What’s the Use of the Humanities in Society?

The Perils of a Practical Education

Dear readers, after a month-long hiatus taking a rest from writing, I appreciate your readership and I have returned to my regular weekly schedule of writing! I hope that you enjoy today’s article about a pressing issue facing modern society. As always, if you have any requests for topics, please drop me a note!

After eight years of hard science searching for truth by the scientific method, I realized it can only be found through the humanities. Science may bring us data, but only a mind trained in the humanities can ever understand it.

It is a familiar trope for children of struggling parents to be pushed toward a practical education because it was advertised for so long as the only way to pull the family toward a more stable financial status in society. It is a common meme that the Asian Parents get shocked and dismayed when their children propose studying something like history or art in university. The purpose of an education then, is primarily to get a good job at the end. A degree is the means to an end for a vocation. The degrees in question that are most efficacious to this end are degrees related to Science, Engineering, Technology and Maths. In fact, the Science and Maths part can be removed from this equation as merely subsidiary fields serving the Engineering and Technology aspect of the equation. 

Because Science and Maths, pursued for their own ends, for their own curiosity, are not useful, they cannot be applied. When people do a science degree, it is to get into medical school or to become a nurse or even some kind of technician. Few people purse Science for its own sake. Those who do become “scientists” do not hold the primary prerogative of scientific discovery, but rather, must write grants to get their research approved.

Their scientific questions must be demonstrated to be “relevant” to cure cancer, depression or dementia or to protect the planet from climate change. The idea of asking a scientific question for its own sake is preposterous, not to mention will not get funding from big pharma (which funds a large majority of scientific research). When people do a maths degree, it is to become an engineer of some sort. Besides the obvious question which hangs in the air, about whether or not this research actually does help these causes that justify it, it is clear that intellectual pursuit for its own sake, is unthinkable in modern academia.

There is a crucial confusion here of the words education and training and we must recognize that the two are not the same thing. An education helps you to think and answer questions about the world, whereas training prepares you for a job. Education can form a crucial part of training, but it seems that it is not respected in its own right in the modern world. This is because we live in a society that only measures value based on material utility, rather than spiritual satisfaction. 

But we cannot get away from the spiritual no matter how much money we make or “stability” we acquire. At the end of the day, we search for poetry when we wish to eulogize the dead, we search for philosophy when life leaves us in quagmires of existential crises, we search for beauty when we walk from one place to the other, and we search for an ability to understand the narratives of history when we wish to make sense of the present.

Man is not merely a material being with material needs. He is also a spiritual being with spiritual needs. More specifically, the arts give us an ability to understand stories, whether they are in novels, poetry, architecture or history. The ability to understand stories, can be translated in a vulgar way to mean “data processing”.

Data would not exist without stories. Data is always an answer to a question. That question is embedded in a story about how one predicts the world works. Then it is tested and the “Results” only make sense in the context of that story. A list of numbers doesn’t mean anything unless you know what they are measuring. Let’s say you find out they are measurements in metres and are people’s heights. The numbers still are not “data” because they do not tell you anything, not even whose heights they are. Let’s say you find out other things like each person’s sex and whether they live in Europe or North America. Suddenly, you can ask questions like, “is the average height of men greater than the average height of women?” or “is the median height of Europeans meaningfully different from the median height of North Americans?”. These questions may seem simple but they are derived not from the sciences, but from the humanities, for they are the humanities that teach us to ask meaningful questions. 

The dismal state of the modern sciences can be attributed to the fact that modern scientists are rarely trained in the humanities and can therefore not ask good questions. Or, if they do ask questions, they are questions that have been blindly absorbed from the state propaganda rather than formed by some kind of sincere curiosity or critical thought. The proof that modern sciences are in a dismal state can be supported by the evidence that new drugs are just iterations of previous ones, there have been no major breakthroughs in the treatment of major illnesses. Academia is underoing a “Replication crisis” in which the vast majority of scientific papers have proven to not be replicable, meaning the experiments and results cannot be replicated by a third party. Even innovations in technology are merely amplifications of the same kind of increasingly enhanced simulation world--we just keep making better cameras and better rendered images for our video games, more addictive apps to trap people in the matrix, better ways to track people’s activities so that ever more draconian laws can be more easily enforced. There are certainly very creative and innovative people doing interesting things today, but they are certainly not the ones who adhere to the mainstream academic dogma, but rather rebel against it.

Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.

George Orwell

An education in the humanities teaches people how to think on their own. Vocational studies, studies that give you a list of facts to learn for a job, teach you what to know and to what end. Whereas the humanities, in other words an education rather than simply a training program, teaches you how to ask questions and which questions to ask. It teaches you how to compare different ends for your study and teaches you to consider which ones are better than others. Without this ability to think, you are merely an automaton for others to use, no better than a machine with buttons. It doesn’t matter if you can regurgitate every statistic from Stalin’s reign in the Soviet Union if you cannot explain why he rose to power or how he kept it for so long. It doesn’t matter if you can cite the name and date of every battle in World War I if you can’t ask and answer questions about the significance of the new form of warfare and how it completely altered society economically and psychologically afterwards forevermore. Learning facts is just as important as learning to think about these facts.

An education in the humanities also gives people the vocabulary to understand their inner world and society much better. Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “the limits of my language are the limits of my world”. When a person knows fewer words, their experience of the world is limited to those words because a person cannot be aware of experiences they cannot articulate. A simple example is an artist learning new words for a wider variety of colours. Suddenly once you learn the name “burnt ochre” you start to see it distinctly from brown and orange that you might have once used to categorize it as. The new word opens up a new dimension of reality. The same thing happens when we read great literature or appreciate great art. Great writers and artists open up new dimensions of reality for us to observe, appreciate and understand. A person who is well educated in the humanities therefore not only has a richer understanding of their own psychology and mind, but also of the world and the ways that it works. This does not offer direct monetary benefit to an individual, but it does offer value indirectly as a more thoughtful person is therefore more intelligent and has more options in life. 

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

George Orwell

It is understandable why the humanities would be purposely sabotaged by a tyrannical regime. Consider the Cultural Revolution in China that destroyed their history, literature and art, or the denigration of the humanities in Soviet Russia, that silenced a once immensely creative people. Consider the arts of today, a mockery of the word art itself. Consider the quality of most writing today that can be replaced with robots. It it never a coincidence when a regime makes a people illiterate and neglectful of the arts. This is because such a people cannot ask questions or critically assess propaganda. A people untrained in the humanities cannot form their own opinions.

People who do not learn real history as a humanities but just the facts that they must memorize for an exam, cannot evaluate history and compare it to modern times. They cannot evaluate the sources to understand whether or not the narrative that they are being told about such and such a period of time is accurate. They cannot argue their perspective or investigate the logic of other people’s perspectives. Logic and critical thinking are not automatic skills, they must be taught through rigorous study and this is precisely the purpose of the study of the humanities: to learn how to ask questions and to learn how to evaluate different peoples answers. Most modern people do not even study history formally, they absorb it from movies and tv shows and take that as unerring fact; in other words, they absorb the state sponsored propaganda without a second thought. This is an illiterate people that is easy to control.

A people untrained in the humanities do not even have the language to articulate the un-ease they might feel in their own societies and their rage is impotent, and their ideas for improvement or rebellion die in their chests. In short, a people uneducated in the humanities are much easier to control and manipulate because they are closer to beasts.

To philosophize is to be human. At times we are beasts, simply attempting to survive from one day to the next, to get food and water, to maintain a shelter, to procreate. But what separates man from beast is arguably his ability to look up from this daily sisyphean task of mere survival, and to thrive, which requires an intellect, a sense of beauty, of art and of curiosity about the world for its own sake. The invention of the humanities was the invention of true education and living in the world, not merely surviving in it like an animal. When we looked up from the ground, scrounging for food, and up at the stars and wondered for the first time at their existence.