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Will the humanities save us? It depends.

Wes Davis is among those who, in recent months, have portrayed the humanities as an antidote to the excesses that hastened our financial crisis. He tells the story of a big company that, a half century ago, sent its top executives to college for a year to get a crash course in the liberal arts. The executives read very widely and had discussions with leading thinkers. They loved it, but they also became "less interested in putting the company’s bottom line ahead of their commitments to their families and communities." The program came to an end in 1960.

Davis mourns the loss of that program. "As the worst economic crisis since the Depression continues and the deepening rift in the nation’s political fabric threatens to forestall economic reform, the values the program instilled would certainly come in handy today," he writes.

I'm inclined to agree with Davis, but I think we have to be careful not to present the humanities as a cure-all. It's perfectly possible to venerate the great artists and authors while committing atrocities of the first order, so I'm not sure a fuller curriculum would, in itself, protect us from the kinds of dirty dealing that contributed to our current woes.

I'll focus on an extreme example--far, far more extreme than any of the worst things than ever happened on Wall Street. The Nazis embraced the humanities. Many of their leaders were aesthetes who celebrated poetry and painting. (Hitler began as a painter, albeit a very bad one.) They pressed figures like Goethe, Rilke and even Shakespeare into service as standard-bearers of their ideology. They were also discriminating thieves, stealing many of Europe's greatest art treasures as they murdered and enslaved their owners.

Of course, they famously burned books and banned the "degenerate" art of the expressionists and dadaists. But they also used art and literature to affirm their brutal world view.

The artists and thinkers who survived or escaped the camps saw that the humanities had been no bulwark against inhumanity. Paul Celan's poetry became ever more cryptic as he recoiled from critics who were apt to read any poem as gesture of reconciliation.

For him, there was no harmony after the Holocaust. Beauty had been poisoned by the thugs who had co-opted it. Theodor Adorno conveyed the enormity of what the Nazis had done to art: "To write a poem after Auschwitz," he wrote, "is barbaric."

So I'm not sure that the arts and humanities in and of themselves will protect us from brutality or falsehood. It's what we do with them that matters. Tyrants and brutes of all stripes have long used them to support the most abhorrent bottom lines.

When we teach the humanities, we must help our students learn to challenge ideology. The humanities can give them a foundation of knowledge on which to build their opinions, but it should also put them in the habit of posing vital questions and rejecting easy answers.

Yes, these are cliches, but they bear repeating because the stakes are so high. In the end, humanity must be the bottom line.

(Hat tip: Joanne Jacobs)