Do The Humanities Really Matter?

We've been using the same arguments for a long time — do they hold up?

Not since the foundation of the first universities in the Middle Ages has the fate of the humanities been so uncertain. Subjects like history, theology, and philosophy report some of the lowest enrollment numbers in the history of higher education in both the United States and Britain. In both countries, less than 10% of bachelor’s degrees are awarded in traditional humanities fields. At the same time, governments in the United States (and, to a lesser extent, Britain) have accused the humanities and social sciences of ‘ideological indoctrination,’ giving them carte blanche to bludgeon departments with funding cuts and admissions quotas. Faced with this new reality — collapsing student interest, political hostility, and now the rise of AI — the old defences of the humanities are simply not enough. We must either find new ways of keeping these ancient studies alive, or have the strength to face the possibility that the humanities just don’t matter anymore. 

I want to start with the old defences of the humanities. The study of man (‘studia humanitatis’) came about in the Renaissance, emerging from the older medieval focus on the study of God. Since the very beginning, Renaissance philosophers, scholars, and pundits advertised the humanities for the skills they could teach. One read Cicero to be a better public speaker, or Aristotle to become a better thinker. Several centuries later, this is still one way humanities programs are advertised today. History isn’t merely the study of history for its own sake, according to one university website, but a chance to learn “competitive research and analytic skills” in a “cutting-edge scholarly environment”. It’s ridiculous to call history “cutting edge”, but the argument is still strong in principle; subjects like literature, theology, philosophy, etc. teach skills like critical thinking and deep literacy that STEM subjects cannot teach.

Humanities scholars were very keen to promote this outlook in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, as universities became more commercialised. Until recently, this worked. It was generally believed that whether you wanted to go into law, business, government, and even some STEM fields, you needed to know how to read and write to be successful. It’s not so obvious that this is the case now. It seems that the skills that the humanities teach can often be done by AI, or at least substituted by AI. It doesn’t matter that AI is a poor facsimile for actual human skill — the important thing is that it is now public belief that AI can read and write as well as any humanities student. 

I can write a hell of a lot better than any damn robot. But potential employers may not care. Fortunately, the humanities are valuable for more than just skills like thinking and writing. The humanities, according to another line of argument, are a field of exploration that expands human knowledge rather like the sciences. This line of argument came about in the ‘90s and early 2000s, with the rise of new paradigms of research like postcolonialism. Fields like history, literature, and philosophy, in dialogue with the social sciences, can ‘discover’ new things in their research areas, just like lab experiments discover facts about the universe. The humanities are valuable because they too can be dynamic sources of knowledge.

As much as I appreciate postcolonialism, I think this is also a ridiculous argument. No one in their right mind would say that monographs on queer Shakespeare or new narratives of the American Revolution produce knowledge in the same way that laboratory empiricism does. Perhaps some kinds of history uncover new facts about the past, or analytic philosophy settles on broad truths that are very difficult to dispute. But by and large, the humanities are just arguments. As your high school English teacher told you, “There is no ‘correct’ interpretation of Moby Dick.” New things in the humanities come about through new arguments based on existing material, or from the application of science to old material (like using lasers to unravel the Herculaneum scrolls). There’s nothing wrong with this, either. In fact, I think it would be better if more people in humanities fields tried to be less like the sciences, and recognize that their fields are, in most cases, fundamentally creative pursuits.

If the humanities today are not valuable for the skills they teach us, or the knowledge they produce, what value could they have? I think the best answer is unsatisfyingly vague. We study the humanities because there is something universal across time and place in the experience of being human, and studies like history, philosophy, literature, etc. reveal that universality. Even before the invention of writing, our worldviews and systems of meaning were rooted in things like storytelling, word games, and epic poetry. With writing, we have access to traditions of meaning far beyond our own narrow cultural and temporal experience. There are many remarkable things about the Epic of Gilgamesh, or Beowulf, or the Shahnameh, but the most incredible thing is that they are intelligible to us. We can understand ourselves in those ancient characters, even though they seem impossibly distant. 

But if you look closely, this isn't an argument in favor of the academic humanities. It’s an argument in favor of the things the humanities purport to study. Even the most computer-obsessed tech bro might grant that some old books have value — after all, their companies are named after the Lord of the Rings — but still claim that the academic study of those books is a waste of time. In today’s day and age, the cultural edifice upon which humanities departments once stood is rapidly eroding. Even if we grant that old books have value (which I think fewer and fewer people are willing to do), it’s not so clear anymore that universities are the best places to study them. If declining enrollment numbers tell us anything, it’s that fewer young people are willing to study something that will give them so little return for such an expensive degree.

I think this is one reason why defenders of the humanities have turned to practical justifications, like skill-building and knowledge creation. I also think this approach has backfired. Students realize skills like reading and writing aren’t important in the same way they used to be, and grow tired of faddish approaches to subjects that claim to reveal new things about ancient texts. But defenders of the humanities repeat these claims ad nauseam because the alternative conclusion is that the academic humanities are useless. That is, they are no longer relevant in a world of Grok and TikTok, in which the profit incentive of megacorporations is directed against deep thinking and sustained attention.

The ultimate fear is that this 700-year-old project of literature, philology, history, art criticism, philosophy, and theology is a mere blip in the history of humanity. It emerged from the specific cultural conditions of medieval Florence, in which the ability to read, write, and think was paramount, and will disappear as a body of inquiry when we no longer care about those skills. Let me be clear: I do not necessarily believe this is true. But this is the rational conclusion when the humanities are justified by the skills they teach. 

Academics and students of the humanities ought to stare this possibility in the face, seriously considering that their disciplines may not exist except as hobbies in a century. The answer to the question, “what are the academic humanities for?” must not be the production of knowledge, or teaching employable skills (those these may be incidental). Instead, we should go back to the source. Why do we read old things? Why do we page through a Graham Greene novel at the Bouquiniste? Because they are nice, and they are nice because they connect us with people radically different from ourselves. If humanities departments are to survive in a brainrot future, they must remember this.

Illustration from Wikimedia Commons