In which I contemplate my university career—De Res Humanitatum—Pathos is all you need
I studied English (literature) at university, and I do not regret it. Why? Here I offer a pragmatic defence of the humanities, including what I belive to be its greatest function and true unique selling-point. This essay began as an extract of a greater program for a “Humanities of Crisis”, but I believe it is of more use in its present form given the broad structure of these essays.
It is necessary, though unpleasant, to begin with definitions. The study of the humanities, in its traditional sense, consists mostly of reading things written by other people, thinking about them, and expressing our opinions to others. The humanities, whether historical, literary, geographical, or philosophical, consists primarily of this textual study, while the scientific domains practise the study of natural and non-human phenomena and the laws that govern them. While vague, we will work with these definitions for the following essay in the interests of brevity. For further reading I recommend Chris Haufe, Do the Humanities Create Knowledge?.
Many defences the humanities have been offered from many different people in our modern age. They often hope to respond to those in the scientific and mathematic disciplines who see the humanities as a remains of an irrational and pre-Enlightenment form of intellectual practice, one that is no longer fit for purpose. It is true, of course, that the humanities has receded in relevance in recent decades: In the past, subjects like history, politics, philosophy and geography have been the greatest influences on the actions of governments. However, the birth of scientific management, national statistics bureaus, and mass industrialisation have all meant that today engineers and technologists have become key drivers of social change in and out of the halls of administration. By contrast politics and democratic decision making have been painted as a slow and inefficient process, one that is detached from reality and one that cannot match the pace of technological change. How can a chamber that takes months to pass urgent aid legislation hope to regulate an industry that produces new innovations every week?
Defences of the humanities take several forms. The simplest and most unsatisfying one simply rejects the need for a purpose entirely. These defenders state that the humanities are indeed of no practical merit, but they should still be studied for the inherent artistic enjoyment they provide, or some similar immaterial quality. I reject these “defences” not only because they yield the point without contesting it but because they treat learning as an essentially meaningless activity that can be undertaken as a luxury. It seems clear to me that the humanities does in fact teach something of worth to the government of our lives, something which is not captured by the technical disciplines. Witness the so-called “techno-optimist manifesto”, Effective Altruism, LessWrong Rationalism, and other attempts in the Valley to reinvent an ethical and practical philosophy on their own terms: they claim on the one hand to simply “shut up and multiply”, but at the same time produce from opaque sources the numbers that they multiply with, and they call the final results objective because of the objective act of multiplication involved. In doing so they validate their existing opinions by giving them a superficial similarity to scientific and mathematic proofs, and so stockbrokers and tech billionaires find a philosophy which allow them to keep doing what they are already doing and call it a moral triumph.
As products of capitalist realism, modern ethical philosophies confuse the master commanding a workman to plant a garden with the workman’s labour in planting that garden; so they call the garden the master’s creation and credit him for the beauty of its cultivation. But beyond any criticism I can make here, which is not my primary purpose, it holds as a general rule that one should be suspicious of any system of ethics that validates things you were inclined to do for selfish reasons already by calling them moral and good. One should also beware of schools of thought which claim to make you immune or resistant to bias in thought, because it is much easier to become blind to your biases than immune to bias itself.
So, if we accept the premise that the humanities does teach something of worth, it remains to find out what it is. The other defences of the humanities generally stand here, and argue that the humanities teaches critical thinking, analysis of arguments, communication skills, the weighing of priorities, as well as benefiting one’s long term prosperity or emotional wellbeing. These are true, but I argue that the primary benefit of a humanities education lies somewhere else. The reason I contend this is because it is possible to learn critical thinking, analysis, communication, and so on in a purely technical manner. It is not necessary to learn them by reading Aristotle or studying ethnographic accounts of the civil rights movement. While a course in the humanities can teach such skills, possessing these skills does not reflect the greatest gift the humanities provides. I argue that this gift is one of general, universal empathy, or pathos.
At each stage of the humanities we as scholars interact with and bear witness to the perspectives of those we study as well as the perspectives that are often embedded within a text, acting as a link in a continuous conversational chain consisting of writers, their characters, past critics, and present readers. In doing so, we both respond to the humanity of others and express our own humanity. This is important because the machinery of social and historical progress is fundamentally human. Whether you believe in market economics, productive forces, technological leaps, or great men as the drivers of history, it remains true that until artificial intelligence or aliens enter the picture humans of some kind will remain the primary components with which history is made. And the fact of the matter is that humans have remained quite similar throughout recorded history, something that we can see by examining the subjects and the writers of texts in the humanities.
By studying the humanities, we are forced to recognise the commonality between humans of different races and ethnicities, creeds and beliefs. We are exposed to the cruel and arbitrary nature of any act that seeks to divide humans into superior and inferior groups, and we are confronted with the similarities between ourselves, our loved friends, and our hated enemies. Furthermore, a high quality education in this manner exposes us to the most moving, most evident, and most powerful examples of these similarities. History and literature alike are about telling stories about the past, and the foreign countries of geography or the moral dimensions of philosophy are not so different from these stories also. I will repeat myself: the primary benefit of the study of the humanities is to learn to recognise the common qualities of all humans across space and time, and to feel this truth deeply. This universal empathy is similar to the concept of pathos described by the Greeks, so I have reused that word here. Of course, this is not necessarily true of every education in the humanities. It is possible to create imperial histories and revanchist geographies, hateful philosophies and literatures that promote violence against the other. You can create an anti-canon out of such studies but they are lesser in both essence and execution. They are incomplete shadows of the humanities because they allow for pathos with some groups of people but contrive reasons to deny it to others. An honest pursuit of the humanities is very different. Throughout history we can read accounts of humanities scholars who feel a deep empathy with the subjects of their study, subjects they never see: from Euripides writing about Trojan Women to Niccolo Macchiavelli conversing with the ancient scholars he reads, people who most of us would struggle to describe as soft hearted have felt this community with distant and foreign others in the works they leave behind. Su Shi’s great poem “Remembrances at the Red Cliffs” echoes the profound, almost sublime sentiment I have seen in my fellow students as they finally understand the humanity of Chaucer or the Gawain-poet.
In the best cases, those who study the humanities are moved to improve humanity, as Thomas Clarkson did after participating in an essay competition on the topic of slavery. However, as we have said above, there have also been those who used their learning to justify evil deeds. This does not mean that we should therefore divide the works of the humanities between good and evil, useful and useless, hyperempathic and hypoempathic. Instead, those incomplete works of the humanities are still worthwhile because they show us the human nature of the monsters we fear. It is easy to draw out a special category of “evil” to place villains within, and therefore call ourselves good. The friend-enemy distinction is a powerful one. However, the truth is that the greatest acts of evil in history have been carried out by societies that in other times would be called ordinary or even moral. “The line between good and evil cuts through every man’s heart.” So, even in its worst examples, studying the humanity should teach us the pathos that lets us beware of our own evil impulses by recognising them as human and true, rather than the beliefs of a distant class of monsters.
But it is not enough to claim that the humanities teaches empathy and leave it at that. One can imagine a pure “empathy course”, one which scientifically optimises for the maximum amount of increase in empathic sentiment per student, but it would not be the humanities as we know it. The humanities teaches pathos and empathy not through abstract example but through lived subjectivity. That is to say, it teaches us how we are the same by showing us how we can be different in different places and different times, yet share in common features all the same. It is not only necessary to understand that “we are all one human genre”, but to understand how we can become different in spite of that, and love one another all the same. This is also key to knowing and loving yourself, even those parts which otherwise you may find disgusting or repulsive, and therefore the study of the humanities improves your happiness over your life. Over-simplified models of the world which do not possess this subjective understanding must compensate by sorting people into boxes and general categories of race, caste, and ethnicity—–simple levers that they can pull to trigger bundles of pre-arranged emotions. They act to reinforce our tribal biases and give us nothing except elegant words to justify the friend-enemy distinction in our hearts.