The Real Crisis in Humanities Isn't Happening at College
The Real Crisis in Humanities Isn't Happening at College
Our problem is in the real world—not the ivory tower—and so is the solution
When I launched The Honest Broker, I had no intention of writing about tech.
My main vocation is in the world of music and culture. My mission in life is championing the arts as a source of enchantment and empowerment in human life.
So why should I care about tech?
But I do know something about the subject. I have a Stanford MBA and spent 25 years at the heart of Silicon Valley. I ran two different tech companies. I’ve pitched to VCs and raised money for startups. I’ve done a successful IPO. I taught myself coding.
I’ve seen the whole kit, and most of the kaboodle too.
I loved it all. I thought Silicon Valley was a source of good things for me—and others.
Until tech started to change. And not for the better.
I never expected that our tech leaders would act in opposition to the creative and humanistic values I held so dearly. But it’s happened—and I’m not the only person who has noticed.
I’ve published several critiques here about the overreaching of dysfunctional technology, and the response has been enormous and heartfelt. The metrics on the articles are eye-opening, but it’s not just the half million views—it’s the emotional response that stands out.
Nobody trusts the technocracy anymore. People suffer from it.
Almost everybody I hear from has some horror story to share. Like me, they loved new tech until recently, and many worked in high positions at tech companies. But then they saw things go bad. They saw upgrades turn into downgrades. They watched as user interfaces morphed into brutal, manipulative command-and-control centers.
Things got worse—and not because something went wrong. The degradation was intentional. It happened because disempowerment and centralized control are profitable, and now drive the business plans.
So search engines got worse—but profits at Alphabet rose. Social media got worse—but profits at Meta grew. (I note that both corporations changed their names, which is usually what malefactors do after committing crimes.)
Scammers and hackers got more tech tools, while users got locked in—because those moves were profitable too.
This is the context for my musings below on the humanities.
I don’t want to summarize it here—I encourage you to read the whole thing. My only preamble is this: the humanities aren’t just something you talk about in a classroom, but are our core tools when the human societies that created and preserved them are under attack.
Like right now.
Further Reading:
The article below is part of an ongoing series. In a series of essays, I probe the growing dysfunction of the dominant tech platforms and initatives and explore more human-centered alternatives.
The Honest Broker is a reader-supported guide to music, books, media & culture. Both free and paid subscriptions are available. If you want to support my work, the best way is by taking out a paid subscription.
The Real Crisis in Humanities Isn’t Happening at College
By Ted Gioia
1.
When I taught jazz at Stanford, I offered a night class for outsiders—people in the community who weren’t college students. The University wanted to do community outreach, and I was enlisted to lead the charge.
Anybody could take my class. They didn’t need to pass the SAT or even have a high school diploma. The only requirement was payment of $300—not a small amount back then, but still much cheaper than Stanford tuition.
Enrollment was limited to 40 students. As it turned out, every one of them was older than me. We met twice a week, on Tuesday and Thursday evenings.
I had low expectations.
I’d been teaching this same material to Stanford students, the most brilliant young minds in the country (or so I was told). My night pupils were just random individuals, people who had three hundred bucks to spare. I suspected that the difference between my ‘real’ students and the night students would be noticeable.
And there was a difference—but not the one I expected.
After our first Tuesday evening session, I was in shock. The classroom discussion had been outstanding. My students were smart and passionate. They took the subject very seriously, more seriously than my Stanford undergrads—which was surprising because there were no grades in this community outreach course.
That was a puzzle. Why are they so focused and participative when they aren’t getting graded?
But the most striking difference came when my students started applying what we were studying to their own lives. They had a wealth of personal experiences to draw on (even more than I did, given my comparative youth). They could connect the dots between what we were doing in a classroom and what was happening in the rest of their lives, or the rest of the world.
This wasn’t what I’d expected. And it continued in the second session on Thursday—and thereafter.
I was having a blast. I started looking forward to my evening ‘community service’ with enthusiasm. This was what education was supposed to be like. But why was it happening here, instead of with the young geniuses I was teaching during the day?
Here’s the kicker. When I talked to other Stanford faculty members who were teaching community classes, they all had the same experience.
The adults were more impressive than the college students.
Maybe that wouldn’t have been true if I’d been teaching calculus or computer science or engineering. But anything related to the arts and the humanities needed—and deserved—a mature mind with some experience of the world before it could bear fruit.
2.
I think about my night school students a lot whenever I hear people lamenting the crisis in the humanities.
That’s a popular topic.
These articles always assume that the crisis is happening at college—and can only be solved on campus. Even the people who disagree with these doomsayers share the same assumption. When they defend the humanities, they always point to what’s happening in a classroom.
Maybe I once believed the same thing. Not anymore.
The situation today is eerily similar to the crisis of 1800, when people rebelled against the overreach of rationalistic and algorithmic thinking—the zeal for financial optimization forcing people into sweatshops and the ‘dark Satanic mills’ of the Industrial Revolution.
This revolt was intense. But it didn’t happen at college. It took place in society at large.
This marked the end of the Age of Reason, and the rise of Romanticism, with its celebration of creativity, artistry, music, poetry, and growing respect for human dignity.
For the next hundred years, creativity got more esteem than rationalism. Artists were more admired than bankers. Culture was viewed as more foundational than commerce.
And it wasn’t just about poets and musicians. Laws got passed restricting child labor and other exploitative practices. (I note that children are the worst victims of today’s exploitative tech—but we don’t have laws against it yet.) The labor movement and other humanistic initiatives gained in strength.
People mattered—for a change.
And the experts and industrialists who ran the Age of Reason were in shock. They never saw it coming.
But they were the actual cause of the humanistic revival. They had assumed that humans would do their bidding—that people could be endlessly manipulated and controlled. Just so long as profit was maximized, who cared how much suffering was inflicted.
But the humans resisted. They created a flourishing counterculture that eventually went mainstream.
Very little of this happened at colleges. Both the crisis and solution took place in society at large.
Academics were probably the last to notice. They usually are.
We need something similar today.
3.
In fact, we need it more than ever right now. And we’re likely to get it, too.
That’s because the backlash against tech manipulation and overreach has already started. The frustration runs deep and almost everybody outside the echo chamber feels the rising antipathy to the technocracy.
I’m worried what these devices are doing to my kids.
The tech was supposed to serve me—now I feel like I’m serving it.
They take away the functions I need, and force me to accept new ones that only benefit them.
My happiest moments are when I leave my devices behind.
I want to talk to a person, not an AI bot.
Give me a break—I don’t want to live inside a virtual reality headset.
Everything digital is starting to suck.
The last tech implementation at work made job miserable. The next one will probably get rid of my job completely.
It wasn’t like this a few years ago. Even last year, things weren’t this bad.
We’ve all had happy experiences with new tech. Computers were empowering and gave us more options—until they didn’t. It was easy to ignore glitches and crashes, because the larger direction was upward and onward.
But the rapid acceleration of algorithmic and AI-driven systems—the latest flavor of the month in Silicon Valley—makes clear where we were heading. The goal in the technocracy is now obvious. Just pay attention to what they say.
There’s a reason why the most popular words in tech right now are acceleration, destruction, disruption.
Have you figured out what they want to destroy and disrupt? Here’s a clue—take a look in the mirror.
That isn’t the terminology of the humanistic tradition—it’s the exact opposite. Until recently destroy and destruct were words you would hear from manufacturers of weapon systems. Nowadays they describe the philosophy behind the apps on your smartphone.
We need a countervailing philosophy. And we have one.
It’s called the humanities.
4.
That’s why I have little patience for dreamers who assume that the crisis in humanities is something to fix inside a college classroom.
Students have already told us what they think of these initiatives—to make the humanities more entertaining or relevant or whatever. They’re not buying it.
I won’t deny that the downward trend in majors is troubling to people (like me) who love the humanities.
But I disagree with the notion that success is based on convincing 18 year olds to declare an English major. That makes a mockery of the whole subject. Youngsters may eventually decide that the humanities are worth studying, but that will only happen after humanistic thinking starts to pervade our society.
Are you skeptical about the humanities flourishing outside academia? Do you doubt this can happen?
In fact, it’s already taking place.
I have an inside source on this. My brother Dana has been working on humanities outreach into communities for decades now—when he was Poet Laureate of California he was always out on the road, showing up for on-the-ground initiatives in all 58 counties.
Nobody had done that before. But that’s always been how Dana rolls.
He has more hands-on experience with the humanities outside of college than anybody I know—dealing face-to-face with people at libraries, local theaters, community centers, workshops, churches, reading groups, businesses, and other real world settings.
He sees the hunger people have for a wisdom and nourishing that algorithms and devices don’t provide—but the humanities can. This is the real crisis in humanities, and it’s reached a boiling point.
I don’t travel as extensively as Dana, but I hear the exact same thing in my online dealings with people. They want something that the tech can’t provide. And the manipulative dysfunctionality of their tech devices only raises the intensity of their craving for a humanistic alternative.
Eventually college administrators will figure this out too. And—sit down, because this next part will shock you!—students (and parents) will be receptive when the change finally comes.
Just consider that, a century ago, immigrants to the US scrimped and saved to give their children a better education—and the liberal arts were seen as essential to this. Sure, you might learn technical skills at college, too; but you couldn’t really develop your full capacities without the gravitas and larger perspective that humanistic learning provides (along with thinking, writing, and communicating skills that were taught as part of it).
That respect for humanistic learning will return. But only after the humanities demonstrate their power and worth in the world.
And the time for that to happen is right now.
5.
In a world suffering under algorithmic, finance-driven thinking gone wild, we need something to fight back with. We need something that makes a difference—not in the classroom, but in the world at large, and inside powerful organizations.
Here are eight imperatives—all of them drawing strength and sustenance from the humanities:
We need a way of defining and pursuing progress that doesn’t reduce that concept to something that only comes from a digital device.
We desperately need access to values and wisdom that aren’t corrupted by the relentless financial metrics and imposed flavor-of-the-month narratives of the current moment.
We need to instill a respect for human beings, whose physical and psychic health should come ahead of the accelerated scalability of corporate bots.
We need to address the growing human crisis—witnessed by a frightening increase in mental illness, cases of depression, suicidal tendencies, etc.—with a human response, instead of ramping up the tech that is demonstrably adding to these problems.
We need to provide the young, who are especially vulnerable to these dysfunctional technologies, with some bedrock of values and practices that will nurture their potential as human beings, not captured tech clients.
We need to learn from the past, and the thousands of years of accumulated wisdom it can provide—something that is only accessible via the humanities.
We need to preserve and celebrate core human values in the face of metrics that want to reduce every initiative, every decision to optimization of the numbers.
We need to propagate a compassionate, humanistic worldview, not a private equity mindset in which every human activity is squeezed to maximize cash flow and support the luxury lifestyles of the technocracy.
Only the humanities can deliver these essential things. And go ahead and mock me, but I’m not exaggerating when I say that this is becoming a matter of life or death.
6.
That’s why I keep thinking about my old students in my community outreach class.
They were receptive to humanistic thinking because they had lived a little. They had felt the squeeze themselves. They knew that you couldn’t reduce everything to metrics.
They knew what cooked.
Those same people still exist today. But here’s the difference—there’s a whole lot more of them.
I hear from them every day. These people don’t need to read Shakespeare to understand the importance of the human element in the humanities—that’s because they see it at risk in their immediate surroundings. And they are receptive to humanistic thinking for that very reason—and not because they want a dose of culture or sophistication.
They know that we need the humanities to survive. Maybe we’re all starting to figure that out.
That’s the greatest motivator you will ever find for learning. When your existence is threatened, you learn new skills.
Some of these people might even be enticed to take a class. Or join a reading group. Or pursue some other traditional form of humanistic education.
But that’s not necessary.
The starting point is to promote a larger conversation based on humanistic values, soft skills, and priorities larger than the numbers on an income statement.
You don’t need to read long books to participate. (But it will empower you if you do.)
This is the humanistic reawakening, and it can happen anywhere. A lot of it is already taking place on Substack and other alternative platforms. Things are also simmering in communities across the country. It’s no coincidence that so many liberal arts and classics-based schools are getting launched right now. But that’s only a small part of the ferment—most of which is taking place outside of pedagogic settings.
This grassroots movement is where the crisis in humanities will end. That’s fitting because it’s the same place where it started—in society at large, in the workplaces, and (yes) even online. In fact, I have a hunch that the humanistic response will happen with particular fervor on the web.
Sooner or later, the academic establishments may notice, and join in our efforts. Or maybe not. That’s their choice. But this train is leaving the station even if they aren’t onboard.
The colleges can catch up with us later. When they finally show up, we will probably have a thing or two to teach them.
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Once you understand two simple facts, everything will make sense:
1. We are ruled by persons whose behavior is indistinguishable from that of high-functioning (in the sense that they can fake empathy when called upon) sociopaths. According to The Iron Law Of Oligarchy, this is basically inevitable, as sociopaths are precisely the people who will do whatever it takes to gain power.
2. The middle class in the West is increasingly picked clean and left to rot. Either you become one of a shrinking number of very well-off people, or you are tossed aside with less consideration than shown for a dead bird.
A friend of mine has to read and grade undergrad papers and can see loads of students are using ChatGPT. Now why on earth would you go to the huge expense and amass debt to study English or Theology at college, only to get a computer to do your assignments. It doesn’t make sense.