Another defence of the humanities - in whose interests is it that we believe in their decline?

When we note that enrolments in humanities fields at undergraduate are in decline internationally, and link this to the increasing public and governmental emphasis on STEMM, and vocational degree courses such as medicine and law, we describe a gap between society’s understanding of the worth of an arts degree versus the value of a science, engineering, or technology qualification. The usual method of defending the humanities in this evaluation of worth in practical, skills-based terms – analysis, critical thinking, summarising arguments, understanding worldviews.

This defence backfoots us, it has me pinned in a corner, throwing generic, overarching tools of an arts education out into a world that wants widgets and apps and ‘innovation’.  The humanities is SO SO much more than a collection of vaguely articulated tools that make for useful worker-units in large organisations. Off the top of my head, here’s what the humanities are:

They’re the repeated analysis of Trump’s rhetoric, both his style of oratory and his language, the dedicated unpicking of the reach and retreat of his worst flourishes – the suggestion of violence in the invocation of the Second Amendment, skilfully semi-retracted and then reiterated, so that the claim of incitement to violence against the body of Hilary Clinton can be both present and absent at the same time. They’re the seeringly insightful satire of John Oliver, Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert – when the satirists are the best sooth-sayers, our 21^st century political culture is inextricably linked to the emergence of satire as a genre, in Juvenal’s Rome. That link, over millennia, provides our current crisis(es) with context. The roots of the plant of our refugee crisis are in the 18^th and 19^th century, when colonial powers from Europe imposed maps along natural boundaries and arbitrary lines (“you can have that side of the river, we’ll have the other”), ignoring local, indigenous nationhoods.

The humanities are both the discourse around Gabby Douglas’ hair AND the backlash, defending a black woman’s right to fix her hair how she damn well pleases. The hums are why more white people than ever know a little bit more about the fraught history of black women’s hair, thanks to widely shared analysis of the line “Becky with the good hair” from Béyonce’s ‘Sorry’ on the visual album Lemonade, an album that is redolent with symbols and signifiers of blackness – symbols and signifiers those not from the culture it celebrates can only attempt to understand with the humanities. The humanities are the frankly uncomfortable images and figures of historic museum practice in the Francis Upritchard retrospective at the Wellington City Gallery; confrontingly compelling visual narratives of a past in which the othering of peoples was entertainment, asking the question, is it still so? 

The humanities are also an Olympics opening ceremony that attempted to recognise and discuss a country’s history of genocide, slavery, and colonisation in a spectacle of dance, light, and music. They’re the questioning of the morality of our Kiwisaver default investments, even if it is deemed legal. They’re the queues and pre-orders for much anticipated artworks – from Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, to the Ghostbusters remake. They’re the conversation we can now have about Nate Turner and Woody Allen and Johnny Depp – whether separating art from the maker is ever possible. 

They’re the ability to both love New Zealand’s beauty, and see our faults, our failures. The humanities provide us with both the vision and the tools to steely-eyed, one step at a time, fix things; from people passionately making Auckland a more liveable city through promoting and celebrating cycling as both transport and recreation – linking the freedom cycling provides in a gridlocked city to the freedom the invention of the push bike gave to young women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. They’re why names matter, why Oranga Tamariki (the wellness of children) is a better name than ‘the ministry for vulnerable children. The humanities are the slow but progressing embedding of the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi into Aotearoa New Zealand. They’re the re-emergence of indigenous voices and festivals and knowledges – Matariki, the maramataka. They’re the increasing attempts to focus on difference-as-benefit, to locate the intersections in our worldviews.

They’re the people quietly making sure there are books in homes, books in schools, books in prisons, the glory of public libraries where there’s heaters, and internet, and books, and classes on everything, and librarians to ask questions of. They’re the museums and galleries and cathedrals and public squares and memorials and public buildings and whare tapu where we can stop, breath caught, and be struck with the wehi of things people have made. They’re mountains, rivers, forests, trees, beaches, lakes, places that have meaning to us – they give us the vocab to write ‘home’ in a wildness that we cannot own. They’re standing so close to Degas’ dancer that you can see the fingerprints of the artist in the cast bronze, the korowai made by an unknown artist, each feather collected, saved, stitched, perfect, functional, beautiful.

They’re the Lollards, the Chartrists, the campaign for universal suffrage, the history of non-violent resistance from Parihaka to Gandhi to Martin Luther King jr to the Arab Spring; the emergence of modernity after the invention of the printing press, a tool that enabled the democratisation of information; the medium of television as the turning point in the Vietnam War and the Black Civil Rights movement; smartphones as tools in a series of popular revolutions; they’re the ability for ANZAC Day to be a day for honouring sacrifice and acknowledging the futility of war and honouring the bravery of conscientious objectors. The humanities provide us with ands, not ors, with change, with margins becoming centres, with multiple voices, with the stories of our pasts and presents and futures told by ordinary people. The humanities are ‘culture is ordinary’, they’re our rugby, racing, and beer AND bread and circuses AND bread and roses.

It’s clear from this stream-of-consciousness list of examples that the real problem with the humanities is that they encourage and enable us to speak truth to power. And perhaps that’s why everyone is so eager to make us believe they’re in decline.