520
STEVEN MARCUS
and reason play? These questions cannot be answered without a fuller
understanding of large-scale social developments in the present, and
this brings us together in our predicament with the social scientists
again.
What contribution if any can the humanities be expected to make
as we begin to face such problems? Matthew Arnold was wrong when
he asserted that culture and literature would and could take the place
of religion. But Arnold was also right when he observed that another
central function of what we call the humanities today was the critical
function. The humanities at their best represent the critical tradition
in our society and culture. That critical tradition must be renewed and
recruited in every generation and as society continues to change, to
produce itself in new forms. The critical tradition can only function
successfully by reason of its aliveness and attentiveness to the world of
the present and so continually clarifying itself and the past.
It
is the
skills and habits of thought associated with this tradition that make up
in great part whatever the strength of the humanities may be, and it is
such qualities of mind, I should like to suggest, that ought to be
brought to bear upon the larger questions that are before us here. For
good or bad the locus of that
tradi~ion
is now almost excl usively within
the university, and many of the difficulties that face us have to do with
finding appropriate means for keeping that tradition alive, bringing it
forward and making it felt and effective in the troubled world both
within the university and outside it that we all inhabit today. Without
the presence of such a critical tradition and the awareness it stimulates
into vivid activity, humanistic studies and education run a double risk.
On the one hand, in the great elite universities, they run the risk of
becoming elaborate exercises in co-optation, systematic means whereby
the existing social-cultural order uncritically and unwittingly repro–
duces itself. On the other, in the middle and lower reaches of the vast
American system of higher education, they run the risk (if they have
not already succumbed to it) of simply becoming conduits for the
further diffusion of debased fragments and decomposed remnants of
what was once a great if corrupt bourgeois-modern social and cultural
tradition. These risks are most acutely apparent in literary studies and
in the teaching of literature in America today, but they are there in
the other humanistic enterprises as well.
