An Art History Student's Defense of the Humanities

Art history sits where the humanities and the arts meet. It asks us to understand the artist's sensibility and also to analyze it with the rational methods of humanistic inquiry. As a student of art history, I therefore have to answer the question of existence twice: why the humanities, and why art. Of the two, I find the case for the humanities easier to make.

The humanities (philosophy, history including art history, literature, languages, religious studies and the like) deal chiefly with questions of meaning and value. Such questions cannot be settled by experiment the way propositions in the natural sciences can, but that does not mean anything goes. They have their own standards: whether an argument is coherent, whether the evidence is sound, how much an interpretation can explain. So the output of the humanities is hard to quantify, but it is not without standards.

The humanities today face two trends at once: they are shrinking in size, and demand for them is growing. Take the first. The share of US bachelor's degrees awarded in the humanities has fallen steadily from its peak in the late 1960s to about one in ten today. Britain tells a similar story, with several universities cutting or merging humanities departments in recent years. In China, students increasingly choose majors with jobs in mind, and humanities programs have broadly fallen out of favor in university applications. As for the second, the demand curve is rising. Society faces more and more questions that call for humanistic ability. With the arrival of AI in particular, the limits and ethics of algorithms need humanistic judgment more than ever. The more powerful technology becomes, the higher the cost of drifting off course, and the more we need the humanities to keep drawing the lines and to work through questions of meaning, value and ethics.

Why is this happening? The rising demand needs little explanation. As for the shrinking, I think the logic runs roughly like this: the cost of higher education rises → students and families treat a degree as an investment → they choose majors by expected personal return → the returns of the humanities are long-term, external and hard to attribute → so they are systematically undervalued in any calculation of personal return.

The key is the fourth step. Much of the value humanistic research creates does not pay off quickly, the way a new invention might. Once a period of history has been properly understood, for example, the whole of society benefits in the long run. But the benefit may take years to show, and the researcher can hardly claim a market reward for it. Economists call this a positive externality, and markets naturally undersupply such goods. The claim that "the humanities are useless" is therefore wrong: it quietly swaps "has no direct price" for "has no value."

To be sure, the humanities have problems of their own. Since the late twentieth century, too much specialization and jargon have tended to turn the field in on itself.

Naturally, those of us who study the humanities spend our spare hours thinking about how to defend them. What follows is only my own view. I find the two most common defenses unconvincing. The first is that "the humanities cultivate critical thinking." This is the most familiar argument, but critical thinking is no monopoly of the humanities: law, economics and even programming claim to train it too. Defending yourself with a function others can perform amounts to admitting you can be replaced. The second, which I often use myself, is that "the humanities are the use of the useless and need no defense." I like it because it sounds morally lofty. Strictly speaking, though, it dodges both the question and the argument, which amounts to surrender.

A sounder defense, I think, works on two levels. The first is personal. Whether or not we study the humanities, each of us must sooner or later answer questions like "How should I live?" and "What truly matters to me?" We cannot avoid them, because not answering is itself an answer: it means silently accepting the answers handed to us by family, the market or an algorithm. Character is largely the way a person answers these questions, and spiritual integrity means those answers hold together. A person has it when what they believe, what they do and how they tell the story of their life all line up, and when they can give reasons for it and own it as theirs. The humanities help build that integrity. Literature carries us beyond the limits of one life and into other people's situations, so we can feel emotions and face choices we have never lived through. History shows us where the ideas we take for granted came from. Philosophy trains us to question the meaning of everything. When we face death, loss and failure, technology can extend life and raise efficiency, but it cannot say what any of it means. What we can lean on then is often a passage of writing, an idea, or an example left by those who came before us. Of course, the humanities guarantee no one will become better; the well-read can do evil like anyone else. A good book does not hand you a ready-made character. It teaches you to fish, giving you the ability to build your own.

The second level is social, and it rests on the first. Technology and markets answer "What can be done, and what is most efficient?" On their own, they cannot answer "What should we pursue?" Every society has to debate its goals in public, and the quality of that debate depends on whether people have been properly trained to interpret, to weigh and to understand others. The humanities are the infrastructure a society uses to debate its goals. Like all infrastructure, it goes unseen until it breaks. Today's chaotic information environment and the decline of public debate are partly the result of long underinvestment in it.

As for AI, its impact on the humanities is naturally large, since these systems are, after all, language models. The bad news is that text-production jobs in the humanities (basic writing, translation, copywriting) will largely be replaced. The good news is that when production becomes cheap, judgment becomes scarce: which interpretation is better, which claim is biased. Most fundamentally, a value judgment needs someone to bear its consequences, and that responsibility cannot be outsourced to any model.

In short, I believe the place of the humanities has been shifting over the past few centuries: from a disciplinary fortress to a capacity for judgment that runs through technology, law and policy. Departments may keep shrinking, but the demand for humanistic ability will spread in other forms.