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