Helle Hochscheid

The death of Mr. Spock, or why humanities matter

So why are numbers of humanities students in the Netherlands declining? Is it, as the news would have us believe, that the decades-long campaign to get students into science finally paid off? Are students bored with stuffy old history, linguistics and philosophy? Are they worried about jobs?

It is while teaching in the liberal arts and sciences that you see the students who do something with their love of a humanities discipline – a minor, some extra courses, while majoring in something more profitable – rendabel, that most Dutch of words. It is a fact that if you want a wage well over the ministerial wage norm, history or literature are unlikely to be your friends. But is this the way to move our world forward?

With increasing amazement, I followed last week’s discussions in British Parliament on participation in air strikes in Syria. These debates are always more fiery and upfront than the Dutch ones. Good arguments were put forward, with considerable research in some cases. But what struck me about many of the speeches was the degree of emotion in the reasoning. MPs in tears; angry, shouting, calling each other terrorist lovers, and on the whole, behaving a little less maturely than the average class I teach. Most of the people in question are university graduates, and so I wondered: where is the ratio, the analysis that they learned as students? Where is the cool head, bringing down the debate to its logical essence? Where is mr. Spock?

Unfortunately, it seems mr. Spock is all but extinct. In the Netherlands too, emotion rules supreme in socio-political debates. While anyone would probably agree that decisions about airstrikes had better be taken with Stoic composure, not to mention minute logic, in practice, the argumentation involved in such serious matters plays out in a theatre of pathos.

And this is where the humanities come in. In rhetoric students learn how to use, but more importantly recognize, rhetorical devices. They learn to consciously examine what a style figure does with their emotions – and disregard it if the underlying argument is flawed. In linguistics and languages, they learn how language influences our thinking. Art history and archaeology show how visual and material culture reflect how past societies worked, the problems they faced and how they dealt with them. Like history, these disciplines demand sources, evidence for claims made, solid arguments rooted in primary evidence, models of analysis that can illuminate how we behave in certain circumstances, why, and whether it is a good idea to repeat the patterns. An average history or archaeology paper of my students has about ten times more and better evidence than many an article on even the good newspaper websites in the Netherlands. Do I even need to explain the benefits for calm, collected, well-informed, rational and ethical assessments of crisis situations through a discipline like philosophy?

And yet we encourage young people to go and study something science-ish, or something that will get them a good job. Doing so does not necessarily make them into the critical, creative thinkers that will reduce the great divides of culture, religion, class or wealth; who will solve the problems of poverty and lack of education, of racism and homophobia. That kind of thinking needs context as well as contents, painstaking evidence-based argumentation as well as rhetoric at the fingertips. It needs humanities.

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