The Wages of Cultural Secularization - Liberties (original) (raw)

I take my title from the critic and literary scholar Simon During, who coined the phrase “cultural secularization” as a way of understanding the sharp decline in prestige — since the beginning of the twenty-first century and especially in the last decade — of the “high humanities.” The concept will strike many as evasively abstract, and certainly it is as open to skepticism and revision as its predecessor and model, the social-scientific and philosophical account of religious secularization that extends from Nietzsche to Weber to Charles Taylor. But the core of the religious secularization narrative rests on a basically unimpeachable empirical claim — that we have “moved from a condition in 1500 in which it was hard not to believe in God” to a modernity in which unbelief “has become quite easy for many,” as Taylor puts it. During’s parallel claim — “Faith has been lost across two different zones: first, religion; then, high culture . . . The humanities have become merely a (rather eccentric) option for a small fraction of the population” — cannot yet command the same ready assent. But in our universities, where tenure tracks in the humanities are swiftly disappearing, where majors and enrollments in fields such as English and art history are plummeting, some such notion as “cultural secularization” seems necessary — even, once you get past a first recoil at its conceptual hubris, obvious. Cultural secularization, During writes, is a “second secularization,” meaning both that it came about after religious secularization and that, to a degree, it is a variant of it. That is because the ascent of the high humanities was understood, and to an extent engineered, by thinkers for whom, as During writes, “culture was consecrated in religion’s place.” The most important expression of this compensatory substitution in the nineteenth century is by Matthew Arnold, for whom “poetry” might preserve what is true in religion from the depredations of scientific positivism: “Our religion has materialized itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it.” But “poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is unconscious poetry.” By the 1930s, I. A. Richards could insist that “the fact” was failing or had failed much more than just religion. As he writes in Science and Poetry, “Countless pseudo-statements — about God, about the universe, about human nature, about the soul, its rank and destiny — pseudo-statements which are pivotal points in the organization of the mind, vital to its well-being, have suddenly become, for sincere, honest, and informed minds, impossible to believe as for centuries they have been believed.” Yet there is a “remedy,” Richards declared: “to cut our pseudo-statements free from that kind of belief which is appropriate to verified statements,” from any dependence on facts. “This is not a desperate remedy,” he insisted, “for as poetry conclusively shows, even the most important among our attitudes can be aroused and maintained without any believing of a factual or verifiable order entering in at all.” Not just religious emotions, but also the whole complex of scientifically invalid but existentially inescapable intimations of significance, are what poetry, or more broadly the sublimated religion of the high humanities, might save. This sublimation was institutionalized in the twentieth- century university’s commitment to the study of art and literature, where the humanities secured a repository of post-Christian meaning precisely for the educated classes that had fallen furthest away from faith. As During observes, an important distinction between cultural secularization and religious secularization is that “unlike religion, the humanities have always been classed. In their formalized modes especially, they have belonged mainly to a fraction of the elite.” That historical reality has led, too hastily, to a prevailing diagnosis of the crisis of the humanities as essentially one of status-signaling. One commonly hears humanities professors lament, in a sociological vein, that classes in literature or art history are under-enrolled now because knowledge about those topics no longer confers “cultural capital” — no longer impresses, or even interests, one’s bourgeois dinner party guests. This is true, but question-begging. The loss of cultural prestige follows upon