Human beings are being killed by those of us who are supposed to protect them. Safeguarding our cultural tradition should be one of the main missions of the University and, however, for several decades we have been subjecting humanistic knowledge to rules that will end up destroying it. Aristotle warned that it is senseless to apply another’s methods and protocols to a science. But I fear that we humanists now spend more time in front of an Excel table than trying to reveal the correct meaning of the words of Stagira’s essay.
In the same way that one civilization colonizes another, the sciences have extended their influence to subjugate foreign disciplines. Only in this way can we understand that practices, metrics and discourses foreign to their mission have been imposed in the field of humanistic disciplines. Today a university professor of history or medieval philosophy is forced to transfer his knowledge not in the form of books, studies or essays, but in documentssmall standardized texts, disciplined and conformed to the taste of other areas of knowledge.
Some believed that reading a study on Petrarca could be equated to listening to a song by Kanye West. But the quality of a paper in the humanities it can never be summed up in the citations or clicks it generates. The excellent researcher who dedicates his life to minority knowledge will necessarily receive fewer citations than a mediocre academic who studies some fashionable topic.
The very conditions of research in the humanities are today under threat. To thrive in academia, the humanist must promote by creating research teams, obtaining funding, brandishing synergies, networking, and using ridiculous managerial language with artful clumsiness. We all accept it and so we collaborate to undermine the foundations of that knowledge that we promised ourselves to defend one day. And it’s a shame, because our work could be infinitely more noble.
It would be enough to have a true love for the subjects we cultivate, constant contact with the sources and, above all, time and silence to study. The situation is so absurd that you can now find a supposed expert on Sallust taking a plane to Copenhagen to do it net. Naturally without carrying a single book in your suitcase. And not due to lack of space, but out of habit.
