Realms of King Arthur” at your local library, that is the humanities.
When you read the diary of a seventeenth-century New England mid-
wife, that is the humanities. When you watch an episode of The Civil
Wa r, that is the humanities too.Note that in all of these examples, the recipient of the humanistic “knowl-
edge” proffered is merely passive, the exhibitions and TV programs designed,
of necessity, for an audience that has no prior knowledge of King Arthur or
the Civil War. In the hope that the more-or-less vacuous NEH statement was
merely an aberration, I turned to the “National Foundation on the Arts and
Humanities Act of 1965,” which brought the NEH and NEA (National En-
dowment for the Arts) into being:
(1) The arts and humanities belong to all the people of the United
States.What can “belong” possibly mean here? As a citizen, I do not “own” speci¤c
artworks and philosophical treatises the way I might own stock or real estate.
And how does this compare with the sciences? Does microbiology—or pro-
tein chemistry—“belong” to all the people of the United States?
(2) An advanced civilization must not limit its efforts to science and
technology alone, but must give full value and support to the other
great branches of scholarly and cultural activity in order to achieve a
better understanding of the past, a better analysis of the present, and
a better view of the future.At best, this statement is blandly patronizing. Imagine someone claiming
that “An advanced civilization must not limit its efforts to the humanities
alone, but must give full value and support to those great branches, the sci-
ences and social sciences”? But further, the assertion that arts and humani-
ties somehow make us better persons and citizens is, to say the least, ques-
tionable. For as we learned in World War II (and of course we had always
known it), “culture” by no means ensures ethical behavior; Hitler, let’s re-
member, was so enraptured by Wagner that he attended performances of
Lohengrin at the Vienna Opera House ten times in the course of the 1908
¤ve-month season.^3
(3) The arts and the humanities re®ect the high place accorded by the
American people to the nation’s rich cultural heritage and to the fos-Literary Study for the Twenty-first Century 3