The first reason to get a degree (or several) in the Humanities is if you have certain needs that can only be addressed by getting this sort of education. I know that this sounds confusing, so I will give a real-life example to illustrate my point.
When I was 20 years old and still living in Ukraine, I invited an acquaintance (let’s call her Anya) to come over to my place. Anya was from a very poor family that lived in the country-side. She was one of 4 siblings. Her father was a violent alcoholic who boozed all day long and never even tried to make a single dime. Her mother worked day and night to feed the family and then struggled to fight off the violent husband who beat her and stole the money she made to buy booze.
Anya was a very bright young woman who didn’t want to live this way. She came to the city to get an education and create a different kind of existence for herself. In short, she is a very admirable, self-made sort of person.
When Anya saw my huge apartment (and when I say “my”, I mean that it was really mine, not some bank’s), my book-lined study, and my gentle, adoring husband who served us a beautiful meal he’d been creating and decorating for three hours (I didn’t know how to boil water at that time. Cooking became my hobby much later), she gasped.
“You are the luckiest person in the world,” she said. “You are living the life of my dreams.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not happy. I feel like none of this has any meaning. My life is empty and useless.”
Anya looked at me like I was a raving maniac. After that visit, she started avoiding me, and we never talked again.
In this situation, Anya and I could have never found a common ground. She was trying to address issues that, for me, had already been solved by the previous generations of people in my family. What for her was an important goal she was going to achieve after years of struggling was something I saw as a given.
Let’s look at this issue from a different perspective now. My North American friends are always very baffled by my unwavering love of capitalism. They like me, so they have learned to accept it as a strange quirk. The difference between us is that they grew up surrounded by all kinds of goods and services anybody could possibly wish for. And so did their parents, grandparents, etc. For them, being able to go out and just buy toilet paper is not a big deal. For me, however, it’s something I did not experience as a child, so the joy of having things available for consumption is still very fresh.
My North American friends never had to figure out what to do when you cannot buy basic goods for any amount of money because such basic goods do not exist in your society. This is why now they can concentrate on the disadvantages of capitalism. I would need a couple of generations of living in a capitalist society to get to that stage.
The professional and financial success, the husband who adored me and never tasted alcohol were not my achievements. They were my mother’s, and she’d handed them to me when I was born. (My mother’s origins were not as tragic as Anya’s but, still, very similar to hers.)
I needed my own set of challenges to feel like my life wasn’t simply a replay of my mother’s existence. This is why I could now dedicate all of my energies to thinking about the meaning of life, studying philosophy and Latin, and analyzing Spanish literature.
When you develop such a set of needs, a degree in the Humanities becomes indispensable to you. It is not the only way, of course, but it’s one of the most logical ones.
In his book, Aaron Clarey says:
In majoring in a good [meaning, STEM] field you increase your earnings potential, begetting a bevvy of financial benefits. . . With high incomes and increased wealth, you can go and enjoy a better life. You can afford better food, live in a better neighborhood, drive a nicer car, and do not have to go into debt to do it. You can send your kids to private schools, get them better educations, and ensure a better future for them. You can also retire earlier, travel more, and just have more leisure time in general.
If you create a list of priorities for yourself and the ones Aaron enumerates in this quote make the top slots on that list, then you probably should think long and hard before getting a degree in Literature, Classics, or Philosophy. If, however, things like “reading huge numbers of books and discussing them for hours with like-minded individuals” make the top of the list, my colleagues and I are eagerly awaiting you in our classes.
[To be continued. . .]
Clarissa's Blog 
If, however, things like “reading huge numbers of books and discussing them for hours with like-minded individuals” make the top of the list, my colleagues and I are eagerly awaiting you in our classes.
That’s my beef. In my experience more than half of the students in the humanities are there because they find everything else too much work, not because they like “reading huge number of books”.
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I agree with you completely. And it’s precisely this kind of people that the book I mentioned tries to address. They come to us for an easy degree and then get very annoyed when they see we expect them to learn.
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I did my PhD because there were too many mysteries out there in the world for me not to investigate them. How could I sit in an office and do anything at all when there were mysteries out there?
I continued it because the plot thickened. The mysteries became more psychological, rather than aesthetic in nature, and they made my mind ache.
I found socialising to be a huge strain in the middle of my PhD, because it took away energy I needed to crack the problem that was at the core of my thesis. (It could be framed in the simplest way as “how can madness be productive?”)
At one stage, I felt like I was going mad. My mind was galloping at a frenetic pace and all of the world seemed to have slowed down and gone stupid. Any part of everyday life that didn’t help me solve my problem got in my way. I couldn’t even explain the nature of my problem except in the most esoteric terms. It had to do with trying to look at the other side of trauma — at the generative side.
So many books seemed to somewhat support my thesis. Other journal articles used part of my theoretical platform, but were more opposed to the conclusions I had drawn. I became perplexed as to how to use this more ambiguous material.
I continued to become madder and madder. I had too much information in my head and I had to make it all add up. I had read extremely widely. The literary material seemed to yield confirmations of my views by flashes of intuitive insights, which I didn’t quite have the means to articulate. You certainly couldn’t point to the text and say, “There it is!”. Nothing was positivist about my views.
Eventually, I couldn’t look at my thesis, as I had looked at it so much, the words had stopped meaning anything. I began to wonder if in fact the words I’d written had no meaning. An old wound had started to open. My father’s words: “You’re a failure and you can’t even communicate properly!” began to resonate. I’d written the thesis to vindicate someone who also seemed to have been victimized by being denied communication — and now, the same was happening to me.
I was fighting my father through trying to complete my thesis. It was the ultimate superego battle — he didn’t want me to show him up through having an education, through not accepting a typical female role, and I wanted to complete my thesis without his interference. Yet, this battle was taking place entirely in my mind — a culmination of at least a 20 year long battle for my right to determine my own direction.
Writing my thesis was a rite of passage. The strain of going against the grain was intense. I engaged with a lot of ideas that would have been denied me had I taken the path I was supposed to. To engage intellectually with ideas of war, trauma and racism would have been one thing. I engaged with these emotionally, however, and this had been forbidden me, growing up. I wasn’t expected or supposed to engage with the realities of the civil war surrounding me. Emotional access to these were related to age, social status and gender.
In engaging with them, against the tacit prohibitions that had been set up to protect me, I was destroying myself as I had been before.
The thesis was, in this sense, an exercise in self destruction through gaining emotional knowledge of my history.
It has taken me at least a couple of years to rebuild, following this self-destruction.
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This is a fascinating story of an intellectual journey, musteryou. It is also very similar to mine. 🙂
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“I’m not happy. I feel like none of this has any meaning. My life is empty and useless.”
After centuries of study in the humanities, at present humanists have come to the existentialist conclusion that the life of the mind leads to an empty and useless life. Huh.
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It’s a good idea to read a post before commenting on it. I thought my life was meaningless precisely because I did not have a good education in the Humanities. Now that I do, my life is filled with meaning.
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The interesting thing about Aaron and his concept of wealth is the fact that it takes energy to make money. Most wealthy people work their asses off to obtain their stuff. Like I warn the kids all the time, be wary of the trade, which is, your time and energy for monetary wealth. Sometimes people get educated in certain fields because of their love of it, not to obtain a bigger financial reward. Most of my clientele make 3 to 4 times more than I make but I wouldnt trade places with them, ever! My wife and I like to joke that we are on the, freedom 85 plan. Hmmm, work till were dead. We wouldnt have it any other way. 🙂
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I know exactly what you mean.
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The most important reason to pursue any subject is that you love it. When I visited a music conservatory, the people there were constantly asking the prospective freshmen if they could see themselves doing music without pay. If you still have a passion for the subject without thinking about money, then it’s the right one.
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I have a simple question:
Why pay some burnt out 1960’s pony-tail wearing professor thousands of dollars to pursue your passion, when you can do it for free AND have the same employment prospects?
I mean, I pursue lapidary and paleontology, but I didn’t drop a dime on learning how to do it.
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Because it’s fun to be in the classroom. 🙂
Also, in the case of my discipline (Spanish), I can guarantee that you will not find a cheaper and more effective way to learn to speak and write in the language really well and really fast than by taking classes with me. I know who teaches at language schools and courses, and that’s a total waste of time. Language software is a huge scam.
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Because it’s fun to be in the classroom. (Clarissa)
You can learn stuff on your own but it is more enjoyable to be around like minded individuals. 🙂 🙂 🙂
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“You can learn stuff on your own but it is more enjoyable to be around like minded individuals.”
– I’m all for auto-didacticism, but I’m a very lazy layabout kind of person and I need the discipline of a syllabus and a schedule. But I admire people who don’t.
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I personally pursue physics. Find me a way to get me where I want to be without paying for college, and maybe I’ll take it into consideration. There are some things for which instruction is needed–languages, for one, and classical music, science, mathematics, anthropology. Group activities are necessary for lab work, for example, or for improvement in music ensembles. I pay for my physics homework program, but it pounds the concepts into my head every week.
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“Group activities are necessary for lab work, for example, or for improvement in music ensembles. ”
– In my are, we have no Spanish speakers, let alone French, German or Chinese speakers. So our students don’t get a chance to practice unless they come to our university.
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“I’m all for auto-didacticism, but I’m a very lazy layabout kind of person and I need the discipline of a syllabus and a schedule. But I admire people who don’t.”
I’m glad I’m not the first person to admit this to themselves.
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