Selected excerpts from The Meaning of the Humanities:
The first conclusion I must draw is that humanism is no new phenomenon of the fourteenth century; and, furthermore, that there is little justification for the designation of the next two centuries as marking a different type of life to be described by the term Renaissance. Instead, it would be more correct to say that, after the days of the Roman Empire, whenever any number of people were sufficiently free from immediate concern about their livelihood and lives, the more intelligent regularly began to satisfy their curiosity about this world.
The most efficient means for the satisfaction of this curiosity, of course, was learning, or the study of books in which, then as now, were preserved mankind's accumulated experience and thought. The curious, therefore, turned to the writings of the ancients, not through any sentimental reverence for the past, but because the more recent writings were almost exclusively concerned with matters of religion, or the relation of this life to the life hereafter. Among the ancients, on the contrary, they found persons as curious about this life and this world as themselves, and persons much farther along the road to satisfying their desires in this direction. [p.76]
Curiosity is precisely what we need from our elites today. In this regard, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are no better than George Bush (H.W. or W.).
This, then, I take to be the true meaning of the humanities in the process of education: that they are not ends in themselves, not closed formulae within which the mind is confined, but means capable of endless improvement, and the best means of inducting youth into an understanding of the world. In that sense, therefore, humanism and the Renaissance did not come to an end in the sixteenth century, even less than they began in the fourteenth. [p.87]
I would submit, however, that the U.S. experienced a steep decline beginning about the time the Constitution was written. One can forgive the author of the essay for not picking up on this downward trajectory since this essay was published in 1938 and it would have not been nearly as obvious at that time.
A subtle difference exists in Latin between scientia and eruditio, and in English between knowledge and learning. Scientia and knowledge, denoting a mental possession rather than a mental process, can be identified with the natural sciences; eruditio and learning, denoting a process rather than a possession, with the humanities. The ideal aim of science would seem to be something like mastery, that of the humanities something like wisdom. [p.117]
The fact is that, for thousands of years, practitioners of power-politics have tried hard to suppress practitioners of the humanities, and they are still trying. [p.121]
Morever, they [humanists] do not yield easily to dragooning. For all their intangibility, or perhaps because of it, they have in general offered surprisingly stubborn resistance to coercion. Without benefit of arms, early Christianity won its place in a hostile Roman empire, and once established therein, survived the empire's collapse. Greek, Jewish, and Arab learning, in turn, made their way into the stream of jealously defended Christian culture, in spite of the Inquisition and the civil arm....[p.122]
Our thinking and living, even our questioning and doubting, can seem to make sense only so long as we have a primary confidence that we and the world have each some intrinsic order, and some essential congruence with each other. [p.124]
