Humanities and the Resurrection of Human Be(ing)

Scholar and WWII bomber pilot John Snell once opined that the humanities are essential “to constructing the village of man, after all the villages of men have been destroyed.” Like William Golding, Snell peered through the smoke collecting over 1940’s Europe and suddenly comprehended the truth of us. In the heat of that war’s industrially calculated destruction, he sniffed a dystopic truth: that empirical science was not what it was cracked up to be, that it repulsed its messianic promise; that it would never alone convey us into a benign and rational human future. Despite over a hundred years of faith in its promise, science alone—even minced and calibrated, dissected and pinned to a spreading board—was not enough. Ultimately we had to recognize that when knowledge is torn from moral human substrates, it becomes at best a dead and at worst a disintegrative thing.

Enlightenment thinkers had been right in maligning the overbearing mechanisms of culture, which for centuries shackled us to a counter-rational superstition. But the belief that scientific truth would dissolve our pathologies, conveying us on empirical wings to some final utopian end-station, turned out to be (like rumors of Mark Twain’s death) grossly exaggerated. In the steam of blood that hisses from our wars, in the teeth-grind of dysentery that tears at the bellies of our poor, in the angst that taints faith with a brutal existential cowardice (one breathless to sell freedom as wage of security) -- in all this we find the dereliction of the enlightenment promise. “Science did,” says Mortimer Graves, “what we never before dreamed possible…only to find itself floundering, frightened and confused, on the road to self destruction.”
So now we stand at a wobble in the once headlong rush of history. There is a point in “The Cry” by Jean-Paul Sartre where the stage goes quiet. Garcin enters, accompanied by the valet, and glances around him: “So here we are?” VALET: “Yes, Mr. Garcin.” GARCIN: “And this is what it looks like?” VALET: “Yes.” GARCIN: “Second Empire furniture, I observe... Well, well, I dare say one gets used to it in time.” VALET: “Some do, some don't.” In this exchange Sartre roentgens the abysmal spiritual abandonment that lurks in our “second empire” science. We have toggled the world over to the truth-shoveling of science, but in our hearts we sense no bottom in this constant excavation of empirical truth, no place where a human being can ultimately plant his human feet, no house, in the words of Henrik Ibsen, “fit for human beings.” So here we sit, stuck in our persistent war-stained catharsis, one raging to exorcise a final dismal apprehension--that science has torn out our centers and then wandered off.
It is the year 2008, and the clash of science and religion has disintegrated to a floor-match. Both sides twitch with fatigue, and press out a grunt or two, but none owns the advantage. The arena has frozen, history seems to have stumbled and comes to a standstill. A voice crackles over the loudspeaker: “What we need now,” laments Saul Bellow, “is a grand synthesis.” An adumbration of who we really are; a mechanism that folds us into ourselves; one that congeals the flexed core of the human spirit with the bold trajectory of the human mind.
Is there such a thing? Something to warm-fuse the intellectual and spiritual aspects of our world? Something that can solve our 21st century human crisis, preventing our annihilation, allowing us to remain for a few more orbits of this earth around this sun? John L. Snell offers that there is, and that it is nothing less than the humanities: “In an age in which thought is increasingly expressed in statistics…the humanities remind us, in the words of a parody of e.e. cummings, that nothing measurable matters ‘a very good God damn.’ "
We must now concede, as the 20th century snaps shut and the 21st opens its gaping star-strewn abyss for us, that nothing measurable has annulled our hate, that nothing measurable has even marginally apprehended the mystery that afflicts us—the mystery lurking in what it means to be human. It is only in the humanities that we approach this conundrum, only in the humanities that we even cautiously form a Saul-Bellow-prodded synthesis of our meaning, one that forms our last hope for assembling plausible human futures. Not only are the humanities relevant in these our nascent 21st century days—they are probably no less than absolutely necessary.