Oh The Humanities

[Music]

how many of you

when you were in college were sitting in

a humanities class thinking to yourself

what am i doing here this

person has been dead for 2 000 years all

the people he wrote about

are dead too how is this even possibly

relevant to my life

well today i’m going to talk to you

about why the humanities are relevant to

everybody’s life

and the really big idea is that you

study the humanities

to become a better human and while there

are

seven billion reasons to study the

humanities today we’re going to talk

about

four and these four are workplace skills

life skills global perspectives

and being able to see the beauty and the

history

of human achievement so

the first reason is workplace skills

you can see from this chart that there

are certain things that employers want

from employees

and some of the most important of these

are critical thinking

communication and numeracy

literacy skills because all of us

live in this society where we

talk about the socratic tradition a lot

we all automatically think that we are

heirs to the socratic tradition

but we aren’t it takes a lot of work to

learn

how to think and one of the most

effective ways to learn how to think is

to do

a lot of reading and writing so

there’s a book called academically

adrift by aaron roska

and in that they cite a study that says

the people who make the greatest

gains in critical thinking are those who

read at least 50 pages a week

and write 20 pages over the course of

the semester

and that sounds like a lot but all of

that looking at the text reacting to the

text

summarizing text and then communicating

about it is what really hones people’s

critical thinking skills

and critical thinking is essential in

the workplace

almost every technical skill you could

learn right now in college is probably

going to be obsolete in five years

but those literacy skills and critical

thinking skills are going to last the

rest of your life

so when you’re in the workplace your

boss

is probably going to say to you here’s

this project i need for you to get it

done

but she’s not going to say to you here’s

step a here’s step b

here’s step c so you have to figure out

the a

and the b and the c as an example of

this

i want to use charles dickens a

christmas carol do well remember

christmas carol with ebenezer scrooge

okay what was ebenezer scrooge like when

we met him

when it opens say it again

mean and crotchety right cheap

exploiting broad cratchit just a

horrible mean person and so

dickens takes us on a journey with

ebenezer scrooge he goes home and jacob

marley says to him the ghost of jacob

marley says

you’re going to be visited by three

ghosts tonight and they’re going to show

you things

and so he goes with the three ghosts to

see the things

and the first one is the christmas past

where his fiancee breaks up with him

and all of a sudden we can kind of see

where what happened to make ebenezer

scrooge the way he was

and it’s not a matter of dickens saying

this is the thing

that made ebenezer scrooge the way he is

dickens allows us to make our own

decisions based on evidence that is

presented to us but we have to

kind of read between the lines to come

up with that final answer

of how ebenezer scrooge landed where he

did

and that’s critical thinking knowing to

ask the right questions knowing what

information

isn’t there and that you have to supply

and this is something you will have to

do

in the workplace to be successful

the next skill well the next thing that

you get from the humanities is life

skills and i’m going to start out with

kind of a laundry list of all the things

that humanities offers people

but this just shows you how important

the humanities are

so people who study music have greater

cognitive gains at the beginning of

their life and at the end of their life

people who study music stave off

dementia longer

than other people people who study

foreign language

get the same benefits as those who study

music

people who sing in choirs have all the

benefits of those who study music but

they have additional benefits of lower

blood pressure

and a reported higher senses of

happiness because they’re a part of a

community

people who study politics and economics

engage in civics at increased rates

people who study drama have better

social skills because they can adopt

personas

for whichever situation they’re in and

people who study literature have

increased levels of empathy and just

like when dickens is telling us about

ebenezer scrooge and we start to feel

empathy for him

there are lots of examples of this in

literature and another

example of this is oedipus rex so

oedipus is the pre it’s a very central

myth in western society

freud named one of his theories after

him but

the story of oedipus rex is that when

he’s born

the fate his fate is that he’s going to

kill his father

and marry his mother and so his dad says

to his mother we have to kill this child

and the mother says i can’t bear to kill

this child so she gives it to a servant

and she says to the servant you kill the

child

the servant can’t bear to kill the child

and so the child is taken out

inside the city limits and rested on a

hill and another couple

picks up oedipus and takes him home and

they raise him

as a nobleman as a king a prince

and then when he’s a young man somewhere

1819

he is told you know you’ve been fated to

kill your father and marry your mother

and so he runs away from home

because he thinks in doing that he can

avoid it

as he’s running back towards the

original city

where his parents actually are he meets

a man on the road and their

carriages are both too wide to pass at

the same time and so they get in a fight

about who has the right of way

and the guy goes for oedipus and oedipus

goes back and he kills the man

so it’s kind of a puzzle this guy has

just been told

that he is probably going to kill his

father and he meets a man on the road

who he doesn’t know and he kills him

who would do that that makes absolutely

no sense at all

but if we study the humanities and we

look at history we understand

why that would have been his first

action and the reason why it’s his first

action is because

sophocles wrote this play in the 5th

century bc

in greece and it was in between the

greek and persian war

and the peloponnesian war when the greek

city-states were warring and so it was a

very militaristic society

and people men were measured by how

quickly and efficiently they could kill

people

and so then oedipus’s actions make sense

and we start to feel empathy for them

and so then at the end of the play when

he realizes he did kill his father he

did marry his mother

and he pokes his eyes out instead of us

thinking that’s ridiculous we think

yeah i can really understand why he did

that

well maybe not but a little bit more

so the next reason that you want to

study the humanities

is because of global perspectives we’ve

got huge global problems

we’ve got starvation we’ve got pollution

we’ve got climate change

we have gross inequity all over the

planet and the only way we’re going to

be able to solve these issues

is as a planet but sometimes when we

look at cultures that are different from

ours

we think um how are we ever going to get

together and see each other as equals

different but equals and the way that we

get access

to people’s culture is by studying their

humanities

and so the country i’m thinking about is

china

china is one of the globe rising global

powers

who we are going to have to partner with

to achieve things but sometimes when

we’re talking to individual

chinese people and there’s the still

face we think

this person is interested isn’t

interested in what i have to say

this person thinks he’s better than me

this person

well we we just can’t work together but

we

just need to read the literature of

china understand

why chinese folks often have still faces

chinese culture is a confucian culture

and

confucian culture is based in the fact

that the

community is more important than the

individual

and if you are showing emotions you are

potentially bringing disharmony

to the community and so you keep your

emotional labor private

to make sure that the community is the

most harmonious possible

and once we understand that we

understand that a still face

isn’t necessarily an indication of

you know hatred or disinterest or

anything else

it’s just a cultural difference so

this quote by confucius where he says

the wise man is full

yet seeming empty offended against yet

never contesting

makes a lot of sense and all we have to

do is see that

to become partners and feel like we’re

equals

so the last biggest point of why you

study the humanities

is because we get to see the beauty and

history of human achievement

a lot of times when we think about

history we think about war we think

about

genocide we think about technological

advances in weaponry

and we need to think about the other

stuff too we need to think about the

collective knowledge

that humanity has amassed so art

starts out as a person putting her hand

against a cave wall and then blowing ink

all around it

sorry my mic and it keeps progressing

and it keeps progressing and it keeps

progressing

and the art that you’re looking at right

now

the picture on the left is from 1300 and

the picture on the right is from

fifteen hundred and you can see the

technological advances

that changed that piece of art so

the picture on the left is recognizably

the madonna with

the head covering that she always wears

and you can see some of the folds in the

cloth

but then after that it’s not terribly

representational we can see the gold

background that signals holiness

but we don’t have perspective it’s very

flat looking

and the proportions of that baby are all

wrong babies don’t look like that

it looks like a regular person was

shrunk down to tiny tiny

but then we look at the picture on the

right and we can see

things have changed and what changed was

math and science

so people using the vanishing point

which is somewhere behind mary which is

when you’re looking at a picture and all

the points of the picture go to some

central point

that allows three-dimensional

perspective along with shading like the

use of shadow helps people see the three

dimensions

and so not only are we seeing the folds

in the cloth

we have almost photorealism and that

baby is proportional

and that’s science people using

observation

and the other thing that you can see is

the background and if i knew more about

italian geography i might be able to

tell you where this was painted because

of the castle on the right

and the city on the left and if i knew

more about italian history i might even

be able to tell you

what season or what year this painting

was started

because of what the trees are doing and

what

the clothes are that people are wearing

and so think about that that’s 500 years

ago and think about how much farther our

collective knowledge has come since then

and think about this in terms of music

and literature

and all kinds of different humanities

history

and we have done so much

but if we forget all of this collective

knowledge then we have to start at a

point further back and we don’t have

time for that

we’ve got big problems to solve we have

to take advantage of the collective

knowledge as it is now

so the next time you’re sitting in a

humanities class and you’re thinking to

yourself

ah i want you to fully engage

and the reason that i want you to fully

engage is because i want you to see that

everything is everything and everything

is connected

instead of thinking in silos like here’s

my math

here’s my history here’s my english

here’s my art

think about everything feeding into

everything else

going back to ebenezer scrooge when we

know about economy

economics and we know about history the

story of ebenezer scrooge becomes

even more rich and

if you can see all the connections not

only can you see the connections

to past knowledge but you can see

connections to other people

and that’s what we need are strong

connections

if we’re going to solve problems if

we’re going to take advantage of

collective knowledge

we have to be able to see these so

why do you want to study the humanities

because you want to be successful in the

workplace

because you want to be successful in

life you want to be successful in seeing

global perspectives

and you want to see the beauty of human

achievement and that’s why you study the

humanities

thank you