This post was written by Mabel Court, a Humanities Center student fellow.
History unspools as it occurs; the future has always been an ever-murky, ever-shifting puzzle. That being said, there do seem to be compounding factors that make this historical moment feel particularly uncertain, with mounting political polarization, wars and rumors of wars, and a broiling climate catastrophe darkening horizons both physically and existentially among them. Author Roy Scranton addresses these factors head-on in Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization. In this slim volume, Scranton proposes a “radical new vision of human life” borne of honest, harrowing discussion on the gravity of the climate crisis and its repercussions. Toward the end of the book, Scranton concludes that the not-too-distant future will almost certainly look drastically different than the world we have come to know and simultaneously argues a compelling case for the humanities as an essential tool with which we can construct a new civilization out of the ashes. As students of the humanities, we must not be content to be passive consumers or guardians of culture, but rather must be actively—even anxiously—engaged in the real work of creating and shaping history.
Recently, a mentor mentioned that they felt as though the landscape of their young adulthood had been colored by a sense of inevitability, that they operated under an assumption of a world that had and would continue to neatly unfold in patterns of predictable progress and justice. This mindset was familiar to me. Although I generally consider myself someone who is aware of human frailty, who doesn’t expect perfection from my institutions, and who is aware of all the ways systems designed with me in mind have continuously harmed others, I also grew up comfortably nestled in the nest of American exceptionalism. Learning history through the lenses of designated units and tidy resolutions, I both acknowledged the failings of the past and felt assured that the arc of the universe always bends toward justice. Foreign disasters that I saw running on newsreels or splashed across newspapers were tragic, but they would never happen here. And certainly, our nation’s immense wealth and power does insulate us from much of the suffering endured by inhabitants of less fortunate parts of the world (suffering that our own country is often responsible for inflicting), but nevertheless, recent events, or maybe just growing up, have fractured my sense of inevitability. I have felt, instead, that the ground is ever-shifting beneath my feet, that the future is tenuous, that I can’t predict what will come next, no matter how hard I try. I’m reminded of Hegel’s writings about Night, an “empty nothing which contains everything in its simplicity,” where inevitabilities dissolve and fear takes root. In this moment, it seems, “the night of the world hangs out toward us,” and it’s up to us how we choose to respond.
Some scorn the study of the humanities as passive, retroactive, or otherwise incapable of engaging adequately with current events. Scranton rejects this perspective, writing instead that “the study of the humanities is nothing less than the patient nurturing of the roots and heirloom varietals of human symbolic life. This nurturing is a practice not strictly of curation … but of active attention, cultivation, making and remaking. It is not enough for the archive to be stored, mapped, or digitized. It must be worked” (99).
In uncertain times, I sometimes want to stick my head into my studies and wait for the storm to pass. Scranton reminds me that the storm is not passing and we cannot necessarily rely on our institutions to carry us placidly downstream toward justice. Rather, we must forge the justice we desire here and now, with the tools available to us—story-telling, meaning-making, communication across disciplines. As Hannah Arendt wrote, “ … the stories which grow out of what men do and endure, of happenings and events, sink back into the futility inherent in the living world … unless they are talked about over and over again. What saves the affairs of mortal men from their inherent futility is nothing but this incessant talk about them, which in its turn remains futile unless certain concepts, certain guideposts for future remembrance, and even for sheer reference, arise out of it.” As students and scholars, we are well-equipped to roll up our sleeves and engage in this sort of productive talk. The way in which human deeds are discussed and the frameworks through which they are interpreted are neither unimportant nor inevitable. They must be consciously and carefully constructed for the sake of our collective cultural and ideological heritage. This construction is the work Scranton demands.
Scranton also quotes Peter Sloterdijk’s notion of the philosopher’s—or for our purposes, the humanities devotee’s—mission in society, which is to “show that a subject can be an interrupter, not merely a channel that allows thematic epidemics and waves of excitation to flow through it” (86). Scranton then notes that the philosopher must “[slow-dance] to its own rhythm, neither attuned to the collective beat nor operating mechanically … perpetually interrupting its own connection to collective life” (87). However, on this facet of the argument, I must push back. We cannot be the keepers of the present and creators of the future that this moment demands we be by disconnecting from collective life and isolating in ivory towers. We can only care for a world to which we are deeply, indelibly connected, a community we have invested in, a people that we truly love. And what drives a study of the humanities if not a genuine love for the world and its people? Let us harness this love and let it drive us to be active creators of history as it unfolds around us.
