Do the Humanities Humanize?

What Can We Expect From Great Works?

According to George Steiner, one of the lessons of the Holocaust is that the Humanities don’t humanize—one can love Schubert and be indifferent to (or even enthusiastic about) genocide. Moral philosophers, so the argument goes, are not necessarily morally superior to anyone else.

Great art remains great, but it can’t protect us from committing or permitting evil.

If so, what should we expect from a life devoted to the study and/or enjoyment of “great art,” whatever it might mean?

Hannah Arendt agrees with Steiner, but adds a qualification. It’s possible to enjoy great art as a consumer and still commit evil, but, she claims, it’s not possible to make great art and commit evil. Consumption is passive, and passivity, she claims, is perfectly compatible with complicity. Not so, creation, which is active, individuating, and, by definition, anti-conformist.

If Arendt is right, we should probably teach people to be original artists, on the assumption that it might awaken in them the contrarian obstinacy needed to buck the evil that often takes hold of crowds. We should spend less time teaching art appreciation and more time encouraging art making (not that the former can’t be taught in the service of the latter).

For Arendt, artistic inspiration comes from a higher plane, and can be forfeited when the artist crosses a line. Arendt brings Bertolt Brecht as an example in her essay Men in Dark Times. Brecht was a great artist until he supported Stalin. Then, she claims, his poetry worsened.

Note that for Arendt, artists can still engage in immoral acts and be great artists. Arendt thinks their artistry permits them moral leeway (she doesn’t think that artists have to be good or kind people). But there is a line that even they can’t cross and remain inspired. Arendt’s threshold for cancel-ability, when it comes to artists and thinkers, is much higher than ours.

I’m not sure I agree with Arendt that the origins of evil lie only in thoughtlessness or passivity, as she often claims. Still, I’m challenged by the idea that a society of creatives (producers) might be less evil than a society of consumers.

What do you think? Should we be bothered if neither the consumption nor the production of art, literature, music, and drama can make us better people?

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