Twentieth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Writing in the shadow of the January 6th insurrection in Washington and, closer to home, the trucker convoy occupying Ottawa (currently in its third week), this paper explores how the humanities can be part of the answer to many critics’ description of these controversies as harbingers of a more ominous shift in the political landscape over the past decade. Albert Einstein famously argued that we can’t solve new problems using outmoded ways of thinking, but paradoxically, this imperative to develop fresh solutions capable of addressing unprecedented pressures may enhance rather than diminish the value of a longer historical perspective. This foregrounds questions about the humanities, both as the discursive space best able to facilitate this historical turn and, as a result of the lessons gleaned from history, as a way of fostering countertendencies capable of addressing these new forms of extremism and alienation. Taking its cue from de Tocqueville’s prescient warning in Democracy in America that “the old words of despotism and of tyranny do not work. The thing is new, so I must try to define it since I cannot name it,” this paper explores John Stuart Mill’s influential response as a basis for his own struggle to forge a sustainable vision of democracy in the face of these corrosive pressures, alert to the prophetic double-edge of de Tocqueville’s account and alarmed at the “supine insensibility” of people’s indifference but determined to offer his own ideas as an interruption of de Tocqueville’s gothic modernity.