I find it curious that there exist no widely-reputed public intellectuals in the humanities of the same caliber of science advocates Neil deGrasse Tyson or Bill Nye.
In spite of the myriad published vindications, there is no chief apologist for the liberal arts. It is not difficult to explain this. The humanities are more fragmented and perhaps more abstract than ‘science,’ which has become an ideological institution pursuing truth and pure objectivity.
This, of course, is not the case (but as long as HuffPost and friends can farm hits with headlines endorsed by scientists, then the misconception will be going nowhere).
But if physics and chemistry are subject to this sexing-up, then why aren’t history and philosophy? After all, wouldn’t one be better off clicking on an article exposing a new trick from rhetoric to become more attractive and popular?
The reality is that the humanities are exploited in the popular media, but instead of being sanctified, they are prostituted. Philosophy and Comparative Literature are not considered technical fields like physics is; rather, they are treated like parts of a person’s daily life that anyone can do in any way one sees fit.
This is not entirely bad: it would be semantic quibbling to assert that a lay person cannot have a personal philosophy. That said, the egalitarian approach to the humanities occasionally leads the non-specialist to speak like a professional.
And the dithering arch-duke of pseudo-historical garbage is the patriotic pinhead himself, Bill O’Reilly. One’s political dispositions notwithstanding, his sloppy, tendentious, laughably anachronistic books like Killing Jesus represent a distinct perigee in the history of literacy.
KJ is not a work of history, or even a work of fiction; rather, it is a monument to an ideology that states anyone can do history, because history is nothing more than an articulation of what a community knows to be true because it has read its own few most cherished books — or, more accurately, had its own books read to them.
But we know, objectively, that is not how history works. “History,” as a body of information, exists in an innumerable collection of written and material records. Historiography is no more than the analysis and synthesis of these records. History itself teaches us very little; it offers, in limited quantity, the bare facts as translated by the most powerful class: the actors and events (the place and the time are more obscure through most pre-modern records, given the variance in chronology and geographic understanding).
Interpretation beyond that is hopelessly subjective. Thus, generations of scholars have wrestled with such familiar questions as “Why did Christianity become the dominant religion in the West?,” “Why did Western Rome collapse,?” or, even more impossible, “What is Christianity?” When an O’Reilly struts in and uses his public figure status to sell his slop to those unfamiliar with the technical work of the historian, he assaults the integrity of the liberal arts and drowns out the voices of honest and sincere scholars.
Would that we had a single, respected voice to remind us of that.