Step Up, Lean in Humanities:
We Need You Now More than Ever
In a recent piece in the New Yorker, philosophy professor Agnes Callard argues that the academic humanities, the study of history, literature, and philosophy, are useless in a crisis — except in the sense of demonstrating how important a crisis-free life is. “My own humanistic learning has failed to prove itself,” she says. Humanistic principles have not helped her avoid “numbness and anxiety.” She feels paralyzed, consumed with trivial annoyances, and obsessed with the COVID-19 news cycle.
But Callard’s moving essay relies on a common definition of the humanities as merely contemplative, as a field reliant on the cloistered environment of the university and unfettered time for perusing the classics. For humanists, she says, “contemplation is a calling.”
This is not everyone’s definition of the humanities. Here at Georgetown University, we have spent more than two centuries committed to the value of the humanities as a dynamic tradition, devoted as much to responsible action as to contemplation.
How does this work? Can we really take the great philosophers, writers, artists, and theologians, and map their work onto worldly concerns? In a crisis, can we rely on the humanities to step up and lean in rather than retreat?
We can if we shift our focus a bit. Instead of limiting ourselves to contemplation, we need to highlight the habits of mind that humanities study fosters. Through the very contemplation that Callard discusses, we develop a set of important skills: the comfort with complexity that comes from studying philosophy and literature, the recognition of newly creative solutions to old problems we acquire from studying history, the ability to move easily from individual circumstances to moral precepts that we get from philosophy and theology. Callard’s conundrum itself is drawn from humanities study. When she asks whether she’s doing the best she can given the current crisis, she’s asking the classic question that drives moral philosophy: what’s the right thing to do?
Oxford Don Helen Small in her recent book The Value of the Humanities lays out five reasons to value the humanities. Perhaps the most relevant to the current crisis is simply this: the value humanists place on individual lives puts pressure on the government’s tendency to focus on utilitarian economics. It’s not a big step from this to the COVID-19 arguments that pitch individual human lives against industry and corporations. How many lives are we willing to sacrifice for economic gain? Will we be the society that values every human life? Or only the lives of those who can survive and thrive in late capitalism?
And what is it, exactly, that we will value about those lives? The humanities teaches us to celebrate not only humanistic thought, but the arts and human creativity. One takeaway from the pandemic is that humans under pressure get creative. Google “coronavirus” and “creativity” and you’ll get 127,000,000 hits. Whether it’s Italians singing from their balconies, photographers posting their latest, writers blogging, children creating sidewalk art, or armchair philosophers reminding us of how the Stoics coped with difficulty, the creative approaches that drive the humanities are providing comfort to many while shifting our understanding of value and “use.”
To be sure, we desperately need both hard science and social science right now. Finding a vaccine, understanding complex data, and managing social change intelligently — these tasks loom large. No matter how imperfect the state of the sciences, we need state-of-the-art medical research and medical care, statistical modeling, and a nuanced understanding of human behavior drawn from the social sciences to deal with this pandemic.
Even more though, we need to embrace the interdisciplines that bring humanities habits of mind to bear in scientific settings. It’s no surprise to humanities folks that the U.S. poster child for scientific reason, Dr. Anthony Fauci, steeped himself in the humanities — Latin, Greek, philosophy — before heading to med school. Even as science has, at least in the short term, failed us, Fauci has adeptly managed the human side of the crisis, offering clear-headed advice while navigating a treacherous political world. In command of the science, he is driven by the same humanities engine that drives Callard: “what’s the right thing to do?”
This crisis will present challenges for university-based humanities programs far more serious than those we’ve experienced over the past decade. Budget cuts and public disdain will worsen. Students will major in the sciences, inspired by Fauci’s example. University administrators will have to make hard decisions, cutting some programs and faculty. Already, professionals in the humanities like Callard are justifiably exhausted: university faculty and administrators have pivoted to online instruction in a panicked effort to save their institutions; humanities centers are struggling to reach diverse publics despite physical distancing; the theaters and museums and cultural centers we count on to bring the public together around common humanities themes are shuttered and dark.
But now is the time to step up and lean in. When we see people citing history as they prepare for the future, shout it out. That’s humanities-in-action. If musicians play a tune to honor a health worker, that again is the humanities at work. And if Agnes Callard writes a piece for the New Yorker that brings her own despair to life while humanizing philosophy and history for the rest of us, well, we need to honor that despair, recognizing as we do so that she has turned despair on its head, making of it something beautiful. That’s stepping up and leaning in. Celebrating complexity, bringing difficulties to light, seeing the whole as more than just parts: these are the functions of the humanities. Let’s own them.
