The Bonfire of the Humanities

As a lover of the humanities and social 'sciences', I am always cheered up when a postmodernist snaps out of it, so we can actually have intelligible conversations again.

Paraphrasing famous modernist designer Massimo Vignelli, postmodernism was/is a critique, at best. It doesn't actually provide a worldview.

To me, it's intellectual madness. Fun, in moderation. Useful, to shake things up.

I'm surprised Moyn doesn't mention Edge.org, whose founder John Brockman has explicitly talked about starting Edge and becoming a literary agent to offer alternatives to what he calls "book reviewers" dominating "intellectual" conversations. Incidentally, the Edge.org annual question books are excellent.

In addition, WRT this:

It seems as if, in roundabout ways, all of our current historiographical trend-followers finally agree with White, in the face of what they regard as a great crisis for historical writing today. But it is one thing to call for speculation for the sake of relevance, and another to bring about a new marriage of history and philosophy.

writers like Keith Windschuttle have been discussing these problems since The Killing of History, if not earlier, and Camille Paglia has been discussing them in essays since the 1990s.

Finally, the lack of jobs in the humanities has been acting as both a negative IQ test and a conformity test for decades. I wrote a little more about that in the context of English here: http://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befor... . This may relate to the willingness of academic historians and other academics to speak to the public or avoid conformity more generally.

Are there any non-academic professions which employ a high percentage of humanities PhDs, e.g. publishing, think tanks?

Phrasing the question differently, if the economics of a humanities education means that only the already-wealthy need apply, where do such people put their education to work?

The article could have benefited from a historical perspective on grad school economics and tenure opportunities. When and why did these change and what does it mean for society?

I'm surprised that this doesn't mention Fukuyama's "end of history" idea [1].

When it looks like the world is full of liberal democracies and nations becoming liberal democracies, history feels less compelling.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_history