The Humanities and the Financial Crisis

Via InTheMiddle, there's this article in today's Chronicle of Higher Education by the director of the National Humanities Center. Allow me to quote some:

Why should society support the humanities when so many people are suffering from the effects of the economic crisis? What claim do the humanities, or scholarship generally, have on increasingly limited resources? Shouldn't such pursuits be considered luxuries at a time when we should be focusing on essentials...?

The humanities are, if not the top priority right now, at least one of the areas that must be recognized as crucial, and supported accordingly. The present crisis does not eclipse the humanities but rather reveals the need for the skills, dispositions, and resources that the humanities, and only the humanities, cultivate....

I am struck by the recurrence of two statements in the numerous analyses I've read: "It is all so obvious in retrospect," and "Our models failed to predict this." Put those two together, and it becomes clear that the most sophisticated tools developed to analyze and predict movements in the economy failed spectacularly to grasp some very large, crucial, and — in retrospect — fully visible facts....

What was missing, some analysts have concluded, was a deeper understanding of the relationship between value and confidence. It was presumed that the value of, say, houses was always going to rise. Beneath that assumption was another, that the value had a certain solidity, like the house itself. However, as Paul S. Willen, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, recently noted, "The price of an asset, like a house or a stock, reflects not only your beliefs about the future, but you're also betting on other people's beliefs." He went on, "It's these hierarchies of beliefs — these behavioral factors — that are so hard to model...."

So our models failed not because they were imprecise but because they were too precise, too neat and crisp to take in the imaginative and social nature of value. Nor did they take in the fully human character of the behavior of lenders, borrowers, analysts, shareholders, or traders, all of whom were driven by largely unconscious and partly irrational beliefs, including the simple desire for social approval, even as they were persuaded of their own powers of analysis and of the underlying "rationality" or "efficiency" of the market....

Well, consider this: When we read a novel, watch a play or a film, listen to a concerto, or read a historical narrative, we are not just attending to the moment but forming expectations about what will come next. Surprise endings surprise only because they do not conform to our expectations.... Being able to engage in such anticipation is an essential part of general intelligence, and developing that ability is one of the primary goals of teaching in the humanities....

Our material lives are sustained by our belief in... fictions, and when we stop believing — as we now have [in our financial system], temporarily — we see revealed the immaterial foundations of the real world. When, a generation ago, a few "postmodern" theorists began to talk about the fictional character of reality, they were laughed at by those who considered themselves hardheaded realists; nobody... is laughing now.

So why support the humanities? The answer is... that the humanities elicit and exercise ways of thinking that help us navigate the world we live in. For my money, that's about as essential as it gets.

My only qualm here is that the article is too confrontational, even manichean, for my taste. Yeah, economists/ social scientists don't have all the answers. Yeah, those in the Humanities do have some. But, speaking as a scholar in the Humanities myself, they do have some answers and we don't have them all. While I agree that we ought strenously to defend the value of the Humanities, we ought not be so doctrinaire in our thinking that we succumb to that which we so deplore -- rigid, disciplinary thinking that excludes perspectives categorically. We can reject bad ideas while realizing that the people behind those ideas might have good ones down the road.