When one studies a subject in the humanities or works in any of its fields one can often encounter complaints from students and even from professionals that the humanities are useless and it does not make sense to learn or practice them.
Most of these complaints come from students in other fields. Accordingly, the source of their complaints is probably that they don't know what one could be working on in the humanities. They have no knowledge of what is studied, how it is studied, what one working as a professional in the humanities does, how this relates to society and whether it is useful or not. Their ignorance and intolerant attitudes can usually be dispelled quite easily if one spends a few minutes explaining what they don't know.
The problem is worse if one encounters serious grown ups voicing such concerns. A few years ago in one of his books for wider audiences Stephen Hawking pushed that the job philosophy did earlier is now entirely taken over by science and therefore we should stop doing philosophy. Hawking is surely a great physicist but we should treat his claims regarding other fields with due suspicion. Of course they can be right, it is just that he is not a professional on education, on teaching or on research, but on physics. Thus we should require a bit more detailed information and argument before we accept big - and superficial - words.
Another instance of condemning the humanities occurred just recently in Hungary. The leading party, Fidesz, is in a governing-frenzy. The country's economic situation is bad, Fidesz enjoys two-thirds majority in the parliament, that is they can pass any law they want, and accordingly they try to reform everything. The under-secretary responsible for higher education, István Klinghammer, voiced the view in an interview with him that "In today's world it is the natural sciences and the mechanical sciences are producing value. The humanities, and culture, are very important, but they do not produce values, they give people delight and enjoyment."
Are such views justified?
There might be many reasons why they aren't. First, there is an organization trying to test whether teaching philosophy in primary schools helps kids develop better skills, needed both for science and humanities related subjects, but of course also beyond school subjects - such as when reading news, instructions, contracts. According to some studies on the effect of their classes critical thinking group-games, with philosophy related material, can lead to such development. They also recently argued for this publicly.
Another function philosophy and other fields of humanities serve is one of being information sources that can shape decision making well. This happens on three levels: first, we all learn the basics of literature, history, the structures found in society throughout school. This shapes both our identities, our notion of what sort of beings we are and what has happened to communities of humans before our birth. An adequate preparation of this sort can help people spot dangers and threats, both on the personal and the community level, thereby guarding them against making immoral judgments, accepting very bad choices from their representatives, and so on. Second, keeping track of good and bad decisions, of different types of states and their relations, on how people conducted themselves and what good and bad effect that had (on their psychology, personal happiness, groups, economy, etc.) is important, both in order to avoid similar pitfalls, and in order to get good ideas for solving problems. Third, many practical questions touch on the lives of individuals, on the lives of communities, nations, institutions. If these questions are to be answered well, they need to be informed by data about how the individuals and the groups behave, what they are, what they value. It is not much use to push certain developments at all costs, if it radically undermines the life-quality of those whom it should serve. This mechanism at large explains why it is a bad decision simply to push forward production rates, without taking into account their effects on our environment, or its effects on small and large scale societal changes.
Any type of humanistic discipline, but especially literature, has an additional virtue: it provides us with a special understanding of others. Understanding isn't used here either its emotional meaning (as to forgive), nor in its scientific meaning (as to give a good causal explanation of it). Understanding in this sense means that we can see the motives for which others act, why those motives are important for them, why they resist forms of rationality that rely on values or reasoning that are external to theirs, and why certain people and groups cannot handle some problems. This sort of understanding can serve the role of disabling our animal instincts to react aggressively and hostile to anyone unknown, or belonging to a different group. Understanding disables our ability to condemn other people for things that stem from their being different from us.
Fostering this form of understanding does not mean - and as clever democrats and liberals know it never did - that one should accept evil, harm bringing means or the condemnation of virtues. A good liberal will stand up and try to show that she or he is right, and act accordingly. But that does not mean that she takes away the right of others to try and defend their views. Bad and faulty views fall, since questions of morality, conduct and norms aren't relative within a group. Nor are they relative on a general human level. (In relation to what would they be relative in the latter case?)
In connection to understanding consider literature for a moment: when one reads a book like Elfriede Jelinek's The Piano Teacher, the book takes about 10-16 hours to read, depending on your tempo, your imagination and level of tiredness. It tells the story of a single person - in the course of this it touches on other people, but all the way through, the protagonist is in the center. How often do you take the time and effort to pay attention to someone else for this amount of time? How often do you spend time on trying to figure out why and how it happened that one did just what one did? How often do you make so much effort to understand how someone's position in society makes them feel? Literature can enable us to do this.
Of course there are many different types of works, not all of them aim at giving us better understanding of others (some of them do not even aim at being entertaining, but for a good reason), some are just shallow forms of entertainment. There is not much wrong with fun, but those books are not the ones doing a lot of important work. The ones combining entertainment and enabling understanding are the great ones.
Also, a charge often brought against people studying humanities is, that many of them do not get jobs in their fields. Let us have a more careful look at this claim, and at why it is problematic.
1. What exactly does this mean? What percentage of people getting diplomas in humanities subjects do not get a job in their field? What's the percentage in law, in engineering, in economics, in management? One rarely sees such claims backed up by data.
2. Why is this a problem? A good training is not necessarily a vocational training. One can gain many skills, experiences and value without preparing for one given job. What sorts of skills can one obtain if one gets a decent humanities diploma with a decent result? A) one will be good at organizing large amounts of data quickly, B) learning new theoretical constructs quickly, C) use models to understand meaning, communication, social interactions better, D) communicate clearly.
3. If there are so many people getting humanities degrees that they cannot get jobs in their fields, why did the governments adopt a uniform and unrealistic support scheme for universities, where you get more money if you have more students? Obviously, this led the universities in every field to accept more and more people. Inevitably, the standards dropped. Since to do well in any field of the humanities appropriately one needs to be quite clever, it could easily be foreseen that the faculties will get lots of people who actually won't be able to do well in these subjects, and cannot get a job in this field with their diplomas. This is similar to the huge droup-out rates in informatics, maths or in other difficult fields.
4. Many people make the following mistake. They look at one or a few undergrad(s), someone who is at most average, or below that in his/her subject and conclude that the people studying in that field aren't studying anything useful, since they cannot give a clear account of what they will do, what their professors research, etc. Of course there is no field where, with the exception of a few outstanding students, young people could answer such questions well. They can give you textbook definitions. What can they tell you about the inner workings, the everyday, the many connections of their field to other social institutions? What can anyone without determination and aspiration tell you about such things? So, why not ask the best ones who have finished and have gotten jobs?
5. What exactly does it show that many people getting a diploma in the humanities do not settle for 'a job in the humanities'? It surely does not show that the overwhelming majority of them don't have the abilities, or knowledge to do so. There simply aren't too many jobs in the humanities. So, they work in all sorts of fields.
Where, you ask? At companies, at hospitals, for the government, as writers, and so on. Would it be better if all these jobs were filled by people with different diplomas? Is it so: the good and giving private sector would love to create more jobs, it is only that there wouldn't be enough people to fill them? No, this isn't the situation. And people with humanities diplomas are obviously capable of doing these jobs well.
But wait, couldn't they do these jobs just as well without their diploma? Well, it isn't sure that they could. Think of the following: people after leaving school with 16 or 18 aren't usually very reliable and disciplined. University gives them many skills in this. Even if at a humanities faculty you learn certain things not related to how a business is run, or a car constructed, you do not just read pulp. You have to exercise your capacities in many ways, figure out solutions to problems, prepare for exams, grasp difficult material, organize your life well and get through exams. All tests and experiences that strengthen the confidence and enable you to handle a job much better.
Also, let us not forget that most systems that are important in our lives, including moral, political, cultural systems (and by cultural I mean habits, forms of leisure and punishment, duties, all in all: forms of life) are not systems that emerge simply from the workings from underlying natural systems. Of course they are realized by such systems, but this does not mean that from the workings from the underlying systems we can understand the workings of the higher level systems. Anything in this world has an underlying natural realization. But this does not mean that the logic of a higher order system is always determined by the functioning of the lower one. Also, it does not mean that we can read off good suggestions on how to make a system work better by understanding natural systems.
Of course, no one clever is against cooperation between the humanities and sciences. Why would anyone be? Why wouldn't we use all the methods we have to discover interesting answers to interesting questions? The suggestion simply is, that the material of humanities is well worthwhile funding and studying, even working on it as a vocation, it can change lives, and thus it is valuable. At the same time when more and more people in the humanities understand how the sciences can be used to contribute to the pursuit of truth, the general public should understand why the humanities are doing just fine, doing good work and can solve many of their problems on their own. You just have to study them, before giving an opinion.
Plus: maybe it is not entirely fair to weigh this in, but most fields in humanities are still way more cheaper than research on sports cars, on far away galaxies, on new anti-depressants, on oil mining, etc. Many of these fields also receive large amounts of funding from the private sector. Although they contribute to economy and create jobs, taking into account their negative consequences - such as enforcing bad consumer choices, creating extra profit for already wealthy companies, pushing non-sustainable energy usage, etc. - is it sure that that's where government funding is best spent? Let's rather spend more on cancer research, Alzheimer's, good economic models, and research in ethics.
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