Is the Next Renaissance Coming?

embattled humanities; anti-intellectualism; the coming change

The State of the Humanities

Are the humanities on the cusp of a renaissance? This may seem like an impossible, even ludicrous, question to entertain right now.

Within the academy and outside of it, the humanities (the studies of literature, art, culture) are embattled on all sides.

The political right and left have done much to weaken the academic study of the humanities over the past four decades. From the right, conservatives and neoliberals have pushed universities toward vocationalism by seeing education as job training. And as state funding for university education was increasingly cut in the 1970s and ‘80s, the cost of tuition rose significantly. Disciplines without clear economic utility are deemed wasteful, at best, Quixotic.

From the left, many humanities disciplines have turned from studying the true, the beautiful, and the good to analyze structures of power and to promote a kind of scholarship political activism. While post-structuralism and critical theory yielded helpful insights, their dominance often reduced literature and art to political symptoms (colonial, patriarchal, capitalist, or otherwise) at the exclusion of aesthetic, formal, spiritual, and moral inquiries. Criticism became political diagnosis rather than appreciation and evaluation. The ideological left became the new orthodoxy in literary studies, often determining admission into programs and job placement on the market.

While the right emptied the humanities of value by reducing education to utility, the left emptied them of meaning by reducing texts to ideology. Both sides risk forgetting that the humanities exist to form human beings (not just money-makers and activists) to cultivate imagination, empathy, wisdom, and moral discernment and to help people find meaning and beauty in life. Erosion from both sides wore down the humanities, no longer celebrated as a shared moral and imaginative education for public and spiritual life.

Meanwhile, beyond the walls of the academy, among the broader public, literacy is in decline. Fewer people read. Disdain for the humanities is growing in the rising tide of anti-intellectualism. In his essay on anti-intellectualism, David Cycleback defines “anti-intellectualism” as “social attitude that dismisses or mistrusts intellectuals, expertise, and critical thinking, instead favoring emotional and irrational thinking including intuition.” His essay outlines its characteristics on both the political right and the political left.

Among young people, some students find it difficult to read complete books at all. The reason might be the smartphone and addiction to short-form content, but the cause is likely deeper. A tool of unprecedented access to the great works of literature and philosophy, the smartphone is more commonly used as a tool of passive entertainment.

The poorest are suffering the most from this addiction. Studies show that the negative effects of smartphones disproportionately hurt people of lower-income households, where quiet spaces are scarce and abuse, anxiety, and depression are more common (see this study by the Pew Research Center). See also my recent post that shows how the smartphone contributes to higher literacy rates.

All around us, in public fora and on social media, the art of dialogue and civil dispute continues to disintegrate. AI threatens to outpace human creativity. For those who care about the life of the mind, it seems as though the humanities are receding into irrelevance.

This situation is bleak. I’m not denying that. But despite all of this (and because of some of it), the humanities will soon see a revival.

Giulio Clovio, Adoration of the Magi and Solomon Adored by the Queen of Sheba from the Farnese Hours, 1546

The Historical Precedent

History suggests that such moments are often the prelude to a renaissance.¹

Nearly every renaissance has begun either under conditions of collapse or shortly after cultural exhaustion and the loss of meaning. And, like the European Renaissance of the fifteenth century, the next one will come from outside of the academy.

I’m currently reading the letters of Marsilio Ficino, the Italian Renaissance translator who introduced the writings of Plato, Neoplatonism, and the so-called Hermes Trismegistus to Italy and the Latin West at a time when the academies were corrupted and embroiled in tedious debates. His para-university “Florentine Academy” helped initiate the revival of learning during the Renaissance.

In fact, the state of the universities today resemble those in Ficino’s time, just before the flourishing of the Italian Renaissance. Medieval universities were locked in Aristotelian scholastic logic-chopping. All across Europe, the major universities of Paris, Bologna, Padua, Oxford, etc. were dominated by a form of stale scholasticism, which focused on logic, commentary traditions, and the reconciliation of Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology (esp. via Thomas Aquinas). By the 14th century, Aristotelian logic and commentaries on Aquinas, Averroes, and Avicenna dominated the university faculties.

The portrait of the medieval academy is not unlike our current academies, wherein the humanities have fragmented into subfields that bicker with one another in specialized jargon. The older ideal of a shared human conversation about meaning, beauty, mortality, freedom has been replaced slowly by the political in-fighting, performative scholarship, and tribal academic discourse that has wearied and repulsed public interest (and many within the academy itself).

But if you examine the characteristics of cultural renaissances of the past, you’ll find that many of them followed hard upon cultural collapse and almost all of them began outside of the academy. The Islamic Golden Age (8th-13th centuries) followed the collapse of the Umayyad dynasty. The Palaiologan Renaissance (13th-15th centuries), which helped transmit the Greek inheritance to Europe, was a cultural rebirth in the wake of cultural collapse. The European Renaissance (14th-15th centuries) was partly initiated by the fall of Constantinople in 1453. When the refugees of Byzantium fled west, they brought with them into Italy the ancient Greek texts that the Byzantine scholars of the previous renaissances preserved and commented upon. The introductions of these new texts helped loosen the grip of pedantic academic disputes in European universities.

Even the Romantic Movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was sparked largely by cultural disruptions by the Industrial and French Revolutions. Romanticism contained all the major signs of a cultural, creative, and intellectual revival.²

In each instance, renewal of the humanities did not arrive from academic institutions. In most cases, the academy was a hindrance to these movements until it was reformed. The revival came from exiles, readers and translators, extra-academic and para-academic educators, and small circles of study that reimagined what the humanities could do for society.

Speaking of a “new Renaissance” here, I suggests that the very signs we take as symptoms of decline (such as technological disruption, institutional distrust, cultural anxiety) may also be the early signs of a rebirth.

Surviving the Refining Fire

But looking closer to our own moment, I see a revival of the humanities in the near future. Our culture is already exhausted by AI content. And after the generation of students who ChatGPT’ed their way through high school and college arrive on the job market, once society is saturated with people who cannot publicly speak or write or dialogue, and once the effects of intellectual passivity and mindless entertainment are fully felt, the world will look again to the humanities. If it is able to look anywhere at all.

And when they do, the universities who survived this nadir are going to be the ones who have fought against gatekeeping and participated in the revival. Some departments are already responding correctly to this need. Harvard’s Arts and Humanities Division just launched The Public Culture Project, which aims at addressing cultural disintegration through public conferences and podcasts that center the relevance of the humanities to our current crisis.

Other programs like Rutgers Public Humanities Initiative, Public Humanities at Yale, NYU Steinhardt’s Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity (PACH), and many others, are the kinds that will help reintroduce the need for the humanities in public discourse.

In a few years, instead of seeing the humanities as a weapon for political ideologies and culture wars, many people, I hope, will see them for what they are, a tool for building a more just and democratic society and as an instrument of human happiness and flourishing.

Until then, what comes next will be refining fire.

1. And this idea that a new Renaissance could be coming is simmering in circles as broad as cultural and literary historians, philosophers, and esotericists, including some of the commenters on my YouTube channel. More recently, Jared Henderson concluded a recent interview by suggesting that renaissances and enlightenments follow periods of darkness. An astrologist friend of mine is convinced that the revolutions and revivals of learning follow the pattern of Pluto’s transit into Aquarius every 250 years. Not to endorse all of these varied contexts in which the word “renaissance” is used, this is merely to say that a real renaissance in the humanities may be brought to a boil soon. And if it does, it will happen faster than it has ever happened before.

2. The Romantic Revival one isn’t often considered a renaissance, but it certainly was. For more on why Romanticism was a renaissance, two excellent starting places include C.S. Lewis’s address at Cambridge “De description temporum” (1954) and Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971).