Hello, I'm Helen Small, I teach English professor of English in Pembroke College and in the faculty of English at Oxford.
The book I just finished is about the ways in which we have conventionally argued for the value of the humanities.
So it's unlike, I guess, most of the work in the field because it isn't aiming to be a polemic or a manifesto in the first
instance is actually addressed to people who find themselves needing to make the arguments.
And what I wanted to do was what we actually do in the classroom, what what we do in our books all the time.
But we often feel too defensive to do when we think about this subject, that is,
ask ourselves the hard questions and figure out what the main arguments are,
put them through their paces, give them a hard time and see what's left standing at the end.
SP2 - A lot of academics are content to study their subjects in an 'arts for art sake' environment.
What made you become such an advocate for the cause?
I became really interested in the humanities debate and wanted to see what I could do with it around 2010.
So I just finished the previous book. I was thinking about what my next subject should be.
And of course this was the time when students were taking to the streets, especially in December of that year,
as they looked at this sudden hike in the funding of an undergraduate education from three thousand pounds,
as you know, to up to nine thousand pounds for most of them.
The students who were on the streets were often the best advocates for the subjects they want to study.
A lot of them came from the humanities, but of course, not just them, also social scientists and scientists out there.
And they were often pretty clear about what they were doing.
But it seemed to me that those of us who were speaking from the university and worrying about the pressure that might be placed on the
humanities especially to become more demonstratively useful to society or produce results that could be tied to improvements in GDP.
And that kind of blunt economist thinking were often becoming too defensive
and were delivering arguments that seemed to be bigger than we could sustain.
So you will see that I have a particular beef, I guess, with democracy needs this argument when it's put very, very boldly like that.
OK, so as I listen to the arguments, I wanted to really just test them out to try to figure out what are the what is the basic claim here?
Where does it come from? What does it assume the antagonism might be? What are we arguing to defend ourselves from?
What are the assumptions about what we study and what the skills and the strengths of it are historically and what they are now?
Which arguments have we used in the past that we might need to change?
Because what we do now is substantially different from what was done in, say, the whole Victorian period when a lot of these arguments were formed,
as it seemed to me, time to update the arguments not just in the mode of polemic, but as a kind of critical exercise in its own right.
It's quite hard to make, such, as you say, academic arguments available to the public.
Is that part of what you do? Yes, it is. But I did want people to delve deeper.
So so my ideal audience is is, if you like, a mixed audience of if you're being really ambitious,
it's the people in Whitehall, isn't it, who are making policy decisions and you want them to access that.
You know, the core claims that are being made, think about them critically and then go away with something they can use.
But I'm also writing a course for people like me.
So people who are immersed in teaching some of this material in a regular basis as part of our Victorian or 20th century classes,
and to want to get into the depth of it historically and in terms of rhetoric and all the other things that are there to be studied.
I think the other thing that you're raising, though,
is is through the huge difficulty implicitly of arguing for the humanities because you're arguing for something that is so broad.
So how do you defend something that runs the gamut really from sort of Sufi mysticism through to middle German or,
you know, theories of music, you name it. It's the boundaries shift on what we include within the humanities.
And I said quite a lot of trading going on across the boundary with the social sciences, most obviously.
But arguing at that level of generality means that you have to get above.
You get it. You have to get at a higher level of abstraction, really, than you can use.
When you were arguing for, for example, what English does in the way of training you to be sceptical about rhetoric,
those claims that are easier to nail in more specific, but trying to find what works across the humanities involves not just abstraction,
but a certain amount of grouping of things that are, you know, that are common across them.
And has that been your biggest struggle then, getting to that level of abstraction?
I guess that is why the very first chapter in the book and the second lecture
that you'll hear if you listen to the podcasts is not strictly evaluation.
It's a description of the definitive work that the humanities can claim to do.
So it's really about a basic way of justifying the humanities on the grounds that they
do something that is distinct from the work of the social sciences in the sciences,
and it's trying to figure out exactly what that work is,
what is what is the subject we have in common and what are the techniques that we have in common
and going about our work and the values that we have that are maybe partly distinctive to us.
How do the authors that you're looking at the moment come into that? Some of them have specific authors associated with them and some of them don't.
So to start historically with the earliest one, the democracy argument has a very strong, authoritative presence in Plato.
So really, you're dealing with Plato's argument that the philosopher is a gadfly to the police,
someone he's teasing and goading it into a more active state of being in the case of John Stuart Mill.
I was intrigued by this. You have one extremely famous person in history, philosophy,
who takes on an rearticulate the idea that the humanities and of course, you wouldn't have the humanities.
He was talking in the first instance about poetry, then more broadly about literature,
make a contribution to happiness in cultivating a certain kind of feeling,
quality in our thinking and a certain ability to mix and analytic thinking with a more responsive human approach to things.
That's enormously famous. But there's been a huge resurgence in thinking about contributions to happiness,
public benefits in the way of improvements of individual and collective happiness in recent years in which mill has pretty much disappeared.
So you're looking at economists, behavioural economists,
especially some psychologists who seem to have stepped away from history of their own subjects.
So what became part of the purpose of that chapter is putting it back in and trying to remind people that there was a very,
very well-developed argument here, which still needs to be taken on board.
And that might actually make for a richer and better calibrated argument than we have if we get him.
And in the one other person who has a strong presence in the book is Arnold,
who for years has figured in these debates as the kind of high cultural defender of the best that has been thought and said.
Where I've used Arnold is really rather differently.
And I suppose you could say I'm making a case for a modern unwieldiness, but with a much more specific grimmett, which is that Arnold was,
in effect working as a bureaucrat in the Department of Education at the time that he was writing Culture on Anarchy.
He's the one who had most cause to think hard about how the humanities should respond to the pressure to be useful to society.
And he had a very finely worked out answer to that. That's the bit model that interests me here.
So could you go into that a little bit? Why? Why we should study the humanities.
We have obviously a quite well outlined argument already available in a series of lectures online.
But we were wondering if you could so I can give you the summary version of it, if you like.
So what I've done is to to fish out,
to provide a taxonomy of what seemed to me the four arguments that have been returned to time and again with good reason.
So the first of the detailed lectures that you hear talks about it offers a definition of what the humanities are and what it is that they do.
It's different. And the core description,
the best I can get to something unifies all of them is that the humanities study the meaning making practises of the culture,
and that they do that in ways which place an unnecessary pressure on qualitative as well as quantitative thinking.
And the second chapter looks at that old pressure from Adam Smith onwards to justify ourselves in terms of the usefulness in practical ends.
What we do that is of immediate benefit to society. And it takes Arnold as a way of thinking about that debate.
And the next of the lectures looks at the argument that comes out of John Stuart Mill, as I said,
which is that the humanities have a contribution to make to our individual and collective happiness.
We're really in the end and I don't think most philosophers have a problem with this.
So some politicians do. The collective happiness is just the sum of individual happiness.
How many people you can put in the way of a fuller understanding of life, the emotions as well as reasoned,
a better and deeper understanding of what reasoning is and what it can do for you and your life.
The next of the arguments is that famous one, which has become hugely important to the English arguments about the humanities in the last few years.
So the argument that democracy needs the humanities because they teach us a range of ways of understanding what a society is,
how human beings work and live together, what the underpinning values are, what we mean by justice,
what the good what the human good is in ways that go beyond simple economic benefits to to societies.
I put quite a lot of pressure on that argument, but I think if that argument of all arguments can't take a bit of scrutiny,
then it's in trouble because that's really what it says. So we need to do it for ourselves, including an argument.
And then finally, I turn to the history of arguing for intrinsic value.
Not all the other arguments that I look at, the idea that we are useful, though,
perhaps in ways that put pressure on economists standard ways of thinking about usefulness,
that we contribute to happiness, that we are a force for good in the democracy.
Something does remain.
That argument, by the way, all of those arguments, what we might call consequentialist, are based on the idea that we have conflicting.
Is in the world, but none of those arguments really is enough by itself,
because if you don't have alongside them a notion that the object you're studying matters for its own sake,
then there will always be something that will do the job you're looking to do better or more directly.
OK, more efficiently and quite a lot of philosophy of value being used in that lecture.
But I hope it's accessible enough for people to understand why I think that might be the better term to use.
So if we take for granted the value of other humanities disciplines, say art history or history or whatever,
why should we study English specifically when I don't make the case?
I deliberately deprive myself of that job of defending myself, if you like, on my particular bit of work.
As I said, I think the job of arguing for the humanities is really about trying to find
what we have in common or what grouped together we do that is distinctive.
It is really striking when you look at the history of arguing for the humanities, how many prominent figures in it have come out of English?
So, John Guillory, for example, the United States definitely not here, but most of those people, when you look at them,
also have a much, much wider interest in Portland on different kinds of skills beyond those of English.
So I would like to see other people entering the debate. It would be great to see a musician in there.
There are some very good historians in there. We need some more linguists in the frame.
I think it would be good, good for the debate if we were represented more broadly across the humanities.
So even though you're a professor of English, you see that English is part of a family of humanities, rather.
Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. Yes, exactly that.
And as I say, I can I can do my best to extract out of or group together the arguments that are true for all of us.
But I think it would be really good if people who were actually practising, for example,
musical aesthetic theories were able to enter the debate and say whether they think those arguments are true for them.
The one argument that you will see isn't pushed very hard. For example,
in what I'm looking at is the argument that we make a contribution to aesthetic appreciation
of the world or that the things that we do are beautiful or have aesthetic value.
I didn't want to make that argument because it seemed to me that it wasn't obviously true of very large groupings within the humanities.
For example, history is what my colleagues do when they look at the history of, you know, of a political debate or the history of nations or whatever.
Is that aesthetic? I don't think it is primarily.
So I've tried not to pin it, not to pin these arguments on things that might capture some of what we do, but are not only true of us and indeed where,
for example, a scientist will tell you are a very strong aesthetic components to what a scientist does or discovers or describes.
So in Darwin's Origin of Species, you could argue for that as a work of the humanities and of course,
the work of the sciences and the humanities and sciences ever be reconciled in that way again?
Yeah, the second of the lectures where I'm dealing with how we how we can best describe ourselves and discriminate ourselves from other kinds
of of work within the university is trying cautiously to step over that old train of argument about two cultures and more recently,
three cultures, where there is people following on from Snow and Leavis of trying to try to describe a tripartite university,
humanities, social sciences, sciences. And what I'm what I'm really arguing.
There is as many people would agree with me, I have agreed already with this.
I will tell you that the antagonistic model of describing ourselves against others has not served us very well in the past.
It produces a pretty quick caricature of what we and our supposed and like partners.
And are there ways in which to study?
The humanities has become even more relevant and important in our recent times, quite apart from the student protests in 2010,
I think we are under huge pressure across society so so that we use all of us who work in any way with
the public sector to account for ourselves in terms that are although they are much more cannily,
intelligently, broadly defined now than they were, are basically econometric.
And I think there are very, very big problems with trying to do that. Once you try to capture the social benefit that the humanities create,
you start to impose upon the people that that benefit has been done to and a burden of telling you that the benefit has been made and felt,
which to me turns us from a public beneficiary into a public or public public benefit giver into a public nuisance.
We have to account for the good of what we do. And there's no I think there isn't any longer much credence, if there ever was,
to the idea that government should hand out large amounts of funding and would ask us to say how we used it for the good.
On the other hand, there comes a point at which your description of the good that you do starts to
take up the time and expenditure of money that doing the good itself should be.
What would you say about the imbalance between funding for the humanities and the sciences?
I think that imbalance is necessary and right. It doesn't take as much money to do the work of the humanities as.
Comparatively, with the laboratory sciences, this medicine seems to me, and I think it seems to many of my colleagues working in humanities,
that the best work in humanities is done by individuals or very small groups thinking at their desk or in small rooms and writing,
thinking, discussing, writing. That's what we do being in the library, you know, researching on our computers and information we need.
But it doesn't take a huge infrastructure to do those things.
And if you look at the size of the grants that are now being handed out for collaborative humanities work,
it's clear that at that level, as others, we're increasingly being modelled against the scale of funding for the sciences.
I'm not at all convinced that it will produce better work. I think in the end you need a lot of small grants directed at individuals or small
groups doing hard thinking in a room where they don't need big machines to do it.
They may need a different computer, a decent laptop and a well stocked library.
What you do need, of course, is that the people in the university were arguing for the humanities share of the budget,
understand what it is that they're arguing for. But it might help to know, for example,
that the HLC or OSSY UK Research Council's UK estimate that the U.S. should have around three percent of the budget distributed to all subjects.
That's tiny. I imagine that's even smaller than most students would care if asked to guess.
And one final question to young people studying humanities at the moment,
it's difficult because firstly the funding is short or that's the perception of public perception.
And secondly, in a time of economic distress, we can feel.
Undergraduates, sixth formers, can feel that perhaps they should be studying something more useful.
What would you say to that?
There's a really interesting report if people want to look at it on Oxford University's website, which describes where students go once they graduate.
And a very interesting law is high up there. Management is high up there.
And a lot of students go on, of course, to further their study in areas that aren't just humanities based.
They would incorporate some economics, a little business training or whatever on top of it.
So these things aren't antagonistic. But the more important message is that we train people in thinking critically about language,
about arguments, about expression, about how best to get one's point across and to think through a problem.
I really think any student thinking about these issues could afford to start introducing themselves to the
wider debate that's been going on there in the last several years about what the value of these things is.
So it's you can track these through the reading lists or attached to the website.
But there are some very interesting debates out there about how best to defend what we do, not just in the eyes of the world, but in your own eyes.