How to Balance Life’s Five Great Stories, or Why You Shouldn’t Work for the NSA
Every few months those of us who love the humanities are delighted to see another viral piece that tries to encapsulate why our field is so important. I read this latest example from Mark Edmundson and agree with every bit of it. Yet I didn’t think it went far enough it explaining what for me is the central problem of life that only the humanities can address, not by one simple formula but by critiquing hundreds of wondrous characters and stories, true and false. It is very good to emphasize that the humanities is designed to help us lead a virtuous life or have deep aesthetic experiences more than land a job; but this for me doesn’t sufficiently alert us to just how crucial the field is. I suspect most of us know lots of virtuous people who have never made a careful study of Shakespeare or learned another language. They seem perfectly happy; but are they as happy as they could be? And is their happiness as stable as it could be? Can they make new meaning every time their old world starts to crumble?
I’m going to make a succinct case for exactly why we all need the humanities, not necessarily as our major in college, but throughout life. This is a shortened version of a talk I give my students on the first day of class when I introduce subjects like Greek Literature or Leadership in the Ancient World.
My point is a very practical one, based in the human brain and modern society. The mind-boggling intricacy of contemporary human decision-making necessitates more than ever the study of the humanities (history, literature, philosophy, language, etc.). If such fields did not exist, we would desperately need to invent them and share them with as many of our fellow humans as possible.
If you don’t feel like reading anything else I have to say, you can just watch this two-minute clip from Good Will Hunting; it touches on most of what I think the study of the humanities should enable us to do. Note that by this point in the film Will Hunting (Matt Damon) has already come under the influence of his psychiatrist (Robin Williams), who is kind of like the humanities personified.
If you’re still reading, here’s the first thing to consider: contemporary human life is made up of not one but probably five “great stories,” long, complicated narratives involving a huge cast of characters and lots of planning and luck.
For much of human history this was not the case and even now is not the case for many people on the planet. But most people who are reading this essay will be able to recognize in their lives an aspiration to enact (1) the career story, (2) the friendship/romance story, (3) the long-term partnership story (I’m thinking of domestic or business partnerships), (4) the leadership story, and (5) the intellectual/spiritual enlightenment story. Each of these stories is drawn out over long periods of time, with many ups and downs. The “career story,” for example, involves lots of reflection and daydreaming early in life, then picking a major, picking a university that’s “known” for that major, making contacts, identifying and cultivating relationships with mentors, keeping an eye out for job prospects, interviewing, and often working at multiple places for years before becoming established — if you are lucky. Of course most career stories don’t actually run this smoothly, but this is how we tend to draw them up. Moreover, all of this story can of course be accomplished without paying much attention to the humanities. An 18-year old who wants to start a business or become an electrical engineer can certainly do so without analyzing, e.g., love poetry. One could argue that studying love poetry improves critical thinking and fosters the creativity necessary to run a business; but the humanities is not the only field that can foster such traits. Besides, some people are naturally more creative than others.
Yet clearly the humanities help out more in scripting the other great stories, given that much of the world’s art and literature deals with romance, leadership, marriage, and enlightenment. But, someone might feel that they can “script” all of these narratives without classes and professors, that perhaps Netflix (and other popular media), family, friends, or religious leaders can give us all the guidance we need in these areas. With the exception of Netflix, many of these sources have been reliable ways of leading our lives for tens of thousands of years. I myself use them all the time myself and appreciate the ways they enrich my life and the planning therein. For example, I never put thought into what beer or wine to buy whenever I’m in the company of an academic because I know I can trust them to select something that will satisfy me. Letting others chose for me is even a way to bond: it shows trust and respect and creates an opportunity for conversation.
Here’s the catch, though: unless you are incredibly lucky and willing to take a lot on blind faith, you have to admit that these guides to scripting your five great stories are in many ways limited and unreliable.
There have been an estimated 100,000,000,000 human beings on this planet since the first anatomically modern version of us emerged 200,ooo years ago. Whichever one of these humans you turned out to be is a very random thing. You might have been born at a different time, in a different place, with different genes, to totally different parents in a totally different community. Even the decisions your parents made — where to move, what jobs to take, when to start a family, what to name you — have a major impact on the kinds of information you are likely to receive when you decide how to live your life. If you are the slightest bit curious about what it would have been like to live in a different universe, you must study the humanities.
Along the same lines, family and friends may not be very reliable because they themselves only have a limited understanding of who you are and what is possible for you to accomplish in the world. Moreover, they may impose their own expectations on you, often without consideration for what your own dreams might be. Again, I say all of this with great appreciation or all that friends and family have done for me; nevertheless, I enjoy being able to make my mind up for myself.
Finally, some of our most common sources for scripting our lives may be carefully manipulating us with ignorant, selfish, or even malignant motives. Do you really trust Netflix to pick a movie for you based on what some prior version of yourself may have been interested in? Do you trust Madison Avenue to weave together life’s great stories around, e.g., the consumption of sugar water?
Here’s the real problem: how do you actually weave together life’s five great stories?
I claim that you must learn to do it on your own, independent of family, friends, and mass media. Your one mentor on this adventure is the humanities, both for the alternative perspectives on the human experience it can offer and for the critical skills it can give you to think for — and about — yourself.
Think about it. It’s hard enough to build a successful career. It takes a lot of hard work, planning, collaboration, and luck. It’s much harder, though, to figure out how to build a career when you’d also like a meaningful love life (can our relationship survive if we go to graduate school in different parts of the country?), a stable family (should I cut back the hours at the office to help my daughter with her homework?), a quiet soul (can I treat my employees like cogs in a machine and still feel good about making money?), or meaningful role in your community (is what I do really taking the world to a better place?). These are the kinds of questions we must ask ourselves not once but throughout our lives if we are to have any confidence in our success. Otherwise, we are just the processed food of a collective industrial farm.
Sometimes our life stories can complement each other. Your friend might also turn out to be a good business partner — or a spiritual guide. You might pick a career, like elementary school teacher, that also happens to be very beneficial to society. Most of the time, though, you spend a finite currency of about 26,000 days on as many meaningful paths as possible.
How do we achieve this balance amidst competing stories? By examining the lives of as many different people as possible, figuring out how they have, or how they do, make meaning out of their 26,000 (or fewer) days. This means looking at their decisions, their emotions, their ideas, their stories, their hopes and dreams, their character, their language, and their successes and failures. This is more than a casual study; it necessitates institutions of learning dedicated to carefully understanding the subject, populated by many talented and caring professors.
My own life has been a pretty good example of this necessity. When I went to college to major in physics and math, I was already pretty well educated. I had taken six AP courses my senior year in high school: English, Political Science, Calculus, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics. I had great public school teachers, some of whom remain friends to this day. But my high school had a pretty weak guidance counseling program: I was encouraged to apply to only one school (it was pretty much all I could afford, anyway), to study physics, which I was happy to do. But I had no idea you could, for example, major in philosophy or read ancient languages, or that people made careers of this! Fortunately for me, my physics major required me to take a bunch of humanities courses, like Latin and intro to philosophy, where I realized a lot of the physics questions I was interested in (cosmology, origin of the universe kind of stuff) were being tackled in other fields. Also, once I became good at deciphering the etymology of almost every word in the English language, I discovered that I could actually be pretty eloquent and persuasive if I wanted to be. The study of the human experience no longer seemed vague and mystical to me. Most of all, I developed a much better facility with balancing life’s five great stories, not only in the scripting of them but in the living of them. I finally knew myself and I knew the world, past and present, well enough to navigate a clearer path. This was not a single “happily ever after” experience, but one that at least prepared me for similar experiences and possible transformations down the road.
Ultimately, the process of balancing many stories requires a versatile story-teller who can comfortably inhabit other times and other people. Of course, the humanities cannot guarantee that the balance of life’s great stories will be achieved. Lots of things can get in the way of what you want. I’m just saying that it’s your one best chance to get what you need.
