The analysis of economic causality has not been one of the great success stories of modern economic history. The techniques which permit a high level of precision in economic analysis do not marry comfortably with attempts to identify what has been going on in the human world, let alone with efforts to assess what is likely to do so in the humanly relevant future. These techniques require idealization, and powerfully ... mathematized abstraction: the thinking away of almost all the clutter of human experience ... What is clear is that the demands of these techniques … virtually rule out an analysis of an economy as a field of human interaction massively influenced by a rich variety of types of human preoccupation and purpose (political, cultural, spiritual), which are extremely volatile over time and in no sense constituted by economic categories themselves. (John Dunn. The Cunning of Unreason: Making Sense of Politics. London: HarperCollins, 2000: 348–9)
Ben Knights is the Director
of the English Subject
Centre. His most recent
book is Masculinities in
Text and Teaching
(Palgrave, 2007).
This article invites ‘English people’, of whatever description, to build on the commonalities we share with the other so-called ‘Humanities’. As disciplines, we have many of the same strengths and are vulnerable to many of the same criticisms. Thus, arguments about the ‘decline of the industrial spirit’, of the kind proposed by the historian Correlli Barnett, cannot simply be discounted. Nor (from another political direction) can Pierre Bourdieu’s damaging association of the Humanities with inherited cultural capital. Going back to their forebears in the post-Romantic ‘clerisy’, Humanities intellectuals have a history of making sweeping claims about their own social significance which should make us wary of exaggerating our collective value to society, or of simply re-hashing arguments about the value of ‘liberal education’. (But see Nussbaum, 1997.) There is, nevertheless, a case to be made, provided it can be made with due sensitivity towards other agencies within a plural intellectual, scientific and social economy.
Key to the significance of this group of disciplines, is the absence of a clear boundary between the subject matter of our scholarship and teaching within universities on the one hand and, on the other, cultural activities and practices that go on ceaselessly in society at large. Writing, drama, music, historical enquiry, formal and informal debate and commentary have a vigorous life in society at large that is only obliquely connected with, and rarely dependent upon, university scholarship. Many of the exaggerated claims made in the past derive from intellectuals’ attempts to insist upon the value they add to everyday symbolic activity. The other way round, a large part of the significance of the Humanities could be seen to derive precisely from this continuity. By generating knowledge and refining the terms of discourse we contribute to what is, effectively, a social conversation. Together with practitioners and readers, we contribute to the maintenance of what the McMaster Report (Supporting Excellence in the Arts: From Measurement to Judgment – (www.culture.gov.uk/what_we_do/Arts/mcmaster_review.htm) refers to as the ‘cultural ecology’. Put another way, we study (often in highly practical ways) the creation, testing and communication of significance.
In our attempt to demonstrate our economic relevance, we would be unwise to become fixated on the so-called Cultural Industries. Clearly the Cultural Industries are now major players in the economy, and equally clearly what and how the Humanities teach feed into such activity1. The Cultural Industries play a growing, if disputed, role in urban and regional regeneration. But however vibrant and dynamic the cultural industries of the 21st-century prove to be, the demand for script and copywriters, novelists, festival organisers, film and programme makers, animators and so on is likely to remain finite. We would render ourselves very vulnerable (eg to the effects of economic recession or changing leisure fashions) if that were the only mast to carry our flag. Nevertheless, in the light of the McMaster review of the arts, the Cultural Industries furnish us with a ready-made argument that imagination, ceremony and play are very far from trivial.
The Leitch Review does not actually say as much about universities and Level 4 skills as might be supposed from the menacing way in which it has been held over us. Much of the paradigm shift Leitch demands rests upon the vision (chapter 5) of ‘employer engagement’ in the delivery of skills. Thus, at Level 4, universities should be incentivised to ‘respond effectively to employer and individual demand’. And, more sinisterly, the Commission ‘should monitor the relationship between higher education and employers to make sure that the reforms recommended by the Review lead to a step change in collaboration.’ (5.74) We can only extract a detailed agenda for universities by extrapolation, and Leitch does not purport to enter into matters of curriculum or pedagogy. The review stresses that the current UK skills deficit is ‘most severe at the bottom end’ (3.3.8): the UK seriously trails comparator economies in basic and intermediate skills, and, while we might protest that this is a social and human disaster as well as an economic one, the universities can only act very indirectly on that situation. The Humanities disciplines cannot simply attempt to answer Leitch in its own terms, for those terms already largely exclude the very things we might wish to talk about. Thus the ‘skills agenda’ and the cult of competencies has been around for over 20 years now, and is still vulnerable to the same critique – viz. that it rests on a pragmatically useful, but extremely partial, theory of learning. In parallel, Leitch draws on an impoverished account of human endeavour, and one that is subject to the devastating critique of human capital theory advanced by Frank Coffield and others. (See, for example, his inaugural lecture at the Institute of Education www.ioe.ac.uk/schools/leid/lss/FCInauguralLectureDec06.doc
Nor are skills value-neutral. As Ron Barnett has argued, the use of a skill requires a prior judgment on the appropriateness of that skill to the situation concerned and, indeed, informed judgment as to whether it is the right situation to be in. (That is to say that the deployment of skills takes place within a matrix which in the final analysis is itself cultural and value-laden.)
A higher education organised around skills is no higher education. It is the substitution of technique for insight; of strategic reason for communicative reason; and of behaviour for wisdom. (Barnett,1994: 61)
In short, we shall only get so far by limiting ourselves to working within Leitch’s own terms. We should neither bend over backwards trying to prove ourselves Leitch-friendly, but nor should we engage in the kind of satisfying but provocative public critique to which some of us might be tempted. A more positive approach would be to seek to complement the argument – urging a broadening of the idea of the economy to encompass what in the banal phrase is known as ‘quality of life’. The interactions of humans with each other and themselves are only very partially describable in terms of customers and providers. The Humanities could have considerable weight in articulating the remainder. At the same time, the economic analysis is, after all, open to dispute in its own terms, not least the observation that the paradigm derived from the City and the financial sector concentrates on very short-term returns. (A contemporary re-statement of the argument can be found in Elliott and Atkinson, 2008.) Or that the assumption of everlasting growth on which it rests is simply unsustainable. It is not simply retrograde to argue for a more nuanced, dialectical understanding of the relationship between the economy, the environment and civil society.
How can our subjects claim to complement Leitch? We can start by celebrating the aims of raising aspiration and ‘embedding a culture of learning’ (chapter 6 passim). But while applauding the ambition to raise aspiration, we could press for a richer definition of all that might be encompassed by such aspiration. There is no shortage of evidence that, generally speaking, humans treasure other things as well as material wealth – indeed that the compulsive search for wealth may often represent a substitute for more profound satisfactions. (I’m drawing here, among other sources, on the sociologist Richard Sennett’s important books Respect: The Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality, 2003 and The Corrosion of Character: the Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism,1998.) Such an approach might lead us to talk about matters like fairness, recognition, respect, security, hope, dignity, the feeling of belonging, shared memory or access to aesthetic expression. All things which the Humanities disciplines treat as knowledge and, as practice, help, articulate, describe, and remember. The other side of this argument demands recognition of ever-increasing evidence that ‘the way we live now’ not only engenders widespread boredom, but, more frighteningly, (and expensively) depression, self-harm, substance abuse and mental health problems of near epidemic proportions. The Humanities are equipped to engage in and foster the conversations that livable societies need. (One example among many would concern the rise of the so-called Medical Humanities, and the roles of writing in forms of therapy.) That Leitch’s vision of a globally ambitious, up-skilled population needs to be enriched by a denser, more ambitious version of human aspiration and inventiveness is born out by a recent survey by the Work Foundation (http://tinyurl.com/6mnqsd), which seems to demonstrate that the four most ‘iconic’ occupations are currently hair dressers, management consultants, celebrities and managers. While Leitch is committed to leaving initiative to the market, these may not be the kind of examples of ‘high value-added industry’ that he had in mind.
To argue, as Leitch does, for ‘demand-led skills’ (chapter 4 passim) itself requires that employers, entrepreneurs or policy makers have the imagination to think towards the skills which might be needed beyond the present moment. The alternative is the default demand for employees who will, basically, do what they are told, a predilection memorably analysed in relation to telesales by Deborah Cameron. So we have to go beyond ‘demand-led skills’. Between them, our disciplines practise and enhance what the evolutionary anthropologist Michael Tomasello refers to as profoundly significant ‘joint attentional activities’ (1999: 6-7). In dialogue with our sources and our students we promote sociable knowledge. It might be too simplistic to claim that the Humanities extend the range and sophistication of human cognition, but evolutionary psychology can be cited in support. Steven Pinker has, in the past, been no friend to social science or cultural studies, but he has an important point to make:
Left to our own devices, we are apt to backslide to our instinctive conceptual ways. This underscores the place of education in a scientifically literate democracy, and even suggests a statement of purpose for it (a surprisingly elusive principle in higher education today). The goal of education is to make up for the shortcomings in our instinctive ways of thinking about the physical and social world. (2007: 439. My emphasis.)
If language and culture constitute our species equipment for overcoming our evolutionary shortcomings, then the Humanities disciplines (as communities of practice) are there to service, refine and maintain that equipment through scholarship and teaching. For Nussbaum, the ‘narrative imagination’ is a crucial component in learning to become ‘citizens of the world’ (Nussbaum, 1997, chs. 2–3) and is thus a democratising force. The Humanities disciplines service the symbolic and narrative environment, taking their place among the organisations and practices which sustain both memory and social imagination – a symbolic eco-system for values and longer-term choices which is not, in turn, irrelevant to the domain of economic production and distribution. They safeguard a space for encounters with the unexpected, provide mental maps for navigating complexity and (even on a narrow analysis) play their part in creating the preconditions for ‘blue skies thinking’. Alongside other sources, they supply nutrients for all kinds of creativity by promoting analogical thought.
For the English disciplines this could even be the moment to revive what might, on the face of things, sound like a Leavisite argument about maturity. Let’s just say that the consumer credit culture has created and relied upon systemic infantilisation. Groups and generations are salami-sliced into niche markets for the grooming of evanescent desires. It is not the least significance of thoughtful attention to texts and discourses that it enables continued vertical dialogue between generations. In the US, the National Endowment for the Arts has noted a strong correlation between literary reading and other forms of active civic participation (www.arts.gov/pub/ReadingATRIsk.pdf).
If we are to contest forms of knowledge predicated on the domination of the natural and social environment, the Humanities will need to change too. In an age of impending ecological disaster, there is an environmentally informed case to be made as well. To ‘get out of the grooves of fatal destiny in which our civilization is now caught’ would, argued Gregory Bateson, require above all social flexibility (1972: 472). To make ethical choices requires adequate symbolic equipment. The ability of the academic practitioners of the Humanities to mediate across boundaries, to balance the claims of the past and of the future, to support their students in navigating the as yet unknown could turn out to be central to what we may learn to call a ‘green pedagogy’. The Humanities contribute through their scholarship and the learning environments they create to producing the equipment, the symbolic tools which 21st-century citizens will need. In providing a medium for responsible dialogue between cultures, communities and generations, they stimulate hospitality towards the strange and different. Our students are equipped to act as translators, go-betweens and inter-cultural ambassadors. They possess the skills and knowledge to build and maintain symbolic communities. An ambitious argument on behalf of the Humanities, as scholarship and as pedagogic practice must be based on a holistic vision for the human environment.
There is another side to all this. We cannot stand up and make these or similar public claims on the basis of disciplinary self-satisfaction. To pursue a forceful dialogue with the culture at large requires that we, within universities, strive to bring all our teaching up to the standard of the best. If the Humanities subjects are going to claim the public significance to which they are eminently entitled, then we have, at the same time, to put our own pedagogic house in order.
1 Though that the importance of the ‘cultural industries’ may well have been over-stated is one argument of Atkinson and Elliott’s vigorous polemic Fantasy Island. London: Constable. 2006.
References
Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. London: Intertext. 1972.
Barnett, Ronald. The Limits of Competence: Knowledge, Higher Education and Society. Buckingham: Open University. 1994. Cameron, Deborah. Good To Talk; Living and Working in a Communication Culture (Sage, 2000).
Elliott, Larry and Dan Atkinson. The Gods That Failed: How Blind Faith in Markets Has Cost Us Our Future. London: Bodley Head. 2008.
Nussbaum, Martha. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Cambridge MA: Harvard. 1997.
Pinker, Steven, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. London: Allen Lane. 2007.
Tomasello, Michael. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. 1999.
