Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong

For many years, I’ve held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, archive perusers, and history buffs who grew to love their areas of study because of the specific objects that constitute the field: the two women I overheard whispering about how they wanted to fuck Adam Bede, in one of my undergrad classes; the student of mine who disclosed that he loved The House of Mirth because “something similar happened to me recently” (????); or the guy who collects swords as a way into understanding the medieval period are examples of this type. You’ve certainly met these people or been taught by them; they are often motivated by personal attachments to specific works, and my hunch is that they represent the majority of those who care about art today.

Secondary Source People are different; they become obsessed with the discourse about the objects being studied. Professional critics, “theory bros” (gender neutral), Letterboxd reviewers who primarily read other Letterboxd reviews, the weirdly combative people in your seminars who know all about the different scholarly camps on a topic—this group prioritizes the conversations, contexts, and conflicts surrounding the works above and beyond the works themselves. Secondary Source People are the main contingent both producing and consuming academic writing. For them, the question of a text’s beauty or capacity to immerse is less important than how its ideas expand or contract as we engage with them.

I realize this demographic distinction is crude, filled with exceptions, and only helpful up to a point, but I stand by it as a general heuristic. Personally, I’m a secondary source guy. I took a great deal of pleasure, for example, reading Frankenstein for the first time in English 101, but what I loved most was situating that text in an intellectual conversation that extended into the present. Discovering that Shelley’s creation was an answer to Malthusian theories of population, a critique of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, a conversation with Locke’s philosophy of mind—and thus a problem for contemporary discussions of feminism, humanism, eugenics, and colonialism—made the novel more interesting, more complicated, and more fun to read. None of those connections could have been made in advance of additional secondary reading; they aren’t points of data that, once established, now and forever adhere to the primary source; they are arguments whose coherence requires readers work their way through the recalcitrance of rhetorical language and construct those interpretive associations. To get there, to experience those distinct pleasures, you have to interact with secondary sources, and that sphere of cultural production hasn’t been faring so well in the popular imagination lately.