Victor Davis Hanson co-wrote a book ten years back called "Who Killed Homer?" Our library had it in the "new book" section right beside an overstuffed couch, so I took a break from theology and read Hanson for 4 hours. (No, theology never suffered from over-rapid advance.)

Hanson makes the point that Classics (study of Greek and Latin) is a dying field:

At the two institutions where we each created Classics programs ex nihilo in the mid-1980s, Classics is now essentially comatose. At Rollins College, where just six years ago there was one tenured and one tenure-track Classicist, there are no longer any tenure-track positions at all. The endowed chair once earmarked for Classics has been diverted from Greek and Latin instruction. At California State University at Fresno the newly arrived president, faced with budget cuts, in 1992 targeted the entire Classics and Humanities program for elimination and laid off its tenured faculty, suspending instruction itself.

The purpose of the book was to carry out a post-mortem and discover the culprit(s). Three major reasons were given, and were so similar to my own musings about Space Plasma Physics. Now that I've been at seminary for a semester, after a 25 year hiatus, I can see similar traits in theology. So if disparate fields of classics, theology and space physics are all suffering the malaise, I wondered if there wasn't a general principle at work.For if we can find the cause, perhaps we can find a cure.

Here is Honora Chapman reviewing WKH? and listing the reasons given for this decline in the humanities

So they composed their incisive and at times very funny screed that pointed the finger not at university presidents or deans but at classicists themselves, chiding them for their faddish bandwagon-hopping (that ironically reduced their objects of study to irrelevance or unintelligibility), sycophancy, wasteful conference attendance, laziness in the form of reduced course loads leading to the abuse of part-timers and grad students, and even simple stupidity. Truth be told, every academic field in the humanities is guilty of all of the above sins, as David Lodge so brilliantly attests in his novels Changing Places and Small World.

Let's boil this down to the three chapters of Hanson's book: (1) neglect of the next generation in favor of "research" or otherwise self-advancement; (2) overpublishing faddish, highly specialized studies undercutting tradition, in order to advance; (3) careerism. But I think you will agree that (3) is what drives (2) which is what drives (1). If there were no career in Classics, then there would not be the overpublishing and the neglect of students.

But if there wasn't a career in the classics, then why should people be taking it anyway?

Good question. Why did they take the classics 100 years ago? Why did they do this 200 years ago? Could it possibly be that classics actually had a purpose beyond self-promotion? Once upon a time, a medical doctor needed to be fluent in Latin, a lawyer needed his Latin desperately, a theologian couldn't even attend a conference without being fluent in Latin.

"Yes", I can see you shaking your head, "good old Galen was the best advice a medical doctor could have...in the dark ages!  It's a good thing we live in a modern world where they don't stick blood-sucking leeches to you to make you better!"

Yes, I would reply, it is good to live in the modern world. But it comes at a price. The price of not knowing anything about economics and bailouts, of not knowing anything about the ethics of euthanasia, of not knowing the burden of malaria in Africa, or of the noises under the hood of your late-model car, or how your watch tells time. We have abandoned the past and with it, an integrated view of the world. There was a time when farmers could debate the value of a gold standard, when teachers could all do sums, when plantation owners could write treatises on government. And today we vote for a man whose platform is "Change we can believe in." What if we don't believe? Who will listen?

John Dewey's pragmatism has finally overtaken us. We have relegated classics to the dustbin of history. I have heard distinguished scientists, former heads of national laboratories, say the same for Space Physics. "When it is no longer useful, we discard it, like yesterday's newspaper. The value of education lies in the magnitude of its monetary return." Yet strangely, that wasn't the reason this gray-haired guru went into Space Physics some 50 years ago. Satellites hadn't even been invented, when he entered space physics. Surely in his youthful idealism, he had seen something more than a secure future in space?

I am sad to report that when I was a physics teacher, I too spewed the sewage of pragmatism to my students. The American Physical Society kept publishing statistics. This is how much you can make with a bachelor in physics, they proclaimed, and the most lucrative field is medical physics. We sheepishly passed these vital statistics on to our students, enticing them to a career that none of us found the slightest bit enticing when we were their age.

But physics student enrollment kept dropping and dropping, both relatively and absolutely since the peak in 1959.

"Get them involved in your research" the APS yelled at us, "a student needs to get attached to the field!" So we dutifully put these green undergraduates in our labs with $100,000 equipment at their disposal. But when the student returned, week after week without results, we began to get anxious. We tempted them with travel funds to exotic locations if they would just finish the paper. We began to do some of the research for them, putting their names on the papers that they had submitted without doing the work. And still the students trickled out of our labs across campus to the post-modern courses on body-piercing..

Searching around for someone, anyone to do the work, we discovered foreign graduate students. And rapidly the labs filled up with Indian engineers, Chinese post-docs. We made no effort to entice them with rewards. We didn't wave the APS statistics at them. We hardly understood a word they said. But they did what they were told. They finished their papers. Our names were splashed across conference proceedings. Our citation index soared. And we gradually forgot that we were ever concerned with propagating our field.

Careerism is a deadly poison. It destroys all enjoyment, drains all idealism, turns us all into cogs in a great economic machine. But surely, I thought, surely theology will be different. Why no one in their right mind would go to seminary when job prospects mean a poverty-line existence in a 30-member church in South Dakota! And so one day I turned in my office and lab keys with access card to the government official in charge of such things, and piled my 25-year old textbooks in the back of Chrysler PT, and drove back 850 miles to my old seminary.

Like most seminaries around the country, it was booming. Three times as many students as when I attended 25 years ago. But fully half of the students were foreign. It was a bit of a jolt, as if I had been transported back into Physics. I spoke with the foreign students and was amazed at their dedication, their perseverance. Many had left everything behind to come to America and get a seminary education. Many were struggling not just with the arcane and obtuse vocabulary of theologians, but with the simple difficulty of learning another country's language. It was usually their third or fourth, of course, but no less difficult for coming simultaneously with Greek, Hebrew and sometimes Aramaic.

But it was us Americans that shocked me most. We had the books and the lingo down pat. We knew which professors taught at which seminaries. We knew the latest scuttlebutt on theological controversies in the denomination. We could roll our eschatological and Christological concerns like the pros we admired. The professionals who spoke at the big conventions, who wrote the latest cutting edge commentaries, who employed the highest tech Bible parsing software.

Now admittedly, I'm in the "academic track", not the "preaching track", but it is astounding that one can make a living being an academic theologian. When I was growing up, we would go to a favorite professor's house and sit on his sagging sofa sipping hot chocolate and discussing the weightier matters of life. If the professor wore a jacket, it had leather patches on the elbows. But we don't do that anymore. We have office hours and conference engagements. We have secretaries and assistants like business professionals. We worry about things like tenure tracks and endowments. And we fly to alumni dinners where we talk about vision statements and enrollments.

Pragmatism has eroded even here, even the very roots of American protestantism. We live in a sheltered cocoon where we write papers of turgid prose for a specialized audience that may never cross the threshold of a church. We footnote and annotate, we cite Greek grammar and Hebrew syntax, but we never speak of Obama or the Taliban. We talk of the eschaton but not of global warming. We bandy apologetics, but we neglect Islam. I wonder if this was the condition of the North African church in that fateful 7th century when a bunch of camel breeders swept up out of the blinding sands. I wonder if this was the condition of the European church when the Mongols came thundering out of the steppes. I wonder if this was the condition of the French church when Robespierre began his rant. I wonder if this was the condition of the German church when a midget in a mustache waved his funny flag.

For pragmatism cannot save. It cannot survive. It cannot even propagate.

Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison.