The Washington Post titles its editorial about the nation’s latest high-class whore Lifestyles of the Cultured.  

UD doesn’t like to see the word cultured used in this scoffing way, but what can she do?

The editorial describes the scumminess of the guy who until recently ran the new Smithsonian American Indian museum.  Like American University’s ex-president Benjamin Ladner (who with the help of sleazy trustees not only spent like a sailor on personal luxuries when he was president, but, forced to resign in disgrace, got a huge financial settlement), and like the Getty Museum’s ex-head Barry Munitz (kicked out of the Getty for grotesque personal indulgence, he was foisted on one of the Cal State universities as a faculty member — in English!),  W. Richard West Jr. is a very specifically destructive human type:  He destroys the life of the mind.

All of these men were the public face of America’s high-culture –university presidents, museum directors.  In an anti-intellectual and materialistic country, they were supposed to embody higher values:  the life of the mind; aesthetic experience for its own sake… Instead, all proved crudely ostentatious egotists, happy to use (in the case of Ladner and West) public as well as private money to feed their greed.

The Post is right – these are our high-profile cultured, our exemplars of  cultivation, of the civilized life.  They are motivated by the same things that motivate Britney Spears.

… Among [West's] obligations [was] a sense of propriety, and of proportion, about spending what is, after all, largely taxpayers’ money. Mr. West’s habits of the purse may not have been as untethered as those of his erstwhile boss, former Smithsonian secretary Lawrence M. Small, who used museum funds for a Hawaiian vacation, for a new heat pump for his lap pool and for a trip to Las Vegas. Still, Mr. West’s extravagant tastes in travel, lodging and lifestyle, and his seemingly liberal practices in billing the Smithsonian for travel at least partly on behalf of other organizations on whose boards he served, were unsuitable for an institution regarded by the public as a national trust.

…Much of his travel — to Paris, Rome, Florence, Venice, Vienna, Sydney, Seville, Athens, New Zealand and other swank destinations whose enthrallment with Native American culture had until now gone unremarked — was only glancingly justified on Mr. West’s expense forms. Many of the particulars of his travels, including a limousine in Paris (where taxis are plentiful) and $1,000-a-night forays to Manhattan, suggest that Mr. West had confused his role with that of the private-foundation executives with whom he rubbed shoulders. An oil portrait of himself that he commissioned, at a cost to the museum of $48,500, is evidence of a vainglorious sense of entitlement.

 …[T]here’s nothing like the glare of media scrutiny to make the point that those who are entrusted with public institutions should not expect to live like hedge fund managers. Still, wouldn’t it have been nice if a sense of decorum and good judgment, and not just the threat of exposure and public ridicule, had impelled Smithsonian officials to moderate their ways?

But really — how do we make the case that people should take culture and its stewardship seriously?   Why should we care that more and more university leaders, like their multiply-millioned football coaches, are money-grubbers lurching from this campus to that for more grub?   Gatsbys whose private vision statement mainly involves upgrades from business to first class?

It’s easy, after all, to go the other way — to say that culture is snobbery, and that the very words that go along with it — decorum –  are rightly offensive to relaxed, egalitarian Americans…   That universities are corporations and should be run by corporation people…  That it’s okay when coaches and presidents crap out for more money because they’re modeling entrepreneurialism for us…

Under its cold irony about these matters, the Post seems to harbor the notion that cultivated people should be better people; that we should expect excellent liberal arts educations, and adult lives engaged in humane reading and study, to produce people of character as well as intellect. 

Indeed, most defenses of the humanities as an object of study come down to a moral argument:  Something intrinsic to such study makes you a better person. 

And… I mean… America’s invested in producing good, trustworthy, reasoning, responsible citizens, right?  Shouldn’t the country therefore invest in humanistic education?   An education at whose top we place people who, educated in the right way, have the right sort of character….

In a recent blogpost, Stanley Fish dumps all sorts of cold water on this thinking:

If it were true  [that humane learning makes you a better person], the most generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people on earth would be the members of literature and philosophy departments, who spend every waking hour with great books and great thoughts, and as someone who’s been there (for 45 years) I can tell you it just isn’t so. Teachers and students of literature and philosophy don’t learn how to be good and wise; they learn how to analyze literary effects and to distinguish between different accounts of the foundations of knowledge. [Humane] texts [are] concerned with the meaning of life; those who study them, however, come away not with a life made newly meaningful, but with a disciplinary knowledge newly enlarged.

And that, I believe, is how it should be. Teachers of literature and philosophy are competent in a subject, not in a ministry. It is not the business of the humanities to save us, no more than it is their business to bring revenue to a state or a university. What then do they do? They don’t do anything, if by “do” is meant bring about effects in the world. And if they don’t bring about effects in the world they cannot be justified except in relation to the pleasure they give to those who enjoy them.

To the question “of what use are the humanities?”, the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good.

Fish is saying a couple of things here:  

 1.]  Humanities professors aren’t ministers, using literary and philosophical scripture to save your soul and redeem your character.  They’re technicians.  They can teach you how to decode the meanings of a text better than you could before you entered their classroom.  They can train you to differentiate between, say, Kantian and Hegelian epistemology.

 2.] These decoding, discriminating procedures give some people pleasure.  That pleasure is a good in itself and should be encouraged by universities and their funders.

Note what’s missing in this account:  Not merely the idea that humane study civilizes and perhaps morally and even spiritually ennobles; but also the idea that the path of humanistic education and cultivation is in some sense a path directed toward greater and greater disclosure of the truth — however ’situated’ we want our sense of the truth to be.   Fish’s justification for the study of literature and philosophy rests entirely on his observation that the technical activity of decoding meaning and comparing knowledge systems yields – in himself and others – pleasure. 

This is a supremely aristocratic account of humane learning, in which the glory of novels and ontologies lies in the peculiar, indefinable delight (Fish does not characterize humanistic pleasure) they afford us.  Stewards of humanistic institutions shouldn’t be expected to be any more “good-hearted and honest” than their faculty; they should be expected to run their institutions in whatever way maximizes the possibility of exposing the largest number of people to humanistic pleasure.

Richard Rorty had a different take on the value and effects of humane study.  Exposure to great literature, he argued, inspires us to imagine and want to contribute to a better world:

Goethe [said] that the ability to shudder with awe is the best feature of human beings. [A.J.] Ayer, by contrast, stood for logic, debunking, and knowingness. He wanted philosophy to be a matter of scientific teamwork, rather than of imaginative breakthroughs by heroic figures. He saw theology, metaphysics, and literature as devoid of what he called “cognitive significance,” and Whitehead as a good logician who had been ruined by poetry. Ayer regarded shudders of awe as neurotic symptoms. He helped create the philosophical tone which Iris Murdoch criticized in her celebrated essay “Against Dryness.”

In the space of two generations, Ayer and dryness won out over Whitehead and romance. Philosophy in the English-speaking world became “analytic,” antimetaphysical, unromantic, and highly professional.

…Inspirational value is typically not produced by the operations of a method, a science, a discipline, or a profession. It is produced by the individual brush strokes of unprofessional prophets and demiurges. You cannot, for example, find inspirational value in a text at the same time that you are viewing it as the product of a mechanism of cultural production. To view a work in this way gives understanding but not hope, knowledge but not self-transformation. For knowledge is a matter putting a work in a familiar context – relating it to things already known.

If it is to have inspirational value, a work must be allowed to recontexualize much of what you previously thought you knew; it cannot, at least at first, be itself recontextualized by what you already believe. Just as you cannot be swept off your feet by another human being at the same time that you recognize him or her as a good specimen of a certain type, so you cannot simultaneously be inspired by a work and be knowing about it. Later on – when first love has been replaced by marriage – you may acquire the ability to be both at once. But the really good marriages, the inspired marriages, are those which began in wild, unreflective infatuation.

…[T]he natural tendency of professionalization and academicization is to favor a talent for analysis and problem-solving over imagination, to replace enthusiasm with dry, sardonic knowingness. The dismalness of a lot of social science, and of a lot of analytic philosophy, is evidence of what happens when this replacement is complete.

Within the academy, the humanities have been a refuge for enthusiasts. If there is no longer a place for them within either philosophy or literature departments, it is not clear where they will find shelter in the future. People … who began devouring books as soon as they learned to read, whose lives were saved by books – may get frozen out of those departments. If they are, the study of the humanities will continue to produce knowledge, but it may no longer produce hope. Humanistic education may become what it was in Oxbridge before the reforms of the 1870s: merely a turnstile for admission to the overclass.

…[Inspiring literature has] to do with futurity and hope – with taking the world by the throat and insisting that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.

Although Rorty attaches no particular morality to this excited sense of a better future, he does use the word “self-transformation” to suggest not a simple operation in which you become a better person, but a complex education in which you break out of the private pleasure-chamber Fish seems to have in mind, and venture in the direction of a larger world toward which your study has led you to feel curiosity and sympathy.