What good are the humanities? – another attempt at answering an eternal question – part 1 (wersja polska poniżej)

„Humanities departments cause only increased unemployment”, „And how will you make a living?”, „Do you want to teach children at school?”, „It’s useless”, „It must be quite pleasant to spend your life reading old books at the taxpayer’s expense” etc. Depending on the stage in his life, a humanist is faced with each of these remarks to various extent: if he earns no money yet – then he should think about his future unemployment (statement 1–2), or at best be prepared for taking a highly unattractive post (statement 3). If he already gets a small salary for what he does – then he is a parasite, living from decent work of other taxpayers (statements 4–5).

San Diego, 2013. The conference was taking place here, but I spent the taxpayer's money at one of the cheapest hostels in town.

 

Being a humanist who currently gets a small salary for her work, I will focus on the two latter charges. Answering them never seemed an easy task to me. Actually, I spent a year off my graduate studies working full-time for a charity, one of main motifs for this decision being my constant worry that the work in the academia, which I had undertaken, seemed useless and impractical. After being hugely disappointed by this charitable institution, but also thanks to better recognition of my natural inclinations, I decided to return to the university. But I still had no strong conviction that research work is important. For some time, I considered it to be a kind of entertainment, maybe a slightly more dignified one: ‘If people find pleasure in watching soap operas, why shouldn’t they enjoy listening to or delivering an interesting presentation at a conference?’ Now I think that, after all, the humanities mean more than sheer entertainment. But I hope that the story of my uncertainty in this matter will make the following argumentation more convincing.

Only very few people, I suppose, would agree with a statement that all cultural activity is useless. On average, the critics of the humanities have in mind only some part of culture, a part particularly useless according to them. The scope of ‘uselessness’ is limited in such polemics in a number of ways. Some suggest that useless are humanists dealing with earlier cultures, which can be seen as antiquated and out-of-date. Some claim that only really good culture is worth some attention, unlike the mediocre one (often an argument ad Shakesperium is raised in this context – ‘I’d understand if you wrote on, say, Shakespeare, but...’). Some agree that art is useful, because it can give people pleasure, yet investigating it has little sense indeed – this latter activity was invented for and by frustrated people, who themselves were not talented enough to become artists.

So let’s take these arguments one at a time. Culture cannot be judged as better or worse sole criterion of such judgement being era in which this culture was created. This kind of thinking is based on simplistic progressivism, which is quite easy to refute. People who lived five centuries or three thousand years ago were also people (see quote from Józef Mackiewicz here) and I see no reason why we should discriminate against knowledge and wisdom they shared. It seems impossible to decide who has ‘less’ to offer to us: Homer, Tolstoj or Picasso. I couldn’t possibly imagine human culture without any of them.

Also, the argument saying that some part of culture is more worth-while based on its quality seems tricky. For it is often the case that only intense studies and considerable commitment of humanists allow to single out these highest achievements of mankind, and this still with all sorts of different reservations. Experts are needed to identify an unknown painting found in an attic as a van Gogh’s masterpiece or to retrieve Norwid’s poems from decades of oblivion. Besides, the question about quality is simply not the only interesting question which can be posed by humanists in their research.

And finally: it was often scholars (in a very broad sense of the word), not only artists, who enabled culture to be passed down to future generations. No one I talked to about these topics supports, I hope, burning cultural property we (as mankind) witnessed during, let’s say, WWII. And it wouldn’t be wise to assume that something similar won’t happen again. Not only the history of 20^th century but also the whole known history proves that a gigantic effort of past generations – from working in medieval scriptoria to creating digital databases – was enough to save only some fraction of all culture from turmoil of wars and other catastrophes.