

The Bonfire of the Humanities - benbreen
http://www.thenation.com/article/195553/bonfire-humanities

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aridiculous
As a lover of the humanities and social 'sciences', I am always cheered up
when a postmodernist snaps out of it, so we can actually have intelligible
conversations again.

Paraphrasing famous modernist designer Massimo Vignelli, postmodernism was/is
a critique, at best. It doesn't actually provide a worldview.

To me, it's intellectual madness. Fun, in moderation. Useful, to shake things
up.

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jseliger
I'm surprised Moyn doesn't mention Edge.org, whose founder John Brockman has
explicitly talked about starting Edge and becoming a literary agent to offer
alternatives to what he calls "book reviewers" dominating "intellectual"
conversations. Incidentally, the Edge.org annual question books are excellent.

In addition, WRT this:

 _It seems as if, in roundabout ways, all of our current historiographical
trend-followers finally agree with White, in the face of what they regard as a
great crisis for historical writing today. But it is one thing to call for
speculation for the sake of relevance, and another to bring about a new
marriage of history and philosophy._

writers like Keith Windschuttle have been discussing these problems since _The
Killing of History_ , if not earlier, and Camille Paglia has been discussing
them in essays since the 1990s.

Finally, the lack of jobs in the humanities has been acting as both a negative
IQ test and a conformity test for decades. I wrote a little more about that in
the context of English here: [http://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-
should-know-befor...](http://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-
before-you-start-grad-school-in-english-literature-the-economic-financial-and-
opportunity-costs) . This may relate to the willingness of academic historians
and other academics to speak to the public or avoid conformity more generally.

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walterbell
Are there any non-academic professions which employ a high percentage of
humanities PhDs, e.g. publishing, think tanks?

Phrasing the question differently, if the economics of a humanities education
means that only the already-wealthy need apply, where do such people put their
education to work?

The article could have benefited from a historical perspective on grad school
economics and tenure opportunities. When and why did these change and what
does it mean for society?

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joshdick
I'm surprised that this doesn't mention Fukuyama's "end of history" idea [1].

When it looks like the world is full of liberal democracies and nations
becoming liberal democracies, history feels less compelling.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_history](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_history)

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nyolfen
the state of affairs since the neoconservatives attempted to implement this
philosophy through the iraq war, or the direction russia has tacked since 91
to name just two prominent examples, has made this idea kind of a joke

