How the Humanities Have Shaped My Life
Remarks for the University of Richmond Arts and Sciences Next Conference, March 3rd 2018
How have humanities shaped my life? Well, in a way, that autobiographical question is actually a broader one posing as autobiographical: why do humanities matter? I believe they do, so much so that I’ve devoted much of my intellectual, professional, and even social life to promoting them. And that interaction between my day-to-day activities and intellectual pursuits have led me to three core reasons the humanities matter and why they have continued importance in our democracy. First, the humanities give us tools to understand how history matters — our contemporary society, its problems, and its virtues are grounded in a long and complex set of concerns that must inform a proper understanding of the world around us. Second, they help us realize the power of empathy, diversity, and mutuality in everyday life and larger political contexts — I couldn’t teach without empathizing with ALL of my students, and as a politician the humanities gift of empathy allows us to draw contrasts without being insulting or disagreeable, even with those who emphatically disagree with us. Third, they teach us the importance of politics broadly conceived to our fulfillment. — as Aristotle said centuries ago, man is a “political animal,” and to be too disengaged from the life of the community is to risk our identity.
So, the first point, that history matters. After an undergraduate and a graduate degree in academic history and over a decade in the classroom, the clearest lesson is that there is no clarity — our societies and governments have complex, messy, and even contradictory histories. Failures to acknowledge that, either by disconnecting events from their past or falling into simplistic narratives and triumphalism often infect how we think about ourselves and our government today.
The great 19th century thinker Alexis de Tocqueville, has had a huge impact on my thinking, and he profoundly expressed the importance of properly contextualizing history when he wrote about the French Revolution “to understand both the Revolution and what it brought about, one must forget for a moment the France that we see before us, and go ask at the tomb of the France that no longer exists.”
His work showed how tangled up together the ancien regime of the Bourbons and the Revolutionary governments really were, that the stones of the tomb were the raw material of the new edifice. His analysis of the ways in which the Revolution was a continuation of the ancien regime’s weakening of feudal institutions helped historians, and others, realize the even a moment as titanic as the French Revolution wasn’t a clean break from the past. Similarly, today’s struggles over the school to prison pipeline which arose in this year’s General Assembly, for example with bills that reformed how schools punish students, are as inseparable from our deep history of race as the ancien regime was from the Revolution — and why de Tocqueville and other historians in the traditions of the humanities remain valuable.
But the value of history that the humanities teach isn’t just contextualization — it’s also complexity. We Americans often love simple, triumphalist history. We’re more likely to remember Martin Luther King Jr. saying that “the arc of progress bends towards justice” than his warning that “Jim Crow did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races after the civil war…it was a political stratagem…engineered,” a testament to the backwards movement of history. One of King’s own causes, the expansion of the franchise, shows the complexity, the instability of historical gains in equality, and the flaws of Whiggish history. The historian Alexander Keyssar has noted how it was only after the 15th Amendment promised the ballot box to African-Americans that insidious mechanisms like literacy tests and burdensome voter registration requirements emerged to undermine that access. Even the Voting Rights Act of 1965, passed a hundred years after Civil War, has experienced as much backlash, contestation, and undermining since its passage as it has success. The humanities teach us to be cautious about historical determinism, especially optimistic historical determinism — and in turn, gives us more reason to be Wordsworth’s “Happy Warrior” and to fight for our own beliefs.
To conclude this section, I’ll end with a Ta-Nehisi Coates quote about one of my favorite historians Tony Judt. Coates writes, “writers — particularly American writers — constantly feel the pull of solutionism, the desire to assure their readers that there is a way out, even where there isn’t. Judt refused this. History, he understood, does not exist to comfort us.”
So, history matters, however, an understanding of the twists, turns, and interrelationships of our pasts to each other and to our present isn’t all — or even most — of the power of the the humanities. My second point is that the humanities teach us how to value diversity of perspective and experience here in the present, as well. In our political moment where we are so divided this seems especially important, but for me for a teacher and now a politician, it has always been deeply relevant.
Reaching for mutual understanding in our society today is somehow more powerful and important than ever and, yet has never been more fragile or fraught. Globalization, immigration, and migration have pushed global and national conversations onto dangerous ledges, yet nonetheless my kids’ friends, my students, and my constituents still represent a dizzying array of cultures, identities, races, beliefs, and orientations. The humanities, particularly literature, help us grapple with this situation like no other field. Zadie Smith is a writer whose work is consumed with this question and who I turn to for questions and stories of modern identity. Bear with me but I think reading from a recent essay she wrote on Brexit is worth quoting at length. Smith writes:
“Amid all the hysterical characterization of those Leavers in the immediate aftermath — no least my own — I paused and thought of a young woman I had noticed in the playground the year my daughter spent in that school in special measures. She was a mother, like the rest of us, but at least 15 years younger. A play date was the natural next step. . .
But I never took that next step and neither did she. I didn’t know how to penetrate what I felt was the fear and loathing she seemed to have for me, not because I was black . . . But because I was middle class. She had seen me open the shiny black door to the house opposite her housing project, just as I had seen her enter the project’s stairwell each day. I remembered those fraught episodes from childhood, when things were the other way around. Could I ask the girl in the big time House on the park into our cramped council flat?
The answer was, usually, yes. Not without tension, not without occasional mortifying moments of social comedy or glimpses of domestic situations bordering on tragedy — but it was still yes . . . But in this New England it felt…impossible . . . The gap between us became too large.”
Smith’s writings enrich my, and our, conceptions of empathy, connection and identity. But they also illustrate the tension between universal values and cultural uniqueness. What the philosopher Michael Walzer’s describes as the “thick and thin”. Walzer writes, “this dualism is, I think, an internal feature of every morality. Philosophers most often describe it in terms of a (thin) set of universal principles adapted (thickly) to these or those historical circumstances. I have in the past suggested the image of a core morality differently elaborated in different cultures.”
Walzer uses the example of the 1989 Prague marchers, marching for the end of Communism. They carry signs that say “truth” and “justice”, universal beliefs (thin), but would implement those values through health care, education, and governance in a Czech or Slovak way (thick). Like Walzer, I believe that the thick is where we should focus our energy, and our analysis, because this is where we can understand and empathize with other cultures while also crafting our uniquely American path. Just as Zadie Smith, in the piece I read, knows and reaches instinctively for the shared cultural experiences and lived realities she had in common with the lower-class woman she met on the playground — their “thick” commonalities.
The gaps of modernity, between classes, between religions, worldviews, nationalities, between rural and metropolitan regions can be bridged culturally and politically and must be bridged educationally to be an effective teacher. But it takes imagination, it takes thought, and it takes a willingness to communicate in both “thick” and “thin” terms. Smith’s writings exemplify that desire, that willingness, that striving to communicate. In novels and essays ranging from White Teeth to Swing Time, Smith shows characters who strive to bridge that divide, who enter “fraught episodes that lead to moments of tragedy.”
Like Smith, I believe that “flexibility of voice leads to a flexibility in all things.” And like Walzer, I believe that both the thick and thin must be part of our evolving connections to each other. Embodying those two things as a teacher, as a father, as a politician, is something that I, and you, can only imperfectly grasp towards. But we cannot make that effort without those multiplicity of voices, the voices we hear in literature, theology, history, and the other disciplines within the humanities.
And, finally, if there is one area in which we, in this moment, seem to misunderstand one another the most, it is in the arena of politics — electoral, legislative, and interpersonal. The humanities help clarify the value, and ultimate importance, of politics, which can often seem so petty or divisive — a clarification I have, as you can see, taken to heart in the last year of my life. Alan Ryan, in his book On Politics, notes that “for the Greeks, it [politics] was an achievement. Many besides Plato thought it a flawed achievement; when historians and philosophers began to articulate its flaws, the history of political thought began among the argumentative Athenians.”
Ryan brings to light the tremendously diverse ways we in the West have approached politics, while maintaining the central insight that it is, for all its flaws, the only successful, and humane, way to mediate and organize the life of the community. For Ryan, and for me, the story of political thought is the story of how we collectively think about what we value and are willing to sacrifice for. Through that lens, the value of political dialogue — for all its storminess — seems clearer. A discussion in a House of Delegates committee may not be the same as an imaginary conversation between Thomas Hobbes and JS Mill, but it is an expression of the same impulses and purposes.
As a matter of fact, in the General Assembly, most days are like this past where we were caught up in a highly contentious fisheries bill that we will on on Tuesday. The issues were technical and specific, and the alliances complicated and shifting. There, neither John Locke nor Thomas Wolfe seem of consequence, and politics seems at times transactional and insignificant. But what political thought teaches us is to see past that moment, to the larger value of the political process and our communal life. To not be cynical. To value our process because for all its flaws it is righteous. Most of life is seemingly mundane, like the fisheries bill appears to be, but it matters deeply to those directly involved — a connection the humanities prime us to see.
The modern Trumpian impulse, an impulse that is not unique but reoccurs throughout history, is to disengage with the insights of the humanities. It is a desire to simplify history, against the insights of de Toqueville. It is a desire to cram all events into a single narrative, against the insights of leaders like King. It is a rejection of mutual engagement and a rejection of the complexity of our identities, against the passionate prose of Zadie Smith. The humanities, though, don’t tell us to give up hope when faced with those who reject their wisdom. Instead, they give us the tools to convince, to engage. As Michael Walzer said. “the risks of politics can be recklessly increased or cautiously reduced but cannot be avoided altogether unless one gives up the hope for great achievements.”
My engagement with the humanities has taken me to the classroom, the campaign trail, the conference room, and the picket line. It is how I think about raising my children, and the source of my deepest friendships. And It has given me the courage to hope for great achievements, even while navigating the rocky poles of political risk.
