Dr. Jerome McGann

Dr. Jerome McGann

On September 17, 2014, at the grand opening of JMU Cohen Center, Dr. Jerome McGann gave a lecture entitled, "Technology, Humanism, History, and Method." His wonderful speech was recorded as follows:

I am grateful to James Madison University, to Larry Burton, and especially to Ralph Cohen for inviting me here today.  Scholars like myself don’t often have the chance to speak on such an auspicious occasion.  For the founding of this Center for the Study of Technological Humanism is an important institutional venture.  Why do I think that?  A few stories will help me explain.  I begin with the most recent.

When Megyn Kelley of Fox News interviewed Dick Cheney on June 18 of this year, she began by asking him to respond to the following passage from an article just printed in the Washington Post by Paul Waldman:

"There is not a single person in America who has been more wrong and more shamelessly dishonest on the topic of Iraq than Dick Cheney, and now as the cascade of misery and death and chaos, he did so much to unleash raises anew, Mr. Cheney has the unadulterated gall to come before the country and tell us that it's all someone else's fault." The suggestion is that you caused this mess, Mr. Vice President. What say you?

“I just fundamentally disagree.”  The phrase is disturbing because its purpose is to blur the distinction between fact and opinion.  In the interview, not all of the relevant facts – not even perhaps the worst – were brought forward by Ms Kelley.  Well over 100,000 Iraqi civilians were killed between 2003-2008.  And to say that  “there was no doubt in anybody's mind about the extent of Saddam's involvement in WMDs” is definitely inaccurate – or to put it more truthfully, definitely not true.  Many people at the time expressed their doubts often and publicly, and some – the United Nations, most notably – actually tried to verify what was or wasn’t true about the American administration’s charges.  But the administration did not allow Hans Blix’s inspection team to make its report in time to prevent the ensuing disaster.

I bring up this interesting story, this interesting history, to begin my salute to Ralph Cohen and James Madison University for founding this Center.    It is an institution that will make events of this kind a focus of its study: that is to say, both the original events that launched a preventable war and the media agents that promoted, resisted, and subsequently reflected upon it.  Indeed, the media and its agents are in  certain obvious respects the most important since they frame and disseminate the messaging.  The Fifth Estate is not now what it was in the 18^th century when our republic was founded and when the technologies for information transmittal were primitive compared to today.  Global communications now proliferate, for better and for worse,  within a radically non-coherent order.  Many of these resources – by no means all -- are available to individuals and relatively small agencies whose locations are as scattered and diverse as their agendas.  Perhaps even more ominous, all are in the hands of those “thrones, principalities, powers, and dominions” that the New Testament warned us about.  Few social networks are more complex or more in need of careful attention than these technological networks.  “More in need” because few are more consequential for the daily lives – even the lives and deaths – of so many.

I’ve been stressing the term “technological” in the phrase “Technological Humanism”.  And after all, the global power and potential of digital communication have swept all of us off our feet.  But that very fact, our being swept away, raises a serious problem that leads me to shift attention to the second term, “Humanism”.  This older and decidedly old-fashioned term seems to me far the most important in the Center’s self-description.

“Of course Professor McGann will say that,” you’re thinking.  “He’s a very old-fashioned humanist scholar”.  As I am.  But it was old-fashioned humanist concerns that made C. P. Snow’s 1959 reflections on “The Two Cultures” so decisive for my work from the outset.  Indeed, it was old-fashioned humanist concerns that took me to Caltech in 1982, where I first learned how to use computational machines.  In 1992, the same set of concerns launched my hands-on involvement with digital resources that continues to this day.  An involvement not just with computational research tools like The Ivanhoe Game, Juxta, and The Rossetti Archive, but with the institutional mechanisms that are their necessary enabling infrastructure.  Institutions like IATH, NINES, the Digital Public Library of America.  Institutions like this Center.  Institutions committed to interdisciplines.

Such commitments are difficult to foster and even more difficult to maintain.  This happens because disciplines on both sides of the two cultures have grown so committed to specialization.  I shouldn’t say “disciplines”, however – that’s too bland and general.  I should say people, the individuals who live out the disciplines.  In this respect it’s helpful to recover a sense of history.  We associate the hard sciences with specialization, but in their formative years – through the 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th centuries – scientists took a decidedly interdisciplinary and capacious view of their work.  This happened, of course, because their education was shaped by the humanist tradition.

Fast forward to the 20^th century, and in particular the late 20^th century.  The Two Cultures was a prescient forecast of the now-notorious “Crisis in the Humanities”. Briefly, this “crisis” reflects a view, widely held both within and outside the research and educational community, that traditional humane studies have little relevance to the complexities of our contemporary world.  The fault in the humanities’ stars is judged to be a lack of technical expertise, a kind of squishy generalism.  Across the cultural way stands an army of specialized experts in the so-called STEM fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.  STEM fields – a most telling word.  For that organic metaphor is a squishy gesture concealing an across-the-board crisis in all our disciplines of knowledge.  As Snow warned almost 75 years ago.  Disciplinary sclerosis is the enemy within disciplinary expertise.

The modern scientific imagination drew its visionary balance from the humanist tradition out of which it grew.  At the same time, the humanities learned from the New Science the importance of an empirical orientation and disciplinary rigor. This is the story of the coming of what we call The Enlightenment, so fundamental to the founding ideas of our country.  It is a great story that today I must simply leave you to remember.  It is important because it is the story that stands behind the second story I do mean to tell – an exemplary tale about a turn toward expertise that humansts began taking in the mid-20^th century. Humanities education and scholarship shifted away from their traditional grounding in history and material culture toward literary philosophy and interpretive theory.

For my generation, the name Paul De Man would be totemic for that shift.  Listen to what he had to say about literary studies in 1970 as the Theory Movement in humanities was in serious lift-off: “There is no room . . . for notions of accuracy and identity in the shifting world of interpretation.”  Or as he remarked a few years earlier in an essay on the poetry of John Keats, Keats’s poems do not have “positive existence”.  History was not exactly “bunk” for De Man, as a famous American entrepreneur once said, but factual accuracy was no longer a “notion” that the humanities had room for. 

I note in passing – another interesting story -- that in 1969 Ralph Cohen had just made his own, very different move in literary studies. That was the year he founded the journal New Literary History, which quickly established itself as one of the most influential scholarly periodicals in the western world. Cohen established  the journal because, as he wrote in his editor’s “Note” in the first issue, he was disturbed at “the current rejection of history either as guide to or knowledge of the present”. The journal was a decisively advanced organ for exploring literary and cultural theory.

At the same time Cohen had not turned his back on “notions of accuracy and identity” in literary studies, nor on the need for an accurate account of their “positive existence” in history.  At the dawning moment of the Theory Movement in humanities, Cohen was calling everyone back to a guiding principle of traditional humane studies:  that humanities scholarship means keeping faith with the empirical factors that shape the identities of your subjects as they shape-change over time.  Meshed as we are in the complex forces of history, thoroughness and accuracy are as imperative for the humanist as they are for the scientist.  And as they ought to be for the citizen and the citizen’s representative, the politician.

How does humanities research and education work and why is it important?  Another story will help me begin my response to that question.  This one comes from the New York Times of 24 March 2014, where a Caltech scientist, Sean Carroll, gave a succinct account of how scientific research proceeds:

Nothing makes scientists happier than an experimental result that completely contradicts a widely accepted theory. . . .  Science progresses when a good theory is superseded by an even better theory, and the most direct route to building a better theory is to be confronted by data that simply don’t fit the old one.

That is an important way of knowledge, as we know. But it is not a description of how the human sciences operate.  The giveaway is the keyword, “data”.  Data about the natural world is not at all like the data we amass about the human world. We study Nature because we are natural creatures, so that understanding Nature seems important for understanding how we might live better human lives.  As William Blake once famously observed, “Where Man is not Nature is barren”.  True as that thought is – that human beings cultivate the natural world -- another famous poet from the same epoch had an equally true, but very different, thought.  Byron thought that it was men who laid waste to Great Creating Nature.  Looking at the beauty of the Greek landscape he reflected how “Man, enamour’d of distress/ Would mar it into wilderness”.  We inflict ourselves on the state of Nature and try to shape it to our needs.  In those acts we change our relation to Nature.  But Nature does not change, it simply mutates, as the humanly devastated State of Nature around Chernobyl reminds us.

The humanities are concerned with human beings and what we’ve done.  We do that by studying the records we make and leave behind.  That is why, for the humanist, libraries and museums – call them memory banks – are as fundamental as the laboratory is to the natural scientist.    The Book of Nature is difficult and mysterious, and so are the Books of Men, the records we make – so many now digital records -- that are the object of humanist studies.   But Nature is mysterious because it is absolute, human records are mysterious because they’re not.  Fallible human beings – scientists, as we say -- study the Book of Nature and make both wonderful discoveries and terrible mistakes.  But the Book of Nature, their subject, is itself perfect.

Human studies are different.  In practicing them, fallible human beings study the books and records that were made by other fallible human beings. Data are records and they are as prone to error as any other record.  Worse yet, all these imperfect records are always fallibly preserved and imperfectly passed along to other fallible beings.  Skeptics might call that a house built on sand.  It’s actually more like a house resting on the backs of those famous turtle that go, as we say, all the way down.   You need a lot of sympathy when you practice the human sciences.  It’s difficult to be sympathetic to sand, it’s a lot easier with turtles.  It’s even easier with human beings.  For the humanist, it’s human beings – natural, mortal -- all the way down.

Socrates proposed that knowledge should be understood and pursued as complete self-reflection.  That was an impossible proposal, as Socrates knew.  He thought he was wise because he knew he knew nothing for certain.  We call his knowledge program the Hellenic vision of truth.   In the West we know its complement as the (equally impossible) Hebrew or Christian or Islamic vision.  These are the visions of the People of the Book, who practice an equally impossible task.  The Bible is our normative book for studying human history.  Why?  Because as a book of truth it is also an imperfect book, full of error and evil: what Poe called “the good and the bad and the worst and the best."

But like the hard sciences, the human sciences have systematic methods, and you can see why.  Humanists need as much rigor and system as we can muster because everything we study, including ourselves, is so unreliable.  The Book of Nature is rock-solid, the Word of God is turtles all the way down.  So are the humanities, which have to be prosecuted as an art:  that is, less under the sign of theory or idea, and more under the sign of method or practice.   As one of our greatest humanities scholars once observed, humanistic study is like fishing.  You only become good at it by patient and repeated experience, and by scrupulous attention to what, where, and why you’re doing it.  Perhaps that’s even what Jesus had in mind when he urged his students, his disciples, to become fishers of men.

Scrupulous attention to the specific and “positive existence” of the human record, past as well as ongoing present.  Mark Twain called all that Life on the Mississippi. You have to know the land, the river, the seasonal shifts, the weather conditions, and all their  unpredictable history.  And you have to know it at first hand, in actual contact with the documentary record.  And you have to know it repeatedly.  Finally, you also have to know it through the first hand knowledge of others whom you know to have long-standing experiential knowledge.  Those are the people you go fishing with.  Those are the people whose humanities scholarship makes a difference.  In the shifting world of the human sciences, accuracy is imperative, as much as you can manage.  We can’t make reliable judgments without being confident that we have accurate information – that’s to say, reports that mean to be candid, honest, and as thorough as possible.   The best we can say of Vice President Cheney is that he was optimistic in his reports.  That seems the truth.  The additional truth is that he was dishonest – and, alas, still is.

People with a commitment to knowledge and truth – people from every quarter of the social and political landscape -- recognize dishonesty.   The recognition is non-partisan and interdisciplinary, a function of a common, if differently shaped, vocation to truth.  But to give that vocation social force you need more than the commitment of a committed individual. 

I am sure that Paul De Man would have been appalled at the Vice President’s cavalier attitude toward accuracy and factual truth.  But De Man’s skepticism about human knowledge – about the positive, factual record—was, though far from dishonest, seriously misguided.  It set an unreliably narrow model for human studies.  I know a better model, or at least a story about a better model.   It’s a story about another scholar – a greater scholar than De Man, in my judgment, though one far less famous (or infamous).  He was an Assistant Professor of Greek and Latin at Harvard, his name was Milman Parry, and he died fairly young – at 33.  In 1934, the year before he died, he delivered an address to the Board of Overseers of Harvard College.  Though it bore an  unprepossessing title, “The Historical Method in Literary Criticism”, Parry delivered it because he was troubled by a Crisis in Humanities.

Even in 1934 there was a Crisis in the Humanities? Alas, yes.  For the fact is that the humanities have been in a regular state of crisis at least since the 18^th century.  Crisis has become a fate of humane studies, whose Modern vocation is the pursuit of social, historical, and personal truth and the preservation of the record of those pursuits.  These are obligations that humanists undertake knowing they are impossible to fulfill.  The historical record that comes down to us is a tiny fractional residue of the human past it might reflect, and even that fraction is riven with holes and fragmentary, disfeatured remains.  And as for the record that grows under own hands, not least in the data-glut of the present, it has always been impossible to master.  Today it has grown to such outrageous dimensions it has to be data-mined.  Data-mining, we may want to remember, was what helped Mr. Cheney and his accomplices to their misjudgment about Saddam Hussein and WMDs.   

Milman Parry did not know about Big Data but he didn’t have to.  His little data was trouble enough for someone interested in fishing for the truth.  And that is what interested him and what he made the subject of his lecture.   The important context of the lecture is signaled by its date, 1934, when “propaganda. . .social changes and confusion” were taking such hold of bewildered people throughout Europe and America.  Stalin had assumed control of the Soviets in 1923, Hitler of the Weimar Republic in 1933, and a freewheeling American Capitalism had plunged the United States into a tormented social condition.  Parry reflected on that situation:

The chief emotional ideas to which men seem to be turning at present. . .are those of nationality—for which they exploit race—and class. . . .  Anyone who has followed the history of the use of propaganda for political purposes, with its extraordinary development of intensity and technique in the past fifty years [recognizes how] those who were directing that propaganda expressed their lack of concern, or even contempt, for what actually was so, or actually had been so.

Parry went on quietly to suggest that “the European humanistic tradition” had something important to contribute to these benighted societies.  He was not thinking of what Poe called “the glory that was Greece, and the grandeur that was Rome”.  On the contrary, he was thinking about humanist scholars who spend their lives trying to give accurate reports about those worlds, so dead and far gone from the Modern present, as he was reminding the Harvard Overseers.  He was also fully aware how insignificant – how pedantic -- such academic pursuits often appear to living people enspelled by propagandistic dreams of national glory and grandeur.

Parry’s heroes are not Achilles or Hector, not even Socrates or Plato.  They are far more minor and modest.  They are people who believe “that there is nothing at the same time finer and more practical than the truth”, and who will spend their days acting on that belief.  You want to know what such days are like?  They are days spent studying a passage in a book few people read or perhaps have even heard of -- perhaps a book in a dead language -- trying to say something accurate and truthful about it.  I knew a scholar who set all his other research work aside for months trying to write a footnote that told the truth about a sentence in a letter by the poet Tennyson.  Whether the document being searched has ideas with current social relevance is, for this kind of scholar, beside the point.  Indeed, apparent irrelevance might be exactly to the point for a people -- that would be for all of us here today -- surrounded by the propaganda and confusion of our fiercely, just-in-time present.   As the poet Bobby Burns once wisely wrote, it’s important “to see ourselves as others see us”.  Or to try to.

What then is the point?  Simply, “that there is nothing at the same time finer and more practical than the truth”.  That would be the truth as such.  Accuracy and truth are not well characterized as “notions” that we have – De Man’s characterization.  Better to know them as commitments that we make.  The strength of a commitment – and therefore its practicality -- rests in how deep it goes.  The turtles of truth go all the way down to where there is, we trust, something we will never have and never know: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

And yet, that even being so, that impossible truth is one of only two things to which we can honorably pledge our complete allegiance.  The other isn’t a thing at all.  It is an individual person, one or another -- someone, someones -- in particular.

We honor ordinary people who emerge to public awareness when they speak truth to powerful people and the thrones of their power.  The glory that can come to such truth-tellers, however brief, is important, even if it comes too late to prevent truthless disaster.  But further down and out of sight are the scholars of the truth.  Milman Parry was one, and he told a moving tale about such people.

The moral of these stories?  It doesn’t need words.  It surrounds us today in the existence of this Center and in the people who brought it about.  Milman Parry was an inspiring humanist truth-teller, but he needed an institution to sustain him.  That is why this institution, this Center, is so important.  It will bring coordinated humanistic discipline to bear on the technologies that are reshaping our national and global communities.  And from those communities will come new stories to be told.  Some will be sobering, some inspiring.  They will all be instructive.

On behalf of those communities, then, I thank you for this Center. The world will little note, nor long remember, what I say here, but may it never forget what you did here.  I dare to invoke those famous words only because I trust that what you have begun will keep, as Gertrude Stein used to say, “beginning again and again.”