Discussion

Capitalism & the Push for Hard Sciences

Doctoral programs are graduating more students than there are job openings in humanities fields (Bradburn and Townsend 2022). It is further difficult to get a job when taking into account the expansion of higher education and the reconfiguration of the professoriate as disproportionately non-tenure-track and contingent. So not only are there less jobs, but less job security for those pursuing a humanities career in academia. Spellmeyer (2012) claims that the fear that students have of majoring in humanities subjects is that they are unable to find jobs. Students are being conditioned to believe that they will not make as much money by pursuing a career in the arts, history, philosophy, etc. And reasonably so! A study by the Humanities Indicators project shows that institutions do not view the humanities as necessary as they once did. And because a capitalistic market relies on cultural success, as pointed out by Spellmeyer, academic knowledge and jobs become harder to obtain if not centered around more culturally appreciated fields like business and STEM. The author emphasizes his argument with his claim that the concept of leadership has displaced the older political ideal of representation—a switch that amounts to "nothing less than a seismic shift" in the way the world is run. As a result, access to academic knowledge becomes harder to maintain given the emphasis placed on members of capitalist societies to enter a science-based field to earn more money and therefore stimulate its economies. As a result, more academics are deterred from pursuing degrees in the humanities fields while encouraged to pursue degrees in business and science fields. From 2012 to 2020, the annual number of humanities bachelor’s degrees awarded fell almost 16 percent, with some of the larger disciplines, such as history, losing almost one-third of their majors. The number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in engineering and in the health and medical sciences increased by over 56 percent over the same period. And as of 2020, the humanities were conferring less than 10 percent of all bachelor’s degrees --the lowest level on record. Given that faculty members in humanities departments often rely on students to make a case for departmental resources, they may understandably feel endangered as the number of individuals majoring in these subjects depletes. Administrators may also look at those trends and wonder if they need to maintain number of faculty members in these departments (Bradburn and Townsend 2022).

Adverse Effects of Federal Economic Presence in Native American Studies

The humanities are essential to the revitalization and protection of cultures that practice endangered languages – like so many of Native American communities that still combat the effects of colonization today. The advocacy for endangered languages acts as a call to preserve culturally-engrained languages from disappearance. However, it is the role that capitalism plays in this task that limits experts’ abilities to sufficiently document and communicate with native communities while also maintaining a “mutual dependency of language experts and community advocates” (Perley 2012, p. 146). Because of the government’s lack of support, these crucial endeavors rely on mostly local funding instead, decreasing their efficiency and efficacy. 

As discussed by linguist Leanne Hinton (2001), capitalism can act as a motivation for the exclusion of minority groups in the United States. The use of a single language makes the government’s job a lot easier because everything can be distributed and announced in just one language; this leads to the marginalization of those who do not speak the language of the majority, and therefore cannot join the economic mainstream. If the U.S. government values equal economic and social opportunities for citizens – as is promised under capitalism – then, from a federal point of view, the presence of minority languages acts a disadvantage to minority citizens.

Perley (2012) and Hill (1992) have respectively confronted the unintended harm of certain rhetoric being used by linguists. Language like “treasure” or “priceless” when referring to endangered languages is used to catch the attention of corporations and the government in order to secure funding. However, using rhetoric that places languages at supposed risk of extinction objectifies the community of their speakers and may also entail that these languages are too valuable to hold a place in everyday markets, which puts them in a more restrictive sphere of exchange. But despite its harm – for the sake of funding – many researchers continue to make use of hyperbolic valorization. 

Imposed Limitations of Pursuits & Programs in the Humanities

By limiting an individual's ability to learn and develop writing skills, speaking/performance skills, and to acquire historical knowledge of issues regarding one’s cultural identity, a given individual within a specific cultural background cannot share their story -- thereby limiting personal and public understanding of one’s culture, language, story, and worldview. Philosopher Michel Foucault claimed that writing down discoveries, actions, and thoughts -- creating a personal hypomneta -- is an indispensable element of life, in that it assists in the formation of oneself. By using internal curiosity as a guide, he thinks, we can better express and discover ourselves. Hilary Putnam (2012) contributes to this view by pointing out how the humanities are essential for one to be an active member of society, including as a contributor to radical movements, creative ideas, and press. Without these skills, it may be assumed that humanity would face an extreme downward spiral of limited individuality and narrowed perspectives. To “reduce the human to a set of skills for the job market, the capacity to vote, live in style, and escape into entertainment,” as Hein Viljoen (2008) states, would give way to “blissful, consumerist ignorance.” The economic sector would therefore gain while the humanities dwindle, limiting opportunities for artists, writers, thinkers, and researchers. What we are seeing now is just that; the culture in the United States' late-capitalist society is de-emphasizing the need for the retention of the humanities. As a result, there is concern with the direction we are headed in regard to political and intellectual autonomy.

Modern capitalist societies like the United States cut funding and impose cultural norms through the use of propaganda to discourage participation in traditionally artistic and humanistic endeavors. This ultimately limits the accessibility of pursuits within the humanities field. Students recognize this and, as a result, fewer choose to pursue a degree in these fields based on preconceptions of fewer opportunities available to a holder of a humanities degree compared to a business or STEM degree, and because of propogandist ideals that have led many individuals and institutions to conclude that there is little worth in these fields. Thus, a cycle begins: federal funding is cut for humanities programs, leading to lower participation in these programs; lower participation signals to the governing economic forces that funding should be further cut; the response of students in higher education increasingly reflects this.

Suppression and Censorship of Literature

Why might a capitalist society not want you to read?

Stone (1969) has linked literacy to revolutions – a capitalist society, of course, wants to prevent this, and therefore does what it can to suppress literacy. Reading books and texts that are un-censored or not federally approved encourages readers to think outside of the capitalist sphere. Radical ideas, especially when surrounded by themes of freedom, oppression, surveillance, labor, propganda, etc. may cause citizens to question their government, and to ultimately organize revolutions. The printing press, for example, is often attributed by historians as the impetus of the American and French revolutions. By being able to read what was printed, and by having the ability (whether legal or not) to print whatever they wanted, radical ideas would be shared among all citizens. In this way, literacy rates keep citizens informed, and politically-informed citizens can be dangerous to a less-than-just government.

  Literacy itself will not, mind you, spark revolution. A government will typically have no problem with a literate population. In fact, being literate helps individuals greatly in the workforce and increases governmental revenue. Thus, a population that can read to the extent that it is able to conduct business and pursue professional careers is encouraged. It is widespread literacy in that individuals are reading a plethora of books, articles, genres, and ideas, however, that poses a threat. In a way, the nature of the humanities encourage outspokenness. A government that is susceptible to backlash wants to understandably avoid this, and so has further reason to suppress widespread endeavors in these fields. The culture surrounding the majorly homogenous views that align with leading government affiliations leans heavily on the pursuit of progress and away from the ethical and critical views typically associated with the humanities. The growing popularity of the former outlook acts as permission for the further cuts in funding for the humanities to take place at a federal level. 

Kaestle (1985) explains that “mass media are controlled by the larger society, the control is complex and variable, and the two most salient sources of control are the government and the economic system” (37). Therefore, capitalist societies in particular (which have historically been the cause of much social and political unrest) have the motivation to limit the freedom of press held by individual members of its society in order to limit the revolutionary ideas that would be imposed as monopolies and unfair economic hierarchies inevitably form. Why, one may be inclined to ask, are these impositions not being pushed back by the large majority of members of the oppressed system? As Byung-Chul Han explains in his book Capitalism and the Death Drive, the modern system in place no longer makes it clear who is ruling -- and who is ruled by -- the disciplinary regime. He identifies typical late-stage capitalist societies as under neo-liberal rule, which ensures there is no resistance through a positing power that turns everyone into "a self-exploiting worker in his own enterprise" (16). 

In essence, a leading capitalist society like the United States does not want its citizens to read nor publish ideas that contradict their economic interests, and so has put a system in place that blinds citizens from their own restrictions of liberty -- a technique that ensures they subordinate themselves to the ruling system voluntarily. Therefore, the reason that these restrictive governmental actions are allowed to continue is because part of the majority culture's pursuit of technology results in a great reliance of its members on technology -- which largely revolves around artificial intelligence. Chad Engelland (2025) and Clay Shirky (2026) discussed in their respective articles about how the use of AI leads to the emotional offloading and deskilling of its users, resulting in the defectiveness of critical thinking skills and more complex applications within the roles held by AI users. This allows for the potentially morally grey integration of technology in U.S. society press on relentlessly and unchecked. Without the implication of non-epistemic values on the more empirical fields in STEM -- a notion considered necessary by Phyllis Rooney (2017) -- this progress continues without ethical regulation.