I've just read Rudolf Bultmann's essay on 'Humanism and Christianity'. His critique of humanism, and of a Christianity too quick to sideline the education of intellect, conscience and imagination remains a telling rejoinder to the claims of human autonomy from any authority other than the self-determining self.
And the threats to human freedom and dignity from a mechanised, economically dominated existence in which human beings are means to the ends of economic, political and cultural forces, is one Bultmann understood deeply, and existentially.
"The decisive factor is that man is not looked upon, and does not look upon himself, as a being serving the purposes of natural, corporate, economic and political life, but as a person, that is, a being who is something on his own account and carries his significance and value in himself, and who is independent of his availability for any of life's practical objects. In a world which is more and more technically developed, and organised to the hilt, man is misused more and more as a means to ends, and is degraded to the status of a member in the machine of life" (pp. 166-167)
Bultmann was writing as a German Christian in 1948 in a Europe still recovering from the shock of the savagery unleashed by ideologies founded on power-backed authority requiring human subservience to military, political and economic forces in which human beings were tools of the State, and a means to ends other than human flourishing. It is no accident, that National Socialism suppressed the humanities, tried to ban the life of the intellect and imagination, and sought to control, edit and censor learning in the universities. When people are taught about their dignity as human beings, encouraged towards personal liberty of conscience and freedom of intellect, educated towards a view of the world which is questioning of power and protective of human aspiration and inspiration, they inevitably challenge and resist those who would control and use human beings for the ends of an ideology or a State. Bultmann was amongst those who offered a sustained intellectual resistance to such ideology and State sponsored control of human life, thought and conscience.
When the humanities are marginalised in favour of utility and functionality, the State is saying something about how it views its citizens as human beings, and whether we are to be valued as ends in ourselves, or as means to the ends of the State and the prevalent economic culture. All this, Bultmann saw, understood and warned against. Seventy years later we are enmeshed in technological innovations and economic and geo-political developments Bultmann himself could not have imagined, from the Internet to genetic technology, from AI to globalised economics.
The consequences for the humanities is dire when utility, functionality and economic return dominate the criteria of the curriculum in school and university. The evidence is now overwhelming that such market forces shape how we believe education should function in an increasingly utilitarian and market driven consumer culture. The humanities, from music to literature, from classics to art, from history to languages are being pushed down the priority list of schools and, in particular, Universities dependent on State funding. As the State increasingly requires practical end products, measurable and demonstrable, such as employability, economic skill sets, graduate attributes that are marketable in return for its investment of public finds, so it is ever more difficult for the humanities to demonstrate their economic return on investment.
That is because the end product is in soft graduate attributes to do with the person, character, values and aspirations of the pupil leaving school, the student leaving university.
How do you measure the loss to a child deprived of years of weekly encounter with music and art, the great nourishers of imagination and creativity? And how then measure the loss to our cultural health and social capital?
What criteria measure the contribution to our culture of a mind opened to historical perspectives, and capable of critical informed thinking about current events; in workplace influence, in social conversation, when interpreting and discerning the unregulated flow of news, opinion, claim and counter claim on social media?
And what difference does it make to have a population capable of speaking more than their own language, and having worked to understand how an 'other' people speak, think and communicate the deep and true and enriching experiences of their 'other' culture?
Or as one more, what difference would it make to our culture if we had at least some understanding of religion, our own and other people's life convictions, and had learned that diversity in humanity is a given, and can lead either to co-operation, enrichment and acceptance, or to fear, resentment and hostility?
The humanities do what the name says; help us understand and live humanely within the reality of being human.
The degradation of the humanities in education, from primary to post graduate, impoverishes our humanity, because education minus such dimensions suffers a sclerosis of purpose. Yes employability is important; yes skills that contribute to the common good and training towards excellence in career and social contribution are to be expected. But that need not, and must not, deprive pupils in schools and students in Higher Education from the opportunity also to develop areas of humane learning. To speak the language of another people, to train the imagination in metaphor and image, story and poetry, to learn ways of interpreting history so as to understand the present and discern the benefits of power at the service of people, and the dangers of power harnessed to narrow ambitions and fixed ideologies - these are also essential components in an education capable of sustaining democratic freedoms. They do this by preserving as non-negotiable principles, the dignity of each human life, and the value of each person as an end in her or his self.
Rudolf Bultmann's essay, 'Humanism and Christianity', was written and spoken as a lecture, at a time when the cost and consequences of forgetting these ethical imperatives was still being counted. And primary to all these ethical imperatives, as a core conviction definitive of the human being, is the recognition and honouring of each child, woman and man as an end in themselves, to be accorded dignity and whose value is more than economic productivity.
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