If you say that the meaning of a poem is indeterminate, you are accused of posing a threat to Western values--often by people who never read poetry. But if you say that the universe is like an ATM card, you get the Nobel Prize. How did humanists get painted into a cultural corner such that everything that a social or natural scientist says that is counterintuitive receives public genuflection, but literature professors are expected to do nothing but reaffirm common sense? ("Dangers Within and Without" 10-11)

Faculty members in science and in social science departments tend to regard humanists as reflexively oppositional to what they do and, therefore, as easy to discount. This perception is founded mainly on ignorance. The summaries of the state of ideas in the humanities in books like E.O. Wilson's Consilence and Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate are appallingly misinformed, but the ignorance is depressing, since it indicates that humanists have almost completely failed at explaining what they do and why it offers as good a return on social investment as genetics or economics. Humanists feed this perception by reciting predicatable critiques of the claims of science and social science. Our response to anything is, "It's more complicated." They assert X, and we say, "But it's overdetermined." They assert Y, and we say, "But there's a contradiction." They assert Z, and we say, "But the concept is socially constructed or historically contested." Humanities departments have turned into the little boy who cries, "Difference!" Humanities professors are right: there is difference, it always is more complicated, concepts are constructed. But the role of the humanities cannot be that of problematizing this and calling into question that. Humanities professors need to construct alternative paradigms, and if those paradigms are built merely from some notion of the literary, they will blow right over. (13-14)

The humanities are the study of life in its cultural dimension, which happens to be the dimension in which every human being actually operates. You can study life in its biological and in its social scientific dimension--that is, you can look at the genetic causes of behavior or at the mehtods by which individuals calculate their political and economic interests--only if you hold culture constant. Culture is no an add-on to the biological and sociological conditions of existence; it is constitutive of species identity. Culture is the medium in which we act, and it is, from a purely rational point of view, always a distorting medium. Culture is why paradigms of social and scientific theory don't work, why people tend never to do what social theory predicts they will do. Kant once said that humanity is a crooked timber from which nothing straight can be cut. That's what humanists study. We study warp. (14-15.)