But now he’s revised his argument, because the years since the Great Recession have been “brutal for almost every major in the humanities.” They’ve also been bad for “social science fields that most closely resemble humanistic ones — sociology, anthropology, international relations and political science.” Meanwhile the sciences and engineering have gained at the expense of humanism, and with them sports management and exercise studies — the “hygiene” and “sport,” if you will, from Auden’s list of Apollonian concerns.

Notably this trend is sharper among elite liberal arts colleges, the top thirty in the US News and World Report rankings, where in the early 2000s the humanities still attracted about a third of all students, but lately only get about a fifth. So it’s not just a matter of the post-Great Recession middle class seeking more practical degrees to make sure their student loans get repaid quickly; the slice of the American elite that’s privileged enough and intellectually-minded enough to choose Swarthmore or Haverford or Amherst over a state school or a research university is abandoning Hermes for Apollo at the fastest clip.

Even this acceleration is no doubt partially driven by economic concerns: Elite college grads are by no means immune to feelings of precarity. But as with another, more literally humanistic pursuit — childbearing — that had seemed to stabilize after a post-1960s collapse but now is in decline again, the absence of a post-Great Recession bounce-back for the humanities suggests that the economic calamity of 2008 was a precondition but not the only cause, and that other cultural shifts had left the humanities ripe for another era of collapse.

In explaining those shifts many conservatives blame the humanists themselves, for being politicized and marching lock step to the left and for pursuing postmodernist obscurantism in their scholarship and prose. But I think it’s more useful to step back a bit and recognize both politicization and postmodern jargon as attempted solutions to a pre-existing problem, not the taproot of the crisis.

That problem is the one that Auden identified seventy years ago: In an Apollonian culture, eager for “Useful Knowledge” and technical mastery and increasingly indifferent to memory and allergic to tradition, the poet and the novelist and the theologian struggle to find an official justification for their arts. And both the turn toward radical politics and the turn toward high theory are attempts by humanists in the academy to supply that justification — to rebrand the humanities as the seat of social justice and a font of political reform, or to assume a pseudoscientific mantle that lets academics claim to be interrogating literature with the rigor and precision of a lab tech doing dissection.

At the moment both efforts look like failed attempts. But is there an alternative? Here I would dissent a little from the sternness of Jacobs’s pessimism, since I think the Christian humanists that he describes — and their secular and Jewish counterparts — had a little more short-run success than he suggests. There was real growth in humanities majors beginning in the 1950s (stronger among women than men, but present among both), and that indicator corresponded to a genuine mass interest, mediated by journalists and popularizers as well as academia, in pursuits that now seem esoteric and strictly elitist — poetry and public theology, classical music and abstract impressionism, the Great American novel and the high theory of French cinema and more.

What sustained this temporary cultural moment, middlebrow and crass in all sorts of ways but still more successfully humanistic than our own? Three forces, in particular, that are no longer with us. First, there was a stronger religious element in midcentury culture, visible both in the general postwar religious revival and in the particular theological-intellectual flowering that Jacobs’s subjects embodied, which rooted midcentury humanism in a metaphysical understanding of human life — an understanding that both ennobled acts of artistic creation and justified a strong interest in the human person’s interiority, his actual person as opposed to just his brain chemistry or social role.