Are English Majors Necessary?

Sometimes, being a bookworm, you start to doubt whether what you do has any real impact on the world. Several weeks ago, I was having a drink with a few people who, like me, are English majors trying to break into the world of publishing and reviewing. “Wow,” somebody said. “If all of us were to suddenly vanish, most of the country probably wouldn’t even notice.” We mulled this over. It was a disturbing thought. If every bookworm—every literature nerd who has a favorite bookmark and devours the book review section of major newspapers—every person for whom questions of semantics are vital, not petty—were to stop doing his or her job, would it matter? In short, how much weight do words really carry?

The question is certainly relevant to the 2008 campaign (after all, at this point, it’s hard to find something that’s not relevant to the campaign). Obama is seen by many as a man armed with words and little else. He has words he uses a lot, like “hope” and “change.” These sound great, sure, but do they mean anything? Some (I count myself in this group) think that these words resonate in America, but others—perhaps those who wouldn’t notice if bookworms all went on that hypothetical sabbatical—are doubtful as to whether any oration, no matter how poetic and persuasive, matters in the long run. There are a lot of ways to characterize the debate about Obama, but over the past few months, I’ve adopted this method: People who love Obama feel as confident as he does that words can create major changes in thought and action. People who are neutral about or downright opposed to him feel that words, even the most convincing and commanding ones, just don’t matter all that much.

A few weeks ago, at the Brooklyn Book Festival, Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books [full disclosure: I’ve worked for the New York Review’s publishing imprint since late 2007], and four of the publication’s contributors—Joan Didion, Mark Danner, Darryl Pinckney, and Ronald Dworkin—held a panel called “The Consequences to Come.” It was named for a book published by the New York Review’s publishing imprint, to which Didion, Danner, Pinckney, and Dworkin (as well as Frank Rich, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and others) contributed essays on how America will have to change after the latest set of Bush years, and if the next administration will ever be able to get the country out of the mess in which it’s currently mired. Did Didion think we—not only the Obama supporters, but the bookworms—had a chance in hell?

The answer was a strong, if nuanced, yes—and to tell the truth, the explanation was much more convincing than I had expected it to be. Not that I doubted these literary and political giants’ abilities to persuade me, but, after all, everyone in that auditorium was in the words business—we all had a serious stake in maintaining the power of language to move and motivate. But Silvers and his fearsome foursome gave a clear and quite compelling analysis of how words are possibly the only thing that can save America.

Dworkin argued that building and strengthening international law is paramount, and that the process is threefold: tribunals, diplomacy, and, perhaps most important, changing “the mindset of the American people.” The last, he said, would be the hardest because we’ve been nurtured in a culture of smug superiority for so long that accepting humility and compromise will be difficult. “It will take a brilliant rhetorician who can do that,” Dworkin said. People’s minds are changed by “cogent, passionate eloquence,” and when people’s minds are changed, the country’s international role can change too.
I left the panel feeling not only amazed but also a bit more reassured. As a bookworm, it can get depressing as you grow up and realize how much of your life affects and is affected by only a small and self-selective group. It’s hard to see the link between words and action, but Dworkin made an important point: Words don’t directly cause action. Instead, they cause emotional and intellectual change, which in turn causes action.

It’s almost certainly still true that, had my English major friends and I vanished from that bar, never to be seen again, most of the country wouldn’t notice that our work wasn’t getting done. But maybe that’s not true on a larger scale. Maybe there is hope after all for language lovers who base their lives around words. If Ronald Dworkin said so, I’m inclined to agree.

Rebecca Evans is a Columbia College junior double-majoring in English and creative writing. One for the Books runs alternate Thursdays.