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 RICHARD E. MILLER
KURT SPELLMEYER

THE NEW HUMANITIE S READER

THIRD EDITION

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Visit The New Humanities Reader Web site @ www.newhum.com

RICHARD E. MILLER
KURT SPELLMEYER

www.newhum.com provides an invaluable resource for both students and

teachers.

Students will find:

• self-directed tutorials to supplement classroom instruction
• sample papers, including teacher comments and recommended grades
• help figuring out what constitutes plagiarism.

Teachers will find:

• sample assignments and sample assignment sequences written by teach­
ers from across the country
• a complete orientation manual, providing concrete advice on how to use
The New Humanities Reader and its companion Web site to improve student
writing
• suggestions on how to grade and respond to student writing.
 THE
New Humanities
READER
Third Edition

Richard E. Miller
R U T G E R S U N IV E R S IT Y

Kurt Spellmeyer
R U T G E R S U N IV E R S IT Y

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT PUBLISHING COMPANY Boston New York

Acknowledgments

This project has been a long time in the making. It has been helped along by the hard work and dedi­
cation of the assistant and associate directors of the Rutgers Writing Program, the writing program's
teaching faculty and staff, the undergraduates at our university, and the teachers and undergraduates
from around the country who have joined us on this project. We are fortunate to work in an environ­
ment where so many people are willing to innovate and to give curricular change a try. We are grate­
ful, as well, for Houghton M ifflin's commitment to this project: the folks in custom publishing, our
editors for the national edition of this volume, and the sales reps have all helped us fine-tune our vi­
sion for the new humanities. Now, all that remains to do is what always remains: to think connec-
tively, to read creatively, and to write one's way to new ways of seeing.

Publisher: Pat Coryell

Sponsoring Editor: Lisa Kimball
Marketing Manager: Tom Ziolkowski
Discipline Product Manager: Giuseppina Daniel
Senior Development Editor: Martha Bustin
Project Editor: Aimee Chevrette Bear
Senior Media Producer: Philip Lanza
Senior Content Manager: Janet Edmonds
Art and Design Manager: Jill Haber
Cover Design Manager: Anne S. Katzeff
Senior Photo Editor: Jennifer Meyer Dare
Senior Composition Buyer: Chuck Dutton
Editorial Assistant: Sarah Truax
Marketing Associate: Bettina Chiu
Editorial Assistant: Laura Collins

Cover credit: Globe, © Doable/Getty Images; The Sentinel Building and The Transamerica Building, San
Francisco, California, USA, © Damir Frkovic/Masterfile; Tswana woman on cellular phone, © Strauss/
Curtis/Corbis; Traditional Windmill and Turbines Netherlands, © Andrej Kopac/Masterfile.

Permissions and credits are found in the Credits beginning on page 783. This Credits section
constitutes an extension of the copyright page.

Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or me­
chanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system with­
out the prior written permission of the copyright owner unless such copying is expressly permitted by
federal copyright law. With the exception of nonprofit transcription in Braille, Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt Publishing is not authorized to grant permission for further uses of copyrighted selections
reprinted in this text without the permission of their owners. Permission must be obtained from the in­
dividual copyright owners as identified herein. Address requests for permission to make copies of
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing material to College Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publishing Company, 222 Berkeley Street, Boston, MA 02116-3764.

Printed in the U.S.A.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008926003

Instructor's exam copy:

ISBN-10: 0-547-00482-6
ISBN-13: 978-0-547-00482-2

For orders, use student text ISBNs:

ISBN-10: 0-618-98856-4
ISBN-13: 978-0-618-98856-3

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9-EB-12 11 10 09 08
 CONTENTS

Thematic Contents ix

Preface xiii

D AVID ABRAM, The Ecology of Magic: A Personal Introduction

to the Inquiry 1
When an anthropologist visits Bali and rediscovers the life of the senses,
his transformation brings the natural world alive in new and amazing
ways.

L EILA AHMED, On Becoming an Arab 25

An Egyptian scholar describes her evolving sense of what it means to be an
Arab within the context of the transformation of Egypt from a British
colony into a sovereign Arab nation.

A NDREW J. BACEVICH, The Real World War IV 47

History textbooks identify two world wars, but the Cold War, which pitted
the United States against the Soviet Union, could also be considered a
world war, as can the current global war against terror. Bacevich traces
World War IV back to President Jimmy Carter and foresees a future defined
by perpetual wars fought to advance a notion of American freedom with­
out limits.

J ONATHAN B OYARÍN, Waiting for a Jew: Marginal Redemption

at the Eighth Street Shul 72
A first-person account of the author's disenchantment with the Jewish tra­
dition of his childhood, followed by his personal reinvention of it after an
odyssey through a postmodern world of multiple perspectives and beliefs.

B RYAN CAPLAN, "Market Fundamentalism" Versus the Religion

of Democracy 95
What are the differences between a religious fundamentalist, someone who
believes that democracy is fundamentally superior to any other form of
government, and someone who believes that the drive for profit is funda­
mentally good for society? Caplan's surprising answer here highlights the
corrective value of the markets and of the economists who study them.

AMY C HUA, A World on the Edge 123

As democracy and free markets spread across the globe, we are supposed
to see an improvement in the quality of life, but many parts of Africa,
iv C ONTENTS

South America, and Asia have witnessed an explosion of violence and eth­
nic hatred. Chua asks us to consider the possibility that too much freedom
all at once can tear societies apart.

DEVRA DAVIS, Presumed Innocent 141

We think of science as the realm in which objective truth can be deter­
mined, but what do we do when the search takes decades and human lives
hang in the balance? A case in point is studying the environmental causes
of cancer, where the effort to secure conclusive evidence is hampered not
only by the complexity of the problem but also by the vested interests of
industries manufacturing everything from pharmaceuticals to cell phones
to artificial sweeteners.

ANNIE DILLARD, The Wreck of Time: Taking Our Century's Measure 167
An essayist and poet contemplates the insignificance of human lives in a
universe so huge that it overwhelms our best efforts to understand it.

SUSAN FALUDI, The Naked Citadel 177

A reporter describes the legal battle—and the cultural meltdown—that
ensues when The Citadel, an all-male military academy, admits its first
female recruit.

DANIEL GILBERT, Immune to Reality 213

Despite the tens of thousands of hours we spend pursuing the American
Dream, recent research in psychology demonstrates that we often prove
surprisingly inept when we try to predict what will make us happy. Is ful­
fillment just an accident?

MALCOLM GLADWELL, The Power of Context: Bernie Goetz

and the Rise and Fall of New York City Crime 233
Why is it that in matters of human behavior, change is so hard to predict?
According to Malcolm Gladwell, a journalist and social critic, we seldom
see the real causes of social change because we pay too much attention to
the big picture. Instead, we need to start with the little things.

WILLIAM GREIDER, Work Rules 251

Millions of Americans dream of the day when they can become their own
bosses, but most of them will spend their working lives in chronic insecu­
rity. Rejecting socialism as well as corporate capitalism, Greider makes his
case for a third way: worker ownership of business.

HENRY J ENKINS, Why Heather Can Write: Media Literacy

and the Harry Potter Wars 272
Young people are immersed in technology, texting friends, chatting online,
wandering virtual realities, and surfing the Web. Does this immersion
 Contents v

work against literacy, or does it redefine what it means to be literate in the

twenty-first century?

STEVEN JOHNSON, The Myth of the Ant Queen 307

Do complex systems like ant colonies and megacities have a collective in­
telligence greater than the intelligence of their individual members? If the
answer is "Yes," then can we ever know where our systems are taking us?

CHRISTINE KENNEALLY, YOU Have Gestures 326

Where does language begin? Do animals have access to language? What is
the significance of the fact that humans point but apes don't? Kenneally
teases apart the differences between human gestures and gestures in the
animal kingdom to show how language is present and active long before a
human child begins to speak.

JON KRAKAUER, Selections from Into the Wild 343

Searching for the fundamentals of life, a young man named Christopher
McCandless sets off into Alaska's backcountry. There he dies, apparently
of starvation. Was he a fool, or does his journey bear witness to courage,
curiosity, and other admirable traits?

BETH LOFFREDA, Selections from Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics
in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder 367
In Laramie, Wyoming, the gruesome murder of a gay college student puts
the town under the media microscope. From one perspective, we see citi­
zens struggling to spin their public image. From another perspective, we
might be able to detect the first signs of genuine cultural change.

TANYA M. LUHRMANN, Metakinesis: How God Becomes Intimate

in Contemporary U.S. Christianity 392
How does God become real to people? Luhrmann, an anthropologist, de­
termines that metakinetic states—hallucinations, trances, hearing voices—
give rise to the experience of a viscerally intimate God, a personal God
who speaks to true believers. The rise in such believers in the United States
might be the result of a lonelier citizenry, made all the lonelier by the
spread of trance-inducing technology.

AZAR NAFISI, Selections from Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir

in Books 416
Can art be more powerful than a dictatorship? An account of a women's
reading group in the days following the establishment of the Islamic
Republic of Iran.

TIM O'BRIEN, HOW to Tell a True War Story 439

When applied to the reality of war, words like honor, valor, courage, and
sacrifice may be profoundly dishonest. O'Brien's short story asks its readers
vi C ONTENTS

to take another look at a subject that no one can claim to understand fully,
not even those who have found themselves in the thick of battle.

VIRGINIA POSTREL, Surface and Substance 453

Has conventional thinking misled us about the "shallowness" of style and
fashion? Postrel asks us to reconsider style as nonverbal communication—
a message as well as a medium. It turns out that the superficial may run
deeper than we imagined.

PIETRA RIVOLI, Dogs Snarling Together: How Politics Came

to Rule the Global Apparel Trade 477
Where have American blue-collar jobs gone? The standard explanation is
that these jobs have been driven overseas and to Latin America, where
cheap labor is to be found in great abundance. Rivoli follows a T-shirt from
the rack at Wal-Mart back to the factory and finds that the story of the de­
cline of the American textile industry is much more complicated and has
many more players than the standard explanation would have us believe.

OLIVER SACKS, The Mind's Eye: What the Blind See 505
For more than a century people have believed that the structure of the
brain was fixed at birth and more or less unchangeable thereafter. But the
writings of people who have lost their sight suggest that the brain can
rewire itself to a degree that scientists have only started to recognize.

CHARLES SIEBERT, An Elephant Crackup? 525

The phenomenon known as Human-Elephant Conflict—as measured by
events where elephants destroy villages and crops, attacking and killing
humans—is on the rise. Elephants, who travel in herds and mourn their
dead, are profoundly social creatures. The collapse of elephant culture,
brought on by predation, stress, and trauma, may point to what lies ahead
for human culture.

PETER SINGER AND JIM MASON, Meat and Milk Factories 543
Most of the meat, poultry, pork, milk, and eggs that Americans eat comes
from massive factory farms where animals live sedentary, medicated lives
before being slaughtered. The environmental consequences of this ap­
proach are known, but Singer and Mason underscore the ethical conse­
quences of turning a blind eye to the suffering of animals.

REBECCA SOLNIT, The Solitary Stroller and the City 571

How we move through the world influences how we know the world: seen
from above, the city is a grid; seen from the back seat of a limousine, the
city is a stage for flaunting one's success; seen through the eyes of the soli­
tary walker, the city becomes a richly textured tapestry, where the citizens
enjoy a communal solitude. Solnit invites her readers to see the benefits of
an urban stroll, as opposed to a walk through the country.
 Contents vii

SANDRA STEINGRABER, War 597

Steingraber, diagnosed with a type of cancer known to be caused by expo­
sure to environmental carcinogens, returns to her childhood home to ex­
plore the local industrial landscape. A scientist by training, Steingraber
traces the use of DDT in World War II and its subsequent use by the agri­
cultural industry, mapping these developments on to the geography of the
countryside that surrounds her home.

GREGORY STOCK, The Enhanced and the Unenhanced 630

Now that genetic technology has moved off the pages of science fiction
novels and into research labs, who will control it? The government? The
medical community? Religious conservatives? Stock argues for a genetic
free market in which parents have the right to enhance their progeny in
any way they want—and can afford.

MARTHA STOUT, When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday 654

The term divided consciousness refers to those times when we withdraw
mentally from the world around us. Daydreams and other forms of subjec­
tive escape often help us to keep our mental balance by shutting out events
when they threaten to be overwhelming. But when does our power to shut
things out begin to close the door on sanity itself?

DEBORAH TANNEN, The Roots of Debate in Education

and the Hope of Dialogue 676
Anyone who watches the presidential debates or listens to talk radio can
see that Americans love to argue. But the truth is that the winner in any de­
bate may prove to be mistaken, while the loser may fail to communicate in­
formation that everyone could benefit from hearing. According to linguist
Deborah Tannen, there has to be a better way.

EDWARD TENNER, Another Look Back, and a Look Ahead 708

Technological innovations happen in response to problems, but each inno­
vation ends up producing a series of new problems in turn—which require
new innovations, which produce new problems once again, apparently ad
infinitum. Is all of this change self-defeating? While admitting that technol­
ogy has "revenge effects," Edward Tenner makes the case that progress is
no illusion.

ROBERT THURMAN, Wisdom 737

Losing one's sense of self or having an empty self is typically imagined to
be a fate worse than death. But Robert Thurman, an expert on the Bud­
dhism of Tibet, argues that we have misjudged the experience of "no self,"
which is not a dark corridor to oblivion, but the road to what he calls
"infinite life."
viii C ONTENTS

JEAN TWENGE, An Army of One: Me 755

What it means to have a self has changed over the course of the past thirty
years. While Baby Boomers set out to change the world, Generation Me
seeks out fun as the highest value and promotes self-esteem as the greatest
good. Drawing on data taken from 1.3 million young people, Twenge
argues that this obsessive focus on the self is not just bad for society, it's
also bad for the individual.

Credits 783

Author and Title Index 787

 THEMATIC CONTENTS

What should a college or university ask beginning students to think and

write about? Our goal is to have our students engage with the most pressing
problems of our time—problems that resist easy answers and that need to
be explored in ways that move across the boundaries that separate the disci­
plines. In the process of crossing these boundaries, each of us has to invent
our own ways of thinking and writing. We offer the follow thematic combi­
nations to illustrate how this creative work might be pursued.

Making Sense of Violence

L EILA AHMED, On Becoming an Arab 25

A NDREW J. B ACEVICH, The Real World War IV 47
DANIEL GILBERT, Immune to Reality 213
M ALCOLM G LADWELL, The Power of Context: Bernie Goetz and
the Rise and Fall of New York City Crime 233
BETH LOFFREDA, Selections from Losing Matt Shepard: Life and
Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder 367
J EAN TWENGE, An Army of One: Me 755

World Religion and World Secularity

L EILA A HMED, On Becoming an Arab 25

A NDREW J. B ACEVICH, The Real World War IV 47
J ONATHAN B OYARÍN, Waiting for a Jew: Marginal Redemption at
the Eighth Street Shul 72
B RYAN CAPLAN, "Market Fundamentalism" Versus the Religion
of Democracy 95
TANYA M. L UHRMANN, Metakinesis: How God Becomes Intimate
in Contemporary U.S. Christianity 392
R OBERT THURMAN, Wisdom 737
X T HEMATIC C ONTENTS

Education: Learning, Conforming, and Knowing

J ONATHAN BOYARIN, Waiting for a Jew: Marginal Redemption

at the Eighth Street Shut 72
SUSAN FALUDI, The Naked Citadel 177
J ON KRAKAUER, Selections from Into the Wild 343
TANYA M. LUHRMANN, Metakinesis: How God Becomes Intimate
in Contemporary U.S. Christianity 392
AZAR NAFISI, Selections from Reading Lolita in Tehran:
A Memoir in Books 416
DEBORAH TANNEN, The Roots of Debate in Education and the
Hope of Dialogue 676

The Future of The Environment: Evolution and Human Ingenuity

DAVID ABRAM, The Ecology of Magic: A Personal Introduction

to the Inquiry 1
DEVRA DAVIS, Presumed Innocent 141
JON KRAKAUER, Selections from Into the Wild 343
CHARLES SIEBERT, An Elephant Crackup? 525
SANDRA STEINGRABER, War 597
JEAN TWENGE, An Army of One: Me 755

Medical Practice and the Arts of Healing

DEVRA DAVIS, Presumed Innocent 141

OLIVER SACKS, The Mind's Eye: What the Blind See 505
SANDRA STEINGRABER, War 597
GREGORY STOCK, The Enhanced and the Unenhanced 630
MARTHA STOUT, When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday 654
ROBERT THURMAN, Wisdom 737

Gender

SUSAN FALUDI, The Naked Citadel 177

HENRY J ENKINS, Why Heather Can Write: Media Literacy
and the Harry Potter Wars 272
 Thematic Contents xi

J ON KRAKAUER, Selections from Into the Wild 343

B ETH LOFFREDA, Selections from Losing Matt Shepard:
Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder 367
T IM O'B RIEN, H OW to Tell a True War Story 439
REBECCA S OLNIT, The Solitary Stroller and the City 571

Art and the Making of Meaning

ANNIE DILLARD, The Wreck of Time: Taking Our Century's Measure 167
DANIEL GILBERT, Immune to Reality 213
CHRISTINE K ENNEALLY, YOU Have Gestures 326
AZAR N AFISI, Selections from Reading Lolita in Tehran:
A Memoir in Books 416
T IM O'B RIEN, H OW to Tell a True War Story 439
V IRGINIA POSTREL, Surface and Substance 453
EDWARD T ENNER, Another Look Back, and a Look Ahead 708

Economics and Justice

BRYAN CAPLAN, "Market Fundamentalism" Versus the Religion

of Democracy 95
W ILLIAM G REIDER, Work Rules 251
AZAR N AFISI, Selections from Reading Lolita in Tehran:
A Memoir in Books 416
V IRGINIA POSTREL, Surface and Substance 453
P IETRA RIVOLI, Dogs Snarling Together: How Politics Came
to Rule the Global Apparel Trade 477
P ETER SINGER AND J IM M ASON, Meat and Milk Factories 543

Culture and Performance

D AVID ABRAM, The Ecology of Magic: A Personal Introduction

to the Inquiry 1
SUSAN FALUDI, The Naked Citadel 177
M ALCOLM G LADWELL, The Power of Context: Bernie Goetz
and the Rise and Fall of New York City Crime 233
CHRISTINE K ENNEALLY, YOU Have Gestures 326
xii T HEMATIC C ONTENTS

M ARTHA STOUT, When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday 654

D EBORAH TANNEN, The Roots of Debate in Education and the
Hope of Dialogue 676

Democracy in the Age of Globalization

A NDREW J. BACEVICH, The Real World War IV 47

A MY C HUA, A World on the Edge 123
W ILLIAM G REIDER, Work Rules 251
STEVEN J OHNSON, The Myth of the Ant Queen 307
PIETRA RIVOLI, Dogs Snarling Together: How Politics Came
to Rule the Global Apparel Trade 477
S ANDRA S TEINGRABER, War 597
 PREFA CE

This book probably differs from most you have encountered, at least those
that you have encountered in school. Generally, the books taught in school
tell students how to think, but ours has a different purpose. We wanted to
put in your hands a book that would require you to make connections for
yourself as you think, read, and write about the events that are likely to
shape your future life.
Although the articles and essays assembled here deal with subjects as
diverse as the global increase in ethnic violence and the practice of Tibetan
meditation, the book is not really "about" violence or meditation or any of
the other subjects explored by the readings we have selected. Instead, this
book is about the need for new ways of thinking, and it does not pretend
that those ways of thinking are widely practiced today. Our world has seen
more change in the last hundred years than it had seen in the previous
thousand. From the media we get daily reports on subjects that our great-
grandparents might have found incomprehensible: breakthroughs in cloning;
mergers of U.S. firms with Japanese or German partners; a global treaty on
biological weapons; a new account of the universe in the first seconds after
the Big Bang; the melting of the polar icecaps; legislation to extend health­
care benefits to same-sex couples. Such events are truly without precedent.
Never before have people faced uncertainty in so many different areas.
Will the Internet be a negative influence, contributing to the forces that have
pulled apart the family unit, or will it strengthen our neighborhoods and com­
munities? Will the global economy create widespread unemployment and en­
vironmental decline, or will it usher in an era of undreamed-of prosperity and
peace? Will encounters between different cultures, long separated by geog­
raphy, lead to a new renaissance, or must such meetings always end in
balkanization and violence? Unlike the questions posed by the standard text­
book, the answers to these questions aren't waiting for any of us in the
teacher's edition. Not even the best educated and the most experienced
among us can foresee with certainty how the life of our times will turn out. If
our problems today are much more sweeping than those encountered by hu­
mankind before, they are also more complex. Globalization is not just an issue
for economists, or political scientists, or historians, or anthropologists: it is an
issue for all of them—and us—together. The degradation of the biosphere is
not just an ecological matter, but a political, social, and cultural matter as well.
The uniqueness of our time requires that we devise new understandings
of ourselves and of the world. One purpose of this book is to provide a
forum for these understandings to emerge. It may seem strange, perhaps,

xiii
xiv P REFACE

that we would have such lofty goals in a course for undergraduates. Surely
the experts are better equipped to respond to issues of the sort our world
now confronts than are beginning students in our colleges and universities.
But this assumption may be unjustified. While the forms of expertise avail­
able today clearly have great value, most of the current academic disciplines
were created more than a century ago, and the divisions of knowledge on
which they are based reflect the needs of a very different society. It is worth
remembering, for example, that in 1900 cars were a new technology, and air­
planes and radios had yet to be invented. Scientists still debated the struc­
ture of the atom. The British Empire dominated three-fourths of the globe,
and "culture" meant the traditions of Western Europe's elite, never more
than one-tenth of one percent of the population of that region. In a certain
sense, the current generation of college students, teachers, and administra­
tors needs to reinvent the university itself, not by replacing one department
or methodology with another, but by forging broad connections across areas
of knowledge that still remain in relative isolation.

New Humanities for New Times:

The Search for Coherence
Some readers of this book will be surprised by the absence of material from
the traditional humanities: poems and plays, photographs of paintings and
statues, excerpts from great works of philosophy such as Plato's Republic
and Descartes's Discourse on Method. Clearly, no one should leave Aristotle
or Shakespeare or Toni Morrison unread. And anyone unfamiliar with
Leonardo da Vinci, Frida Kahlo, Thelonious Monk, and Georgia O'Keeffe
has missed a priceless opportunity. Yet this book has grown out of the belief
that the humanities today must reach further than in centuries past. Without
intending to do so, traditional humanists may have contributed to the
decline of their own enterprise. One could even argue that the humanities
have seen their principal task as the preservation of the past rather than the
creation of the future. Humanists have often left real-world activities and
concerns to other fields, while devoting themselves to passive contempla­
tion, aesthetic pleasure, and partisan critique. Consequently, most people
outside the university have come to consider the humanities as something
closer to entertainment, wish fulfillment, or a covert form of politics, while
regarding the sciences as the only real truth.
The humanities today must be understood in a new way: not as a
particular area of knowledge but as the human dimension of all knowledge.
Engineering may lie outside the traditional humanities, but it enters the do­
main of the New Humanities when we begin to consider the unexpected
consequences of technological innovation, as Edward Tenner does in his
observations on the consequences of the automobile. When we define the
 Preface xv

humanities in this way, it may come as a surprise that some of our society's
foremost humanists work in fields quite far removed from the traditional
humanities. Oliver Sacks, one of the writers in this collection, is a world-
renowned neurologist whose case histories have served both to open up the
mysteries of the human brain and, at the same time, to humanize: patients
suffering from a wide array of mental illnesses, brain injuries, and neurolog­
ical disorders. And Devra Davis, an expert in epidemiology, is working to
get the chemical, pharmaceutical, food, and health care industries to change
their business practices to safeguard society from the effects of environmen­
tal toxins.
The New Humanities, as represented by this book, promote change
in another way as well: they invite us to take knowledge obtained at the
university beyond the confines of the university itself. In a certain sense, this
means that we all must become our own best teachers: we must find in our
own lives— our problems, values, dreams, and commitments—an organizing
principle that cannot be found in a curriculum. The great, unspoken secret
of the university is that the curriculum has no center: specialization makes
sure of that. Historians write primarily for historians; literary critics for
other critics. As we shuttle back and forth between these specialized disci­
plines, the only coherence we gain is the coherence we have constructed for
ourselves. Under these conditions, what the New Humanities can teach us
is a different way of using knowledge, a way of thinking that synthesizes
many different fields of study.
Specialized learning in the disciplines typically deals with the "how," but
it often leaves unanswered the "why." There has never been a course called
"Life 101," and given the complexity of our world, such a course would have
to be without end. But something important will be missing if we leave the
"w hy" questions unexplored. Should we continue to pursue a technological
utopia? Does modern science mean the end of religion? Is social inequality
an acceptable price to pay for economic growth? Any attempt to answer
these questions requires specialized knowledge, yet knowledge alone is not
enough. Because a cogent, well-informed case can be made on either side of
almost every issue, the source of our ultimate commitments must reach
deeper. We might say that the "w hy" questions shape these commitments
because they address our most basic and most personal relations to other
people and to the world. In different ways, these questions ask us how we
choose to live. No expert can choose on our behalf, because no expert can live
our lives for us or define what our experiences should mean to us.
The coherence missing from the curriculum is not a quality of knowledge
but of our own lives. In itself, no amount of learning can produce a sense of
coherence. That sense arises, instead, from a creative and synthetic activity
on our part as we interact with the world. Again and again, we need to make
connections between discrete areas of knowledge and between knowledge
and our personal experience. This coherence is never complete because
xvi P REFACE

there is always something more to learn that remains unconnected, but we

might think of coherence, not as a goal reached once and for all but as an
ideal worth pursuing continuously. Of course, cynicism and fragmentation
are always options, too, and they require no special effort. One could easily
live as though nothing and no one mattered, but in such a case, learning and
living become exercises in futility. The New Humanities offer a better path.

Knowledge in Depth and Knowledge of the World

As everyone understands, formal education has been carefully designed to
keep the disciplines separate. In economics classes, we typically read eco­
nomics; in history classes, we typically read history. This approach allows
information to be imparted in small, efficiently managed packages. We can
divide, say, biology from chemistry, and then we can divide biology into
vertebrate and invertebrate, and chemistry into organic and inorganic. We
start with the general and move to the particular: ideally, we learn in depth,
with increasing mastery of details that become more and more refined. At
the end of the semester, if everything goes well, we can distinguish between
an ecosystem and a niche, a polymer and a plastic, a neo-Kantian and a neo­
Hegelian. We can contrast Hawthorne's treatment of the outsider with
Salinger's, or we can explain the debate about whether slavery or states'
rights actually caused the Civil War.
Knowledge in depth is indispensable. But it can also create a sense of
disconnection, the impression that education is an empty ritual without real-
world consequences beyond the receipt of a grade and the fulfillment of a
requirement. In the classroom, we learn to calculate sine and cosine without
ever discovering how these calculations might be used and why they were
invented. Searching for symbols in a poem or a short story becomes a men­
tal exercise on par with doing a crossword puzzle. Instead of reflecting on
why events have happened and how they get remembered and recorded, we
refine our ability to recapitulate strings of dates and names. At its worst,
learning in depth can produce a strange disconnect: the purpose of learning
becomes learning itself, while activity in the real world becomes incidental,
even difficult to imagine. As students reach the final years of high school,
they may understand vaguely that they ought to know Hamlet, and should
be able to identify The Declaration o f Independence and explain how photosyn­
thesis has influenced the shape of leaves, but in response to an actual
tragedy, an environmental disaster, or a real-life legal crisis, they might feel
unqualified to speak and unprepared to act.
College-level learning can offer an escape from this predicament by giv­
ing students greater freedom to choose what they will study, and in many
cases the subjects they choose are closely related to their real-world objec­
tives. But even with this newfound freedom, the problem of disconnection
 Preface xvii

crops up in other ways. After years of hard work, a student who has mas­
tered electrical engineering may still leave college poorly informed about
the globalized, commercial environment in which most engineers now do
their work. Students well versed in Renaissance drama or the history of
World War I may find their own lives after graduation much more difficult
to explain. For some people, this problem of disconnection may arise long
before graduation. One who sets out to memorize facts from, say, a social
psychology textbook may find that these facts grow increasingly stale. Easily
memorized one day, they are quickly forgotten the next. The risk of knowl­
edge in depth is that we lose our sense of the larger world and we forget that
a field like psychology, for all its current sophistication, began with tentative
and somewhat clumsy questions about the mind. Ironically, the more we
treat an area of knowledge as a reality in itself, the less we may be able to
understand and use what we have supposedly learned.
There is another kind of knowledge that we begin to create when we
ask ourselves how our learning pertains to the world outside the classroom.
This line of questioning is more complex than it might initially seem be­
cause the larger world is never simply out there waiting for us. All knowl­
edge begins as a knowledge of parts and fragments, even our knowledge of
the private lives we know in most detail. Each of our private lives may
seem complete, in itself, just as a field like psychology can seem to explain
everything once we are immersed in its methods and its facts. But this sense
of completeness is an illusion produced by the limits of our perspective. Be­
yond the reach of what we know here and now, nothing seems to matter.
We begin to get a glimpse of the larger world, however, only when we shift
our focus from one reality to another: only then do we discover the defi­
ciencies in our previous ways of thinking, and only then are we able to
think in new and different ways. This movement from the known to the un­
known is the essence of all learning; indeed, the most successful learners
are generally those who have developed the highest tolerance for not
knowing—those who continue to question and explore issues beyond their
own areas of specialization, entertaining alternatives that others might find
unimaginable.
Knowledge itself can be defined in many ways: as a quantity of infor­
mation, as technical expertise, as cultivated taste, as a special kind of self-
awareness. And as varied as these definitions may appear, they share an un­
derlying principle. Whatever the form knowledge may take, it always
emerges from a process we might call connecting. The eighteenth-century
English scientist Sir Isaac Newton, who first understood the complex rela­
tions between force, mass, and acceleration, may have been inspired by con­
necting his scientific work with his deeply held religious convictions about
the rational perfection of God and His Creation. Many other notable thinkers
likewise found inspiration through connection. Roughly two hundred years
after Newton's discoveries had sparked a technological revolution, a young
xviii P REFACE

lawyer born in India, Mohandas K. Gandhi, drew on Henry David

Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, written in support of abolitionists just before
the Civil War, to launch a campaign of passive resistance against the racist
government of South Africa. Two years before Gandhi spent his first term in
jail as a political prisoner, a French artist and intellectual, Marcel Duchamps,
shocked the art world with a painting—Nude Descending a Staircase—
inspired by scientific photographs of athletes in motion. Whether we are
talking about physics or political systems, epidemiology or aesthetics,
knowledge by its very nature brings together disparate worlds of thought
and action.

Creative Reading: From Explicit to Implicit

The selections in this book are intended for creative reading. The humanities
should do more than convey information or give professors a chance to
demonstrate their brilliance. After all, studies have consistently demon­
strated that we retain little of what we have been taught unless we put that
knowledge to use. At its best, education should offer beginners the chance
to practice the same activities that more accomplished thinkers engage in:
beyond receiving knowledge, beginners should participate in the making of
knowledge. The articles and chapters collected in this book offer many op­
portunities for such participation. All of the selections are challenging, some
because they are long and complex, some because they draw on specialized
disciplines, and some because they open up unusual perspectives. These are
not readings that lend themselves to simple summaries and multiple-choice
answers. Instead, they require discussion—they were written to elicit activ­
ity and response.
It is important not to think of essays such as these as truths to be commit­
ted to memory or arguments to be weighed and then accepted or rejected. It
might be more useful to see them in much the same way we now see Internet
sites. Every site on the Internet is linked to countless others by the connec­
tions that Web authors and programmers have forged. As a result of their cu­
mulative efforts, one site links us to another and then to the next, on and on
for as long as we care to go. In some ways, even the most useful and infor­
mative written texts are less sophisticated than the simplest Web sites, and the
Internet can transform the labor of many days—sifting through periodicals
and rummaging through the library stacks—into the work of a few hours. Yet
the Web also has limitations that the printed word does not. The Web, after
all, can show us only those pathways that someone has already made semi­
permanent. By contrast, all connections to the printed text are virtual connec­
tions: any text can be linked to any other text in a web of inquiry and analysis
potentially much vaster than the Internet itself. When we surf the Internet, we
find only what others want us to find, but the connections we personally
forge between one text and the next may truly be uncharted terrain.
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