in defense of the humanities

written in anger

I’ve been thinking about this for a long, long time, often wondering why defenses of the humanities feel so flimsy. In a sense, the fact that we need to justify their value is already a bad thing — the fact that justifications for their value often seem so rhetorical and empty just intensifies it all. ‘The humanities teach us to think critically'. Ok, cool. It doesn’t really seem like anybody cares about this, though.

What’s strange about these arguments is that the value of the humanities is latently present in culture, everywhere you look. Everyone would be a writer, if they could. This is almost universally acknowledged as an aspirational thing to do. There are whole aesthetic worlds developed to the trappings of artistic production. Parents have to discourage their children from taking English degrees instead of going into computer science. On the other side, everyone loves their favorite show, or fantasy book series, or video game. Narrative worlds matter to people, whether that’s a science fictional universe or a representation of the historical past, delivered through podcast. Art sits at the core of people’s lives, to the extent that, culturally, we have to discourage them from focusing too much on it, whether that’s by discouraging them from getting a PhD in Art History (or whatever) or telling them that they shouldn’t watch too much TV. It’s as if a culture that doesn’t encourage robust attention toward and investment in the arts has to constantly reinforce itself. It is turning away from the arts that is artificial, not pursuing them.

The obvious argument against this is that artistic production doesn’t need the academic humanities to go on happening. I am not going to concede this. Sure, they’re not strictly necessary, but the academic humanities provide incredible tools for people who wish to produce art, and many academics are also artists. A separation between the humanities and any kind of narrative art is essentially artificial. Sure, we could abolish universities, but that would mean abolishing archives that help artists make good art, spaces that encourage and fund artists and writers, and (yes) research that changes the ways in which people make art. Concerns in theory and concerns in popular art often mirror each other, and this is to the benefit of both.

So I don’t feel much of a need to defend the humanities, when the arts create and designate importance for, I would say, the majority of people. What I would ask, instead, is why we have learned to artificially devalue the things that we all acknowledge make life worth living and are the most fun things to do. To me, the issue seems to be that the constant cultural messaging against humanities and the arts, the idea that these are essentially selfish pursuits, has created a phenomenon not of lessening interest in the arts, but of worse audiences. People are encouraged to reject the humanities, and so they do not get what the humanities can offer, and so they become bad readers who don’t know how to select for good writing (or any writing at all!) or bad watchers who don’t know how to select for good visual media. Add to this online life, which is an uncanny facsimile of both narrative art and social interaction, and you have a downward spiral, alienating people further and further from meaningful artistic experience.

Today, I finished Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel. The Cromwell trilogy was incredibly popular, at least in Britain. I think I’ve seen people reading Wolf Hall at the beach. I lent that latter book to my mother, not an academic type by any means, who today texted me, ‘I love Thomas Cromwell!’. Mantel’s trilogy was a phenomenon that generated a popular TV series and, probably, lots of interest in the Tudors, which I must assume then generated more media about the Tudors. This all, I imagine, made lots of people lots of money. None of it was possible without the academic sources that Mantel drew from to write the books.

There is nothing inherently outdated, unprofitable, or out of touch about the humanities. I’m sick of seeing people in my field act like their work is selfish or useless. We have to have some confidence and bravery, and at least try to defend what we know is important.

apologies for posting twice in one week, and for posting what is essentially a rant, but i’ve been meaning to write something about this for a while and today: 1) i had a conversation with my mother about Hilary Mantel; 2) i had a conversation with another PhD student about the fact that the heating in the faculty of classics is essentially broken, and there don’t seem to be any plans to fix it. This latter point made me feel kind of incensed, so i figured it was a good time to write.