Humanization

So as I mentioned in the previous post, I was at a round table for English professors and students yesterday and we got to talking about "why are we here?" with here being the English department. And I made my typical little speech and even got a "wow" from Professor Mack, our resident Shakespeare authority. I wish I had thought to introduce myself when I said it. Oh well. At any rate, here is my (extended) rant on why the world needs arts and humanities majors:

I don't think that as English majors, or any other ARHU majors, that we need to feel guilty about our choice of study. We need the humanities for exactly that reason: they humanize us. If we only pursue those fields which seem to us to have obvious utilitarian goals, such computer science, engineering, or even medicine, we lose our souls, our spirits, that which makes us special among animals. If we think only in terms of how the search for knowledge will help us to live a more physically comfortable life, then we stop being human. I don't say this out of derision of animals, since anyone who knows me knows that I love them better than most people, but they are not human. They do not have our capacity to make change, and therefore they do not have our need for self-reflection.

The truth is that practical science has betrayed us. The first major technological revolution was agriculture, and soon after civilization developed nutritional and social problems that never existed for us as hunter-gatherers. We became a drain on our own resources and started to look for ways to take other communities' resources. In a more modern sense, we are still being betrayed. Our means of getting more food faster has made many of obese, leading to issues ranging from low-energy to deadly diabetes. Not to mention that many of our processed foods are carcinogenic.

Beyond that, our planet is quite literally melting. And our greater technologies have more than anything given us greater power to bring death to our fellow man. And the people who are only concerned with the most efficient, the cheapest, the fastest, are the ones who are leading the way to destruction.

And even if people don't die, their cultures often do. We are losing the beauty of diversity to the diseases of globalism, capitalism, homegenization and the sirens of celebrity, consumerism, technology.

I do not mean to say that we should cease to study chemisty, economics, biotechnology. But rather that we need the humanities as check, a balance. It seems that the increase of our tools has led to a decrease in our morals. And it is up to the artists, the humanists to cast the light on our excesses and our cruelties and to force us to look at what we, as humans, have become.

Today, quite by accident, I stumbled upon a quotation that beautifully expresses this: "Scientific progress makes moral progress a necessity; for if man's power is increased, the checks that restrain him from abusing it must be strengthened,"
Madame de Stael, "The Influence of Literature upon Society"

So, now you know why I don't feel the least bit self-indulgent being an English and History major.