Postmodernism Killed the Humanities
The humanities once stood near the centre of Western civilisation. Philosophy asked what truth was. History preserved cultural memory. Literature explored the human condition. Theology wrestled with morality, suffering, and transcendence. Even when scholars disagreed, the humanities retained a civilisational confidence: there existed such a thing as truth, beauty, virtue, and human nature worthy of study.
Today much of that world lies in ruins. The modern university humanities department increasingly resembles not a guardian of civilisation, but its critic, prosecutor, and demolition crew. Students entering many Arts faculties no longer encounter the great conversation of civilisation. Instead, they often meet ideological conformity, political activism, and a suffocating atmosphere of suspicion directed toward the very culture that created the university itself.
This transformation did not happen overnight. One of the chief turning points was the rise of postmodernism. Thinkers associated with postmodern and post-structuralist theory challenged the Enlightenment belief that reason could discover objective truth. Grand narratives were treated with suspicion. Truth became socially constructed. Language itself was viewed not as a medium for discovering reality, but as a system of power relations.
Initially this seemed intellectually daring. There was some value in questioning simplistic assumptions about progress and objectivity. But over time the acid kept dissolving. Once truth is reduced to perspective, and meaning to power, the humanities begin sawing off the branch upon which they sit. Why study Shakespeare as profound literature if texts merely conceal structures of oppression? Why study history as a search for understanding if history is simply political narrative warfare? Why preserve a canon if all standards are merely instruments of dominance?
The result was not liberation but institutional nihilism.
The old humanities were imperfect, but fundamentally humanistic. They assumed that human beings shared enough common nature to make dialogue across centuries meaningful. A reader could still learn from Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Austen, or Tolstoy because they spoke to enduring features of human existence. Postmodernism increasingly replaced this with fragmentation. Identity superseded universality. Subjective experience displaced shared standards. Interpretation became politicised.
In effect, the humanities mutated into what might be called the "inhumanities."
The irony is striking. Departments supposedly devoted to expanding the mind often became intellectually narrow. Scholars who once celebrated scepticism and critical inquiry developed rigid orthodoxies around race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, and identity. Dissent became morally suspect. The humanities, once defenders of free intellectual exploration, increasingly mirrored ideological seminaries.
Students noticed. So did the public. Enrolments collapsed partly because many people instinctively sensed that something valuable had died. Parents became reluctant to incur massive debt for degrees that appeared detached from reality and openly contemptuous of ordinary culture. Employers questioned the practical value of programs increasingly centred on theoretical activism rather than intellectual formation. Even many academics privately admit that large sections of the humanities now produce unreadable jargon for shrinking ideological subcultures.
The tragedy is that the decline was not inevitable. The humanities remain indispensable when properly understood. Civilisations require historical memory, ethical reflection, literary imagination, and philosophical seriousness. A society governed only by technocrats, algorithms, and economic metrics becomes spiritually hollow. Human beings need meaning as much as machinery.
But postmodernism hollowed out the foundations upon which the humanities depended. Once objective truth, beauty, and rational inquiry were treated as illusions masking power, the disciplines lost their justification. The humanities committed a strange form of intellectual suicide. They undermined belief in their own mission while expecting society to continue funding them indefinitely.
Now artificial intelligence accelerates the crisis. If humanities departments increasingly produce ideological repetition rather than genuine insight, machines may imitate much of the output with alarming ease. Bureaucratised theory written in opaque jargon/slop is precisely the sort of pattern-based language generation that AI handles well: garbage in; garbage out. Ironically, the disciplines most obsessed with deconstructing human uniqueness may be among the first culturally displaced by non-human systems.
Yet one should resist triumphalism. The collapse of the humanities is not entirely good news. A civilisation without serious reflection on meaning, morality, beauty, and truth becomes vulnerable to technocratic barbarism. The answer is not to abolish the humanities, but to recover them from the ruins of postmodernism. If that is possible.
But whether such recovery is possible remains uncertain. Institutions that spend decades teaching students that truth is relative and civilisation oppressive may struggle to persuade anyone that they possess wisdom worth preserving. The old humanities sought to cultivate human beings. The inhumanities often cultivate resentment, abstraction, and cultural self-loathing.
Perhaps future generations will rebuild what has been lost. But if they do, they will likely need to begin by rediscovering an unfashionable idea: that truth exists, that human nature is real, and that civilisation is something to inherit rather than merely deconstruct.
