.

As I have been suggesting, Nussbaum too readily instrumentalizes humanistic education – if not for business, then for citizenship. She fails to reflect seriously on the intrinsic worth of studying the liberal arts and sciences. Since others on the blog (and in the wider world) have previously levelled this criticism against Nussbaum, I limit myself to two additional, and equally uncomfortable, observations on this front. First, Nussbaum’s “humanities-for-democracy” view is paradoxical in that, if it is correct, then it may have anti-democratic implications. For if humanistic learning makes us better citizens, then the professoriate should be distinctively excellent citizens. Professors should be as far superior in citizenship to their fellow citizens, as they are superior in intellectual achievement to their undergraduates. Down this path lies the rule of philosopher-kings. I say this not so much to denigrate philosopher kings as to show that this familiar argument has more than a whiff of paradox about it. But, as Socrates will ask, is there such a thing as political wisdom, or are there thresholds of good citizenship beyond which further distinctions do not matter, or do not matter much for the successful practice of democracy? Nussbaum doesn’t raise the question – and in that way she proves to behave less Socratically than she recommends.

Second, by advancing instrumental arguments for the humanities’ significance, Nussbaum may unwittingly promote the cause of the humanities’ detractors. As Stanley Fish has often stressed, even the best humanistic education doesn’t necessarily produce good democratic citizens; and, conversely, good democratic citizens can arise in a variety of ways. The connections between humanistic education and democratic citizenship often fail to convince. As a result, Nussbaum’s rivals may come to believe that even leading academics have failed to produce a coherent account of humanistic education. Sadly, the most powerful justification remains unspoken: that humanistic study has intrinsic worth, as the effort to realize and perfect our highest human capacities. Nussbaum alludes to this point briefly on p.9.

Along the same lines, I worry about Nussbaum’s uses and abuses of history for the sake of democracy. After discussing Socrates and the Athenian democracy, Nussbaum offers a selective treatment of modern educational philosophers whose work embodies different strands of what she calls “Socratic pedagogy.” These include Rousseau, Johann Pestalozzi, Friedrich Froebel, Bronson Alcott, Horace Mann, John Dewey, Rabindranath Tagore, and Matthew Lipman, who has developed an extremely interesting “Philosophy for Children” curriculum at Montclair State University. I’m sympathetic with the educational ideals outlined in this section, including active learning; a rigorous focus on logic, critical reasoning, and the structure of arguments; cultivation of emotional intelligence and imagination; and an emphasis on self-government, self-reliance, and freedom. Others on the blog have said that they don’t know how to cultivate all of these qualities, and I don’t, either: but they are still worthwhile educational objectives, I think, which experienced teachers, in particular circumstances, might have the good sense and situational appreciation to embody in practice.

However, my worry is that, in discussing both democratic Athens and the history of educational philosophy, Nussbaum offers a highly selective and tendentious narrative – one that suits her case, in a way, but also one that smooths over the rough edges of history and unduly simplifies the unruly facts that come down to us. To her credit, Nussbaum explores in other chapters the necessity of teaching history as a set of arguments about highly imperfect evidence, rather than as a static narrative to be digested and regurgitated at appropriate moments. Elsewhere in the volume, moreover, she inspiringly denounces the BJP’s jingoistic and triumphal appropriations of India’s history (e.g., 21-22). Yet, in discussing the Athenian democrats, Nussbaum simplistically charges that, according to Thucydides, “Rarely if ever did they examine their major policy objectives, or systematically ask how the diverse things they valued could fit together” (49). Nussbaum enters this statement in order to explain why “this thriving democracy” needed to be “stung into greater wakefulness” by Socratic argument.

In this section, as before, Nussbaum fails to practice what she recommends and risks turning her historical analysis into a political morality tale. Like all other successful democracies, the Athenian democracy did indeed examine major policy objectives (how could it not?) and consider what a good life among democrats could or should be. One of the central texts illustrating this point comes from Thucydides himself: think of Pericles’ Funeral Oration in Book II of Thucydides’ History. As Clifford Orwin, Arlene Saxonhouse, and others have argued, moreover, the Mytilenian Debate with which Nussbaum indicts Athens actually shows the Athenian democracy virtuously revising ill-founded decisions in the light of further argument. The Athenian democrats examined and reconsidered their views – so that it is incorrect to say, with Nussbaum, that important policy matters and many human lives “were left to chance rather than reasoned debate” (50). As a great deal of recent work has illustrated, in fact, the Athenian democracy itself practiced a politics of virtue that could possibly stand as a model of reasoned discourse and cultural education for contemporary democracies that do not offer their citizens such direct experiences of political debate or action.

The main point, in the end, is that Nussbaum’s analysis lacks the richness and complexity that we have come to expect from her work and that these all-important subjects demand. The greatest American statesmen (not to mention thinkers) have always understood that democratic citizens are capable of grasping complex arguments that adequately address the problems and opportunities of democratic politics. On the other hand, as Tocqueville pointed out, “The habit of inattention ought to be considered the greatest vice of the democratic mind” (DA II 3.15, tr. Mansfield/Winthrop). I worry that Nussbaum’s manifesto both expresses and promotes the prevailing characteristics of our time, instead of helping to counteract them.

Chpt. 4 - Socratic Pedagogy

2011-06-26T23:03:00.000-05:00

Hello everyone! Ryan Balot's post on "Socratic Pedagogy" (chpt. 4) is below.

Peyton

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I’ve been asked to comment on the central chapter of Not for Profit, which is entitled “Socratic Pedagogy: The Importance of Argument.” This chapter is the centerpiece of the book’s argument, I think, since Nussbaum persistently evokes the connections between Socratic critical thinking and flourishing democratic politics. Like previous contributors, I have reservations about the arguments Nussbaum offers. I would like to pose several challenges and questions, in the spirit of a friendly critique, and in the hope that they will stimulate further discussion about these important subjects.

I find a certain tension between humanistic education and the “values” or convictions, not to say dogmas, that underlie Nussbaum’s enterprise. (The scare quotes are meant to signal an irony that Nussbaum would find unwelcome. As my colleagues Edward Andrew and Ronald Beiner have argued, the term “value” in Nussbaum’s sense is originally drawn from the vocabulary of the marketplace. It fossilizes both the instrumental calculations characteristic of the marketplace and the subjective norms of evaluation that govern economic transactions – norms that are alarmingly ill-suited to the “not for profit” theme and, more deeply, to the universalizing, naturalistic arguments Nussbaum offers elsewhere in the “capabilities approach” and in the scientific and Freudian paradigms of human psychology found in Chapter 3 of the present volume.)

Lawrie Balfour alluded to the tension between humanistic education and Nussbaum’s democratic convictions, via her reference to Louis Menand’s recent essay on “why we have college.” With Balfour and Menand, we might explicitly raise as a paradox the “normalizing” tendencies of contemporary liberal education – the tendency of universities to extol intellectual autonomy while producing conformists. This paradox becomes especially acute in Nussbaum’s discussion of Socratic pedagogy. Nussbaum knows, and knows that she knows, perhaps as befits a manifesto, that democracy, equality, autonomy, participatory citizenship, and so on, are good things; she offers a clear and precise anatomy of the human soul based on modern social science and cognitive neuroscience; and she presents a progressive history of childhood educational philosophies that culminates in her own emphasis on “choice” (70-71), on “practical engagement” and “real life” (66), and on the close interconnections between philosophical work and pragmatic political activity. The students in Nussbaum’s university will presumably come to recognize and appreciate the same “values.”

But Socrates, along with whatever pedagogy benefits from association with him, knows that he does not know “the greatest things,” i.e. the precise character of human excellence (or “virtue”) and the human good. This knowledge of one’s own ignorance is called “human wisdom” in Plato’s Apology. (To see the importance of this point, we can, and probably should, leave aside the myriad questions surrounding the relationship between the historical Socrates and the Socrateses presented by Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes, and Aristotle – not to mention the relationship between Plato’s Socrates as represented in Plato’s short, so-called “Socratic” dialogues, and Plato’s Socrates as represented in longer, more ambitious philosophical works such as the Republic or the Phaedrus.) Socrates’ awareness of his own epistemic limitations led him to believe that the only life worthy of a human being was one of continuous, rational self-examination, usually conducted in dialogue with others. Such self-scrutiny or self-auditing had, in principle, no limits: it extended, for example, even to the question, explored thoroughly in Plato’s Gorgias, of whether doing or receiving injustice provides greater benefits to an individual, or to the question, in the Republic, of whether philosophers should rule. Are these questions genuinely “up for grabs” within Nussbaum’s framework?

Socratic inquiry also questioned the goodness of democracy as a regime-type, and, of course, there is no reason in principle why philosophical questioning should feel itself constrained by Nussbaum’s liberal, progressive opinions about politics, ethics, and the human good. Hence, a humanistic education, and particularly Socratic pedagogy, is worthy of its name only if it invites students, along with their instructors and fellow-travelers, to “live the questions” surrounding what it means to live a good human life – including questions about the goodness and character of cherished ideals such as freedom, equality, and even democracy itself. There is not a seamless continuity, as Nussbaum suggests, between philosophical inquiry and the practices of democratic citizenship. And one of the questions a humanistic education might or must address is precisely the relation of philosophy to democracy, and vice-versa. (And perhaps philosophy has more important things to worry about, anyway – at least it’s worth raising the question.)

For if the European and North American traditions of philosophy have persistently raised questions about democracy as a regime-type, then democracy equally, as Tocqueville and Aristophanes recognized in their different ways, has always harboured questions about the benefits and trustworthiness of philosophical inquiry, not to mention the pursuit of a philosophical life. The Athenian democracy executed Socrates and thought that philosophers were buffoons. In 1835-1840, Tocqueville foreshadowed Nussbaum’s present lament, when he predicted that Americans would increasingly emphasize the profit-motive over the study of classical literature, theoretical science or mathematics, and speculative philosophy. Tocqueville, of course, offered a comparative analysis of democracy with aristocracy and pinpointed the features of democracy that tend to militate against the careful and time-consuming work required for philosophical inquiry. In his recent book Human Dignity, in fact, George Kateb picked up this line of thought and asked whether democracy as a regime type tends to undermine the development of the arts or corrode the supportive culture that enables philosophy to flourish. Is democracy as such, or only a corrupt democracy, hostile to the liberal arts and sciences?

It’s a good question, but an uncomfortable one – and not one well suited to the public speeches of President Obama, who, later in the book, draws fire from Nussbaum, despite the very real rhetorical and political constraints under which he operates. Imagine President Obama arguing forcefully, during his upcoming campaign, for the educational importance of questioning whether democracy is the best regime. But that’s what Socrates would have him do, and Socrates would then go on to ask whether politics altogether is an important, or rather an insignificant, sphere of human activity, by comparison with pursuing philosophical questions about the “greatest things.”

To put these points differently, Nussbaum doesn’t explore very deeply the categories of “democracy” and the “humanities” that are at the heart of her passionate manifesto. Yet, if the questions are to become vivid and our practical judgments are to make sense, then we need to find a more searching account of these categories and of their ambiguous interrelations. At all events, a sound humanistic education will not simply produce likeminded individuals, but rather non-conformists, sometimes at a very deep level of non-conformity. Even if democracy tends to corrupt humanistic study through emphasizing the profit-motive, perhaps equally its goodness lies, at least in part, and in its liberal manifestations, in granting us the freedom to pursue Socratic questions to the hilt, wherever they may lead.

I can’t resist pointing out that right in the opening sentence of Nussbaum’s chapter these ambiguities assert themselves with great intensity. Here is Nussbaum’s opening sentence: “Socrates proclaimed that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being’” (47). And here is Socrates’ own statement, from the Platonic Apology: “If on the other hand I say that the greatest good for man is to fashion arguments each day about virtue and the other things you hear me discussing when I examine myself and others, and that the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being, you will believe what I say still less” (38a, tr. Allen, adapted). Leave aside the subtle but significant point that, according to Socrates himself, the democratic jurors could not be persuaded that the best life was the life of rational self-examination. The real question is this: Is Socrates making a robustly demanding claim to the effect that only the philosophical life, only a life devoted to continuous questioning, every day, is worth living for a human being, and that a life devoted to democratic citizenship, not to mention productive economic activity, is not worth living for a human being? Or does his remark, which is not casual in any way, admit of degrees of self-examination and thus of a spectrum of lives ranging from less worthwhile to more worthwhile? And would a committed, progressive, cosmopolitan democrat, such as Nussbaum, even tolerate this line of questioning?

To some extent I hesitate to make these remarks, because I favour both democracy and a humanistic education; and I don’t want to weaken the cause of either by suggesting that the two are in conflict. But it would be less than honest to skim over the thorny tensions and paradoxes that characterize their relationship – paradoxes to which Socrates’ life and arguments draw attention. Hence, even more intolerable questions will necessarily follow. It’s true that Socrates represents himself as a gadfly rousing a sluggish democratic horse, as Nussbaum points out; but, as Nussbaum does not point out, Socrates also asks in the Apology whether horses are better trained by an inexpert multitude, such as the Athenian democratic citizenry, or by an expert horse-trainer – to which the answer is obvious. And then, in a characteristic move, Socrates proceeds to question the very idea of expertise in educating human beings about the greatest things. And so we are left, I think, not with a progressive narrative that confirms our pre-existing opinions, but rather with a host of new questions, now hopefully clearer and better defined questions, that raise genuinely serious, provocative, and uncomfortable issues about democracy, humanistic education, and human flourishing.

As I have been suggesting, Nussbaum too readily instrumentalizes humanistic education – if not for business, then for citizenship. She fails to reflect seriously on the intrinsic worth of studying the liberal arts and sciences. Since others on the blog (and in the wider world) have previously levelled this criticism against Nussbaum, I limit myself to two additional, and equally uncomfortable, observations on this front. First, Nussbaum’s “humanities-for-democracy” view is paradoxical in that, if it is correct, then it may have anti-democratic implications. For if humanistic learning makes us better citizens, then the professoriate should be distinctively excellent citizens. Professors should be as far superior in citizenship to their fellow citizens, as they are superior in intellectual achievement to their undergraduates. Down this path lies the rule of philosopher-kings. I say this not so much to denigrate philosopher kings as to show that this familiar argument has more than a whiff of paradox about it. But, as Socrates will ask, is there such a thing as political wisdom, or are there thresholds of good citizenship beyond which further distinctions do not matter, or do not matter much for the successful practice of democracy? Nussbaum doesn’t raise the question – and in that way she proves to behave less Socratically than she recommends.

Second, by advancing instrumental arguments for the humanities’ significance, Nussbaum may unwittingly promote the cause of the humanities’ detractors. As Stanley Fish has often stressed, even the best humanistic education doesn’t necessarily produce good democratic citizens; and, conversely, good democratic citizens can arise in a variety of ways. The connections between humanistic education and democratic citizenship often fail to convince. As a result, Nussbaum’s rivals may come to believe that even leading academics have failed to produce a coherent account of humanistic education. Sadly, the most powerful justification remains unspoken: that humanistic study has intrinsic worth, as the effort to realize and perfect our highest human capacities. Nussbaum alludes to this point briefly on p.9.

Along the same lines, I worry about Nussbaum’s uses and abuses of history for the sake of democracy. After discussing Socrates and the Athenian democracy, Nussbaum offers a selective treatment of modern educational philosophers whose work embodies different strands of what she calls “Socratic pedagogy.” These include Rousseau, Johann Pestalozzi, Friedrich Froebel, Bronson Alcott, Horace Mann, John Dewey, Rabindranath Tagore, and Matthew Lipman, who has developed an extremely interesting “Philosophy for Children” curriculum at Montclair State University. I’m sympathetic with the educational ideals outlined in this section, including active learning; a rigorous focus on logic, critical reasoning, and the structure of arguments; cultivation of emotional intelligence and imagination; and an emphasis on self-government, self-reliance, and freedom. Others on the blog have said that they don’t know how to cultivate all of these qualities, and I don’t, either: but they are still worthwhile educational objectives, I think, which experienced teachers, in particular circumstances, might have the good sense and situational appreciation to embody in practice.

However, my worry is that, in discussing both democratic Athens and the history of educational philosophy, Nussbaum offers a highly selective and tendentious narrative – one that suits her case, in a way, but also one that smooths over the rough edges of history and unduly simplifies the unruly facts that come down to us. To her credit, Nussbaum explores in other chapters the necessity of teaching history as a set of arguments about highly imperfect evidence, rather than as a static narrative to be digested and regurgitated at appropriate moments. Elsewhere in the volume, moreover, she inspiringly denounces the BJP’s jingoistic and triumphal appropriations of India’s history (e.g., 21-22). Yet, in discussing the Athenian democrats, Nussbaum simplistically charges that, according to Thucydides, “Rarely if ever did they examine their major policy objectives, or systematically ask how the diverse things they valued could fit together” (49). Nussbaum enters this statement in order to explain why “this thriving democracy” needed to be “stung into greater wakefulness” by Socratic argument.

In this section, as before, Nussbaum fails to practice what she recommends and risks turning her historical analysis into a political morality tale. Like all other successful democracies, the Athenian democracy did indeed examine major policy objectives (how could it not?) and consider what a good life among democrats could or should be. One of the central texts illustrating this point comes from Thucydides himself: think of Pericles’ Funeral Oration in Book II of Thucydides’ History. As Clifford Orwin, Arlene Saxonhouse, and others have argued, moreover, the Mytilenian Debate with which Nussbaum indicts Athens actually shows the Athenian democracy virtuously revising ill-founded decisions in the light of further argument. The Athenian democrats examined and reconsidered their views – so that it is incorrect to say, with Nussbaum, that important policy matters and many human lives “were left to chance rather than reasoned debate” (50). As a great deal of recent work has illustrated, in fact, the Athenian democracy itself practiced a politics of virtue that could possibly stand as a model of reasoned discourse and cultural education for contemporary democracies that do not offer their citizens such direct experiences of political debate or action.

The main point, in the end, is that Nussbaum’s analysis lacks the richness and complexity that we have come to expect from her work and that these all-important subjects demand. The greatest American statesmen (not to mention thinkers) have always understood that democratic citizens are capable of grasping complex arguments that adequately address the problems and opportunities of democratic politics. On the other hand, as Tocqueville pointed out, “The habit of inattention ought to be considered the greatest vice of the democratic mind” (DA II 3.15, tr. Mansfield/Winthrop). I worry that Nussbaum’s manifesto both expresses and promotes the prevailing characteristics of our time, instead of helping to counteract them.

- Ryan Balot

3. Educating Citizens: The Moral (and Anti-Moral) Emotions

2011-06-20T11:47:00.003-05:00

Hello,

Thanks to Alisa, Amit, Lisa, and Peyton for initiating this discussion and for the invitation to be part of it. Now that we are entering week three, the burden of leading things off is much lighter, but it may be replaced by an expectation that subsequent commentators will distinguish themselves from their predecessors. In this regard, I'm afraid, my responses are bound to disappoint. My reading of Not for Profit echoes and amplifies comments offered by John and Eric over the last two weeks. Like them, I am part of the choir that shares Nussbaum's sense of urgency about the vulnerability of humanities education, and like them, I approached Not for Profit as someone who admires and has learned enormously from Nussbaum's work. For reasons similar to some of those already offered, I am puzzled about why she pursues this line of thinking to make her case. The this, in the case of chapter 3, is Nussbaum's turn to psychology to undergird an argument for democratic education. Where John's and Eric's posts address a kind of flatness that in the account of the humanities on offer in the book (where's the buzz?), I want to think a bit about what chapter 3 does and doesn't tell us about democracy. Let me sketch some of the main points of the argument and then register two worries about its implications.

"Educating Citizens" focuses on the internal dynamics that drive antidemocratic behavior and advances possible educational cures. How, Nussbaum asks, can we conceive an approach to education that will mitigate human desires to dominate and to marginalize and that will inculcate in everyone a heightened sense of compassion and a capacity to take responsibility both within and beyond national borders? By way of reply, she looks to the "psychology of human development" (30) to find the childhood roots of antidemocratic behavior. And she traces human beings' tendency to stigmatize others to feelings of disgust and shame. The sense of helplessness we all experience may produce a sense of empathy for other, vulnerable creatures; but, untrained, it can lead us to stigmatize others. Further, there are situational factors that exacerbate our bad behavior: our tendency to obey authority and our susceptibility to abusing others when we are in positions of dominance. Enlarging children's imaginative capacities and cultivating their skills as both compassionate beings and critical thinkers, Nussbaum argues, is crucial to enabling them to negotiate feelings of weakness rather than projecting them onto others and thus to salvaging democratic possibility in a profit-driven world.

My first worry is that Nussbaum presents a view of democratic education without explicitly acknowledging the paradoxical character of such an effort. When she asks readers to contemplate "the problems we face on the way to making students responsible democratic citizens who might think and choose well about a wide range of issues" (27), she does not pause to reckon with the tensions inherent in the idea of "making" democratic citizens. How should we think about the authority "we" exercise in producing subjects capable of thinking for themselves? This is not a particularly original point, and thus it is that much more surprising that Nussbaum's book, and chapter 3 particularly, appears to ignore it. The tension I have in mind here is beautifully (frighteningly) revealed in Louis Menand's June 6 New Yorker article on "why we have college." College, he writes, "takes people with disparate backgrounds and beliefts and brings them into line with mainstream norms of reason and taste. Independence of mind is tolerated in college, and even honored, but students have to master the accepted ways of doing things before they are permitted to deviate. Ideally, we want everyone to go to college, because college gets everyone on the same page. It's a way of producing a society of like-minded grownups" (74). Even if Menand's claim is facetious, if it's an overstatement, or if it's simply wrong, at the very least, it raises an uncomfortable question: how do we negotiate the dilemma of teaching students to think for themselves but do so in ways that are compatible with democratic ends?

Not to address this question is troubling in two ways. Insofar as it offers an un-tragic reading of the project of democratic education, it evades dilemmas of collective life about which Nussbaum has written so powerfully and which might provide a more robust answer to the question of "why democracy needs the humanities." Beyond this, the unselfconscious advocacy of a kind of social engineering may offer volatile fuel to the fires stoked by conservatives, who fear that colleges have become breeding grounds for "politically correct" thinking. For example, even though I aspire to "teach real and true things about other groups" (45), especially stigmatized groups, I fear that this formulation is both too bland and too inflammatory to convey the dilemmas such an aspiration engenders. Where the book offers maxims about democratic education, I longed to see Nussbaum work through an example—not merely an illustration—that would reveal the knottiness of the problems she asks us to confront and maybe offer a glimmer of alternative possibilities.

The second worry is that concentrating on the inner lives of individuals obscures historical and structural obstacles to democratic life. "We must acknowledge, sadly, that all human societies have created out-groups who are stigmatized as either shameful or disgusting, and usually both" (34-35), Nussbaum observes. Whether or not this is a universal quality of human being, the air of inevitability is deeply troubling and the suggestion that there is a psychological, perhaps evolutionary, explanation for undemocratic relations of power may have the inadvertent effect of letting everyone, especially the relatively powerful, off the hook. Does it, for example, enable American citizens to reckon with the causes and severity of racial inequality in health, wealth, education, political representation, safety, incarceration, and a wide range of other indicators of well-being? How should her recommendations be applied in the context of segregated schools? Here, I think, Nussbaum's appeal to psychology may work against the humane, egalitarian results she seeks. For instance, if we want to understand and challenge the gap in racial attitudes about the victims of Hurricane Katrina, the relative lack of compassion expressed by white citizens, then we may find rich resources in the humanities. But we may be stymied by comments like the following: "the tendency to segment the world into the known and the unknown probably lies very deep in our evolutionary heritage" (38). This concern is not limited to Not for Profit; instead it reflects a nagging sense that worthy and even inspiring calls for all of us to attend to the sources of our emotional responses and to broaden our sympathies can efface the injustices built into our everyday lives and the politics those injustices might engender. Despite our good intentions, we might be the descendants of the "bankers' daughters" of Richard Wright's nightmares, who "could read and weep and feel good about" the stories of others' suffering.

My point isn't simply that Nussbaum has not made her case in the way that I hoped she would make it. Her larger body of work testifies to the many possible avenues opened up for us by the literary, artistic, and philosophical traditions through which we struggle to make sense of our world. What I had hoped for, in the end, was a book that made the humanities come alive and rendered more fully the texture of democratic life. Where chapter 3 of Not for Profit concludes with a list of bullet points that suggest "what schools can and should do to produce citizens in and for a healthy democracy" (45), I thought wistfully about another closing, the final line of her chapter on Antigone, published 25 years ago. There Nussbaum explores, without preaching, what makes the play tragic, moving, democratic. And when she reads the Chorus' ode to Dionysus, she shows why democracy needs the humanities: "[The Chorus] suggest[s] that the spectacle of this tragedy is itself an orderly mystery, ambitiously yielding, healing without cure, whose very harmony (as we respond in common) is not simplicity but the tension of distinct and separate beauties" (The Fragility of Goodness, 82).

Chapter 2: Education for Profit, Education for Democracy

2011-06-13T06:53:00.002-05:00

Hi everyone!

First of all, thanks to Alisa, Amit, Lisa and Peyton for inviting me to join this conversation, and to John especially for setting a high bar with the first post – and for not shying away from his snarky side. I’m a big fan of Martha Nussbaum and her work, but I’m not a big fan of this book for many of the same reasons that John laid out in his comments on chapter 1.

I’ve been asked to comment on chapter 2, “Education for Profit, Education for Democracy.” This chapter, like the one that follows it, fits kind of awkwardly into the overall structure of the book. In chapter 1 Nussbaum lays out the claim that the humanities are in crisis and names three abilities that she says are cultivated by a humanistic education and essential to a healthy democracy: “the ability to think critically; the ability to transcend local loyalties and to approach world problems as a ‘citizen of the world’; and…the ability to imagine sympathetically the predicament of another person.” (p. 7) These become the focus of chapters 4, 5 and 6, respectively.

Chapters 2 and 3 draw on Nussbaum’s recent work on the “capabilities approach” in developmental economics – e.g. in Women and Human Development and the recently published Creating Capabilities – and on the role of the emotions in cognitive and developmental psychology – e.g. in Upheavals of Thought and Hiding from Humanity. The idea is that before we show how the humanities can help to create a healthy democracy, we have to know what a healthy democracy would look like (pp. 14, 27-8), but the arguments that she offers are only loosely connected to that theme, and the whole sequence feels like a bit of a detour.

Chapter 2 centers around the contrast between the “growth” and “human development” paradigms in development economics. This is a little strange, since Not for Profit is about the state of education in the United States, Europe, and India, and the development literature really only speaks to the latter case. Nussbaum argues, drawing on the work of Amartya Sen, that GDP growth is an inadequate measure of social progress, and that we therefore have reason to favor humanistic over growth-oriented or business-friendly educational policies. This is also a little strange, since she emphasizes at several points elsewhere in the book (e.g. pp. 10, 52-3, 112) that a humanistic education is essential for economic growth as well as for democracy, and that the more astute partisans of growth realize this (maybe the book should have been called Not Only for Profit). She goes on to make a kind of social justice argument, suggesting that “moral obtuseness is necessary to carry out programs of economic development that ignore inequality,” and that “art is a great enemy of that obtuseness.” (p. 23) But even if we believe that a humanistic education makes one less likely to engage in economic exploitation (I don’t), this strikes me as a pretty slender reed on which to rest a defense of the humanities.

Rather than focus on this line of argument, I’d like to use the rest of this post to raise some broader questions about the nature of the defense of the humanities that’s offered here.

What surprised me most about this book is how little Nussbaum has to say about the experience of being moved by literature, art, music, philosophy, etc. We all care about the humanities, I take it, because we’ve all had, and learned to crave, that buzzy, exhilarated feeling that you get when something is beautifully expressed, or when some new insight changes the way you look at the world. I don’t think we can really make a case for studying the humanities – if by that term we mean the traditional elements of a “liberal” education – unless we put this feeling at center stage. I imagine, for example, though I don't know from firsthand experience, that there’s plenty of critical inquiry, global thinking and empathetic role-taking going on in business or law school when the students work through the latest cases. In some ways this is probably a more efficient way of imparting these skills than a traditional liberal education, since the material is less recondite and the stated aim is to figure out how to serve the interests of customers or clients rather than, say, understanding why philosophers should be kings. But I take it that Nussbaum, like most of us, would want to say that something important is missing from such an education.

So what can we say about buzzy exhilaration (for lack of a better term) from a democratic standpoint? It’s definitely an elevating feeling, if only because, like most rewarding experiences, it offers us a chance to forget about ourselves for a while. But I’m not convinced that it’s a morally elevating feeling, let alone that it tends to lead to good citizenship. In some ways it’s an obviously selfish feeling – one for the sake of which we’re often tempted to neglect our other duties, civic or otherwise. So I’m less inclined than Nussbaum is to defend a humanistic education on instrumental grounds, and more inclined simply to treat it as one of the things that makes life worth living – and to argue that we have an obligation as democrats to make it available to as many people as possible.

The problem with this way of framing the issue, of course, is that a lot of people don’t seem to be very interested in having such an education made available to them. This fact, and this whole way of talking – an enlightened “we” making something available to a benighted “they” – helps to explain the persistent view that the humanities are an “elitist” enterprise whose democratic credentials are therefore suspect. That’s an easy view to dismiss for those of us who don’t come from especially privileged backgrounds and who were brought to love the humanities – sometimes despite our initial resistance – by inspiring and dedicated mentors. But we should keep in mind that however we came to it, a conspicuous love of the humanities is just as surely a marker of status as any other kind of conspicuous consumption.

This brings us to another odd feature of Nussbaum’s book: the fact that it’s addressed mostly to elites – politicians, business leaders, educational administrators, etc. – rather than to the actual “consumers” of education; namely students and (indirectly) their parents. I think that this focus on the supply rather than the demand side of the equation gets things exactly backwards. In my experience it isn’t myopic administrators or sinister business interests who are imposing a “growth-oriented” agenda on students; the situation is nearer the reverse, as students – especially working class students, whose presence in college is one of the great democratic victories of the American educational system – demand a more “practical” curriculum. If we’re going to “save” the humanities (assuming that they really need saving), then that’s where the saving will have to be done.

This brings us back, finally, to the question of the relationship between the humanities and economic development. Aristotle, about whom Nussbaum knows a thing or two, says that a liberal education – the kind of education that’s suitable for a free person – presupposes the existence of leisure (scholē, the root of the English scholar), and is fundamentally concerned with the question of how to use one’s leisure well. Needless to say leisure time tends to vary directly with prosperity, and so there’s reason to think not only that a liberal education is a necessary condition for prosperity, but also that a certain level of prosperity is a necessary condition for an appreciation of a liberal education.

Necessary, but not sufficient. I remember teaching this part of Aristotle years ago during my first (not very successful) attempt at leading a large lecture class. I ended the lecture with the following thought experiment:

“Imagine that there was nothing in the world that you had to do: that you didn’t have to worry about making money, or getting good grades, or getting married or raising kids, or pleasing your parents, or whatever it is that you have to do, or think you have to do, in your life right now. Imagine that you were perfectly free in that sense, perfectly free from necessities. What would you do? Many of us wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves if we didn’t have some external goal, like money or power or status or even just trying to please other people, to get us out of bed in the morning. But some of us, Aristotle thinks, would have the wisdom to use an opportunity like that to make something out of ourselves: to cultivate our higher faculties, to enjoy the finer things that life has to offer, and to make and do things that are worthy of admiration. That’s the test for Aristotle of whether a person is liberally educated or not; whether they would be able to make good use of their freedom if they had it. It’s not necessarily up to us to decide whether an opportunity like that will ever come our way; that’s largely a matter of fortune, as Aristotle says. But it is up to us to decide what we would do with the opportunity if we had it.”

This was a bright spot in an otherwise spotty semester of teaching: I could see the students’ faces relax and brighten as I was speaking, and when the lecture ended there was that buzz in the room that you always like to hear after a class. The lesson that I took from that experience was that teaching students to value a liberal education isn’t necessarily a matter of teaching them to be less selfish and more other-directed than they are; most of them have plenty of worries and responsibilities as it is. In some ways the challenge is to teach them to be more selfish – to want things out of life that they didn’t realize they wanted, or could want. If we want to make the cultivation of the humanities one of the aims of our democracy – and please notice I’m phrasing this as a conditional – then I think that’s the tack we should take.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve tried to write down my thoughts on this subject, and I’m sure that I’ll change my mind about some of them as you all respond. But the nice thing about blogging is that it gives us a chance to be wrong in real time instead of being wrong in slow motion, which is the usual fate of academic writing. So … have at it!

Who said that?

2011-06-09T16:15:00.007-05:00

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Chpt. 1: The Silent Crisis

2011-06-06T02:37:00.007-05:00

Hi APT VRGers!

While attempting to initiate general discussion on Martha Nussbaum’s book Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, I will also try to confine my bloggy remarks to her proem, “The Silent Crisis.”

My reaction on first pass: I agree with pretty much everything Martha Nussbaum is saying. She’s preaching to the academic-robed choir in which I’m a full-throated member. Most days these days I share her alarmist mood regarding cutbacks in the humanities and the liberal arts overall. Mind you, I have colleagues near and dear to me who counsel against such despair and outrage. They remind me that such chickenlittlelike crisis-rhetoric often reveals a false nostalgia that serves as a cover for forms of privilege and elitism that are now being subjected to new and evolving economies of digitized democratization, which they welcome. Print culture, and therewith the humanities, surely won’t perish from the earth; reading practices will be altered and perhaps even accelerated, but not eliminated. No need to cling to a bound-book fetish. Yes, certain well-placed scribes and institutional gatekeepers, who have purported to hold a quaint authority over various disciplinary practices (such as reading novels or doing philosophy), may find themselves downsized and out of a job. But let’s not pretend that these eggheads were the main catalysts for worldwide creativity, or for inter-personal empathy, or even for thoughtfulness as such, or that their demise necessarily augurs a dreary future populated entirely by soulless, if gainfully employed, bots.

No, I reject those upbeat spins, accommodations, and rationalizations and, as already mentioned, share Nussbaum’s dire view that “We are in the midst of a crisis of massive proportions and grave global significance.” Two quick quibbles: first, the crisis isn’t really silent, at least not in my circles, not now. (I suspect the book seemed more like a breakout book during the Bush-Spellings era and its early aftermath.) Second, whereas the humanities and liberal arts are on a steep decline in this country, elsewhere we are seeing an uptick of interest in U.S.-style liberal arts programs and colleges, particularly in certain countries that heretofore have specialized in STEM subjects and technical education. By my count, eighteen liberal arts colleges, drawing mainly upon the U.S. SLAC model, have been founded outside the U.S. in the last twelve years, and numerous other liberal arts programs and collaborations have also been initiated in foreign universities in recent periods (many residing in decidedly un-democratic countries). Yet global capitalism will probably crush eventually these wistful experiments as well, so they shouldn't be viewed as detracting much from Nussbaum’s broadside.

To sum up thus far: I am mighty glad that Nussbaum decided to write a “manifesto” and “call to arms” on this matter. I heartily endorse her sweeping contention that the profit motive is largely corrosive as applied to educational pursuits. She rocks. She’s an academic star who is trying to engage a larger public, who abides by the courage of her convictions, who is putting her non-Marxist credentials on the line against the oligarchs. I admire that as Rome burns, she isn’t fiddling. What’s the problem then, Snark-boy Seery, you might be asking? Come clean, do tell. Well, I don’t want to be pedantic and captious (that’s true, seriously). Remember that I’m on her side. The book seems foremost directed toward policy makers and movers and shakers, not to me, as a small-time classroom teacher, so I’m inclined to withhold critical comment. But I must if I must say: the book, too often, bores me. I read certain passages, they sound like buzzwordy boilerplate, they sound like declaimed mini-lectures, they sound like cut-and-paste clip-jobs from longer Nussbaum tomes, they sound like academic blah blah blah (with citations), and my eyes gloss over. I want to be moved. I want to be inflamed. I want to be inspired. I want others to be inspired. I don’t think this book will do the trick. That saddens me. Backfiring, it threatens to compound, rather than ameliorate, the problem of the humanities. When one of our greatest exemplars of the humanities writes a manifesto on behalf of the humanities, it should soar and sing and prick and prod. It should make you clap, laugh, cry, tap your toe, or pound your fist. This one doesn’t (at least not in this opening chapter).

It’s too preachy. Its form of presentation is didactic, not Socratic, even as it explicitly celebrates Socratic interactions. Hence its do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do subtext undercuts its overt claims. A manifesto on behalf of the humanities should convey something—quite a bit—of the excitement, the passion, the risk, the fun, the pleasures, the profundities, the trials, the work, the puzzlement, the self-questioning that altogether make so many of us devoted to such intensive labors of learning. Nussbaum here, I’m afraid, comes across as a fancy pants know-it-all—which I suspect could have the unintended effect of further isolating snooty academics from a larger public. Her authorial voice (belying what I take to be her intentions) strikes me as autocratic rather than democratic, more hectoring than collaborative. (And I realize there are multiple ways of inscribing and enacting democratic overtures. In transactional Hollywood, you’ve got about 30 seconds to make your pitch. Don’t drone on. Get to the point. Convey complexity quickly. Convey heart. Be real. Show, don’t tell. Don’t bullshit. Know your audience.)

After a few head scratches, I found myself recoiling at such lines as “The future of the world’s democracies hangs in the balance” (p. 2) or that a humanities-educated person approaches problems as a “citizen of the world” (p. 7). To my ear, such language sounds so exalted, so high-minded, so earnest, and so pretentious. I would never get away with that missionary language in a small seminar of sly undergraduates (they would mock: what’s the difference between a world citizen and an intergalactic one?). The language is also horribly reductive: the purposes of liberal arts education exceed, or are distinct from, or are sometimes averse to, those of democratic enculturation. A good person is not the same as a good citizen, Aristotle told us. A good geology major is not the same as a good citizen. The strategic and substantive problem here is that while Nussbaum wants to defend not-for-profit education against profit-seeking corporatist and capitalist enterprise, she repairs to the über-instrumentalist language of democracy-building as a way of justifying outwardly the inward activities of academe. Why not explain instead that the marketplace of ideas must be in good part sheltered from the marketplace of goods and services? Forget that patronizing, puffed-up stuff about “faculties of thought and imagination that make us human and make our relationships rich human relationships” (p. 6). It strains credulity, and seems like grandstanding, to say that democracies, in principle or in fact, depend for their very survival upon heady pursuits of truth, beauty, virtue, and knowledge as such. Democracy doesn’t need the humanities (drop that arrogant PR campaign), but the humanities today do apparently need more democratic appeal and support.

Those cranky objections notwithstanding, I’d like the take-home to be: We should all follow Nussbaum’s agitated example, stepping out of the cubicle and into the non-proverbial public square, in order to invite others to understand better, nay to join us in pursuing, the joys and rigors of lifelong learning. (Which means, we need to start putting ourselves in the awkwardly self-serving position of singing our own praises, because university administrators and trustees cannot be trusted to do their jobs in that respect.)

Finally, I invite you to chronicle here various cutbacks, encroachments and indignities regarding the humanities (however you draw the ambit of that term), as well as happier countervailing tales, at your home institution or other places. Please e-expatiate below!

John Seery

2011-05-28T22:51:00.007-05:00

Welcome to the Association for Political Theory’s first Virtual Reading Group!

We’ll be reading Martha Nussbaum’s Not for Profit and using it to guide our conversation about the place of the humanities (and humanities education) in democratic society. Our discussion promises to touch on a variety of topics, from the specific task of curriculum construction to the broad project of identifying the proper purpose of democratic nations.

Posting and commenting will be loosely organized according to the seven chapters of Not for Profit with one initiating scholar per chapter. Each scholar will present their thoughts on the specific chapter and the broader issues Nussbaum raises. Lisa and I will push the discussion forward if it begins to lag. While posting is restricted to invited participants, all who are interested in what Nussbaum terms “the crisis facing us” are welcome to comment, provided those comments are intellectual in nature.

As the summer draws to a close, we will sift through the discussion and present our ‘final’ (nothing is ever final, of course) thoughts on the issues raised by Not for Profit. With these final thoughts, we'll transition to the non-virtual portion of the VRG, the roundtable discussion.

In October, APT will host the roundtable featuring VRG-independent scholars (to avoid too much repetition). The roundtable will feature Patrick Deneen (Georgetown University), Fred Dallmayr (University of Notre Dame) and Arlene Saxonhouse (University of Michigan).

VRG participants are invited to attend and bring the questions, themes, concerns, conclusions, etc. drawn from the VRG to the panelists’ attention. In addition, all APT folks are invited to participate in the roundtable discussion. Thank you in advance to our participants, particularly the initiating scholars!

Peyton & Lisa, your VRG co-chairs

Hi Everyone

2011-04-26T17:45:00.002-05:00

Hi Everyone! Looking forward to reading NFP together this summer!