5. The Humanities

Philosophers, scholars of literature, and historians diff er from natural and social scientists in many of the dimensions listed in Chapter 1. Most work alone, are not highly dependent on grant support from government agencies, and rely primarily on semantic texts as a source of evidence (that is why I classifd historians with humanists rather than with social scientists). Novelists, poets, playwrights, painters, and composers belong to a special category because most are not associated with academic institutions and their creative products are intended to serve aesthetic motives, rather than meet the scientists’ demand for a close correspondence between an idea and an observation.

 

The humanists lost a great deal of the authority they enjoyed a few centuries earlier when professors of philosophy and theology commanded far more respect than the small cohort of natural philosophers. Beethoven claimed some of the moral authority that nineteenth-century Europeans attributed to poets by regarding himself as a tone poet. Humanists lost substantially more confence than social scientists following the ascent of the natural sciences. This erosion of status was especially strong among Americans, who have always restricted their praise and admiration to intellectual work that had pragmatic consequences. That is why Benjamin Franklin, not Herman Melville or Nathaniel Hawthorne, is a national hero, why the Congress of the young democracy chose to build the patent office, rather than a church, museum, symphony hall, or library, on a prominent location on the mall, and why Henry Ford snarled, “History is bunk.”

 

This long-standing suspicion of the “intellectual” concerned with knowing, rather than doing, is maintained by many conditions. One element is the desire to support an egalitarian society. Eighteenth-century Americans wanted to differentiate themselves from the effete Europeans quoting Keats; the nineteenth- century citizens who settled the lands west of Philadelphia wished to be free of the snobbery of the better educated New Englanders. Americans insist that status should not be based on differences in abstract knowledge that has no practical consequences. The selftaught Franklin and Lincoln are our heroes, not the presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson who was called a “nerd,” and Bob Dylan is lionized as America’s John Keats.

 

America’s founders were not totally unreceptive to the possibility that novelists and philosophers might occasionally provide insights into society and human nature. The correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams reveals the breadth of their reading in history, philosophy, and literature, although Jefferson believed that a farmer would bring more wisdom to a moral dilemma than a professor. Earlier cohorts of natural scientists were friendlier to the musings of philosophers than contemporary investigators. For example, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger lectured on the relation between the assumptions of the classic Greek philosophers and those of modern physicists. Roald Hoff mann is an unusual member of his natural science cohort for he is Professor of Humane Letters at Cornell University, a poet, and a Nobel laureate in chemistry who is troubled by the mind-numbing monotony of the scientif papers describing discoveries of great beauty that reduce “the miracle of the living world to a set of cold, hard facts gained by the logic of dissection.” 

 

However, whatever faith remained in the hope that some enduring bit of wisdom was hiding in the works of humanists was eroded after a vocal band of twentieth-century scholars, partly motivated by the demands of women and minority groups for greater dignity, announced that the presumed truths in the works of White European males, such as Montaigne, Locke, Hume, Kant, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Gibbon, or Tolstoy, were local to the prejudices of their gender, time, and place and were “social constructions.” These critics, often called postmodernists, argued that no value system or interpretation of text was inherently more valid than any other. The group that happened to be dominant promoted their values, methods, concepts, and explanations in order to retain power over those honoring a different ethical code. Although the members of a faculty or professional guild have always competed for positions of power, the postmodernists chose to make all intellectual effort political.

 

Soon after, the humanities fragmented into sects studying categories of people – women, Muslims, Hispanics, gays – rather than categories of ideas. The catechism of the postmodernists, or deconstructionists, who claimed Nietzsche and Heidegger as their grandparents and Derrida and Foucault as their parents, maintained that no writer had any special access to truth because there was no relation between a semantic description and reality. The meaning of every word depended on the other words in the sentence, and the meaning of every sentence depended on the other sentences in the narrative. Every scholar was caught in an infite regress within a labyrinth of words that could never capture reality accurately. Words, as Joyce Appleby notes, were to be compared to balls careening wildly in a pinball machine rather than jewels in a safe deposit box.

 

On refl ection, this skeptical view is not as radical as it appears on the surface for its fundamental thesis is traceable to Francis Bacon, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Virginia Woolf. The essential idea, noted earlier, is that every sentence has an envelope of possible meanings, and no meaning has a privileged status or unchanging referent. Hence, the relation between language and reality is always ambiguous. Although some aspects of the deconstructionists’ message were valid, they were less revolutionary than they or their followers thought. However, they became so zealous in their semantic housecleaning they began to break some precious crystal goblets. The excessively harsh attacks on the correspondence meaning of truth, their caricature of scientif claims, and criticism of the belief that some mental symptoms were legitimate illnesses were motivated, in part, by the humanists’ loss of status to the scientists who had become the preferred targets of aff ection, generosity, and attention from college deans and the media. Recall that when the residents of New Salem town began to threaten the traditional citizens in Old Salem the latter accused the former of witchcraft .

 

If the meanings of all sentences are inherently ambiguous, the belief that any text could reveal the truth about anything is illusory. Because natural scientists believed they were discovering valid facts about nature, the postmodernists’ attack on historians, philosophers, and literary critics was also a challenge to the scientists who claimed to possess a special purchase on truths about nature. However, the reason why physicists rejected the ether as a medium through which light traveled is not to be equated with the reason why Jacques Derrida insisted that uncertainty penetrated every narrative. Although investigators can only know what they observe, and can never know the events as they actually happen in nature; nonetheless, scientists continue to make important discoveries that contribute to their critics’ health and welfare. The deconstructionists seemed to be declaring that if they cannot have it all, they want nothing.

 

This movement retained some vitality from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, but began to lose adherents because doing nothing, whichis an impossible posture, was the obvious implication of its arguments. The few postmodern claims that were valid were assimilated and the extravagant announcements that strayed far beyond the bounds of reasonableness were cast aside. The contemporary generation of students and faculty, who escaped this moment of enthusiasm, watch NOVA , Nature , and Charlie Rose interviews with Nobel Laureates in science, and read Richard Dawkins and Malcolm Gladwell, not Dostoevsky, Gibbon, or Whitehead, to learn the “real” truths about the human condition.

 

Loss of Confidence

 

At least four relatively independent events contributed to the humanists’ fall from grace. The changing membership in the humanities was one factor because the status of an activity cannot be separated from the symbolic meanings attached to the people who engage in it. Gynecology is not regarded as a profession of perverts because of the lengthy training and benevolent intentions of its practitioners. Europeans used to treat careers in business as a less desirable way to make a living because this activity had been dominated by Jews in earlier centuries. Commerce was cleansed of taint after bureaucratic businesses, corporations, banks, supermarkets, franchises, and investment firms, which attracted adults from all religious and ethnic groups, replaced the owners of small shops. When women and minorities began to join White middle- and upper-middle-class males in English and history departments, especially after 1950, these disciplines began to lose some of the prestige they had enjoyed.

 

Second, many nineteenth-century Americans spent most of their lives in the same region or town and few traveled regularly to new places. Hence, the vivid descriptions of unfamiliar peoples, events, and ideas in literature and history were welcome novelties that incited the imagination during long, quiet, winter evenings. Twentyfour-hour television and theaters with wide screens spreading vivid pictures of exotic places that could not have been imagined a century earlier can excite the imagination as eff ectively as books. H. G. Wells’s 1898 novel The War of the Worlds pales beside the Star Trek fms, and Saving Private Ryan provides a more graphic picture of the gory details of war than All Quiet on the Western Front . Although Virginia Woolf denigrated fms as an art form in 1926, more Americans have seen the movie version of Mrs. Dalloway than have read the novel, and television news programs devote more time to new fms than to recent novels. The enhanced position of fm in modern life is signaled by Harvard University’s approval in 2008 of a Ph.D. program in “Film Studies.” Virginia Woolf would have been shocked.

 

Th ird, humanists lost some of their sense of professionalism when postmodern critics argued that anyone could write a history, biography, or novel, often citing as the rationale T. S. Eliot’s reply, “Poetry,” when asked, “What does a poet need to know?”  Natural scientists policed their members more eff ectively by maintaining strict rules as to who could call themselves physicists, chemists, or biologists.

 

Finally, scientists began to invade the humanists’ territory. Most humanists writing before the ascent of the natural and social sciences regarded an enhanced understanding of human morality, thought, language, perception, emotion, learning, and forms of social organization as their primary assignments. Social scientists began to claim these themes at the end of the nineteenth century by arguing that the time had come for empirical facts, rather than intuition or analyses of sentences, to reveal the deep truths about these matters. Neuroscientists claimed parts of the same territory two generations later, declaring that brain profes, not behaviors or verbal reports, were the “true” measures of perception, memory, thought, and emotion. This imperious attitude threatened the social scientists who regarded psychological phenomena as emergent events not reducible to descriptions of brain activity. A few even resurrected the nineteenth-century interest in phenomenological experience, which celebrates the idiosyncratic quality of consciousness, in order to challenge the biologists with statements like, “If you think you’re so smart, try to explain why I see a blend of objects with varying shades of greens as I stand in midsummer on the top of a mountain peering at the valley below and you see hundreds of spruce trees.”

 

The scientists’ intrusions into the philosophers’ territory, which robbed the latter of part of their mission, forced them to fd another assignment and many selected analyses of the coherence of the scientists’ semantic texts. This enterprise is useful because the meanings of many words do change with history. The meaning of “emotion” for Aristotle was a conscious appraisal of a change in bodily feeling; for the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio an emotion is a brain state. Hume understood that the word “causality” referred to a mental representation of the reason for a sequence of events. Renee Baillargeon, a developmental psychologist, awards infants a belief in causality if they display a prolonged stare when a motionless small ball moves one second after a large moving block stops one inch before contacting the small ball. Baillargeon argues that the infant knows that the small ball’s motion has to be caused by a force inherent in being struck by another object. The infant stares because he or she is surprised by what happened. All of these forces came together at about the same time to plunge the humanities into a crisis of confence, not unlike the sudden irrelevance of whale oil to provide light when electricity became available.

 

Historians

 

Historians have defended the claim that their writings bear some correspondence to reality, and might contain generalizations that applied to sequences other than the one they described. However, each life, war, crime, and political crisis occurs in a unique setting and the sequence of events might have been altered if the era, culture, or actors changed. It is not clear, therefore, whether any history of the American Revolution is a source of insights that could be applied to other domestic rebellions. Similarly, the setting, problem pursued, and personalities of Rosalind Franklin, whose photographs of the DNA molecule allowed Crick and Watson to discover the structure of DNA, and those of Nobel biologist Rita Levi-Montalcinere suffiently different it is not obvious that readers could extract a broad generalization about the lives of female scientists.

 

The most serious problem is that historians cannot avoid imposing a biased construction on the events they synthesize because more than one coherent narrative can be written from the same historical evidence. Tory and Whig scholars refl ecting on the same set of “facts” wrote distinctive histories of England. Simon Schama has even defended the practice of inventing a few facts in order to render a narrative more interesting and was not embarrassed by confessing that he writes “historical novellas.” The skeptical historian Hayden White captured this problem in sharp prose by noting that historians wish to “have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary …. Does the world really present itself to perception in the form of well-made stories, with central subjects, proper beginnings, middles, and ends, and a coherence that permits us to see the end in every beginning?” Kurt Vonnegut endorsed White’s views in his novel Slaughterhouse Five .

 

The fact that sentences are the most important, though not the only, source of evidence in historical scholarship poses diffulties because, as noted earlier, the meanings of words often change over time. A. N. Whitehead understood this problem. “Language … foists on us exact concepts as though they represented the immediate deliverances of experience. The result is that we imagine that we have immediate experience of a world with perfectly defed objects implicated in perfectly defed events … This world is a world of ideas and the elucidation of the precise connections between this world and the feelings of actual experiences is a fundamental question of scientif philosophy.”

 

Nonetheless, historians’ documentation of the geographic mobility of Americans helps explain why nineteenth-century Americans were more individualistic than Europeans. The population of Boston grew by a factor of eight between 1830 and 1890 and one in fe residents remained in the city for less than fe years before moving to another place. Identifation with a community is diffult when adults reside in a city or neighborhood for only a few years. As a result, primary loyalty remains with the self and the self ’s family, and a mistrust of strangers becomes more prevalent. Only 7 percent of a random sample of almost 3,000 contemporary Americans reported a great deal of trust in the replies or actions of strangers; whereas, more than 35 million Americans – more than 10 percent – had absolutely no trust in any stranger.

 

The historians’ strategies resemble those of biologists studying the evolution of a single species. However, the biologists have the advantage of being able to exploit evidence gathered by other natural scientists, for example, DNA profes of extinct species and information on past climate changes or asteroid impacts. This information allows the biologists to invent a more persuasive account. If historians had access to the psychological states of the deceased agents they describe they, too, would be able to construct more coherent narratives. Nonetheless, art historians with a hunch about the authenticity of a particular painting are as passionate and respectful of evidence as natural scientists and enjoy an equally intense emotional high when they confm an intuition that no one else had entertained. Thus, the mood of historians working on a problem that has seized their curiosity resembles that of scientists, even though they cannot alter conditions in order to evaluate the validity of a preliminary explanation, and must remain satisfd with uncertain syntheses of scattered pieces of evidence. However, they should take comfort from the fact that astrophysicists describing the beginning of the universe, and biologists probing the conditions that existed when the fst living forms emerged, are in a similar position.

 

The Humanists’ Contributions

 

Many contemporary humanists would answer the question, “What are the functions of humanistic scholarship?” with “To provide divergent perspectives on the human condition and to create objects of beauty”. These praiseworthy goals are far less ambitious than those of Plato, Dante, Bacon, Montaigne, Hume, Kant, or Toynbee who thought they were communicating profound insights about human nature that should be incorporated into ethical positions, political actions, or daily rituals. A large number of contemporary humanists fear that they would be classifd as narrow-minded bigots if they suggested that anyone ought to think or act in a particular way. Anthony Kronman mourns this timidity and, with the fervor of King Harry at the battle of Agincourt, pleads with these scholars to return to their earlier role as secular humanists inviting students to brood more deeply on the causes of the ethical void in modern society lest they become “a laughingstock both within the academy and outside it.”

 

Despite the problems, humanists perform several critical functions. They remind the society of its contradictions, articulate salient emotional states, detect changing cultural premises, confront their culture’s deepest moral dilemmas, and document the unpredictable events that punctuate a life or historical era. The books, poems, plays, and fms that contain these ideas help the public fd a balance between the benevolent and self-destructive consequences of their illusions so that hopefully each can create an ideal worthy of effort.

 

Humanists writing during the last half of the nineteenth century captured the inchoate blend of thoughts and moods provoked by Darwin’s suggestion that the gap between animals and humans was only quantitative, the anonymity that followed mass migrations to large cities, the confent announcements by positivists that free will was a ftion, and the erosion of religious belief. Walt Whitman, like the thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi, united the spheres of body and mind that natural scientists had separated. George Eliot reminded readers rendered despondent by the positivists’ arrogant brief for determinism of the role of chance in every life. C. S. Lewis’s narrative of his epiphany at age 31, when a belief in God suddenly replaced a long-standing atheism, diff used some of the intimidating power of a scientif frame of mind that frustrated those who wanted to believe in a spiritual force.

 

European writers and artists at the end of World War I helped the public appreciate the revolution in ideas brought on by the war and the economic crises it spawned in the 1930s. Oswald Spengler detected the effects of mechanization of the work place on the laborer’s sense of agency and in his gloomy 1922 book, The Decline of the West, prophesied some of the tragic narrative that followed Hitler’s assumption of power. The films of Vittorio De Sica in the years following the end of World War II captured the Italians’ desire to treat the suffering of the poor as a mark of virtue. The main figures in his two classic films, The Bicycle Thief and Umberto D , are desperately poor, but free of corrosive hate and fundamentally loyal, loving, and trying to preserve their flimsy veil of dignity. This idealistic view of poverty may be uniquely Italian for this bias is absent in critically acclaimed films made in Germany, France, England, and Sweden during the same era. The primary source of human distress in Ingmar Bergman’s films is reflective brooding, not social conditions in the society. In the 1957 film, The Seventh Seal the educated knight who has returned from the Crusades suffers because he has begun to doubt God and cannot find meaning in life. The uneducated clown and his wife, free of the anguish that doubt generates, are happy witheach other and their young infant.

 

Western literature during most of the twentieth century tried to capture each person’s attempt to escape the local conventions that limited personal freedom, promoted a tolerance toward groups with deviant ideologies and cast women in the role of “savior.” Robert Anderson’s play, Tea and Sympathy , which opened in 1953, confronted two conventional beliefs that were beginning to assume a distinct shape in the American psyche. The fst promoted tolerance toward those with different life styles, in this case sexual preference. The second, which dominates contemporary fms and television dramas, awards a woman’s love a magical ability to cure men of their confusions, worries, and dis couragements. The mantra of the 1960s, “Make love, not war,” was nascent in an essay in The Atlantic during the fst decade of that century that suggested that American women were feeling an enhanced personal power they were eager to exploit in order to purify, or at least reform, the male character. Greer Garson, in the popular 1942 fm, Random Harvest, impulsively abandoned her job after acciden tally meetingt Ronald Colman, a soldier suff ering from amnesia as a result of a trauma during World War I, because she believed her aff ection would be curative. In the fal scene of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960 fm, L’Avventura , Claudia forgives her carelessly disloyal lover, tempting viewers to presume that her love might reform his errant character. There are few examples of such heroines in Shakespeare’s plays. Lady Macbeth corrupts her husband, Hamlet’s mother is unfaithful, Ophelia becomes mad after her father’s death, Portia is clever but uncaring, and Desdemona is impotent against Othello’s jealous rage. Males, whether chimps or humans, thrive in hierarchical social structures and contemporary writers understand that men become confused when their world renders social relationships horizontal and need the healing love of women to restore their vitality.

 

Chinese writers probed different themes during the early decades of the nineteenth-century before Western intrusion. Confucian philosophy, with its emphasis on obligations to others, supplied the primary rationale for daily rituals. The Chinese were less friendly to abstract ethical ideas, the unrestrained accumulation of wealth, or John Rawls’s notion of social justice. The Chinese had little faith in the possibility of economic and status equality among the members of a society with so many poor peasants. Life was a zero-sum game in which one person’s gain had to be another’s loss.

 

Only a century later, after Western infl uence had eroded faith in these assumptions, the Chinese began to consider the possibility that life was absurd. The resulting spiritual vacuum made Mao’s idealism appealing to a majority. However, his reform movement lasted for only one generation because it violated the sanctity of the family and did not bring the comforts it promised. Contemporary Chinese and Taiwanese writers, following Sartre and Beckett, have turned up the gain on Wallace Stevens’s suggestion that no ideology has any special claim to wisdom; hence each person has to construct their own list of commandments.

 

Complex Emotional Blends

 

The humanists’ rich descriptions of emotional blends that are not yet amenable to scientif study should motivate scientists to invent procedures that might assess these states more accurately. Abdellah Hammoudi, the Muslim anthropologist mentioned earlier who was identifd with the ethos of Islam but rejected its religious premises, described feeling a “fake” as he planned his hajj to Mecca. The troubling intuition that one is “inauthentic” is a potent, and not uncommon, human state. Read the memoirs of the literary critic Frank Kermode, the novelists John Widemann and John Updike, and the statesman George Kennan. The latter confessed that he felt like a Midwestern rube among his sophisticated, East Coast establishment classmates at Princeton early in the last century. Some of the Jewish children who managed to escape Hitler’s Germany to become successful professionals in American society and respected citizens in their communities failed to conquer the feeling of the inauthentic outsider. One confessed, “after 60 years in the U.S., I still do not feel at home.”  Not one of the hundreds of essays and books on human emotions written by social scientists or neurobiologists over the past century regarded this feeling as a signifant emotional state.

 

Novels, autobiographies, and fms also capture the state of individuals who believe they are undeserving of pleasure, praise, success, or love. One of the consequences of this usually unconscious idea is a profound inability to be enhanced by the love of another, as if the unconscious recites the mantra: “Since I am not deserving of anyone’s admiration or love, your aff ection for me cannot improve my mood and, therefore, you cannot be a source of pleasure I must possess.” The young hero in the fm Into the Wild is an example of this personality type.

 

Biographies and memoirs articulate the differences between those driven to their career by emotions they could not deny and those who made the same vocational choice more freely. The contrast between Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford is an example. Other writers help us understand how an individual might productively exploit traits that had led to marginalization. The young Samuel Beckett needed money, was incompetent as an instructor, bored by his teaching duties at Trinity College in Dublin, and an ambitious writer with no successes. However, Beckett persuaded himself that he was better read, less hypocritical, and concerned with deeper issues than the Irish citizens and scholars around him. This private belief in his superiority, which created a morally arrogant rebelliousness, rendered his plays and poetry suffiently original to warrant later receipt of the Nobel Prize.

 

Although born into a peasant family, Mao Zedong’s talents and ambition motivated him to leave home to matriculate in a school attended mainly by children of wealthy families who ridiculed the language and crude habits he brought from his rural setting. These embarrassing experiences probably created a permanent anger toward the privileged class that he satisfd after he assumed power in 1949.  John Updike’s critics have praised his dazzling prose but complained of his inability or reluctance to probe the depths of his characters. Updike resolved their puzzlement by explaining that his avoidant temperamental style, psoriasis, asthma, fear of insects, and shame over his family’s marginal class position during childhood and adolescence shaped a personality that hid behind a thick barrier separating his feelings from the world, a place to hide that was “out of harm’s way.”

 

Humanists often portray characters with unique combinations of temperament and life history who fd it diffult to violate their standards on honesty because of a need to maintain a conception of self as a moral agent, even if the ethical violation would have served the self ’s interests. Stephen Daedalus, the hero in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , refused to attend Easter mass, even though he knew it would have pleased his mother, because that act would have been inconsistent with his loss of faith and he was unable to be a hypocrite. Th omas More paid a heavy price for honoring his conscience and not consenting to Henry VIII’s request to approve his marriage to Anne Boleyn. Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit archaeologist who in 1929 discovered the 500,000-year-old fossil called Peking man (later recognized as Homo erectus ), could not abandon his religious vows prohibiting a sexual relation with the woman he loved, despite the church’s insistence that he renounce his views on evolution and dogmatic refusal to approve publication of his scientif writings. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s lifelong need to remain “pure” of motive appears to have been the result of a chronically dysphoric temperament and a gnawing doubt of his authenticity because of his father’s deliberate suppression of a Jewish relative in the family pedigree.

 

Sometimes an unbending loyalty to a moral imperative can induce an episode of seriously disturbed aff ect. Stuart Sutherland, a British psychologist, described his severe mental breakdown when he violated a private standard demanding control of jealousy and irrational behavior. Sutherland could not forgive himself for being unable to control a surge of wild emotions and impulsive actions when he learned of his wife’s sexual infelity with a mutual friend. These are only a few examples of a personality type familiar to clinical psychologists and psychiatrists that biographers and novelists have described so well.

 

Psychologists who wish to understand the full emotional patina that humans can experience have to choose between trying to measure the emotional blends that humanists describe or honoring the rules of natural science that call for parsimony and amenability to accurate measurement. Most psychologists, understandingly, have remained loyal to the rules of natural science. As a result, the current generation of social scientists would explain the emotion of Stephen Daedalus as a derivative of the abstract concepts of fear and sadness, which happen to be two of the ten emotions most psychologists endorse as basic. Asking psychologists to explain the emotions of Hammoudi, More, or Sutherland from the small set of so-called basic states is like asking a biochemist to derive all the proteins from ten rather than the full complement of twenty amino acids.

 

Humanists recognize uncertainty as a prevalent human emotion, or for some a chronic mood. Humans are uncomfortable when they cannot understand a feeling, confront an inconsistency in their deepest beliefs, or must choose one behavior from several possibilities. Alexis de Tocqueville, the young French aristocrat who toured America in 1831–1832, confessed that, after illness and death, doubt was the third worst human misery. A middle-aged woman raised as a girl, but born with a chromosomal anomaly that rendered her partially a biological male, provides an example of the therapeutic value of having a source of uncertainty resolved. The woman’s intense distress over her failure to understand her subjective feelings and attraction to women was reduced after her psychiatrist, who had examined her unusual genome, explained the biological bases for her emotions. Biological explanations of an unwanted psychological state are attractive because they remove some of the responsibility from the person and the family of rearing. Attributing misfortune to bad luck is always preferred over possession by the devil for a past sin.

 

Humanists appreciate, however, that the exact form of the uncertainty depends on its source and target. This emotion has at least three important components. One refers to the specif “other” who is evaluating self, whether the local community, the family, a love object, the self ’s private evaluation, or God. The second element is temporal: whether the uncertainty surrounds failure or loss in the past or the future. The third specifs the qualities that self or others are evaluating, which can include a talent, power, piety, honesty, close friendships, or satisfying love relationships. Humans are always vulnerable to uncertainty; what changes with time and culture are the presumed origins of this feeling. I suspect, but cannot prove, that the frequency of gnawing uncertainty felt by Medieval Europeans wondering whether they will end their earthly existence in purgatory shares some, but not all, features with the states of contemporary Americans and Europeans worrying over job failure, social rejection, or the values they must always honor.

 

A mood of uncertainty, which can become contagious when a society is threatened by war, epidemic, flood, or economic stagnation, often provokes a new habit or coping strategy during the stressful period. Large numbers of French parents pressured their late-adolescent daughters to enter convents during the brief interval from 1630 to 1650 to protect them from the plague and to escape the demand on the family for an expensive dowry. When the plague receded and dowry prices fell to usual levels the number of applicants to the convents dropped dramatically.

 

The Significance of the Setting

 

Humanists also remind readers of the extraordinary particularity of the events in every narrative. The historians studying witchcraft in early modern Europe documented the many factors that had to be present before a person was accused of being a witch. Although older unmarried or widowed women were at the highest risk, the majority of these women escaped this taint because other qualities, especially an aggressive, excessively self-interested personality and a reputation for possessing the potential to become a witch, were also required. The same degree of particularity applies to a criminal act, a bout of depression, and a civil war. The historians’ documentation of the uniqueness of each narrative reminds us that a social context represents only a heightened preparedness for an outcome. A specif incentive must occur if the events of interest are to be actualized.

 

Historians of science help readers appreciate why many novel ideas required a combination of particular historical conditions. Peter Galison’s  wonderful book, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps , did this for special relativity. Einstein’s insight required refl ection on the meaning of “simultaneity,” a word that became ambiguous following the introduction of railroads connecting European cities. Offials worried about the coordination of local times across railway stations separated by long distances; if it was 9 AM in Bern, what time was it in Paris? This new uncertainty motivated clockmakers to invent more accurate ways to measure time and Einstein, sitting in the Bern patent offe, was responsible for reviewing the many proposals coming across his desk. This experience probably turned his mind to brooding about the meaning of time and simultaneity, and eventually to special relativity.

 

Jack Repcheck did for Nicolaus Copernicus what Galison did for Einstein. Copernicus was twenty years old when Columbus returned to Lisbon after his historic voyage and twenty-three when Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope. Bothevents affmed that the earth was not fl at. In addition, Copernicus enjoyed the leisure of being a canon in the Catholic church with time to pursue his interest in astronomy and, thanks to his father’s wealth, was able to attend universities in Krakow, Bologna, and Padua at a time of intellectual ferment and a growing rebellion against the corrupt indulgences that Martin Luther protested in his list of ninety-fe theses. But, unlike Einstein, Copernicus waited thirty years before allowing offial publication of his heliocentric theory in 1543, the year that he died, because, like Darwin, he worried over how this idea would be received by those whose acceptance he courted. Copernicus’s concern was realistic because clerics in the church hierarchy knew that he continued to violate his celibacy vows by maintaining a long-term sexual relationship with his housekeeper. These narratives persuade readers that a creative product is not only a property of a person, but requires a particular historical setting and an audience prepared to receive the novel idea. Creativity shares more features with heroism than witheye color. No one can be a hero or heroine unless he or she has the opportunity to display a trait that some members of the community regard as courageous, beautiful, or insightful.

 

Tacit Understandings

 

Each historical era in a society is characterized by layers of understanding that slip by each other as complementary conceptions, not unlike the negative print of a scene. Consider, as an example, North America and most of Europe in 1958, when these nations were at peace and enjoying economic prosperity. In addition, the natural scientists were aglow with pride for contributing to the victory over the Axis powers and anticipating the manufacture of the vaccine against the polio virus, and social scientists were nurturing the illusion that they were close to understanding society’s major ills. The surface gleamed with optimism.

 

But 1958 was also the year of the fst stage performance of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape , whose opening scene depicted an old, disheveled, despondent man slipping on a banana peel. It was also the year that John Kenneth Galbraith lamented the self-interested consumerism of Americans stripped of any concern for the integrity of their society, and the time when Americans were discussing Jack Kerouac’s On the Road , whichevoked nostalgia for a simpler era before interstate highways when most of the town turned out for the annual July 4 parade and band concert, and Rhett Butler, played by Clark Gable in the movie version of Gone With the Wind , was the model for young men wondering how to behave with their dates on Saturday evening. The audiences of 1958 were listening to John Cage’s anarchic music which celebrated novelty for the sake of novelty. In the piece titled “4’33’’ a pianist sits perfectly still at a keyboard for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, producing only silence. In less than 150 years, Western musical compositions had been transformed from Brahms’s adherence to the rules of harmony and counterpoint to the atonality of Arnold Schoenberg in 1910, to the loss of predictability in the works of John Cage. A few years later critics praised Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?, which portrayed an undisguised mood of mutual destructiveness between the marital couple Martha and George, and young listeners cheered Bob Dylan’s vocal reply to a woman longing for a man to nurture her in times of distress, “No, no, no, it ain’t me babe, it ain’t me you’re looking for, babe.”

 

An inconsistency between the surface mood of a society and the less conscious state lying beneath the surface is possible because a feeling of vitality usually requires either faith in some ideal goal individuals believe they can attain, a meaningful challenge to conquer, a catastrophe to avoid, or a disturbing ideology to oppose. Absence of any one of these conditions can provoke an ennuhat drains passion from each day’s plans. The cohort of Americans that came to maturity at the end of the nineteenth century was troubled by the social consequences of unbridled capitalism, but they had the advantage of believing that socialism might cure society’s ills. The cohort of 1958 was more seriously apathetic because the horrors of World War II made it impossible to deny the dangerously thin veneer separating civility from senseless killing and the failing communist regimes in the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China deprived them of any reason to hope for a more benevolent political arrangement. As a result, privileged college youth, who worried over being draft ed into the Vietnam war and felt some guilt over a comfortable life style they had not earned, searched for some ethical ideal that deserved an emotional commitment. Some members of this group initiated a reform movement in the 1960s that combined protest against the war with a demand for racial justice and gender equality. To the surprise of many “experts,” the movement lasted less than a dozen years because the war ended and the minority groups that were the intended recipients of the student protests rejected their benefactors’ efforts as condescending.

 

The current cohort of twenty-year-olds faces two problems. First, they fd it diffult to honor an ethic demanding empathic concern for needy others because of the media’s dissemination of the assumptions of evolutionary psychologists and economists declaring that self-interest is the only rational life strategy. Second, the imperative to be tolerant of all values denies them an alien morality requiring energetic opposition.

 

Humanists are usually the fst to detect the early signs of these pessimistic states and their insights help the public sculpt a more consciously coherent representation of the historical period in which they are trapped. Humans need some basis for hope, even if it is illusory. Recall that patients with Parkinson’s disease given a drug they believed would help them, even though it was only a placebo, secreted the neurotransmitter that normally relieves the symptoms because this molecule is released when humans are expecting an infrequent, but desired, event.

 

The uncertainty and cynicism that characterize the current historical moment cry out to the next cohort of humanists to initiate a crusade. The doubt and ambivalence that surround the commitment to, and pursuit of, some ideal goal, beside the sex, celebrity, and wealth that are prominent gratifations among Americans and Europeans, is refl ected in the pages of The New Yorker magazine. The nonftional essays celebrate fame, erotic appeal, and an unfettered ego while its cartoons satirize these same qualities. The combination of an eventual loss of oil as a source of energy, climate change that might leave large regions with a serious water shortage or flooded harbors, and a growing Muslim community giving voice to an anger they believe is morally justifd could represent the initial stage of a perfect storm that, in time, could cripple the industrialized nations.

 

The current confusion over which moral standards deserve a resolute commitment, combined with a skeptical view of the utility of honoring the traditional standards for honesty, justice, and loyalty, have created an ethical vacuum. The humanists writing during the early decades of the nineteenth century, sensing the troubled consciences of enlightened Americans, spoke in almost one voice in their demand for the abolition of slavery. One of the earliest sound fms, The Jazz Singer, made in 1927 dealt with three ethical themes: the assimilation of Jewish immigrants into American life, the level of loyalty a son owed to his dying father, and the contribution of the music of African Americans to the larger culture.

 

The lack of consensus among contemporary Americans and Europeans has forced humanists to adopt a more timid posture and to supress the impulse to rouse the public to demand change, whether a serious reduction in class privilege, the gap in academic achievement between the children of the poor and the privileged, or less violence on television. Only the economists feel confent in their recommendation that a guilt-free self-interest is the only rational way to conduct a life.

 

The modern world desperately needs a Swift , Kant, Goya, Shaw, Beckett, or Eliot to provoke a passive population, adrift in a ship without a confent direction, chatting about the last episode of The Sopranos or Talking of Michelangelo to choose a moral position that demands a deeper empathic concern with the social and natural settings into whicheach generation is born and to communicate it to a desperate public. The mood that emerged in Europe after World War I, which T. S. Eliot captured in The Wasteland, is gradually engulfg more of the world’s populations and creating conditions in which a species, whose biology demands a meaningful reason for acting usually found in ethical values, fds itself deprived of this necessary resource, not unlike bees who cannot fd their home hive. Pleasant sensations and material comforts are unsatisfactory substitutes for this need. So, like lost bees, Americans and Europeans wander in circles till their time is up, wishing perhaps that Eve had not eaten that apple. Czeslaw Milosz provides some basis for hope in his refusal to yield to the grotesque cruelty and dispiriting meaninglessness of modern life. Surrender, which characterizes the oppressed, robs humans of the prize they value most – their dignity. Milosz urges a similar resistance on all of us in a memory of an afternoon when, while walking in a Polish village, he saw some ducks splashing in a dirty puddle. The sight struck him as odd because nearby was a lovely stream flowing through an alder wood. When he asked a peasant why the ducks ignored the stream the old man’s terse reply was, “If only they knew.”