A Commonplace Book

Setting up humanists as straw men for the fall of the Western world is as easy as shooting literati in a barrel. But that ease may result more from the form than the content of humanists' beliefs. In the humanities, scholars usually do their research alone. Scientists, on the other hand, are trained to work in groups. Little wonder, then, that the humanities now features a full-blown academic celebrity culture. In order for celebrities to exist, people have to be willing to look up as well as down -- and looking both ways can promote insecurity.

The work of a historian is to tell stories. The work of a literary critic is to interpret them. It's inherently approachable -- until recently. The last two generations have seen the pursuits of humanists take on their own quasi-scientific aspects, complete with highly technical jargon. Attempts to popularize have often been met with the special hostility that attends defense of hierarchy -- consider the philosopher Judith Butler's assertion on the op-ed page of The New York Times that her ideas were so complex they couldn't be expressed in away that regular people might understand.

The story of the Bell Labs physics scandal initially intrigued me because I thought it might turn out to be a scientific version of the culture wars, with scientists coming under attack from groups that help finance them. It didn't turn out that way. The data turned out to be faked, the perpetrator was fired, and the ripples from the scandal were contained within the physics world. But humanists have long been embroiled in their own conflicts with the society that finances them -- and one of the reasons lies in the way that we raise roadblocks and bar the world from entering our neighborhood. That's the opposite of what we ought to be doing, and it's all the more shameful because humanists are in an unusual and enviable position: The nature of our work makes it easy to open our doors and share that work. We can start doing so in the simplest way: by being nicer.