In My Words: Humanity needs the humanities

I began my college career with no real idea of what I wanted to do or what I wanted to study, with one exception. I knew that I wanted to study Arabic. When I was fourteen years old my father received a research grant that took my family to Morocco for six months and I spent one semester of high school in Morocco, where I started learning Arabic and French. When I came back to the United States, I was able to continue studying French, but Arabic wasn’t offered in my high school and I was determined to get it back.

And that was a challenge. Because I entered college in 2003, at the beginning of the war in Iraq, when everyone and their grandmother was convinced that learning Arabic was the ticket to getting a job in government. At the school I went to, all students were preregistered for classes with the exception of first year students and graduate students, who had to attend classes before they could register. All classes were required to leave three seats open for first years and graduate students. So, I showed up to the first day of Beginning I Arabic along with 70 other students, all hoping to get one of those three seats. The instructor announced that he would not allow anyone to register for those three seats until there were only three students left in the class who wanted them. And so I proceeded to wait the rest of them out. I came to every class and did all the work in the class, without any guarantee that I would get in officially or get credit for it until enough people gave up that I was offered the slot. So the first thing I learned in my college career was that I would have to fight for the Humanities and they were worth fighting for. I am still doing that work today.

But aside from Arabic, I really didn’t know what else I wanted to study. So I started off by studying everything. I took classes in history, and political science, and anthropology, and comparative literature. And calculus, and biology, and Religious Studies. And they were all great classes, but I found that I had a particular love of that place where religion, history, literature, and philosophy met and connected. Those classes lit a fire in me. Because they showed me that in places and periods and languages that were wholey different from my own people had grappled with the questions that provoked and haunted me, questions of deep existential meaning and ongoing political urgency – and that they had expressed their answers in language that was profoundly beautiful. When I studied those answers, I found myself connected to peoples, movements, and cultures larger myself.  And as I went deeper and deeper into my studies, I found that they were changing me. Once I learned how to read deeply, I found that I could read anything, including the social and political institutions in which I was embedded. I learned to question everything, and to produce my own critical answers. I put myself to work imaging other, better worlds.

The period that I grew up in, was really not perfect. I went to college – and then lived in the Middle East – during the Iraq War. A war of choice, when the President decided to invade a country that posed no threat to the United States, largely to secure access to vast oil resources. I then graduated from college into a massive financial disaster caused by the loosening of banking regulations so that very rich people could become even richer. So I can’t say that it was an easy time to be a young person – if there is ever an easy time to be a young person.

But I do think that it is much harder to be a young person today. I went through college at a time when few students had personal laptops, before the invention of the smart phone or the ipad or the rise of social media. The students I went to school with didn’t all like me – but they were all really present along with me in the spaces we shared. The political culture at the time seemed divisive, but it was nothing in comparison to the chaos and fury of the current age. It’s hard right now y’all.

But one of the things that is making it even harder is that the institutions and entities who are invested in dividing us from each other, in fracturing our attention and undermining our interpersonal relationships – are also selling us a particular approach to knowledge. This approach is, “the extractive attitude.” It is based on the idea that the purpose of knowledge is to extract resources from the environment and money from the economy – which ultimately means from consumers. This attitude is not new. I know from my own field of African history that the European governments who colonized various territories sent scholars out in the wake of the armies, geographers and engineers to survey and map the land, and linguists and anthropologists to learn languages, and catalogue customs. The purpose of these colonial scholar-soldiers was to facilitate the pacification of the population and the extraction of natural resources. Knowledge has always been a form of power. And then, just as now, deep engagement in storytelling, religious worldviews, and philosophy was disregarded and rejected as impractical. Education, according to the extractive attitude, is a product whose value measured as a return on investment. This attitude invites us to use learning to maintain a position in cultural and class warfare.

The opposite of the extractive attitude is a humanistic attitude. A humanistic attitude values knowledge for its ability to bring meaning and joy into our lives and our communities. A humanistic attitude evaluates our present relative to both our past and our vision of the future. A humanistic attitude is an approach that finds richness and complexity in things that seem simple. And it does those things through a deep engagement with the ideas and the art that have been produced by humans through the ages.

When I went to college I had to fight for a seat in a language class against the forces of opportunism. And I want you to fight for humanism too. And it is a fight sometimes. A fight to maintain vision and resolve in the face of a thousand messages that tell us that the humanistic attitude is “useless.” The makers and marketers of new technological products are trying to convince us to give up our capacity for deep engagement. To give up our ability to generate ideas, to read literature, to think about the past, to make and appreciate art and culture, and to communicate with each other. To convince us to give up on humanism they threaten us with catastrophe and apocalypse. They warn that their products will change society so deeply that it will be unrecognizable, or that they might destroy humanity entirely. But I have my own message. For anyone who is worried about understanding these forces, or who is struggling to make sense of the world right now – the Humanities can help.

Those of us in Religious Studies have studied apocalyptic predictions, we know the distance between what they promise and what they deliver. Those of us in History have studied revolutions and know how politics and new forms of media align. Those of us in World Languages and Cultures know that our understanding of the world is shaped by language and how to connect with people across cultural differences. Those of us in Philosophy know that the potential for meaningful change is rooted in examination and reflection.  And those of us in English know (to paraphrase James Baldwin), that it is literature that teaches us that the things that torment us the most are the very things that connect us with all the people who are alive, or who have ever lived. The Humanities are a repository of our shared humanity and the heart of our capacity to be, not just human, but better humans. More than ever, humanity needs the Humanities. And right now, the Humanities needs you.