The Humanities and Social Sciences Should Teach Civilization, Not Contempt

The Humanities and Social Sciences Should Teach Civilization, Not Contempt

When a seven-year project examining thousands of social and behavioral science papers recently reported that only about half of the selected findings could be replicated, many observers treated the result as another entry in the familiar “replication crisis.” But the more troubling finding was less dramatic and more damning: reproducibility.

Replication means re-testing a claim with new data. Reproducibility means taking the authors’ own data and analysis and seeing whether the reported result can be obtained again. In other words, it asks whether the paper’s arithmetic, coding, and analytical record actually support its conclusion. According to reporting on the SCORE project, only 54 percent of analyzed papers were exactly reproducible. That is not merely an academic housekeeping problem; it is a crisis of scholarship.

If the public is asked to reorder law, schools, hiring, medicine, and civic life around claims emerging from the humanities and social sciences, then those fields must first show that they can distinguish inquiry from advocacy and evidence from assertion. A field that cannot consistently reproduce its own calculations should be especially cautious about issuing sweeping moral verdicts on civilization itself.

That caution is mostly absent from contemporary academic culture. Large parts of the humanities and social sciences have abandoned the traditional liberal-arts mission: introducing students to the best that has been thought, argued, created, and built; training them to reason carefully; and helping them inherit civilization rather than despise it. Too often, these disciplines begin from the preconceived premise that the West is uniquely oppressive and that scholarship exists to expose and dismantle its institutions. The result is not education but political malformation.

Critical theory is central to this transformation. Proper criticism is indispensable to scholarship: it tests arguments, exposes errors, and forces inherited beliefs to justify themselves. But critical theory, in the Marxist tradition of Horkheimer and his followers, reverses the scholarly sequence. Instead of beginning with facts and moving toward conclusions, it begins with conclusions—oppression, domination, privilege, systemic injustice—and then interprets the facts through that predetermined prism. This is why so much contemporary scholarship reads like indictment rather than investigation.

Intersectionality—the increasingly widespread analytical framework that dominates the humanities and social sciences and has even infiltrated STEM fields—illustrates the problem. It began as a legal and analytical attempt to explain how different categories of identity might combine in particular cases of discrimination. In its dominant academic and institutional form, however, it functions as political activism, treating disparities as presumptive evidence of oppression and identity groups as bearers of collective guilt or virtue. Race, sex, class, religion, sexuality, disability, immigration status, and other categories are arranged into an ever-expanding grid of power. The individual disappears into the category.

This worldview erodes moral universalism. Classical liberal arts education traditionally teaches that human beings possess equal dignity as individuals and that moral judgment depends on conduct, character, and agency. Identity-based theories replace that standard with collective moral accounting. Some groups are presumed suspect because they are associated with power; others are presumed virtuous because they are associated with victimhood. This does not abolish hierarchy. It inverts it. Nor does it produce justice. It produces resentment, suspicion, and the habit of seeing fellow citizens not as neighbors but as representatives of historical guilt or grievance.

The damage is especially severe in education. Students should learn Athens and Jerusalem, Rome and Philadelphia, Shakespeare and Milton, Locke and Montesquieu, Douglass and Lincoln, Tocqueville and Burke. They should learn that Western civilization is not merely flawed; it is the most humane and self-correcting form of civilization yet produced.

Other civilizations have treated human life with far less restraint and far less regard for individual dignity. The Western inheritance, shaped by classical reason and Judeo-Christian moral teaching, gave the world constitutionalism, the rule of law, scientific inquiry, individual rights, free speech, religious liberty, representative government, and the moral vocabulary by which its own failures have been judged and corrected. It does not require apology. It requires gratitude, stewardship, and transmission.

To teach students that only hating that inheritance is not sophistication but deprivation. Students who can denounce “power structures” but cannot explain the Magna Carta, the common law, the scientific revolution, the American founding, abolitionism, liberal democracy, or civil-rights constitutionalism have not been educated. They have been armed with slogans and denied memory.

This also helps explain why antisemitic, anti-American, and anti-Western movements find sympathetic audiences on campuses. If students are taught that liberal democracies and constitutional republics are merely masks for domination, illiberal actors can be romanticized so long as they position themselves against the West. The moral distinction between reform and destruction disappears. Once identity and positionality replace universal moral standards, almost any inversion becomes possible.

Students need not be shielded from Marx, Foucault, or other radical critics, but they should encounter them historically, as influential figures whose ideas shaped modern politics and academic culture. Their point of view is not equivalent to the foundations of liberal arts education. Marxism, critical theory, and postmodernism are ideological episodes to be studied and judged against the deeper tradition of reason, moral universalism, ordered liberty, and humane self-government.

The humanities and social sciences can recover their authority only by recovering their proper purposes. They should transmit memory, cultivate judgment, refine language, and form moral imagination. The social sciences should study human institutions with humility, methodological rigor, and respect for history.

Even the term “social sciences” becomes evasive as a replacement for the traditional study of Classics and history—it encourages scholars to evade chronological, documentary, and comparative investigation and instead cherry-pick issues that serve a destructive critical narrative. History asks what happened, in what order, under what conditions, and compared with what alternatives. Ideology asks only how the past can be arranged to condemn the present.

The solution is to restore education to the classical liberal-arts model still practiced by some conservative and Christian colleges: a model ordered toward truth, moral formation, disciplined reasoning, historical memory, and gratitude for civilization. Public funding should not support institutions or programs that teach contempt for America and the West as their governing premise.

Nor should taxpayers subsidize fake fields of study, which abound in the humanities and social sciences and function as propaganda rather than scholarship. Left to their own devices, many such programs would not endure, because they are neither truthful nor useful. The task now is to restore education to its earlier glory: to form free, responsible, historically literate citizens capable of inheriting, improving, and defending the civilization that made their freedom possible.

Nora D. Clinton is a Research Scholar at the Legal Insurrection Foundation. She was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Classics and has published extensively on ancient documents on stone. In 2020, she authored the popular memoir Quarantine Reflections Across Two Worlds. Nora is a co-founder of two partner charities dedicated to academic cooperation and American values. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son.

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