Why studying humanities is not a hindrance to finding an impactful job

University-level humanities programs in Australia, the UK and US are shrinking, but the study of history, literature, art and music, of languages, philosophy and religion is the perfect thing for job readiness and vocational adaptability.

Caravaggio’s 1597 painting The Musicians epitomises the connection between the Renaissance and the humanities.

The humanities are under siege. In Australia, the UK and the US, undergraduate enrolments in the liberal arts, particularly history and literature, are in freefall, and university-level humanities programs are shrinking. At the same time, there’s a Klondike gold rush to so-called “job-ready” courses, as well as maths, science and technology, although creative writing – the notion that everyone has a novel in them seems to have taken hold – is on the rise.

A cautionary note about the ­receding tide of traditional human-centred studies comes from a report released by the University of Oxford last month, titled The Value of the Humanities. It tracked the career destinations of more than 9000 Oxford humanities graduates between 2000 and 2019 and found, in short, that they were well suited to a labour market and work environment assailed by digitalisation, flexible work structures, and the leap in AI capability.

Remarked Professor Dan Grimley, head of humanities at Oxford: “Students, graduates and employers noted that the resilience and adaptability developed during a humanities degree is particularly useful during big changes in the labour market – whether that’s triggered by a global financial crisis, changes caused by the rise of automation and AI technologies, or indeed a global pandemic. I often hear young people saying that they would love to continue studying music or languages or history or classics at A-level and beyond, but they fear it would compromise their ability to get an impactful job. I hope this report will convince them – and their parents and teachers – that they can continue studying the humanities subject they love and at the same time develop skills which employers report they are valuing more and more.”

It’s good to have that cleared up. Though I don’t think it was really ever in doubt. Over the past few decades, I’ve seen colleagues, humanities graduates for the most part, twist themselves into the professional equivalents of pretzel shapes as the world around them melted away.

My deeper concern about the loss of humanities is their role in undergirding civilisation and what happens when we lose a collective sense of – to crib from Paul ­Gauguin – “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?”

I’m not, I stress, focused exclusively on Western civilisation. The humanities impart sensitivity: to music, art, and literature; to the clamorous chorus of history, as well as its tremulous solo voices. And these sensitivities, which in a university environment are, or should be, grafted on to a long tradition of rigorous analysis and discernment, are transportable across cultures. There’s no reason the sensitivities refined by a study of Western art can’t be applied to Eastern art. Ditto music. Philosophy. Religion.

And yet there’s no point denying the organic centrality of Western culture to Western institutions of higher learning. The raison d’etre of the first late medieval universities – at Bologna, Paris and Oxford – was the preservation and enrichment of that culture alongside the cultivation through the liberal arts of what we might call cultural capital: eloquence, skill in disputation, the ability to cite learned authority.

The University of Oxford. Picture: Wikipedia

Contemporary Asian educational institutions are similarly focused – more rigorously, in fact, than those in the West – on their own long traditions. In the West, the humanities have approached this core mission – of imparting and transferring cultural knowledge – in a critical spirit. If that weren’t the case, our universities wouldn’t have generated swarms of Marxists, postcolonial scholars and postmodernists; a key distinction being that while Marxists are largely hostile to one expression of Western culture – capitalism – the main strands of postmodernism and postcolonialism are hostile to Western culture tout court.

I’m not aware of anyone who is really speaking into the murky space where the fragility of Western culture intersects with the perilous dynamic of international relations and questions of national interest. But recent remarks by US academic Stephen Kotkin, a Stalin scholar and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, shine a light. Kotkin argues that American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations thesis was wrong in that it saw civilisational rivalry as something that would evolve naturally in the 21st century. What is happening instead, Kotkin believes, is that the autocratic rulers of a number of ancient land-based Eurasian powers, particularly Russia and China, have borrowed from Huntington’s “playbook” to forcefully assert their power and prestige, their antiquity and legitimacy, so that they are seen as grand civilisations, not simply thrusting nations.

The top-down rhetoric coming out of these countries pictures a “golden age” that was stolen by “upstart” maritime European imperial powers: the English, followed by the Dutch, before imperial power was re-fashioned by post-war America. Kotkin distils the argument from these older aggrieved powers: “And who put the Americans in charge of the world? When in fact Americans barely exist when it comes to Russian history, or Chinese history.”

The view from Moscow and Beijing is not entirely wrong. The Islamic Golden Age predated the European Renaissance by at least four centuries, as did the Song dynasty, while the Indian Golden Age (320-600) coincided with Europe’s so-called Dark Ages. But of course it’s terribly blinkered and dangerously cynical. Golden Age narratives are used by Putin, Erdogan, Xi, Khamenei and their ilk to pin the tail of past cultural greatness on to their own asinine rumps.

Kotkin is not in any sense denying the former greatness of these old civilisations. His argument, rather, is that ways must be found to disassociate their legitimate historical legacy from its autocratic manipulation. “We need to think about how the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t own Chinese civilisation, to separate the civilisation from the regime. That’s true of the Russian case, and the Iranian case. The Mullahs don’t represent Persian civilisation. Vladimir Putin does not equal Russian civilisation and its achievements.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin “does not equal Russian civilisation and its achievements”. Picture: Alexander Kazakov/Sputnik/AFP

The humanities are primarily concerned with human achievement as expressed individually, in works of enduring art, and collectively in forms and patterns of civilisation. And if questions about civilisation are also questions of national and collective security, of great power rivalry, as Kotkin suggests, then the humanities have a much more urgent and dynamic role than previously thought. Time was when the humanities were seen as little more than paths to elite character formation and connoisseurship. They are now intimately connected with the rapidly shifting internal dynamics of ­global power.

Humanism, in the form of cosmopolitanism, open inquiry and tolerance, is not unique to European civilisation. But it took on a particular form in 14th century Italy as scholars truffled through ancient libraries for lost Greek and Latin texts, and civic patrons such as the Medicis sought to promote their cultural patronage in order to compete against rival Italian states with royal bloodlines – princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses.

In time, the dukes of Ferrara and Urbino were getting in on the act, and an entire chequerboard of city states was vying for cultural supremacy.

A salient yet largely ignored fact about the humanist movement is that it was not disconnected from religion. Humanism, in fact, was bound intimately to Christian faith. The great early humanists such as the poets Petrarch and Boccaccio, the philosophers Nicholas of Cusa, Marsilio Ficino, Lorenzo Valla, and Pico della Mirandola, exalted humankind, classical antiquity, and Christianity. An important ingredient in Humanism’s special sauce was the Christian hierarchy of being in which humankind took up a middle position between God – in this view perfect goodness and perfect beauty – and the animal world.

What makes humans distinctive in this vision is that they contain both bestial and divine instincts and have the capacity to select which elevator to take: up or down. In his Oration on the Dignity of Man, the theme song of the Italian renaissance – even though it was never actually orated – Pico della Mirandola insists that humans are “the most fortunate of animals” – “a great miracle … a truly astonishing animal”.

As Pico saw it, a permanent existential crisis was inscribed in the human soul. He imagines God’s primal instructions to Adam in these terms: “No fixed seat, no special look, nor any particular gift of your own have we given you, Adam … For others a definite nature is confined within laws that we have prescribed. With no strictures confining you, you will determine that nature by your own choice, which is the authority under which I have put you … You can sink back into lower forms that are beasts; or from your own resolute spirit, you can be born again to higher forms that are divine.” The Renaissance pursuit of excellence – the dome of Santa Maria Fiore, the frescoes of Arezzo’s Bacci chapel, the Vatican and Medicean libraries, the paintings of Leonardo and Raphael – are connected with this vision of a divine realm to which humans aspire and strive.

Michelangelo’s fesco The Creation of Adam (c. 1508-12) in the Sistine Chapel. Picture: VCG Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images

Michelangelo’s God represents one form of this spiritual drama. The deity of the Sistine Chapel reaches towards Adam, power-digit extended. But look closely: it’s the casually recumbent mortal Adam who has the longer and more powerful – and visually commanding – reach.

The humanities, if they are to enjoy any sort of revival, will need to be reconstructed on a secular footing. But that doesn’t mean we have to misremember or distort our own history, or simply forget that the humanist movement was embedded profoundly in a Christian milieu and the philosophers of the Quattrocento sought to reconcile pagan thought and Christianity rather than extol the former at the expense of the latter.

That Christian vision of an exalted humanity powered the Renaissance. So how does our post-Christian culture recover some­thing of the spirit of Christian optimism, the belief in human excellence, without the cladding of an abandoned faith? It’s a difficult, though pressing, question. The humanities, as they’ve always been, are here to help us find answers.

The study of history, literature, art and music, of languages, philosophy and religion, is the perfect thing for job readiness and vocational adaptability, as the new Oxford University study reveals. But the humanities have a much deeper – and at the same time more ­urgent – value, as ways of studying and criticising civilisation and the self. What is more, questions about civilisation, in these next few decades, will as likely as not bear on the struggle for global ascendancy. The humanities at root, are about civilisation. And civilisations are on the march.