humanities vs. stem
The joke is, there are two kinds of people who work full-time at Starbucks: those without university degrees, and those with university degrees in Philosophy who just couldn't find a job. That is, if you study the Humanities in college, you will be condemned to a unprofitable job and an unfortunate life of poverty compared to your classmates.
This sheds some light on a conundrum for new college students trying to pick a major—namely, whether they should study the Humanities (languages, literature, philosophy, history, etc.) or STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). In a modern world dominated by technological progress, the choice is quite evident for the majority of enrollees. Consequently, STEM is encroaching on what was once the primacy of Humanities in the higher education curriculum. What was once the core component of "becoming educated" is now relegated to small departments with less research funding, in danger of disappearing from the mainstream forever.
Some people argue that humanistic fields of study are still of significant value, even in the modern era. Note: I'm defining humanities via Wikipedia: "Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture...The humanities include the study of ancient and modern languages, literature, philosophy, history, archaeology, anthropology, human geography, law, politics, religion, and art." Arguments vary, but usually centre around the ability of history, literature, and other cultural products to provide us with coherent perspectives on the human experience and the "connection" we share with others. You cannot truly be educated, without a background in the human cultural mission. How else are you supposed to draw together a united set of values to govern your own life, in these fragmented modern times? How else are you to develop a keen eye for empathy, in order to be sensitive to the plights of others? Or, how else are you supposed to navigate the so-called human-condition, what some may call the central pursuit of life itself?
So even if a degree in Classics does not easily come with the utilitarian benefit of providing you with as stable and as high-paying of a job than a degree in say, Data Science, the argument is that it provides a central blueprint for how to live your life. The lessons are not so "practical," but rather color your perspective on the outer world with which you interact, allowing you to make the right choices about what you value with your limited time here.
But the candid truth is that, on average, a degree in the Humanities is a much less practical investment in your future. It does not come with the options, the job security, and the long-term growth potential that a degree in something like Data Science might. This leads to clear preconceptions about the humanistic fields of study: In general*,*** for you to solely study the Humanities in college, you typically need an adequate financial security net, making you a member of a certain social background and class. In short — you have to be privileged.
No wonder fields like Classics have an unsavoury reputation for being exclusive, for promoting entitlement and whiteness over inclusivity. Is the drive to bring back historical values really a fight against heartless rationalism and the fragmentation of modern identity, or is it a thinly-veiled attempt to conserve the status quo and to discourage the prioritization of social progress and critical reflection upon the ill-begotten norms of the past?
I'm not going to pretend I have a final answer to this question. Rather, I would like to turn the discussion back to what we should really be espousing from this jumble to new college students, in order to clarify what it really means to study the Humanities — a task that is often much less clear-cut than the practical outlook that STEM has to offer. Along the way, I would like to pose a more general set of guiding questions: In an ideal society, would it be necessary for everyone to obtain somewhat of a background in the humanities? Do we really need people to provide humanistic guidance to commercialized fields, or would that be unneeded and impractical? And of course, what really is the role of the Humanities in the modern world?
As a Classics student myself, I chose this subject in freshman year because of how much of it I enjoyed — like reading Sappho's romantic poetry, debating the actions of Antigone, or learning about the wacky initiation rituals of the Eleusinian Mysteries. There's something so foreign, yet familiar all at once. Reading a text like the Odyssey, for instance, does not just capture one period in time. It means determined preservation, from the oral history of Bronze and Iron age bards, to the scholars from the Classical, Hellenistic, Roman, and the Late Antique periods, to the monks in the Middle Ages, to the new generation of the Renaissance, and onwards, up until the students of today. It is a condensation of thousands of years of human inquiry starting from people first formulating these tales and emotions — who, very much like you or me, were people who simply enjoyed a good story.
Like Mary Beard says about ancient Rome in SPQR, it is not our duty to learn from the past by trying to apply their historical lessons to our present time. But what we should always strive to preserve is the spirit of dialogue with them, our interest in their literature, archaeological remains, and material artefacts, and to never let that spirit dissipate. Or else, we would be losing something essential.
Studying the Humanities connects you to the cultural products of human history, and in result, it brings you face-to-face with the broader human endeavour for knowledge. It is all too easy to forget during the trials of day-to-day life that we are indeed, all connected to this 300,000 year old quest to understand the world around us and how it relates to our inner life, and to inscribe our discoveries in myth, poetry, art, music, literature, and other forms of culture. Our penchant for creation, for the Humanities — the human disciplines — is part of what makes us human. It would be a shame for us to forget this fact. That is why we must continue to embrace a world imbued with the values that the Humanities provides us, and people to study it, to contemplate it, and to update it within the framework of modern life.
Moreover, it is important to remember that the Humanities and STEM are not mutually exclusive. Science is a form of philosophy, and is the most important toolkit by which we can understand the surrounding world and Cosmos. Cultural products do not have a monopoly on beauty — just as much can be found in physics on the macro and micro scales, the economy and symmetry of biology, and in structures of theoretical mathematics. I challenge you to deny the elegance of the stars in the night sky on a cloudless night, the way a human fetus develops from a tiny embryo, or the way that much of nature reflects the same mathematical motifs.
However, it isn't raw technical observation and prowess alone that brings about human progress. We need to have the creativity to know what to observe, and how to connect our observations together to form eloquent frameworks for understanding the world. We need to have the tools to communicate our findings to a general audience, and to transform complex, yet absolutely essential topics, to ideas that everyone can intuitively grasp. Most importantly, we should know why we observe the things we see around us, what motivates us to become better — as a whole species, to be a part of something greater than our individual selves. In this, the Humanities may be our best guide. They tell us why we do the things we do and why we should care about the things we do.
Everyone should have a personal experience with the Humanities, but they don't need to get a formal education to do so. It's just like shopping at the grocery store — pick out what you like from the aisle, something that you can afford with the money and the time you have. Read The Bakkhai by Euripides for some morbidly witty banter, or get some relationship advice from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Listen to some Early c. 5th CE Germanic music, or brush up on your French with Baudelaire's Les Fleurs Du Mal. You don't have to like everything, but you have to find what you like and see where it takes you. We produce culture for a reason, and we preserve great stories — including those from the ancient past — because we are inherently great storytellers.
No individual life is that long. A singular lifespan is just like a falling grain of sand in an hourglass; blink and it will already have been buried. But what people manage to do with what small experience they have, is quite extraordinary. And by engaging in their work that has been distilled to you, you are integrating your small grain of sand into the larger dune of human progress.
So, I invite you to imagine yourself as a casual watercolorist, with the humanities as your palette. Pick a tone you see in front of you and allow it to color your life — a little goes a long way.
