You’ll recall that last week I wrote some pretty blistering stuff about the way humanities profs sometimes defend the value of their field.  A few of you wrote back saying, “well, how would you do it, smart guy”?

The short answer is: the way Paul Wells does in his 2010 article, In Praise of the Squishy Subjects (read the whole thing. It’s worth it).  He points out that in the real world, where societal problems are incredibly complex and can’t be explained by simple cause-and-effect, what the humanities do is get people used to the idea of complexity.  The fact that they do so by getting people to read material that’s hundreds of years old is irrelevant.  It’s not just that classics are classics, it’s that:

If you spend a few years wrestling with the idea of society as propounded by Hobbes, Locke, Mill, Rousseau and Marx, you come away with a better understanding of all the alternative ways our own society might choose to configure itself, with their attendant risks. If you study the fur trade in British North America, you learn something lasting about the contribution of aboriginal Canadians to our politics and economics, and you begin to understand the behaviour of today’s Canadian businesses a little better. Read Goethe or Cervantes in the original and you understand things about Germany and Spain today that Goethe and Cervantes cannot have imagined.

Bingo.  The world always needs to be approached from a variety of lenses, and the humanities teach you how to do that.  Plus, as Wells says, since societies can’t know in advance what they’re going to need to know (all those Arab language and history degrees looked pretty useless in August 2001), it’s handy to have people around who know all sorts of weird things.  Humanities are thus also an insurance policy.

That’s the way I’d defend humanities in their current state.  With some small tweaks to the way they are set up, I could imagine two defences:

1)      Humanities Leverages Science.  You’ll note that a lot of humanities-types these days like to throw around that Steve Jobs quote, the one about how results only really sing when technology is married to the liberal arts.  However, this would be a way more convincing defence of the humanities if any humanities programs were themselves actually involved in such marriages.  Though there is some super-interesting digital humanities stuff going on out there, it ain’t penetrating down to undergraduate level.  Humanities programs that took those “many lenses” we talked about earlier, and applied them to some practical technological problems, would likely be extremely popular.

2)      Reposition Humanities as a Luxury-Good.  You know what?  Lots of people think humanities are fun, challenging, and interesting, and they pay extraordinarily good money to study it.  Look at AC Grayling’s College of the Humanities in London, charging twice the going rate (£18,000).  Look at any number of Liberal Arts Schools in the US charging $30,000 plus.  Who cares if other people don’t think it’s “worth it”?  The market speaks, baby.  The problem is, this route only works if universities have the cojones to go with a premium pricing strategy, which I’m guessing most don’t (although if I were, say, Mount Allison, I would definitely want to think about this).

So there you go.  No denigrating other fields, no self-absorbed equation of the humanities with civilization itself.  Just plain, simple non-histrionic arguments.  Let’s give them a try.