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Module 1: What Are the Humanities?
WHAT ARE THE HUMANITIES?
As much as professors like to malign Wikipedia, it is not a bad place to begin when examining a question for the first time. Read the entire Wikipedia entry defining the Humanities:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanities (Links to an external site.)
In recent years, college students have grown frightened of majoring in the humanities because they fear a humanities major will make them unemployable. This article tracks the recent history of this trend, and makes an argument for why that line of thinking is flawed:
“The Humanities Are in Crisis: Students are abandoning humanities majors, turning to degrees they think yield far better job prospects. But they’re wrong (Links to an external site.).“ The Atlantic. August 23, 2018. Benjamin Schmidt. Assistant professor of history at Northeastern University.
A few years ago, I made a short movie about the crisis in humanities, and interviewed some of my college professor friends about it. This film sums up my feelings about the importance of the humanities being brought to college students by full-time liberal arts professors. To sign in to see the video, this is the password (with a lower-case “l” not an upper-case “I”): lad2018
https://vimeo.com/254238517 (Links to an external site.)
In this video, Then & Now lays out an arguments for the central importance of the humanities in a democracy, and in society, linking these subjects to the art of STORYTELLING:
Oh The Humanities – A Defense of the Humanities (Links to an external site.)
The humanities are about what it means to be human, what our societies believe, and what it means to have a story for our lives.
Education based purely on marketable skills and the learning of a trade is not so much concerned with “Why are things this way?” or “How might things be different?” than “This is how things are done. This is what you must do to succeed in this single field.” Education in these fields tends to be based more on cultivating obedience to authority and learning the correct answers to a test in advance and writing them down at the right time. Frequently, such majors are so invested in producing majors that all look exactly alike that they will even have rules against taking elective courses or minors in other majors or disciplines.
Instead, Humanities education is very much oriented around: Why are things this way? Why are we this way? Are we living good lives? What should we change? The humanities are more about teaching critical thinking, self-awareness, empathy, and creativity than training obedient workers. The humanities value difference over conformity. Ironically, humanists are the ones most often accused of being ideologues and the ones who do all the brainwashing of students. This is mostly because critical thinking and creativity are dynamic mental processes, but are frightening to people who like stability, tradition, and and a culture where dissent is discouraged.
And yet, many people live their lives purely on emotion and instinct, are unhappy, don’t understand why they make the choices they do, and do not even begin to know how they could imagine making different life choices. People in this situation, exposed to the humanities, could understand themselves and the world better, know their place in the world better, and have a better chance of making more solid decisions. Cultivating understanding – of ourselves, others, and the world around us – is often an essential component of leading a rewarding life.
One of the problems with American tribalism, where we all tend to identify with our own team (be it sports team, political party, religion, ethnicity, or gender) and lack empathy with members of “the other team” is we become so concerned with winning and “good press” and “owning” our enemies that we start to like boiling complex issues down to memes and bumper stickers. While it makes for good theater and may help us “win” elections or cultural debates, this process of making complex issues simple undermines out ability to solve – or even address – complex social problems (be it fallout from a natural disaster, an economic downturn, a long-running war, or any truly large-scale or systemic problem) and hurts our abilities to see many of our own relatives and co-workers as anything but an enemy agent. There is a danger to making “THIS” the “CORRECT WORLD VIEW” and all others not just “WRONG” but “EVIL.”
The humanities proposes the opposite tactic. Make things more complicated. Take the meme and make it more nuanced. Take the bumper sticker and ask what its full ramifications are. Does this bumper sticker REALLY cover all that is important about a given issue? Does it distort the views of the opposition? Does it proceed from a false assumption? Is it needlessly cruel?
These are fundamentally important questions. However, we are endlessly discouraged from asking them. After all, asking questions means rocking the boat and maybe disagreeing with the other members of your team. Asking these questions destroys internal unity. That is why humanists tend to be cast in the roles of traitors, morale-wreckers, or malcontents.
And yet, I keep returning to the fact that a great many of us are unhappy. A great many of us see no hope for the future, no possibility of gainful employment, and no possibility of healthy personal relationships. This is the legacy of tribalism. We think if we get even more tribal and even more committed to our group, things will get better. Next time, WE WIN! AND WE DESTROY ALL MEMBERS OF THE OTHER TEAM FOREVER! AND I’LL BE HAPPY! Yeah, I’m not so sure. I think a lot of us get stuck in a bumper-sticker worldview that makes us fundamentally unhappy. We need more room to maneuver, especially if we are the only person who thinks or feels a certain way in our household, neighborhood, or town…
We need more than one narrative to live by, or we get in a rut. Yes, we could all agree on one definition of what it means to be a good American, one definition of what it means to be a good employee, a good child, or a good member of a faith community. But there is a danger to a single story…
The danger of a single story | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Links to an external site.)
This course is about how to see as many stories as possible, so we can better understand ourselves, our society, our friends, and our enemies.
This course is about how to understand the stories around us and how to begin to tell different and better stories for ourselves and a new generation.
Discussion related to these videos…
- What are the Humanities?
The humanities are notoriously difficult to “define.” If you were to define them in a sentence or two, how would you do it? Many SWOSU students have said that they did not do much studying of the humanities in their K-12 education, which emphasized the fields of STEM and athletics. What exposure have you had to the humanities so far, in your formal education, and in your day-to-day lives? What element of the humanities appears the most potentially interesting to you?
IMPORTANT: To ensure you get full credit, cite ideas from the readings and videos in this module to show you are engaged with the material and understand it. Also, do not just repeat what others say or agree with them, but go deeper, or take the conversation in a new direction.
