It is no wonder scientists are often impatient with the humanities leading to conclusions they are absurd or trivial or both, and often with good cause. But, there is a growing danger, as science grows, of the humanities being pushed farther into the academic background. Yet, if ever there was need for the humanities, it is now, before the educational system required by a scientific and technological society settles into rigid patterns.
To many influential sections of Western society, industrialism and its concomitants are distasteful, not merely in their manifestation, but in their essence. They wish to reject them. They prefer to retain the social and cultural exclusiveness of an agrarian and commercial society, something of the world of Jane Austen, of Anthony Trollope and Rudyard Kipling, even sentimentalizing the likes of Trotsky. Hence we have had cults of D.H. Lawrence, basically a gifted but beatnik version of Thoreau, or W.H. Auden, men who loved life and hated humanity, men of the misanthrope instinct who had sensitive hearts and thick heads of which you could add Kerouac and Burroughs and other icons of alienation such as the post-modern Zizek and Chomskyites.
—This all echoed the official Soviet response to the Holocaust, which was to universalize suffering and thus conveniently avoid mentioning the specific group of Soviet citizens who were targeted for being Jewish. Some 27 million Soviets died in the war—“So in Soviet discourse, those 3 million were just ‘peaceful Soviet citizens,’ ” Gershenson said. Why talk about Jewish victims as a unique group when every victim was another “peaceful Soviet citizen”?
This was the case in Steps in the Night, a 1962 Lithuanian film. It was originally based on the true escape of 64 prisoners—60 of them Jewish—from a Nazi prison. Gershenson found four versions of the screenplay in the archives. In the first, a single token Jewish prisoner was included. The final film had no Jewish characters—the heroes were all strong-jawed Soviets in the finest socialist-realism tradition.—click image for source…
Although this crisis in the humanities primarily springs from the nature of our backward looking, tradition-drugged society, it has been encouraged by the treason of historians to their subject. Many have permitted, almost without protest, a false image of history to be projected leaving the role to many unworthies the task of formulating social attitudes to the world about us.
—George Stubbs (English, 1724-1806). The Prince of Wales’s Phaeton, 1793.—click image for source…
It is an odd situation whereby history, despite the resources available to it, has been so socially impotent. This is probably due to a reluctance to accept the social responsibilities that their subject imposes on them as well as a conservatism towards the teaching of history. Yet as humanity continues to crawl on with all its hesitations, slips and miraculous scrambling back, it seems more than a little painful that those who plot its course should give so little encouragement.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Massacre of the Innocents.
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