The Humanities! What is it good for?

I ought to recognize this from the start: the humanities do not command much respect in society today. Salaries for individuals possessing bachelors degrees in the humanities (English, History, Philosophy, Religious Studies, Cultural Studies, etc.) start out abysmally low and end up edging toward mediocrity. American children want to be stars, as actors, musicians or especially sports players. Their parents push them to be doctors, lawyers or accountants, with the odd engineering profession thrown in for good measure.

A person working in the humanities does not even measure productivity in the same fashion as other professions. A playwright's one-act, a philosopher's treatise or historian's article does not at all affect a nation's Gross Domestic Product until it is commoditized and commercialized. Once a work has been commercialized, it's worth then is determined by the market. This market value is what is captured by the economic and labor statistics. The aesthetic value is left aside.

Yet this is how it should be. Everyone needs to eat, so let individuals make decisions on aesthetic value and let a plurality of individual decisions form a market. I have no problem with selling out. Some people make what other people want and are justly rewarded for their effort and innovation.

The market economy only explains how people in the humanities survive, though. It does not explain why these people do what they do. Many responses have been offered to the why question. Some value the aesthetics of literature and poetry. Some value the intellectual jousting found in philosophy. Some value the dedicated interpretation of the past offered by the study of history. What motivates me to study in the humanities, however, is the thrill of danger.

Seriously, I find the humanities to be thrilling. Why? The humanities kill people. Sure, the sciences kill people too. But those deaths are usually accidental, unless co-opted by the humanities to some sinister end. Tribalism, Nationalism, Totalitarianism, Anti-Semitism all fall under the humanities is one form or another. If it's an -ism, it's in the humanities. The 20th Century alone saw millions of people die for the sake of ideas. Clearly then, ideas are some pretty powerful things, with the capacity to drive humanity mad.

I will use this blog to record my attempts to make some sense of the ideas (brilliant and inane alike) that impact this world. If I aim at a target large enough, I just might hit it. That's the idea, at least. Readers can expect posts to be of uneven quality and disparate disciplines. Perhaps some short academic-level papers will be published here, alongside normal blog-length posts. I cannot promise definitive conclusions, but I hope to have several productive nudges in the right direction. Thanks for riding along.