A few weeks ago, I took my two brothers — both in high school — to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The first of many masterpieces I took them to was “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” an 1851 painting by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze. It’s my favorite painting in the museum, a gorgeous and complicated portrait of George Washington on his way to fight British forces, carried by an ahistorical, racially utopian crew. To me, its beauty was self-evident.
My brothers weren’t impressed. They weren’t impressed by anything in the museum, really. Even when we went to the mummies, the Roman statues and the gleaming knights’ armor, they were bored.
The Met wasn’t the problem. Clearly, no one taught my brothers how to appreciate art. And on that day, I failed to show them how to appreciate it, too.
When my brothers go to college, they’re not going to major in the humanities like I did. If they haven’t learned how to appreciate the humanities already, formal education isn’t going to teach them in the future. It’s my job to do that now. And maybe that’s what the humanities are for.
Maybe I have some sort of particular taste or education that lets me appreciate the humanities in ways that they don’t. I’ve certainly had the guidance and exposure to good literature and cinema that they haven’t, largely because I sought it out myself. Both of my brothers would prefer the latest “Transformers” movie over the latest Coen Brothers and they’d rather not read a book at all. It’s my fault, because I never really tried to change that. I just rolled my eyes and went back to the book I was reading.
But the thing is, the humanities are for all humans, not just for those who major in them. It is the job of the humanities major to articulate and communicate the significance of the humanities — whatever that may be — to everyone else.
Columns about the value of a liberal arts education are commonplace, as if the concept needs defending. Unfortunately, they often adopt smug tones, as if those who are not educated in the same way are boring, soulless robots. To use a classic example, in his lecture “Vocation and Society,” W. H. Auden describes a student majoring in physics as “without passion, one of those trimmers in the Inferno of whom Virgil says: ‘Mercy and Justice disdains them; let us not speak of them; but look and pass.’”
That day at the Met, I was guilty of following Auden’s advice. I just looked and passed. But my brothers aren’t “without passion,” and neither, necessarily, is anyone else who chooses to pursue physics instead of philosophy.
Not everyone should major in the humanities, of course, but everyone should have an education in it. The decline of students majoring in humanities instead of STEM or business is well-documented and that’s fine. The world doesn’t need more English or history majors, but it does need people who can make robots and cure diseases and stuff.
A STEM education means learning useful, specific skills to solve practical, specific problems. A humanities education is not “useful” in any sense. It provides different functions, functions like being able to understand Shakespeare and Melville. Functions like going to the Met and gazing upon a portrait of George Washington spending his Christmas Eve on his way to kick some Hessian butt in a historically anachronistic boat that purports to present America as more racially harmonious than it actually was at the time, but goddammit, it’s immense, and overwhelmingly beautiful, and tells a story of a people struggling for independence in a time of roiling uncertainty and war.
So when I go back home this winter break, I’m going to take my brothers to the Met, and try to do better.