You hear the following question being asked with increasing frequency these days: ‘Why would anyone go to university to study the Humanities – philosophy, literature, history, languages, the classics – now that life is so competitive, making it essential that an investment in education should be an investment in a career?’
The answer might come as a surprise even to those for whom life is nothing but a career – a banausic view, but a practical one after all; so it is good to be able to report that studying the Humanities is an excellent investment in this respect. And this is a bonus to something even more important: which is that studying the Humanities is an excellent investment – here almost all who know what they are talking about say: the best investment – in life itself.
They say this because although a successful and flourishing career provides the resources and much of the satisfaction on which the rest of life depends, it remains true that people are more than their jobs. They are also neighbours, voters, citizens, parents, lovers, travellers – there are many things that constitute an individual existence in addition to a career, however defining and essential that career might be. If an education equipped people both for careers and for the larger life around it, would that not be an education mightily worth investing in?
Of course there will always be a need for doctors and engineers, physicists and computer scientists, experts and researchers in technical fields of various kinds. These vocational subjects will always flourish, because the world requires them. But it also and emphatically needs the Humanities.
It is easy to see how study of the Humanities can widen the horizons and deepen the insights of anyone who studies them attentively. They introduce fresh perspectives, a wide variety of experiences, distillations of wisdom and observation, challenges and thought-provoking questions, new opinions, assumptions and outlooks, that must healthily influence any mind that contemplates them. I say ‘healthily’ because all these enquiries broaden the sympathies of educated minds, and make them more perceptive, so that they ‘see things steadily and see them whole’, as Matthew Arnold famously said. And this provides a powerful countervailing force to the narrowness, prejudice, limitation and bad mental habits that are the offsprings of ignorance.
It is narrowness, prejudice and the rest that motivate divisions and conflicts in the world, and make people reactionary, stuck in traditional attitudes and ways. The cultivation of mind provided by a Humanities education, by contrast, promotes creativity, open-mindedness and flexibility. And it does this while remembering that the past has many lessons to teach, and that there are some things from the past that are not broken and do not need to be fixed.
Attentive study of the Humanities thus provides the materials for individual lives to be well-lived. This is no small matter. Fulfilled people with alert, outward-looking interests and understanding are always going to be a civilising influence in the world. But study of the Humanities also provides the basis for successful work-place careers because they equip their students with two invaluable possessions: an overview of human affairs whose lessons and examples can be applied in response to new challenges; and a capacity to think – really, properly, genuinely think – which among many other things means an ability to handle and evaluate ideas and information, to solve problems, to apply the lessons of experience, to see new opportunities, to innovate and to lead.
The Humanities have always provided thought-leaders and people-leaders in society. To study the Humanities is to study the example and insights of our forebears in the great human story. Only think of the lessons taught by history and literature, and the analyses offered by philosophy and psychology: the study of these subjects yields knowledge of human affairs, and it demands the acquisition and honing of a repertoire of intellectual skills of great value, applicable in the work-place, the boardroom, the courtroom, the editorial office, the art studio, the debating chambers of governments, civil service offices, lecture halls and classrooms, the City of London and Wall Street, the surgeries of doctors and the meetings of diplomats.
It has become a commonplace, but no less true for being one, to say that in a rapidly changing world one of the fundamental purposes of education must be to render people fit to deal with unpredictable changes and challenges. This includes having to compete in a global economy, evolving fast and in often unexpected ways. In all the identities people have, as individuals, as citizens of the world as well as of a particular state, and as workers in whatever field, they more than ever need flexible, alert and well-informed minds. Otherwise they will fall behind and end by playing a passive rather than active part in the tumultuous and noisy affairs of our contemporary world.
Being left behind is the opposite of what people would wish for themselves, for their children or their fellow-citizens; so, given that education is the great resource for enabling people to be actors in their own lives rather than the acted-upon by life in general, we have to ensure that education – the expansive, sharpening, informative education of the Humanities – continues to be available and encouraged.
As all this shows, there is a deep connection between a study of the Humanities and the question of the flourishing life. There is an obvious connection between the idea of a life that feels good to live, and the idea of a life that is successful and productive. This is not to say that a quietly withdrawn life cannot feel good to live; for a certain sort of person, that is indeed the ideal existence. But for most people satisfaction comes from activity.
The first big question is: what kind of activity? It goes without saying that we are talking of legal, decent and life-enhancing activities, for however satisfying a malefactor might find evil-doing, no rational person will concede that his satisfaction justifies his actions. All the Humanities and all human experience teach us this. Pleasure and happiness can only be regarded as worthwhile aims when they are not enjoyed at the expense of others’ misery. So whatever we mean by ‘good’ in talking of good activity, we have to mean something that stands up to searching moral scrutiny. And to undertake such scrutiny, we need to be educated and informed – by the Humanities, which prompt us to think about values, and to act on our thoughts.
In the nineteenth century John Stuart Mill made the controversial claim that intellectual activities – reading, learning, enquiring, thinking – are of higher value than such physical activities as eating and drinking or playing sport. He did not say that these latter are not good, and he accepted that they are pleasurable; his point was that they are of less value than things of the mind, so that if there had to be a choice between the two kinds of pleasure, the pleasure of mental activity should always win. It is as if he were saying that study of the Humanities should trump any other kind of activity.
Critics point out that this is exactly what you would expect a philosopher to say, and that it is a snobbishly elitist view. Where does he get the right to place the pleasures of kicking a football or drinking a beer lower down the scale, when these might in fact be as great or greater to one who enjoys them, as the pleasure an intellectual gets from reading Aeschylus?
There is no need to get lost in this quarrel, for it is clear that someone capable of both intellectual and physical pleasures is much better off than someone who has access to one of them only. The more important point is that all worthwhile activities can be pleasures, or greater pleasures, when approached in an intelligent and well-informed way.
Someone who has a knowledge of the Humanities comes off the football field with more left in the day to enjoy – conversation, reading, the theatre or cinema, the pleasures of reflection on the game itself and its place in life. To be nothing but a footballer is to be not much more than the football itself – and that is not an idle point, for Socrates said that the life most worth living is the considered life, the informed and chosen life. The unconsidered life is the opposite of this – it is one lived by people who are other people’s footballs. They do not choose their own goal, but go where chance and others kick them.
The Humanities are the resource for considering life in all its variety and complexity. Because they prepare one for all aspects of life – including work – they are described as providing an all-round education. So they do: because human beings are all-round creatures, and to live full lives they need the nourishment that the great conversation of humankind provides. And that is exactly what the Humanities add up to: participation in the great conversation of humankind.