In the final paragraph of his magnum opus From Dawn to Decadence, the American historian Jacque Barzun proffers a vision of the future — an indulgence he has earned, having devoted some 800 pages to a study of the past. In this future, when the world is no longer brave or new and the Western mind has long since passed from decadence into nihilistic despair — prompted first by the loss of God, then of Man, then of “the good life” altogether — humanity is bored of its solipsism. “Over-entertained” and restless, a group of future radicals rediscover “the old neglected library”. They are profoundly altered by the “record of a fuller life” that they find in its historic “literary and photographic texts”. It spurs them to action. In discovering the past, they “use it to create a new present”.

Like any disciple of science, it became her business to expose and demystify

As well as softening his diagnosis — that we are currently living through a period of decadence, not dissimilar to that fateful period in Roman history when the elites were too busy procuring orgies to stave off the barbarians — Barzun’s prophecy serves to remind us that repositories for human culture are of indispensable value. Preserving this store for future generations has historically been the raison d’etre of the humanities, but with the desire to deconstruct now stronger than the desire to conserve in university departments across the country, Barzun’s prediction is unlikely to come to pass. When future radicals come to unseal our long-neglected libraries, what they will find is more likely to incite rage than stir hearts. Instead of finding “the best of what has been thought and said”, they will discover that the culture we saw fit to bequeath them is nothing more than pseudo-science and a far too plentiful supply of celebrity biography. 

“Instead of transmitting culture”, humanities departments exist now “to deconstruct it”. According to the philosopher Roger Scruton, this is a consequence of losing the battle for dominance with science. They say whoever wins the war redefines the language, but they also set the terms of debate. When humanities scholars in the 1960s began speaking in the language of method and evidence, it was only a matter of time before they abandoned their founding purpose altogether. What sense did it make to defend the transmission of culture when what the increasingly bureaucratic universities wanted was veritable proof of their output — without which, of course, there would be no cash. Before long, the vision of the humanities as a “living culture” was abandoned, and the reign of the cultural criticism began. Determined to prove that the humanities had some measurable worth beyond mere conservation, the critic engaged in the infinitely more productive and measurable task of exposing Western culture as complicit in the maintenance of oppressive power structures. Equipped with various scalpels, the critic set about dissecting our great repositories. Like any disciple of science, it became her business to expose and demystify.

It is a great misconception that in becoming more evidence-based, better scrutinizers of texts, expert doubters of sources, we humanities scholars inoculate ourselves against master texts — those dangerous purveyors of bourgeois canonical values. Somehow, despite the oaths sworn to deconstruct all grand narratives, we have left science not only intact but in charge. So pervasive is its influence, that it reigns with an invisible fist, silently reordering everything in its dominion. When the critic reaches for Marxist ideology (or a poststructuralist version of it) to deconstruct the novel in his hand, it is this invisible fist that guides him. Science, too, is behind the trend for interdisciplinary research, where the humanities scholar is invited to plunder from the language of neuroscience or biology to demystify once and for all the outmoded idea of beauty. To say that the critic of culture is a disciple of science, is to speak accurately about how closely she observes the scriptures of the new religion. More scientist than humanist, her overwhelming desire is to order and explain. 

At the decisive moment, Michael Gove flunked it

Fortunately for us, the world will keep on evading explanation and will rarely coalesce around a neat pattern. Were critics to pay more attention to the works of art they dissect, they would hear this message over and over. It’s there, for example, in the works of Iris Murdoch and her anxiety about gurus, or “magicians” as she calls them, who claim to have all the answers. It’s there too in George Eliot’s masterpiece Middlemarch, in the character of poor Casaubon who is so fixated on finding the “key to all mythologies” that he entirely misses the beauty of Rome. Virginia Woolf understood the tempting appeal of a neat answer when she warned us against those “nuggets of truth” that sit so nicely on the mantelpiece, but, like all ornamental things, do little more than gather dust. What these great artists teach us is that our hubristic desire for mastery is futile. We are not, as Murdoch argued, “isolated creatures, monarchs of all we survey, but benighted creatures sunk in a reality whose nature we are constantly and overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy”.

In a recent speech for the think tank Onward, the Conservative MP Michael Gove had the perfect opportunity to defend the humanities as a repository for such invaluable human wisdom. Conservatives, he waxed, “feel the responsibility of stewardship; the need to cherish what we have inherited and pass it on, enhanced, to the next generation”. Lifting ever so slightly onto his tiptoes, emboldened by the ghosts of F.R. Leavis, Matthew Arnold and Edmund Burke, whose honourable heads Gove imagined were nodding fervently beside his own, he continued to rhapsodise about the conservative belief in “the human, the organic. The ties that bind”. At the decisive moment, though, when the logic of his argument called upon him to affirm the crucial role played by the humanities in preserving these values, he flunked it. The whole tenor of the speech had surely been leading to an ardent defence of humanities scholarship, but in the end Gove lent his backing to science — in the interest, naturally, of the national economy. Having worked so hard to exorcise it in the first half of his speech, the libertarian impulse had come home to roost. The market, and its accomplice science, won out. 

In order that we leave something of worth for those future radicals, it’s time that science returned to its own department. This is not to say that as independent disciplines the humanities and sciences should not continue to collaborate, particularly around the ethics of AI and biotech. To expect the humanities to flourish under its current stranglehold is like asking a rose to flower through bindweed, however. We need only look around at the number of rapidly failing humanities departments to see that science not only won the war, but, by means of a slow takeover, steadily hollowed out the opposition. To regrow, the humanities will need to find renewed purpose and recover from the addiction to neat theories. Fortunately, we are not so far gone in our decadence that a revival is inconceivable.