According to Harvard professor James Hankins, the humanities as we know them aren’t working, and a return to Renaissance education could be the solution.
Hankins, who gave a lecture at Hillsdale College on Oct. 15, is a professor of History at Harvard University specializing in the Italian Renaissance. He is the author of several books and contributes to publications including The New Criterion, The Claremont Review of Books, and The Wall Street Journal. He received a B.A. in Classics from Duke University and an M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in History from Columbia University.
Hankins began his lecture by discussing the necessity of societal order. Although the laws and institutions that keep order are often associated with coercion, Hankins said that the most important factor in keeping orderly societies are self-disciplined citizens.
“Coercion is not enough to keep a society together,” he said. “No state can last long that relies entirely on force to exact obedience. No surveillance or policing can cope with people who do not submit willingly to authority.”
Instead, citizens must choose to follow society’s rules.
“Members of a society must perceive its laws as just. They must have a fixed disposition to be lawful imprinted on their souls,” Hankins said.
According to Hankins, loyalty to custom and religion is usually enough to “induce a sense of obligation towards society” in the average citizen. Societies’ leaders, however, require a more reasoned approach to moral obligation. Ancient Greece and Rome produced two main systems: the philosophical, invented by Socrates, and the humanistic, which gained prominence in Rome and then during the Italian Renaissance.
“Schools in the philosophical tradition taught philosophy as a way of life and a connective vision of the divine, the cosmos and humanity,” Hankins said. “Philosophical contemplation anchored human beings in what was universal and eternal and taught them how to live life according to nature.”
The humanistic tradition of the Renaissance “involves the study of classical languages, literature, history, and moral philosophy. It was designed to improve the intellect and moral behavior of human beings to root them deeply in the civilized traditions they had inherited,” Hankins said.
From its roots in the Italian Renaissance, the humanistic tradition gained ground in Western secondary schools, academies, and universities into the 20th century.
“The humanistic idea is that education in the humanities can make you more human and therefore better,” Hankins said. “People so educated would be capable of choosing voluntarily to do what is right and to submit to just authority.”
Essentially, societal “statecraft” and individual “soulcraft” are necessary for culture to thrive. Hankins asserted that statecraft and soulcraft are best learned within a humanistic curriculum.
In the modern world, however, the beliefs and customs essential to a humanist education have been stripped away in favor of substitutes such as secular humanism, ethnic nationalism, fascism, and socialism.
“The Enlightenment ended up alienating the educated from those who embrace traditional customs and religions,” Hankins said. “In the contemporary world, the traditional role of the humanities in moral self-cultivation and preparing future leaders and society has largely vanished. The humanities are prized by some individuals for what they have to give in the way of personal fulfillment, but they have no clear social goal or purpose.”
According to professor of English David Whalen, however, the humanities never did anything else.
“It’s impossible for humanistic formation to have had no effect on culture,” Whalen said. “However, it is also impossible to know what the effects precisely are. Principles of causation are way too complicated for us to say, ‘Well, the humanities failed.’”
Whalen said that any sort of “success” the humanities may have cannot be measured on a societal level.
“We shouldn’t forsake hope for improving the culture, but we can’t get to culture except through individuals,” he said.
In fact, Whalen argued that the very purpose of a humanistic education — making people “more human” — does not necessarily lead to better societies.
“An education that humanizes people is not a guarantee for a nobler world,” Whalen said. “In a human being, you have both noble and ignoble. So if you amplify and fulfill that, it’s going to be a mixed bag. Remember that a humanistic education isn’t a bunch of courses on how to be good.”
Whalen said that the most important thing to remember about a humanistic education is that it must be undertaken by individuals and its success measured on an individual level.
“Like Christianity, a humanistic education takes one person at a time and does its best not to fix the culture, but to fix your imagination — to render robust and agile your understanding,” Whalen said. “It may be that what you do with that agile understanding and imagination might be wicked, and it would be lamentable if you did, but I don’t think you can lay that at the doorstep of humanistic education.”
Hankins said that some postmodernists deny that humanistic education can have any effect at all — not even on an individual level.
“So-called postmodern practitioners of hermeneutics even deny the possibility of understanding an author’s intended meaning,” he said. “This forecloses on the possibility that students might improve their characters as a result of reading poetry, literature, and history.”
At the conclusion of his lecture, Hankins addressed one looming question: Is it really possible to reform humanistic education under modern conditions? If we adopt some key components of a Renaissance-style curriculum, Hankins argued, it might be.
“The full humanist curriculum as it emerged in the Renaissance laid out a program of study in the language arts that sought to impart clear, correct, and powerful speech, and it also saw moral improvement through the study of poetry, history, and moral philosophy,” he said.
According to Hankins, communication is a key component of humanistic education — and one that has been lost in the modern school system.
“We in America are rapidly losing appreciation for grammar. It’s seen as a fusty old subject,” Hankins said. “The traditional humanities laid great emphasis on grammar, which they saw as the art of clear and correct speech.”
He continued, “The essential point from a moral perspective is that students be taught to communicate. Cooperation among individuals and peoples requires trust, understanding, and empathy. And these are impossible without language.”
Junior Eliana Kernodle, who introduced Hankins and attended the lecture, agreed with his argument for the necessity of grammar in education.
“Grammar is under-emphasized now, and we have to be able to communicate clearly if we’re going to be able to learn about higher things,” she said. “It’s an essential foundation for bigger conversations.”
Ultimately, Hankins asserted that we must breathe life back into the humanities in order for them to do their intended work of moral cultivation.
“We need to read the authors not as mere text, but as writings that convey the voices of our fellow human beings. We must hear them again as the voices of great poets, historians, and artists, identified by our tradition as unique transmitters of virtue and wisdom,” Hankins asserted. “We must open ourselves to them, strive to understand their high wisdom, heed their exhortations to virtue, and be convinced of their value for our lives.”