The humanities, the great works of the human spirit which we study to supposedly enrich our character and understanding of what it means to be a human being, have formed an integral part of higher education since at least the time of the great classical thinkers Plato and Aristotle. Yet seniority alone has not shielded the great works from scrutiny, now subject to various criticisms of the cynical modern eye, none so scathing and as vigorous as those proposed by literary scholar Stanley Fish. The humanities are charged with failing students in preparing them for life, said to be nothing more than fanciful entertainments and pleasurable diversions from reality, obsessions of which are not only wasteful but potentially divisive. Responding to these criticisms is Wilfred M. McClay, who in “The Burden of the Humanities” argued in stark contrast, being so bold as to claim that the humanities are needed “in order to understand more fully what it means to be human, and to permit that knowledge to shape and nourish the way we live,” (38) serving as the cornerstone of human civilization and meaning.
McClay interprets much of the criticisms of the humanities’ place in academia to be of a narrow-minded scope. While critics such as Fish claim that the humanities have no use in the technical and practical world of contemporary society, save their entertainment value, that the people of this age have no time nor can gain anything from the abstract world of ideas and sublime knowledge, the author proposes a critical flaw in such reasoning, explaining “the difficulty comes when we operate with too narrow a definition of ‘use'” (38). Yes, the humanities will not immediately offer us guidance in matters of filing tax returns, or in fixing a broken head gasket, but this does not mean that the great works are useless, but could perhaps fulfill another altogether crucial function. For McClay this function is the “[making]” of a “genuinely meaningful human life” (38), of grounding in the human spirit a sense of contentment, meaning and duty, that bonds to the very core of the being, related as a contemplative spiritual exercise in the form of storytelling. If money is the end of all things, the author notes, why can the rich be unhappy? The humanities elucidates such incongruities by exposing to us the wisdom of the ancients, who seemed obsessed with not appearing to live well, but living well – the quest for human excellence – and so encountered the obstacles and vices our modern liberal societies seem unable to overcome, no matter the dysfunctional and ill-tempered indulgence of modern ingenuities and pharmaceutical placebos, and more alarmingly at times embrace as virtues.
A second function of the humanities as outlined in the article is in revealing to us the importance and knowledge of our cultural past, “for [one] can’t really appreciate… or know the value of American liberty and prosperity, or intelligently assess America’s virtues and vices against the standard of human history and human possibility, unless you pay the price of learning the stories. (39)” A society ignorant to its cornerstone goods and principles is a society enfeebled, unable to cope with challenges both internal and external, as it has no standard or context in which to judge the good by, suffering the malnourished stock of modernism, starved for myth and meaning.