A Bull Market in the Humanities

Here are eight imperatives—all of them drawing strength and sustenance from the humanities:

1. We need a way of defining and pursuing progress that doesn’t reduce that concept to something that only comes from a digital device.


2. We desperately need access to values and wisdom that aren’t corrupted by the relentless financial metrics and imposed flavor-of

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He sees the hunger people have for a wisdom and nourishing that algorithms and devices don’t provide—but the humanities can. This is the real crisis in humanities, and it’s reached a boiling point.

I don’t travel as extensively as Dana, but I hear the exact same thing in my online dealings with people. They want something that the tech can’t provid... See more

You can no longer make students do the reading or the writing. So what’s left? Only this: give them work they want to do. And help them want to do it. What, again, is education? The non-coercive rearranging of desire.

Within five years, it will make little sense for scholars of history to keep producing monographs in the traditional mold—nobody will... See more

But to be human is not to have answers. It is to have questions—and to live with them. The machines can’t do that for us. Not now, not ever.

And so, at last, we can return—seriously, earnestly—to the reinvention of the humanities, and of humanistic education itself. We can return to what was always the heart of the matter—the lived experience of exi... See more