How could an ideology that is by definition 'presentist' care about the past? Tolga Akmen / Anadolu Agency / Getty
Unsurprisingly, after 25 years of destruction to the humanities in the name of equity, and the ease with which identitarian requirements and interdicts of the academe have prevailed in the corporate world, many conservatives are now reconsidering their embrace of the so-called “free market”. The obvious question is: why did it take them this long? Did they really not see that the capitalism with which they so identified — even if they were pro-capitalist merely because they were anti-communist — was, as my mother once put it, “the bull in the china shop of human history”?
It is as if, somehow, conservatives imagined that the cultural worldview best expressed by T.S. Eliot in his “Tradition and the Individual Talent” could long thrive in a capitalist culture. As if Eliot’s view, that the true significance of an artist’s work lies in the relationship between the artist and those who had come before, could be compatible with capitalism, an ideology that is by definition “presentist” and utterly disdainful of the past. Or, to put it another way, as if what Daniel Bell described as capitalism’s “radical individualism in economics, and [its] willingness to tear up all traditional social relations in the process” could somehow still leave room for traditionalism in culture.
For tradition is, at least in the long run, the cultural, and perhaps even the moral, opposite of innovation which is what the free market perpetually aspires to. To use the business school boilerplate, new technologies give rise to new industries, which in turn produce new goods and services. In the process, social relations are transformed. Even if it is correct to believe that capitalism, through what Joseph Schumpeter described as “creative destruction”, is the best economic system in history for creating prosperity, the price for that prosperity was always going to be high culture.
In his 1976 book, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Daniel Bell rejected Marx’s idea that culture was a reflection of the economy — that it was “integrally allied to it through the exchange process”. Instead, Bell argued that culture had become ever more autonomous. And yet the connection he made between the growth of discretionary income, and the advent of a cultural order that proudly proclaimed itself the adversary of the established social order, actually fits in better with Marx’s view than his own. Towards the end of his essay, Bell conceded that the breakup of the traditional bourgeois value system was, in fact, brought about by the bourgeois economic system — by the free market, to be precise.
But Bell doesn’t seem to have understood something quite crucial about the role of the arts. It is unquestionably the case that from the middle of the 19th century, despite a few dissenting voices such as Eliot’s, artists in the West saw their mission as the dissolution of the social status quo. With hindsight, however, it is clear that their more important role, in world historical terms, was to serve as a kind of inadvertent avant-garde of the free market: by systematically destroying the Protestant Ethic with all its moral and economic commitments to what Bell called “Malthusian prudence”. Bell’s language is elegiac. American capitalism, he wrote, “has lost its legitimacy, which was based on a moral system of reward, and the Protestant sanctification of work”. And, writing as he was in 1970, it is understandable that he thought that the replacement of Protestant moralism with hedonism, with a new “voluptuary system” of “social permissiveness and libertinism”, would be unsustainable.
And had it stopped there, perhaps Bell would have been right. Every social system needs some kind of moral warrant, and in 1970 it was anything but clear what that new moral warrant would be. Half a century later, though, we now know what it has been: wokeness, Critical Race Theory, intersectionality, LGTBQ+, and the rest. These doctrines have moralised the voluptuary system, disciplined the libertinism, and politicised the permissiveness. As for the cultural contradiction Bell warned of, that, too, has been settled — and in Carthaginian fashion, by condemning and repudiating the past as racist, which in practical terms means calling for the erasure of the high culture of the past. It could hardly be otherwise, since high culture in every society has always been the product of the rich and powerful, of kings, empires, princes, or plutocrats.
High culture became the only thing standing in the way of the free market, and now that too has been taken care of. Art can co-exist with Schlock, but it cannot indefinitely survive the onslaught of Kitsch — the only kind of culture the free market can really tolerate. And there we have the unimaginable combination of Schumpeter and Fanon. Yet, once imagined, obvious; perhaps, even, inevitable. Because, at least in the long run, it is impossible to have an economic system based on obsolescence and destruction (“creative” or otherwise) and a cultural system based on pious continuity. We have moved from the Grand Inquisitor to the Grand Therapist.
And so now only 8% of university students in the UK are enrolled in humanities subjects. The madness of wokeness and the barbarous inanities of “anti-racism” are well on their way to destroying high culture in the Anglosphere and, probably, in parts of Latin America and Western Europe as well. And this despite the Rightward turn, because most of the Right in the US, Canada, and Australia are no more committed to high culture than to the preservation of the environment. In Western Europe and Latin America, high culture has at least for a century not been a monopoly of the Left — from Borges to Houellebecq, a conservative tradition remains alive. By contrast, in the Anglosphere, once one gets past Chesterton, Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy, the cultural pickings are slim indeed.
Let us for once be honest: what is on offer in terms of contemporary culture on both sides of the woke/anti-woke battle line today is a penumbral shadow of the culture of the past. This is not to say that there aren’t any people of talent in both camps. But, if we are being rigorous, it is simply a fact to say that the greatest days of Western culture are behind it. There is nothing unusual in this. Cultures and civilisations are as mortal as human beings. The great Renaissance historian and politician Francesco Guicciardini said that a citizen must not mourn the decline of their city. All cities decline, he wrote. If there is anything to mourn it is that it has been one’s unhappy fate to be born when one’s city is in decline.
If there is a new culture waiting to be born, it will certainly not be born of wokeness, of neo-tribalist nostalgia, of notions of race that would have pleased the worst 20th-century race scientist. But nor will Western high culture ever ascend to the place it reached so gloriously in the period between the Renaissance and the middle of the 20th century. That race has run its course. And somewhere, deep down, everyone knows this. Given that, why in God’s name would one want to study a subject in the humanities? There are, of course, material reasons for the death of the humanities as well. One can be materialist here, but not too materialist; allegro ma non troppo, as it were. The old culture is dying, and what purports to be its successor has come into the world stillborn.
***
A version of this essay appears in David Rieff’s new book, Desire and Fate, published by Eris and out now.
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SubscribeDavid Rieff should leave Europe. He would see that far more capitalistic areas of the world have thriving humanities. It isn’t capitalism that has destroyed humanities in the UK but the universities themselves, the institutions trusted to preserve them. UK universities, bastions of left wing politics funded not by capitalism but the state** offering degrees that have no economic value to half of all students.
Across the world, classical education including humanities is thriving. Even in capitalist USA, the private universities away from the East Coast have kept alive the traditional humanities. In right wing states like Florida grade school education is once again focusing on classical logic and rhetoric. Turning to capitalist Africa and Asia, great investments are being made in the traditional humanities education Rieff mourns the death of here.
No, capitalism hasn’t killed humanities. The Christian civilisational decay of Europe is killing humanities in Europe and East Coast America and Canada. Woke is just a symptom of that civilisational decay, filling the vacuum.
**UK government debt sitting behind student loans is now £240bn, with £20bn a year “lent” by the state to prop up the universities.
Correct, most of the ‘capitalist’ globe is still enthralled by the Classical World , the World of Greece and Rome, and quite rightly so.*
(*Until off course Christianity wrecked it.)
I think the author should be reported to Trading Standards for selling this article as a coherent piece of writing
I was with you until the absolutely ridiculous assertion that “Woke is just a symptom of that civilizational decay” which smacked of Orange Jesus comments on why all those people died in the Potomac River. Speaking of Orange Jesus, the odds that any of the schools you reflected upon, receive a dime of Federal funding in the near future is poor, in their exemplary effort to keep alive this tradition.
Erm, I’m wrote the decay is happening because of something else other than woke, not directly because of woke. Have another read.
So you think a safety committee should have dei as basic goal instead of safety. Or do you think having two targets is quite ok?
re to the point does CF think that you can appoint the DEI candidate in preference to the best candidate and not compromise safety.
I see the latest news reports seem to confirm that Trump was right
Where is the Potomac River and where is Nell Clover’s commentary?
So what is the root cause of this “Christian civilisational decay” as you put it?
Would you put its start at around 1914 or perhaps a little earlier, say 1859 perhaps?
Christianity relies on volunteers, whereas Islam and Buddhism use conscripts.
As Christianity relies on enthusiasm, it is vulnerable. But for 1,000 years (711 when the Moors conquered Spain, to 1699 when the Ottoman Empire was tamed) it was propped up by Muslim attacks on Europe, which linked the causes of European freedom and culture to that of Christianity.
Not coincidentally, Christian Europe declined from about 1699.
Darwinism only robs people of Christian faith if they already wish to be robbed of it. Unless you’re a Bible literalist. Darwinism is religiously irrelevant.
Christianity was state sponsored from 380 AD* at the latest. Volunteers were unnecessary as it now had ‘critical mass’.
*To use Christian chronology otherwise 1061 AUC.
I wish you’d written a full essay on this subject rather than the above to be frank.
What has killed the humanities is the woke progressives who control universities and insist that classical music is white supremacy; that the term Anglo-Saxon should be dropped because it’s racist and they ‘never existed’; that the English Lit canon should be thrown out to make way for second rate writers who happen to be the equity-deserving-identity de jour — so as a university professor, I would defund 90% of humanities and social science, divert funding to guilds and craft colleges….and allow new private sector and deregulated institutions to deliver classical humanities education (or woke nonsense if people want to pay). The disciplines of sociology and anthropology have been completely destroyed by leftist agenda setting and DEI. Biological anthropology doesn’t now exist as a discipline because of Trans nonsense.
The unholy alliance of the postmodern and the global corporation operating through the post-national states and Islam.
The author falls into the trap of making claims that he thinks become true simply by making them. There are several examples, most of them involving the term “High culture” which he uses without apparent embarrassment.
I suspect the reason for this is a lack of understanding of how artistic endeavour originates and flourishes. What becomes culturally dominant over a lengthy period of time is the precise opposite of what he refers to as “presentism” in the context of capitalism. It’s that which resonates beyond the present (in whatever medium) with insights into our common humanity. It can never, therefore, be definitively:
We had the article on “genius” the other day, and many of the comments were far more searching and relevant than this view of culture as a product of prevailing economic system(s). Littering his article with -isms merely confirms that, as a wordsmith – an artisan – he perhaps needs to live a little more and experience how the world can change as time passes rather than relying on ‘learnt’ cultural change. He seems to be mourning the diminution of “the humanities” yet diminishes the act of creation in the arts to a by-product of materialism.
Perhaps the last sentence was enough to get the gist of the piece. “The old culture is dying, and what purports to be its successor has come into the world stillborn.”
There is no deeply human enrichment to the new Alt-Right conglomerate, a sickening mixture of consumerism, White Nationalism, Evangelical nonsense and gobs of money. It does not matter how many persons prattle on with high IQs attempting to create that new basis of civilization, they fail because their topic holds no human epic, no beauty, nor richness of language , no deep encounters with self.
Yet the standard bearers of the new AltRight are quite haughty about their Quixotic mountain from which they have strategically located their existence so they they can look down upon us lessor souls refusing to give up the last vantages of our wokeness, our humanity.
It is ironic at least to me that they have chosen as their great leader one of the slimmest, lying, hollow, narcissistic swamp lizards on the planet, and it is equally ironic that the high hill from which they piously cast their derision looks far more like a wretchedly awful bog, from where I stand.
Dear god. Absolutely revolting. I’m sick of these mentally ill casualties of the West’s descent into Marxist insanity and brainwashing replacing education and the obligation to learn to think for yourself. Sick of reading from them and having to put up with there psychosis and us/them hatred, and constantly toxic stream of histrionic lunacy and malicious accusations. You are nothing but the victim of every tactic he talks about here. A Soviet Defector who knew all about brainwashing and ideological subversion, as it was his profession and clearly saw how most of our leaders, post 60’s revolution were complete got and in turn created the most anxious, depressed, scared, fearful generation ever. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9Yv_AQPWVQ&ab_channel=JoeyVantes
Everyone but you people have the problem. It’s the alt-right. It’s the magas. It’s white supremacists. It’s the patriots. It’s the Nazis who want to ‘stomp us into the ground’. It’s everyone on the right. It’s never you being a feeble minded individual that is not even aware that the media is non-propaganda machine perpetuating non-stop info-wars to acheive their ends, and you’re just perfect fodder. You’ve believed every lie you ever been told and never doubled-checked for yourself. What are you doing here. You’re going to have a nervous breakdown exposing yourself to so many evil right-wing Nazis.
Move aside, weirdos. I pray the rejection of these people in the US is a genuinely turning point of ridding society of these disgusting sick people.
All these deeply troubled souls do is non-stop call us every evil term under the sun. They are not well. Shame on us for every tolerating them and kowtowing to these strange, abnormal idiots that can’t properly relate to other people if they think different. Who don’t have the strength of mind to deal with intellectual plurality. They don’t deserve to be engaged with normally. That makes them feel validated.
They need to be confronted, and pushed the the margins. A society stocked top to bottom in all positions of influence with people that actively despise the other half of the country and see them as an enemy that represents all evil is the reason the West, by design, has been destroyed irrevocably. We are filled with deranged people, programmed to subvert from within. And these monsters do even know it.
Imagine being so braindead you can’t even tell you’re being completely brainwashed. I can’t believe so many people like this exist.
Had to wade through an awful lot of sewage in the comments today to find the odd nugget of genuine insight. ( Is everyone just having a bad day?) Some people took issue with the author’s use of the term “High Culture”. It’s admittedly a somewhat fraught concept these days, but how else do you want to distinguish it from other aspects of culture? After all, culture is also how and what we eat, how we clothe ourselves, what our houses look like, and even the words that circulate into and out of common usage.
I don’t find the author’s analysis to be one-sided, as so many commenters seem to think. He argues that capitalism is a necessary condition for the dissolution of cultural traditions, but nowhere does he assert that it is a sufficient one, or that some other system might be just as good it.
That last sentence should read ” might not be just as good at it”.
I wonder if you think you are free from the grip of an of us/them hatred that flirts with psychosis yourself.
You ruined that with your extraordinary excursion into hyperbole in the last paragraph.
His entire comment was nonsensical hyperbole but the last paragraph is the cherry on top
You’re too generous!
AI Bot I think
The rich and powerful used to pay artists to create paintings and sculptures. Now they pay gamers to help them cheat at Diablo IV.
Or pay “artists” millions for a banana taped to a wall.
My first instinct on seeing the title was to rewrite it as “humanities have killed the humanities”.
Which is more or less what the author admits in his very first sentence: “Unsurprisingly, after 25 years of destruction to the humanities in the name of equity”.
As other have noted, the piece is rather short on definitions – what exactly is “high culture”. What are “humanities” ?
“And so now only 8% of university students in the UK are enrolled in humanities subjects.”
I would be astonished if that were true based on what I understand humanities to mean (i.e. arts/liberal arts degrees).
Besdies which, it might make more sense to ask how many arts/humanities graduates our society needs and what quality these need to be rather than demanding a percentage share of the pie.
One thing I would suggest is that some of the spare capacity in humanities teaching be used to round out the education of STEM graduates.
Indeed. 50 years or so ago 5% of school leavers went onto University. This admittedly coarse comb meant that only the best went on to a science or humanities degree. When something like 50% go to University the quality is spread more broadly. Do we need extra numbers of humanities students? Probably not.
Very obviously NOT!
Did anyone ever claim that the free market cares about tradition? The free market is merely a dumb tool that people wield, not a entity in and of itself. We just so happen to live in a world where for the last 200+ years the champions of free markets have also happened to be, English-speaking, Protestant countries. Firstly the British faced down mercantalism and then the Americans did the same with Communism.
The lack of an alternative isn’t a bad thing – just look at how stupid mercantalist/communist societies seem now (18thC France/Spain, the USSR, North Korea and Cuba). Remember, they were the “progressive” future once. It just so happened that in the 17th century in the Northwest corner of Europe free trade was practiced, spread and developed into the now hegemonic economic model.
I was under the impression that the current focus at universities and by academia on the humanities was at the expense of STEM, economics and the like. In other words, the eschewing of the very knowledge and toolkit of that which drives capitalism.
I was under the impression that the current focus is credentialism with ever more people paying for a degree rather than for an education. With close to 50% of the population staying on in tertiary education, of course the curricula is not how it was when only 5% of us studied for a degree.
This leads to Universities making courses (and exams) ever easier. One of my relatives is a Professor and he complains bitterly about being forced to “re-mark” exams to allow a student a pass mark.
What a strange rumination. Written through a very partial and personal lens on the world. One thinks of Academic Ivory Towers and loftie Lefties pontificating.
The Left work assiduously to destroy white western culture – then mewl like spoilt children when their free State grant money dries up.
Why fund or maintain interest in ‘high culture’ which is a product of western cultural capabilities and history – when all around us the activists of the Left and of Woke, the race grifters of BLM, and Critical Race, and DEI all focus on destroying our belief in our own history, our pride in our national identities, our institutions, our sexual mores and norms, our family structure and even the very nature of what it is to be a man and a woman?
The author should write about what his academic and Leftie friends are all intent upon – and not bother to focus on the core engine of economic generation namely Capitalism that still hangs on as an engine of wealth creation and taxation that funds the arts.
Excellent article – and Bell’s book, along with Lasch, are the definitive road maps for our current dilemnas.
But we also have to see, I believe, how the post-60s Left has not been so much in opposition to capitalism, but instead acts as its battering ram.
The Left’s redefinition of prostitution as “sex work, ” for instance, has undoubtedly opened up new vistas for the interpenetration of commerce into private life. Likewise, the Left’s uncritical embrace of transgenderism (which in practice calls for putting people in permanent client roles for a voracious, profiteering health system) as a form of “resistance.”
If the old Left created an image of brawny factory workers seizing the means of production, the image of today’s Left is the permanently scarred victim-client needing professionally provided services.
Hmmm…the author is apparently historically illiterate. It is socialist/communist/wokeists who destroy tradition and rewrite history.
If you want to understand why artists were once called bohemians, you have to visit Bohemia. This province was the first part of Eastern Europe to be share in the prosperity of the industrial revolution. The discretional income that capitalism gave rise to caused an explosion of Czech art and culture. Art nouveau, imported from France, proliferated everywhere. Cubism was expressed in new lines of furniture. Museums and universities flourished.
I have seen the same story repeated elsewhere. The modest town of Columbus, Indiana because an architectural showcase, a miniature Midwestern Shanghai, on the earnings of one company which manufactured diesel engines. Stanford University was built on nineteenth-century railroad profits. Capitalism brought high culture to New York City, Chicago, and Tokyo in turn.
Arthur O’Shaughnessy wrote: ‘For each age is a dream that is dying / or one that is coming to birth.’
I have seen several dreams dying in my lifetime, but no sign of one coming to birth.
I think you study the humanities to understand the idea of human that they hold dear. That doesn’t mean it’s the only idea of human.
For instance in school I studied various mythologies. These mythologies broached the stories people told so tell us about something about their understanding of themselves.
I don’t see the link to capitalism and if not capitalism, then how are things like prices and wages established?
Isn’t an unherd nostrum that everyone is in gender studies and no one in stem. This article unseats that view.
A provocative essay if ever there was one. If we accept the author’s contention that the highest achievements of European culture will never be equalled again— depending as they did on the existence of a highly refined aristocracy of taste that has been swept away in the maelstrom of capitalism—we should not therefore discount the possibility of a more democratic yet equally brilliant efflorescence of culture in the centuries ahead: one that, this time owing to the positive as opposed to the negative achievements of capitalism, is equally rooted in the historical traditions of European (now Western) civilization.
For some idea of what the matrix of this future efflorescence might look like see here. Or here.
Art is in the eye of the beholder. Most “art” is nonsense. Its only the focus put on it by the beholder that gives it any current or future value. Value comes from scarcity and asset value or primarily from the capitalist system generating opportunities for fans to engage with their favourite art. The alternative is art prescribed by elites.