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Hope, Attention and the Crisis of the Humanities

Episode 6: Hope, Attention and the Crisis of the Humanities

Lee Siegel and David Rieff on the crisis of the humanities and why art's refusal to be useful is what makes it so central to the human experience.

Show notes

Amid the collapse of university humanities programs, the rise of identity politics, and the relentless commercialization of culture, conservatives have revived the claim that great books and artistic tradition can redeem the nation. Lee Siegel and David Rieff aren't buying it. Their argument: treating art as a civilizational rescue mission distorts what makes it valuable in the first place. Art resists usefulness. It cultivates what Siegel describes as a quality of absolute attention that no political program of cultural renewal can manufacture. Rieff goes on to express an historicist skepticism, suggesting that Western culture may not be in crisis so much as ending. Siegel pushes back on the fatalism. Our crises are real, he argues, but they're not final. Hope matters. Attention matters. And art, whether it can save us or not, still does something no other human activity quite manages.

Executive producer Matty Rosenberg
Edited by Lee Siegel, David Rieff, and Matty Rosenberg
Additional video editing by Matty Rosenberg and Esther Martel
Music arrangement and performance by Matt Schreiber

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This is a production of Radio Free Rhinecliff

Hosts

David Rieff

David Rieff

Lee Siegel

Lee Siegel


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