The humanities gave me my life. It’s not that I didn’t have a life previously, but that I can describe my life pre-humanities in the same way one might describe one’s life before college. The classic: “I used to be really good at…” whatever exceptional or prepubescent talents that got you into college and have since waned. Before the humanities, I used to be really good at separating every sphere of my life: school, work, relaxation and entertainment. Now everything has blurred together because of the new ideas percolating and infiltrating everyday experience. There is no on/off switch for the humanities because it trains a type of thinking, and there is no way to stop thinking.
My friends can attest to how I now “ruin” movie nights when I start to analyze the undertones and implications of certain cinematic choices. I see this as not ruining the movie, or the good vibes, but rather applying a critical eye to what we have all shared. For someone with a humanities background this doesn’t seem like studies or school seeping into a social interaction; it seems natural.
I feel that this is linked to the discourse about college as preparation for the ‘real world.’ Everyone, myself included, loves to think about college as separate from the real world, almost as a buffer zone to give time to figure out your life. It’s a tactic that endows entitlement to have the “best years of your life.” Strangely, this puts an asterisk on ‘life’ with the implication that the university is not the ‘real world,’ that your life starts post-graduation. The humanities challenge this assumption by forcing you to look thoughtfully at the world from a different subject position.
The humanities unsettle, comment on and analyze ways to look at the world not through formulas that posit people as numbers, human beings as two-dimensional consumers and target audiences wanting more, but through a practice of thinking as others, with others, and critiquing the perspectives presented. One could call this practice “critical thinking.” Yet I feel that the resume-ready term is somewhat reductive because it uses a discourse that’s uncharacteristic of the humanities. In other words, it applies a schema to fit the humanities into a concept bubble on a concept map, compares the humanities’ tools to the others in the shed.
The humanities use its tools to pop the bubbles, to take apart the shed and put it back together — occupy it, learn its every panel and stand outside of it — from an outside perspective it doesn’t seem like anything is being done, but anyone in the humanities will smile because there is no instruction manual to what we do.
This weekend, there are two events that epitomize the breadth of work the humanities accomplish: The Virginia Film Festival and the first Virginia Universities and Race Histories Conference sponsored by the University and Community Action for Racial Equality (UCARE). The film festival promises to give a creative lens to synthesize, refer to and comment on current events, like the Boston bombings, the organ trade and abortion in Virginia. The race histories conference will discuss the role slavery, segregation and discrimination played in shaping Virginia universities.
The humanities train us to think about these issues in a responsible way. The humanities focuses its attention on the world by representing it, questioning it and imagining that through this practice we might all smile, nod our heads and know something has been done.
James Perla is a third-year College student majoring in English.
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