I think the real question for the humanities is "How can we understand the ways in which globalization and new technology are reshaping how we think about fundamental cultural issues?" I think the humanistic disciplines are the only disciplines that can even ask such a question, let alone answer it. But I think the disciplines that are usually most touted as addressing such questions, by which I mean much of the critical theory and cultural studies establishment, are busy in cloud cuckoo land.

I should add that I continue to think the humanities need rethinking and retooling. I also think something like audience analysis is highly relevant to that necessity. But my view is that we need to liberate undergraduate education from the dead hand of graduate education and again ask ourselves what undergraduate education is for. I think the humanities are central to that. I continue to believe that there is such a thing as education for citizenship that is distinct from all professional and technical training, and I continue to think the humanities have a role to play in undergraduate education that is different from anybody's professing of the humanities at the graduate level. This is why we have some of the serious conflicts we have in some university departments now with scores of undergraduates being turned away from courses and majors because established faculty will not teach the courses. Much humanistic education, both old fashioned and new fashioned, is quite irrelevant to the real world needs of undergraduate students and serves only to further the goals and desires of an adacemic clerisy.

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It seems to me that humanistic study has always been ethical, in the sense that it is concerned with happiness. But I don't mean the personal self-fulfillment sort of happiness. I mean the kind of happiness that is a function of doing life in a reasonable, honorable, and civil manner. For this purpose Greek philosophy is more valuable than much modern philosophy, Aquinas is probably better than Luther and Calvin, and great poetry is just generally valuable. But the use of these things isn't a foregone conclusion. They have value chiefly for us as we appropriate them into our own modern discourses, into our own modes of being in the world. There is much in ancient and medieval texts, for instance, that it is very hard for any modern to find solidarity with. What can I say in recommending The Merchant of Venice to a modern reader, for instance.

Humanist education, as a part of an overall university education, is also about finding one's practice. For a while in the twentieth century it seemed that the humanities would be marginalized by science. That seems not to have taken place. But humanistic study has had to become more like science in order to coexist with science. What has happened to the humanities in American universities in the past thirty years or so isn't surprising if you look at what happened in continental European universities at the end of the last century. Dilthey is good on this topic.

I'm thinking that just as there is a difference between using monumental texts as sources of personal self-fulfillment and studying them in contexts of corporate behavior, there is also a difference between studying monumental texts as texts and studying them as wisdom. The latter is more appropriate to a monastic education than to an academic one. A monastic education is fine, but I've taken no vows. Hence, I will not leave my students with the impression that I think of Dante as an unqualified success. I will leave them with a problematized Dante, because I think that's my job.

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I would suggest additionally that there has been a fundamental change in the way Americans perceive education in relation to middle class life. At one time, culture in the sense of cultivation, was thought to be equipment as important as technical skill for persons wishing to enter the middle class. This view of culture shaped the approach to the humanities developed by and through the American genteel tradition. That tradition has been on the wane during most of the twentieth century, but it's assumptions in regard to the uses of cultivation in developing refined sensibilities are still around. Kenneth Cmiel, in a book I am reading now and have recommended elsewhere, writes very interestingly about this history from the perspective of a historian interested in the public sphere. I personally think the old assumptions are valid enough in present day society. The notion of refinement doesn't work, but I think the notion of civility does, even though civility is often used to hype very narrow and sometimes bigoted political agendas. An antidote, though by no means the only antidote, to the notion of civility as narrow mindedness, is the history of culture--or I think so.

Here's a story. I have a friend who is a yuppie lawyer, very bright, a millionaire by now, and a really nice man. We were talking recently, and he mentioned that one of his children is starting music lessons. I thought about the way the piano ads are hyping research that purports to show that music study makes your kids smarter--particularly the Steinway ads in Dallas which feature the refined voice of the lovely Van Cliburn. The argument of the Steinway commercial is more or less as follows: 'Music will make your kids smarter. It made Van Cliburn (whose piano teacher was his mama) an international celebrity (and incidentally, mama had a Steinway). Don't you think your kids should have a Steinway?' My friend shrugged and said, "If you're a yuppie millionaire, and you can afford a Steinway, and you'd like to have one in your house, why not? And besides, it might even work."

And the point, which I’m not making quite as well as I might, isn't so much that money can't buy me love as a couple of other things. At the risk of sounding really pompous, ignorance is ignorance, even if it has fifty million dollars. I've said before that I think the humanities have to make their case on the basis of merit, something I think rhetoric and political theory are generally doing a better job of than literary studies and philosophy these days. But ignorance is still ignorance. I'm disturbed by the thought that ignorant rich people ought to be able to shape institutions just because they are rich.

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As I said, my friend is a very nice man, a genteel man (I've argued up the page that money doesn't make people genteel). Soon, I will participate in a performance of the Bach St. John Passion, which we will sing in German with English subtitles projected above the stage just like the opera. And I'm thinking of the twist at the end of an essay of Loren Eiseley's "All over the city the cogs in the hard, bright mechanisms have begun to turn. Figures move through computers, names are spelled out, a thoughtful machine selects the fingerprints of a wanted criminal from an array of thousands. In the laboratory an electonic mouse runs swiftly through a maze toward the cheese it can neither taste nor enjoy. On the second run it does it better than a real mouse."