The high humanities are to be preserved, then, not just because they intensify practical reasoning and imagination; because they enable us fully to appreciate and enjoy the cultural heritage and connect us to the past; because they offer a space for free contemplation and reflection; because they help us spiritually “endure modernization” (as the German theorists Joachim Ritter and Odo Marquard have argued); or because they encourage particular political subjectivities and movements. They are to be preserved because they are compelled to push back on the capitalist apparatuses that are dismantling them. In that pushback, what remains of them is aligned with green and radically left anti-capitalist movements. That is so even for those in the humanities (and there are many such) who do not personally sign on to political programs that formally contest current capitalist state regimes.
The idea that we are now enduring a second secularization — this time not of religion but of culture and the humanities — helps reconcile us to our losses by helping us to see their larger logic. It is important to remember that religious secularization does not mean the end of religion. The same will be true of cultural secularization. And just as religious secularization involved political resistance, adjustment to cultural secularization will involve critique and resistance.
Simon During, Losing Faith in the Humanities.
