Technological Change and the Humanities Curriculum/part one

TECHNOLOGICAL change and the humanities curriculum? The very suggestion--that a developing technics will exert a profound and consistent pressure on the humanities curriculum--has a faintly ridiculous tone. For our special prejudices as teachers in the humanities dispose us to think of our subject matter as fundamentally opposed to technology.

This is to say, the idols of our academic cave persuade us to a series of facile dichotomies: the humanities are an island of sanity in a morass of technological insanity; the humanities develop the whole man; the humanities are a reservoir of stable values in a civilization badgered by an unassimilated series of technical innovations. Technology stresses the mechanical; the humanities develop the imaginative. With technology we associate the clinical, the standardized, the commercial; with the humanities, the sympathetic, the individual, the esthetic. The end result of the first series is the one-eyed televiewer; the proud product of the second, a contemporary counterpart of Doctor Johnson.

There is just enough truth in this vision to blind us to its larger falseness. And this distrust of the businessman and technician as inimical to culture has roots deep in American experience. The frontier, Jacksonian vulgarity, the Gilded Age, Babbittry, and the ad-copy conformity of the present--these echo the theme that, in America, practical accomplishment is what counts. Art, in this mythos, is for the ladies and expatriates. And, indeed, as the "custodians" of culture in America, we have seldom operated in what might be called an encouraging atmosphere. We act the way we feel: just another generation of dedicated people fighting a delaying action against the vulgar masses.

Our tradition reminds us that we are "defenders" of the humanities. For these and other reasons, then, we view with skepticism the possibility that business technology has anything to offer our own specialty. Co-existence sounds too much like the appeasement of vulgarity. This condition of armed truce no longer fits all the facts. In the writer's opinion, important changes have taken place in the patronage of the arts in America largely because of business and technology. These changes, further, are major contributions to the power of the humanities in our national life. Our previous experience with the cruder excesses of business and technology has prevented us from seeing and cooperating with, in any thorough-going way, these new developments.

This paper describes, in an introductory fashion, some of these new modes of patronage. It also suggests ways in which humanists might contribute to the effectiveness of these changes. Though it may appear too uncritical of certain phases of these new media of esthetic communication-sensational advertising, for example, the reader should remember that we are usually well aware of these negative tendencies.

Moreover, we are in no position to criticize until we have done our best to encourage the positive factors. And there are many. For technology-through innovations in paperback book publication, LP recording processes, and color reproduction methods; and business-through its creation of new methods of distribution: the ubiquitous pocketbook rack and the book, record, and portfolio of the month clubs; have revolutionized the patterns of art patronage in the United States.

These developments have taken place largely since World War II; their end is not in sight. Above all else these factors in the mass reproduction revolution need what only the imaginative and unstinting cooperation of the humanities faculties can give: stability and a sense of direction. In return, we can expect unmatched resources in new reproductions of literature, art, and music.