I have a brief essay in today’s Washington Post drawing out the disconnect between the current administration’s call for “the desire and the courage to preserve” Western traditions and its eagerness to defund the National Endowment for the Humanities, a major catalyst for scholarship that does exactly that. As one of the lexicographers at the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, I argue that “defunding the NEH threatens to pull the nation out of the world’s collective effort to define — literally — Western history.”
Here are the two key paragraphs about today’s political hostility toward humanities scholarship, but do go over to the Post to read the whole text:
Sometimes it feels like we lexicographers are piling together a medieval cathedral, one that is centuries in the making and that no single generation — and indeed, no single country — can call its own. And perhaps this metaphor hints at an unfortunate reason for renewed political hostility to work like ours. Many politicians today do not look to a timeless cathedral as a guiding architectural analogue for their statesmanship. Instead of constructing a Burkean civil society of intergenerational effort, they now see their ideals reflected in a glitzy skyscraper on Fifth Avenue: a monument to a real estate developer whose megalomaniacal impulsiveness brings to mind certain Roman predecessors, and not good ones.
My hunch, in other words, is that Trumpists are not eager to eliminate the NEH and to undercut international scholarship out of genuine concerns about government spending or even a principled, radical isolationism. Instead, my job is newly imperiled because my research is not fast-paced and exciting. TLL entries are much longer than a tweet, more tedious than a campaign rally. When our president’s family history is told through gaudy hotels and neon-saturated casinos, and when his policy positions center on a hyperbolic “big, beautiful wall” and tales of urban violence worthy of dystopian action films, it should surprise no one that his administration is racing to cut its support, small as it already is, of the quiet study of old books.
